The Dual Dangers of Ephemeral & Emotionally-Manipulative Media
A Brave New Age
"I feel sad that the brave new age of instant information didn't make things or us better. We may need to re-evolve as humanity before any of this makes any impact at all."
One human can recognize the problems, but that realization alone does not transform the quicksand, because all those ignorant others are still believing, sill supporting, still attempting to suck that one human back down. We cannot truly escape without freeing the masses. How many people today can quote verbatim countless movies of previous eras, yet have no clue about the real world crimes of people like Fauci?
"With a small “night-watchmen” state, it might be feasible for the ordinary citizen to inspect the government’s business. However, the costs to any citizen of monitoring the thousands of programs emerging from the myriad ministries of our bloated governments is extremely high compared to the minuscule benefit or cost imposed on him by any one of those policies. Introducing state-licensing for a trade, for example, has typically meant that the established corporations with their accumulated capital, political connections, and specialism in their field get to “assist the state” in writing the rules that govern their niche. With all these forces mounted against the citizen, it’s not surprising that we then get stuck with politically stronger versions of the overbearing corporations which our “radically reimagined” and “comprehensive” policies were meant to curb." [Source]
For most of human history, the individual minds & personalities you interacted with were those that were in your immediate physical surroundings. With the advent of mass communication, from the written word on crude paper to the internet, we increasingly ceded that spotlight to faraway minds. How many children no longer look to their immediate elders for wisdom? How many find that the contents of their minds, their lifetime's worth of acquired wisdom, is valued at near-zero by those others who surround them? What does this do to us as individuals and entire societies?
One consequence: Far too many children are not taught how to properly deal with their emotions. Instead they learn from TV and movies whose portrayals are of course exaggerations. The descriptions & depictions of these emotions often implies a powerlessness to resist which is a terrible message to send to a still developing child. Not a great message for adults either.
It seems, in addition, that the inundation of peoples' minds with fake dramatic fiction has dulled the senses to the mundane truths reality so often provides. I wonder if this desensitization prohibits us from returning directly to a more fact-focused kind of journalism. Just as someone might need to be weaned off powerful medications, do we need to actively provide more emotion-laden analysis whose underlying goals are to hopefully direct as many as possible back onto more reliable ground, eventually?
Perhaps most insidious however, is the increasingly ephemeral nature of media. Journalism is often called the "first draft of history." Lets set aside discussions of journalistic quality and instead focus on the permanence of that draft understanding. As with any draft, we expect there to be mistakes. No journalist is perfect, you'll get a name or title wrong, you might even misattribute a whole quote or get your budget numbers switched around. It happens and a simple correction with a note is seen as perfectly acceptable. But what we are experiencing today, with more and more frequency, is alterations, "corrections," which go way beyond this normal practice. We're not discussing revising a draft, this is rewriting the entire story (or at least key elements of it).
Though this is not the only kind of emphemeral media that we should be concerned about. The memory-holing doesn't end with altered news stories. No, it advances much further into the realm of complete censorship. Any really inconvenient truths are swept under the rug, or if you're of the "Harry Potter generation" (terrible books by the way, the best thing about JK Rowling is her stance on transgenderism) then perhaps you'd prefer a comparison to Voldemort.
These dangers, the emotional-manipulativeness & the increasingly ephemeral nature of journalism & information, pose a grave threat to the continuation of a free society. Tools like journalism are supposed to aid us in overcoming our more reactionary impulses. Tools like the written word are supposed to aid us in preserving a record of past thought & argument.
"...the really desirable potential of the web is the exact opposite of majoritarian rule: the non-rule of any section of the public, minority or majority.
Its genuine promise lies in the free entry of any expression that can be represented or hosted in the cybersphere: a belief, an argument, a debate, a proposal, a news-report, a work of visual art, music, a poem, or an ongoing cooperation of some kind. More than that, the web stands for a transformative and sometimes disruptive networked-social life, bringing about inventive ways of connecting and sharing....
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But are the tech giants going to distort our perception of the truth and install their ideological narrative and fake worldviews? Yuval Noah Harari seems to think so, or at least that possibility is implied by his view of people. Lesson number 17 of his book, 21 Lessons For The 21st Century, is entitled “Post-Truth: Some Fake News Lasts Forever”:
"Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions…"
The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. Many people assume that if a particular religion or ideology misrepresents reality, its adherents are bound to discover it sooner or later, because they will not be able to compete with more clear-sighted rivals. Well, that’s just another comforting myth." [Source]
Puppeteered Emotions
"In the last four years especially, a rift has formed in the news business, an argument primarily about method and approach. Some of us were raised to think the reporter’s job is confined to gathering information and giving it to readers, who should then be free to do with it what they will. A lot of journalists raised in this school were trained to be terrified in the days (and, especially, the nights) after publication, in case a mistake surfaces, but to stop worrying after that.
A new approach, symbolized by a Times column four years ago called “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” stresses choosing and presenting information in such a way as to ensure that audiences make the “correct” political decision with the news they’re given. The fear there is more about impact: are people taking the news the right way?
This argument over method put many journalists in a bind. Some either had to get on board with what they considered a perversion of the job, or they had to find some other place to go." [Source]
The increasingly awful New York Times (though its always wise, when gauging their rate of descent, to remember their coverage of Hitler) provides a fine example of this "new" kind of journalism in practice (via Matt Taibbi):
"When Biden decided not to punish Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi on the grounds that the “cost” of “breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies” was too high, the New York Times headline read: “Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach.” When Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn’t cut ties because “the world is a very dangerous place” and “our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the paper joined most of the rest of the press corps in howling in outrage.
“In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing.” was the Times headline, in a piece that said Trump’s decision was “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.” The paper noted, “Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.”
This week, in its “Crusader for the Poor” piece, the Times described Biden’s identical bin Salman decision as mere evidence that he remains “in the cautious middle” in his foreign policy. The paper previously had David Sanger dig up a quote from former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who “applauded Mr. Biden for ‘trying to thread the needle here… This is the classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests.’” It’s two opposite takes on exactly the same thing.
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This format isn’t all that different from the one we had before, except in one respect: without the superficial requirement to tend to a two-party balance, the hagiography in big media organizations flies out of control. These companies already tend to wash out people who are too contentious or anti-establishment in their leanings. Promoted instead, as even Noam Chomsky described a generation ago, are people with the digestive systems of jackals or monitor lizards, who can swallow even the most toxic piles of official nonsense without blinking. Still, those reporters once had to at least pretend to be something other than courtiers, as it was considered unseemly to openly gush about a party or a politician." [Source]
The professionalization of everything has had a reciprocal effect: the infantalization of many. Lacking the broad array of skills for survival once possessed by the masses, our modern masses are unmoored & isolated. These individuals often lack even the space, let alone the skills, to provide themselves with something as simple & essential as food. Such essential tasks are outsourced to a knowledgeable few and the skills crucial to survival atrophy in the minds of the masses. There are consequences, some paid by individuals and some by society itself.
"Many of us want to be led. As children we look to our parents to protect us, to soothe our fears, to relieve us of responsibility. As adults we seek the same protection...
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And so trustingly, time after time, we relinquish our power to those grandiose individuals who covet high office, unaware that their determination – their sheer, dogged, winner-takes-all ambition, their superficial charm and seductiveness – may suggest that many are psychologically unsuited to these roles.
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We don’t imagine that psychopaths might be journalists.
So, we heed their warnings about the virus, which accord with those of our leaders. Though they might confuse us with their reporting of ‘cases’ and ‘positive tests’ and ‘hospitalisations’ – with their graphs and statistics and relative risks – we are reassured that the message is a simple one: that the jab will be our route to freedom; that our vaccine rollout is the fastest; that our NHS is the finest in the world: clap clap clap clap clap!" [Source]
The Covid "crisis" has proven to be fertile ground for growing the media's manipulation skillset. While the marketing of consumer products and social science studies can provide useful insights in how to properly motivate the masses nothing compares to the real-world laboratory. The lessons learned from Covid are already planned to be repurposed for other campaigns:
"CNN’s technical director was caught on video admitting that the cable “news” network traffics in propaganda under the guise of journalism in order achieve a desired political outcome.
The director, Charlie Chester, described in Part One of Project Veritas’ “CNN Exposed” series how the network used propaganda to benefit Joe Biden and get former President Trump voted out of office.
During a conversation with an undercover Project Veritas reporter, Chester also divulged that CNN plans to start hyping the climate change agenda as soon as the Covid-19 hysteria dies down, per CEO Jeff Zucker’s orders.
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Chester explained how the propaganda network used shots of Biden jogging and/or wearing hip aviator sunglasses to deflect from his advanced age and promote the idea that he was healthy.
“He is definitely — the whole thing of him running during the entire — like run for the campaign. Showing him jogging is obviously deflection of his age and they’re [CNN] trying to make it like, ‘Oh, I’m healthy,” Chester said. “We would always show shots of him [Biden] jogging and that [he’s] healthy, you know, and him in aviator shades. Like you paint him as a young geriatric.”" [Source]
These lies & manipulations are not confined to targeting or protecting broad policies & prominent people. They also effect the day-to-day operations & seek to undermine the very foundations of our collective society. For example, the already cracked base of our "justice" system is jack-hammered by race-obsessed fanatics seeking to fan the flames of passion. The coverage of the Chauvin trial provides an excellent example:
"The coverage was striking in the glowing accounts of the prosecution’s closing arguments as opposed to the criticism of the defense. More importantly, the coverage shows little concern over the rights of criminal defendants or appreciation for the position of defense counsel.
We saw the same trend during the Trump Administration when legal experts adopted ridiculously broad interpretations of criminal provisions in a blind obsession to find any way to charge Donald Trump or his family. Some of us from the defense bar warned how dangerous such interpretations would be — and how they ignored both the element and controlling case law. Legal experts dismissed abuses disclosed in prior investigations involving defendants like Michael Flynn and Carter Page. They disregarded the implications of sweeping definitions of crimes like obstruction or the Logan Act. They defended judicial bias when it worked against Trump officials.
The saddest aspect to this trend is that legal analysis was once largely immune from such open bias. I have worked as a television legal analyst for thirty years on various networks. I have watched as legal analysts in both television and print have become part of the echo journalism model — offering reassuring analysis for viewers who want continual reaffirmation of their own political preferences. We have now lost any semblance of objectively or neutrality. That is consistent with the trend in journalism at large where there are growing calls for advocacy in journalism. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Even Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. The result however has been the steady decline in trust for the media." [Source]
These tactics seek to replace critical thinking & analysis with emotional knee-jerk reactions. Rage promotion is the name of the game. The end result of all this is the increasing importance of appearance, or to use the political jargon: optics. Consider the case of "Senator Cancun":
"Apparently, a certain kind of person’s suffering is compounded when he knows that someone he dislikes is not suffering the same. The wall-to-wall coverage of Cruz’s trip to Cancun—this non-event—was a cynical attempt to stoke the ire of those prone to this kind of vicarious suffering, the people who suffer more when they know someone else is suffering less. The media, as usual, was deliberately amplifying the resentment of their audience, which in this case meant maximizing the frustrations of people negatively impacted by a weather emergency. That’s a rude ploy, but it represents a growing trend in American journalism: the obsession with “optics.”
It wasn’t really that Sen. Cruz had done something wrong. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t done something right. It was that he did something that looked bad. The “optics” were bad, and that could be leveraged to advance political objectives that were completely unrelated to the weather in Texas. This constant weaponization of optics, something all too common in news media, reveals some troubling realities about contemporary American society and democratic governance.
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The conventional meaning of “optics” is a field of knowledge that deals with light and vision. The Oxford English (OED) dictionary has a secondary entry with the newer meaning of the word when used as a noun: “The way in which a situation, event, or course of action is perceived by the public[,] Frequently in political contexts.” The earliest known example of this usage cited in the OED (behind a paywall) occurred in the Boston Globe in 1973. That timing is important: just as new visual forms of media (television, fax machines, rudimentary computing) were becoming the predominant channels for public communication, our culture and politics developed a new fixation on appearances.
Around this time, Marshall McLuhan (a media theorist and professor of English at the University of Toronto) became something of a sensation among the intelligentsia, as he was among the first thinkers to offer a rich description of how the changes in mass media were reinventing the social sphere. One of his most famous books (co-authored with Quentin Fiore) was The Medium is the Massage, which explained how the dynamics and operation of a given medium of representation (television, radio, etc.) are actually more powerful than the information that they transmit to the audience.
According to McLuhan, any medium of communication also entails an interpretation of social reality, and enables an “extension” of that reality. That is, the mediated representation of social events controls how audiences receive those events. In turn, this conditioning of the audience’s reception of information brings about some transformation of reality because it changes how people interact with the world. It doesn’t matter so much what reality is; people’s actions are determined by how reality appears to them.
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McLuhan and Fiore’s title is a nod to this management of perceptions: the medium is “the massage,” because any platform for the sharing of public information will “massage” the collective experience of that reality. They explain: “All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”
Thus, media technology creates a doubling of reality where the world of real events is modified by a world of perceptions: there is the pre-existing, external reality to which the media refers and attempts to represent, and there is the manufactured reality that comes into being as an effect of representing that external reality. Because of the ubiquity of mediated ways of interacting with the world (where news outlets serve as middlemen that prescribe the public interpretation of events), these two realities are increasingly indistinguishable. The media takes real events (which are often of marginal concern for society and its governance) and reinvents them as public objects of concern which can then advance all manner of ideological itineraries.
This process of reinvention generates what Daniel Boorstin (American historian and former librarian of Congress) has called “pseudo-events” in his appropriately titled book The Image.
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Like an event, a pseudo-event also works to broaden the audience of any particular happening, bringing it to the attention of people who would otherwise be unaware. With pseudo-events, however, there is a key difference: the pseudo-event refers to and represents a real event, but its reference to and representation of that event are designed to create and modify realities that are not immediately related to the event.
[For] example, if you were to post “Lost Dog” signs not in order to find your dog, but rather, to elicit pity from a potential romantic partner in the neighborhood, then we’d approach the realm of a pseudo-event. If that was the primary motivation behind the “Lost Dog” signs, you could very well imagine a scenario in which there was no missing dog—no dog at all. Just a guy trying to get attention. Of course, there may well be a lost dog: the event to which the pseudo-event refers is not necessarily a fiction. What’s important here is that the purpose of reclaiming the dog is decidedly secondary. Disseminating the news of the lost dog aims to achieve an external outcome (e.g., getting a date) that had nothing to do with the dog or its departure." [Source]
Pseudo-events are the type of influence & analysis tools which we need to become more familiar with. Though not just to defend against their use on us. The type of thinking and strategizing involved in the creation of pseudo-events can also be used to help secure our liberation. In an ideal world of course such tools would not be acceptable in civilized society and anyone using them for any purpose would be condemned. But we're living in a far from ideal world. We live in a world where the masses have been primed to be susceptible to exactly these kinds of manipulation operations.
So we must develop ways to utilize these tools for the emancipation of the masses' minds. This will not be an easy task. If you've read any fantasy literature at all you'll be familiar with the trope of the powerful tool that so many seek to use for good but ultimately ends up a corrupting and malevolent force. Keep in mind, as you read the following examples, that many of the people crafting these pseudo-events may in fact believe in their "rightness" in the exact same way as you do.
"Consider the pseudo-event of Officer Sicknick’s body lying in state, after the media falsely reported that he had been bludgeoned to death by protesters with a fire extinguisher. In reality, the only death directly resulting from the Capitol entry was the case of a protester who was killed by the gun of a police officer. Indeed, there were other deaths that appear to have been indirectly related to the breach of the Capitol, but those were due to peripheral causes like a heart attack, suicide, or a stroke. In the public imagination, though, the full death toll of January 6th was directly attributable to Donald Trump and his murderous supporters.
The media manipulation of reality is broader than simply waiting for an event that “looks bad” and using it to create a pseudo-reality to further a partisan agenda. While media outlets will speak openly about “bad optics,” “good optics” also play a role, albeit a quieter one.
When something “looks good” for an ideological opponent of the media (that is, when the representation and dissemination of an event might advance a domestic opponent’s objectives), the event will not be represented. Thus, when video is posted to Twitter of security officials allowing protesters into the Capitol, it will quickly be discredited. Don’t believe your lying eyes. After all, it serves as an obstacle to creating the pseudo-event of the “armed insurrection.” Conversely, when something “looks good” for allies of the media (that is, when it might advance their shared partisan agenda), it will be broadcast extensively to expand the audience and visibility of the event. (Consider the wide dissemination of Ocasio-Cortez’s tearful visit to the southern border to visit the migrant “kids in cages” during the Trump administration.)
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In a troubling passage from The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan and Fiore describe new media technologies as the greatest modern power in shaping culture, society and international affairs: “Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric information media—under cold conditions, and constantly. [This] cold war is the real war front […] involving everybody—all the time—everywhere.” Whereas the traditional democratic function of media is to equip the public for effective deliberation by informing them about realities pertinent to the national interest, the media now serves as a partisan weapon to undermine domestic opponents of elite ideology." [Source]
It is worth returning once more to the events & coverage surrounding January 6th (and the months leading up to it):
"That fake news can have such real world consequences should scare every American to death.
Notice also how the fake news story worsens with each repeat. On January 6, the alleged insurrection was by “Trump supporters.” By January 23 Trump supporters had been morphed into “White supremacist insurrectionists.”
The entire world now believes in something that does not exist.
This is an example of what it means to live in The Matrix. Everyone lives in a false world created by lies repeated endlessly by pressitutes.
The ruling lies are lies that enable Establishment agendas by getting rid of non-establishment explanations and shutting down non-establishment leaders. Trump had to go because he was in the way of Establishment agendas. An example is being made of Trump as a lesson to others who value service to the people higher than service to the Establishment.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Trump won reelection. The accumulated evidence of electoral fraud is overwhelming. Yet the Lie Machine was able to prevent the evidence being presented and examined. All the presstitutes ever said was that “there is no evidence of fraud,” followed by “all who support examining the evidence are enemies of democracy.”
In other words, democracy is a stolen election. If you protest the theft, you are an enemy of democracy." [Source]
If you still aren't seeing much of a problem, the vapid & vain propagandists at CNN & CBS were kind enough to provide a particularly blunt example:
"In a headline clearly designed to prompt outrage, CNN recently claimed that “Sidney Powell argues in new court filing that no reasonable people would believe her election fraud claims.” Similarly, CBS News asserted that “Sidney Powell tells court ‘no reasonable person’ would take her voter fraud claims as fact.” The implication is that Powell, one of the most prominent critics of the 2020 presidential election, who has been outspoken in her claims that Joe Biden’s victory was secured through outright fraud involving, in particular, illegal and malicious manipulation of the vote-counting machines, has now repudiated those claims.
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...it is accurate that the filing by Powell’s attorneys in the defamation lawsuit did assert that when Powell made her charges of election fraud involving the Dominion voting systems, she made clear that she was asserting opinion rather than fact, as her charges remained to be proved, and the evidence on which she relied for her assertions (which was spelled out in detail by Powell at the time) still had not been authenticated in a judicial setting.
The explanation for this seeming anomaly (that Powell believed and still believes that fraud took place and her lawyers’ assertion that she was only asserting opinion) is that for Dominion to succeed in its libel case against Powell it would have to prove that she knew what she was asserting was false, and that, indeed that falsity was a matter of fact she consciously or recklessly malevolently presented as something it was not.
Her lawyers, in other words, were simply making a highly technical legal argument that at the time Powell made the statements in question they could only be matters of opinion, and the statement of an opinion is not a statement of fact and therefore could not be grounds for a defamation action. This is not the easiest point to grasp, but any reading of the whole pleading by anyone with legal training should have made it evident." [Source]
You see with the above example how some very important nuance is removed and what remains is designed to trigger specific emotions, to lead you to the "correct" conclusions, and to shut down your critical thinking abilities & encourage emotional reactions. Whether it's the Trump years or "mass shootings," the information presented to you by the media is not provided to inform but rather to make you conform.
Reality White-Out
"[The 1950s] was a disastrous period in American media that not only resulted in a historically repressive atmosphere of conformity, but saw all sorts of glaring social problems covered up or de-emphasized with relative ease, from Jim Crow laws to fraudulent propaganda about communist infiltration to overthrows and assassinations in foreign countries.
The wink-wink arrangement that big media companies had with the government persisted through the early sixties, and enabled horribly destructive lies about everything from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe to the Missile Gap to go mostly unchallenged, for a simple reason: if you give someone formal or informal power to choke off lies, they themselves may now lie with impunity. It’s Whac-a-Mole: in an effort to solve one problem, you create a much bigger one elsewhere, incentivizing official deceptions.
That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything should be run by people with graduate degrees." [Source]
It's not just via emotional-manipulation that poor journalism seeks to control you "help you come to the right conclusions." After all, some people are becoming increasingly adept at sussing out and combating emotional manipulation in media. To really control the masses you'll need to trot out every propagandist's favorite tool: the eraser. Consider the coverage of Kamala Harris, in particular the piece referenced below. At the time of its publishing it was nothing but a simple candidate puff piece, typical of much political coverage these days. But when later circumstances turn it into a potential tool of delegitimization, out comes the eraser:
"Here's how the first seven paragraphs of that article, published by the Post on July 23, 2019, and bylined by features reporter Ben Terris, originally appeared:
It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and Kamala Harris was explaining to her sister, Maya, that campaigns are like prisons.
She'd been recounting how in the days before the Democratic debate in Miami life had actually slowed down to a manageable pace. Kamala, Maya and the rest of the team had spent three days prepping for that contest in a beach-facing hotel suite, where they closed the curtains to blot out the fun. But for all the hours of studying policy and practicing the zingers that would supercharge her candidacy, the trip allowed for a break in an otherwise all-encompassing schedule.
"I actually got sleep," Kamala said, sitting in a Hilton conference room, beside her sister, and smiling as she recalled walks on the beach with her husband and that one morning SoulCycle class she was able to take.
"That kind of stuff," Kamala said between sips of iced tea, "which was about bringing a little normal to the days, that was a treat for me."
"I mean, in some ways it was a treat," Maya said. "But not really."
"It's a treat that a prisoner gets when they ask for, 'A morsel of food please,' " Kamala said shoving her hands forward as if clutching a metal plate, her voice now trembling like an old British man locked in a Dickensian jail cell. "'And water! I just want wahtahhh….'Your standards really go out the f—ing window."
Kamala burst into laughter." [Source]
This particular example may seem minor and insignificant but that may be the most important part of all. One can almost understand attempting to hide something massive & potentially embarrassing or otherwise detrimental. But something like this is not that. Its erasure & memory-holing points to an insecurity that is deep-rooted. This insecurity has been making itself more visible in recent months.
"Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.
Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”
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But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.
In case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices, including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative outlets by these cable providers
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For the last four years, we were inundated with media messaging that Trump posed an unprecedented threat to press freedoms. The Washington Post even flamboyantly adopted a new motto to implicitly ratify that accusation (while claiming it was not Trump-specific). Other than the indictment of Julian Assange — which most Washington Democrats cheered — what did the Trump administration do in the way of attacking press freedoms that remotely compares to Democrats abusing their majoritarian power to force the removal of conservative cable outlets from the airwaves, just days after doing the same with dissident voices online?
There is not a peep of protest from any liberal journalists. Do any of the people who spent four years pretending to care so deeply about the vital role of press freedom have anything to say about this full frontal attack by the majority party in Washington on news outlets opposed to their political agenda and ideology?
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Just imagine if, during the Trump years, the GOP Senate had abused its power to bully cable outlets into removing MSNBC from their platforms, or banning liberal journalists and activists from using social media platforms, on the grounds that they were spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. It is hard to overstate how extreme the rhetoric would have been that Trump and the Republicans were engaged in authoritarian measures to destroy free speech and a free press." [Source]
Those of us that had paid attention prior to the Trump years were able to dip into a massive archive of hypocrisy & "inconvenient" truths. We had the ability to showcase with hard evidence the duplicity of the media maggots. Even with this access & ability our efforts were resisted & their effects were limited. How much more difficult would this essential task have been operating under the conditions we find ourselves in today? What about the conditions that seem likely to emerge should we remain on our current trajectory?
What Lies Behind
""Completely detached from their own nations, imbued with a global liberal ideology and driven by the desire to accumulate wealth regardless of the consequences, Western elites have become antagonistic to their own citizens whose physical existence and spiritual heritage is unreservedly sacrificed for narrow economic interests and ideological views. The reaction of the other side is expectedly negative, but slow, given that social engineering within Western countries has been conducted since the end of World War II." [Source]
There's a trend of people defining "civilized" as offloading more and more of what would normally have been handled between people in ad-hoc, often far from perfect manners, onto a standardized bureaucratic regime. Any mistakes & failures are seized upon as reasons why more and more must be brought into fold and that the tinkering & data analysis must always increase so we can become ever more perfect. The end of the road of all this is a Transhumanist hellscape, the Final Cage.
"“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
In 2011 there was a devastating nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant in Japan. An “investigation” concluded that:
“its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture, our reflexive obedience, our reluctance to question authority, our devotion to sticking with the programme”.
However, there is nothing specifically Japanese about these attitudes....Why do powerful people in governments and corporations commit so many crimes? Why do people tolerate a government that commits war crimes? Why do people turn a blind eye when large corporations repeatedly carry out unethical activities? Why is it we are so easily misled?
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Psychologists have recognised that our beliefs are an important part of how we see ourselves. We prefer to receive information that confirms our existing views or beliefs, because it makes us feel good about ourselves. Psychologists use the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ to describe a situation where people feel uncomfortable because they are presented with evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs. We try to find ways to deal with this discomfort, either by ignoring the information, or by using faulty logic to justify our existing beliefs. This is known as ‘confirmation bias’, and is often divided into three main areas.
Firstly, biased search is where we actively seek out information that supports our existing views. Most newspaper readers will be aware that they choose a newspaper where the writers express similar views to their own.
Secondly, biased interpretation is where we interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting our existing position. We also find reasons to dismiss evidence that contradicts our beliefs, by convincing ourselves that the source was unreliable.
Finally, biased memory is where we remember information that supports our existing beliefs, and forget information that contradicts them. Over time, most people forget the detail of what they have learned. They create a framework of understanding, or a framework of knowledge. This is like a general overview of how we see the world. If new information is consistent with this framework, it fits into the framework easily, reinforces the framework, and might be remembered. If new information does not fit easily into the framework then we don’t know what to do with it, so it will tend to be dismissed and quickly forgotten.
Affection for beliefs seems to be similar to affection for people. Recent research has shown that some parts of the brain are de-activated when thinking about people we love. In particular, some of the areas responsible for critical thinking. The same appears to be true when thinking about beliefs. Our brain treats differently any information that might challenge our beliefs. The effect seems to be stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. This is particularly the case where people believe in a powerful ideology, or a big idea, such as ‘markets’. We are mostly unaware of how deeply these big ideas affect the way we think. Confirmation bias can lead to a situation where people will continue to believe something, even when it is strongly contradicted by the evidence." [Source]
I think perhaps the cure to these biases, along with authority worship, may be to actively empower people from the ground up. For example, the task of creating your own news clipping archive both provides you with a resource to use in the creation of future work and a way to help you remember information you may have forgotten.
What those in authority do seems complex but they're just weaving together a variety of simple processes to create their manipulative BS. Anyone can do what they do given the resources, but more importantly, once people can do it themselves, even on a small scale, seeing through it becomes that much easier.
A similar statement could be made for us free-thinkers as well. "Doing your own research" often seems complex and overwhelming, but all it is is simple processes that add up over time. If people can read in a critical manner (and the more they do the better they'll get) they can free themselves and begin to free others. Consider this new research on whether you can "bullshit a bullshitter":
"For the purposes of science, the researchers define “bullsh*t” as information deliberately crafted to persuade or ‘sell’ people on an idea with little or no concern for the truth of the matter. They also divide bullsh*t into two subtypes: persuasive and evasive. Persuasive bullsh*t is designed to impress an audience and win them over, whereas evasive bullsh*t, as the name suggests, is designed to bamboozle them with irrelevant nonsense so as to avoid inconvenient or uncomfortable truths in a given situation or context.
The University of Waterloo researchers took 800 participants from the US and Canada and tested their bullsh*tting prowess. They compared the participants’ self-reported engagement in both types of bullsh*tting with their take on a series of pseudoscience, fake news, and the other assorted forms of bullsh*t everyone is subjected to online on a daily basis.
The participants also underwent cognitive screenings and personality tests to determine their levels of introspection and self-confidence, and their ability to reflect on their own behavior. And, as the research proved, it turns out that, contrary to popular wisdom, one can indeed bullsh*t a bullsh*tter.
“Persuasive BSers seem to mistake superficial profoundness for actual profoundness. So, if something simply sounds profound, truthful, or accurate to them, that means it really is,” Littrell said, adding that the evasive bullsh*tters are the ones to look out for.
“[E]vasive bullshitters were much better at making this distinction.”" [Source]
So that's an angle of attack I'm currently working on: Trying to make people's current habits empowering, attempting to get them to not be passive consumers, promoting the creation of your own news archives, encouraging individuals to provide their own research & analysis, etc. And doing all this just by using simple processes that add up to something bigger. It's the type of thing schools should be doing rather than attempting to fill students up with a list of facts & concepts decided by some central planner technocrats.
"Michael J. Fox, the third president of the United States, was responsible for establishing Presbyterianism as the state religion of the new federation after its peaceful secession from the English empire.
Or did he? When you read that sentence, you probably scrunched up your forehead or raised an eyebrow in disbelief. Maybe you know that Michael J. Fox is the actor who played Marty McFly in the Back to the Future movies. Maybe you know the third president of the United States was Thomas Jefferson and that on point of principle, the United States has never had a state religion. I suspect you are probably aware that its citizens fought a war to gain independence and you may know that this independence was gained from Great Britain rather than England. What I am pretty sure you did not do was attempt to look at the sentence from multiple perspectives or evaluate the source.
The development of the capacity to think critically is an aim of education on which most of us can agree. It is a commonplace to amend a call for such a capacity to the issues of the day and so, if inclined, we may point to fake news, myths about COVID-19, and the ever-widening polarization of political debate as evidence for the urgent need to nurture critical thinking. Yet I am confident that we could justify such a call under the circumstances of any year since the advent of mass education. The need for critical thinking is not in question. Instead, the point of interest is how best to develop this capacity given that we have yet failed to do so at scale.
If you go to one of those conferences on education that serve a pleasing lunch then you will hear about critical thinking as a “skill.” The solution is simple—we just need to develop the capacity for critical thinking in young people by making them do critical thinking. Perhaps they could do a project about climate change (a popular choice) and as a result they will somehow—don’t bore me with the details here—kind of pick-up the ability to think critically. Perhaps we should teach them some heuristics such as, “look at the problem from multiple perspectives” or “write down a list of positive and negative points.”
Indeed, critical thinking is one of the “4 Cs” of the ageing 21st century skills movement, alongside creativity, collaboration, and communication. The Australian Curriculum has drawn upon these ideas in its model of “general capabilities,” one of which is “critical and creative thinking.” Unfortunately, critical thinking is not a skill that can be improved through practice—like a golf swing—nor is it a “general” capability. Instead, it is an abstract description of what humans can do as a result amassing a wealth of underpinning knowledge and skills relevant to the particular context in which thinking is to be deployed." [Source]
Building up in everyone the basic analytical skills & the foundational knowledge required to really use them effectively is key. We can't just leave these activities to a professionalized minority. Heck, these days it certainly seems things like a journalism degree should act as a disqualifier, rather than a qualification. And just like few kids, even ones who dream of playing in the NFL, are going to have much interest in spending 10-15 years doing nothing but practice & drills before they even play a real game, many will lack interest in truly developing their analytical skills & foundational knowledge without having some outlets to really test & apply themselves in the short-term.
We need to encourage more and more people to put their own ideas out there to have them critically analyzed too. Everyone's got an area they're knowledgeable about but we can't just specialize, we need to have the courage to be wrong (and we need to support others' ability to be wrong and not be mocked or shamed for it).
There's often a longing for a past version of things, and journalism proves no exception. We even saw examples of such nostalgia above. But like many instances of this kind of longing, we must determine whether it is based more on fantasy than fact. Was there a time when journalism was truly good or were there just times where it was harder to call out & show journalistic wrongness in real-time? Does the vast treasure chest history provides allow us to pick out the exceptional examples of previous eras and overshadow the far more numerous unexceptional ones?
Another problem we face in this country is this: We really can't even be certain how people are using words and what they're intending them to mean. So even something like "activist journalism" can conjure entirely different visions in people's minds. If activist journalism means journalism which often hides inconvenient facts that would distract from the narrative trying to be presented then I'm certainly against that. But if it means journalism done by people who genuinely care about the issues they're covering and who present things in a fair manner, well that's OK by me, but I'd also agree in that instance that maybe adding "activist" was unnecessary.
We're going to need to get better at probing people to achieve greater understanding of their meanings. It is essential that we do this because the lack of a clearly shared meaning is not simply confined to the meaning of words but extends deep into our societal structures:
"The principle of tolerance, within one society, cannot coexist with the reality of completely different cultures which in some respects are even hostile to one another. Multiculturalism is used as an excuse to reject integration, but without integration and partial assimilation, the wholeness of one society and state cannot be preserved." [Source]
One thing I've been pondering lately more and more is the sheer scale of the task, the absolute number of minds we must now address. Are we capable of actually uniting that many minds behind anything truly meaningful? In a strange way perhaps things like Hollywood & Disney can offer us hope: We see so many enthralled by the creations of these fantasists. And many others are on similar paths, influencing the minds of the masses.
So clearly it is not a physically impossible task. But to do it in an honest, non-manipulative manner? To do it in quick enough? To do it starting from the poor positions we find ourselves in? That I do not know. I'm concerned far too many are going to be inclined to join the side offering the shiny high-tech "fun & exciting" future. And that ain't us. But I still have hope.
"If you do journalism well, then you’re going to make people angry, and if you’re making people angry, then they are going to say unpleasant and hurtful things about you. If you’re lucky, that is all that will happen. The bigger your platform, the more angry people there will be, and the angrier they will be. The more powerful the people angered by your work, the more intense the retaliation. That is what it means to call someone “powerful”: they have the capacity to inflict punishment on those who impede them.
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Anyone who cannot endure that, or who does not want to, is well-advised not to seek out a public platform and try to become an influential figure who helps shape discourse, debate and political outcomes, and especially not to become a reporter devoted to exposing secret corruption by powerful factions. It would obviously be better if all of that did not happen, but wishing that it would stop is like hoping it never rains again: not only is it futile, but — like rain — there are cleansing and healthy aspects to having those who wield influence and power have to hear from those they affect, and anger.
But with that cost, which can be substantial, comes an enormous benefit. It is an immense privilege to have a large platform that you can utilize to shape the society around you, reach large numbers of people, and highlight injustices you believe are being neglected. Those who have that, and who earn a living by pursuing their passion to use it, are incredibly fortunate. Journalists who are murdered or imprisoned or prosecuted for their work are victims of real persecution. Journalists who are maligned with words are not, especially when those words come not from powerful state officials but from random people on the internet." [Source]
Clearly, engaging in real journalism, especially today, is not a completely safe endeavor. These threats, both subtle and not, encourage inaction, docility, and timidity. Though I think part of the reason no one wants to act is because there's no well-defined path with a plausible & positive outcome. The talking heads, as many rightfully note, are all failures. They may have nuggets of wisdom to mine here or there but for the most part they're just out to increase their business and maybe get some cheap rush out of having so much "influence."
"The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”
Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can “neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”
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Gurri predicted throughout that entrenched authorities would be unable to distinguish between legitimate criticism and illegitimate rebellion. Once they lost control “over the story told about their performance,” they’d denounce clearly factual evidence of public discontent as lies. Gurri would later talk about centralized authority being “institutionally unable to grasp that it has lost its monopoly over political reality.” This in turn would stimulate even more “distrust and loss of legitimacy.”" [Source]
Some will argue that these forces arrayed against us are too powerful to stop with anything but violence. But if our problem is there is no well-defined path then not everything left to do is illegal. That path may cross into in gray or black areas of the law at points, maybe it does not. But if that path is not walked by tens of millions with a firm belief that something better lies on the other side of the treacherous mountain pass, we won't succeed. So one of the tasks on our to-do list is to actually make that treacherous path seem worth the risk to more and more people. And some of that will look like small-time, pep rally, inspirational BS. But its necessary in a world of 8 billion minds, I think.
"When we look at ideological movements, we see many people spreading certain ideas, perhaps zealously and dogmatically protesting in the streets with flags, banners, and sometimes violence. Some movements, peopled by thousands or millions, look like unstoppable, rock-solid juggernauts. But these intellectual “things” are in fact more fluid. If we look closely, we will notice a turnover of membership and, if we cast our gaze over a longer period of time, we witness within these “juggernauts” splits and other dramatic internal disagreements. For example, when we examine the Communist Parties in the West during the 1930s, we’re at first impressed by what looks like formidable discipline, strength, and staying power. But all the time, some Communist Party members were leaving and new people were joining. Typically, in such ideological bodies of adherents, there are a few stalwarts who remain at the helm through thick and thin, while the great body of members are continually being replaced.
A similar phenomenon affects religious movements. In her 1989 book New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction, the sociologist Eileen Barker reported that at least 61 percent of those who joined the Unification Church during a four-month period in 1978 had left within two-and-a-half years. Others have found very similar defection rates in various minor religious sects." [Source]
The leviathan we face may in fact not be a leviathan at all. It may simply be, as wise & brave Toto showed us: a grand illusion created & controlled by a weak & insecure force. Our leviathan may be nothing but a hologram whose controllers are hidden behind a curtain we are not even supposed to notice.
Well I want you to notice that curtain. Look at it. Inspect it. And let's figure out the best way to rip that sucker down and expose what lies behind.