THE SCROLL: Manufacturing Public Opinion: Media IS Manipulation

A Community Conversation About Media History, Propaganda, Sensationalism, and Ethics In Journalism

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A conversation cropped up around a restack I posted of an excellent article by

The Bone Writer

called The News Media, Propaganda, and Fairy Tales. Please do check it out and subscribe.

I had quoted The Bone Writer where he’d said, “Frankly, I think people on social media should just stop sharing the breaking news out but that won't happen. Most of them have been duped by the false sensationalism anyway. And then a large amount of them are now monetized by social platforms to get those early clicks, views, and impressions. The whole damn internet is a mass propaganda machine based on advertising and market/ad share.”

I reposted this to tell him I had enjoyed the piece, and I told him the following:

The reverse was also true in my experience. I was sharing a story as it related directly to my own experience of the way that story unfolded, and because that story garnered too much attention, Newsweek chose to say they ‘debunked’ my own firsthand experience.

I’m wary of anyone doing ‘fact-checking’ because I know from my own experience that this has been weaponized against people relaying stories that others with more pull/something to lose do not want heard or understood.

So, the 5-6pm retraction may be weaponized also - the publication can point to the fact that they corrected the error while doing so at a time when they know no one is looking - intentionally - and then say they couldn’t help it was late in the day because they mentioned it ‘as soon as possible.’

You’re absolutely right to be wary.

The Bone Writer agreed and lamented that there were not many solutions available “other than, look at everything with a skeptical eye, judge for yourself and don’t take the media angle as expertise or fact because I’m not sure one can say they are experts or putting forth any facts when that advertising money is going into their bank accounts.”

I agreed and cited having a presence on

Substack

Notes as a solution all its own. In an environment where we are largely uncensored, we are able to have a more fluid and organic meeting of the minds which more closely resembles what the early internet was like, as opposed to the broken dystopian monster that the majority of online spaces have since become.

As a quick aside, we’re even seeing emergent ways of using Notes to collaborate with each other coming into play. A similar post to this one emerged from

Thinking Man

’s

Melissa Petrie

cataloging a conversation on Notes that turned into a sort of impromptu think tank on academia. And in the spirit of adding an additional example of the way our community is utilizing the available tools for this function,

Nathalie Martinek PhD

posted a think tank style conversation she hosted on bullying in the workplace to the thread.

A return to this early internet feel of organic conversation and collaboration (sans algorithmic tampering to stoke engagement by inciting aggression) is a breath of fresh air for so many of us who are utilizing the Notes platform, and not a day goes by where I don’t hear another user bullhorning a great big sigh of relief.

Those of us who were deplatformed and censored have a lot of knee-jerk reactions from having survived four years of gaslighting, ridicule, and ostracism which might even point to some new form of not-yet-studied mass PTSD. Personally, I would love to see honest doctors and scientists looking into that now to preempt future issues. Keyword: HONEST.

On the same thread discussing The Bone Writer’s article,

Jim Davidson

of

L5 News

shared the following:

One of the turning points in my spiritual journey was reading news reports in an industry publication based on an interview by them of me in early 1990 in which I was directly misquoted and not named. No retraction was forthcoming. A few weeks later, a group of which I was a national director was betrayed by its ‘legislative affairs’ subcommittee and issued a global press release directly attacking a major investor in the company I worked for without consulting the full board. So I resigned from the board of that group.

At the end of that year I knew the industry I was in (commercial space transportation) was broken beyond repair. I made a valiant effort at tremendous personal cost to fix it and change the entire context we were working in. Which elevated the distribution of the lies and manipulations about my work to a much more destructive level in early 1991.

We can never go back to the way things were. And knowing what they were, I don't wanna.

Social media is driven by click bait to drive views to adverts. The bait taking is huge because people refuse to acknowledge why there is free food in the mousetrap.

But it's okay. The vast population is not going to involve themselves in building the future. And they can't stop the things that are about to happen. I continue to prepare to alleviate the suffering that is coming.

Upon a time, I would have said that I am sorry I am not able to do more. But today I was again reminded that the key factor in the timing is the salvation of souls, which is in God's hands. In fact, it is exclusively God's grace and mercy. There isn't much time, but there is enough.

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I responded to Jim to let him know I had had a similar experience:

Prior to my having attended film school, my friends were interviewed by the news media as we were entering an auditorium to see a concert.

There was a protest outside the venue that they were covering and wanted to get the reverse opinions from the concertgoers regarding the issue.

When we later saw the story air, everything about the event had been sensationalized and taken out of context by the news crew.

This was my first taste of this behavior on a personal level. I was only 18.

And I wasn’t naive about it - I knew they had done it on purpose.

By the time I got to film school and I started studying film history coupled with film editing, sound design, and special FX makeup, in addition to my regular writer/director/producer study track… well, if you know anything about that, all of the original cinematic tricks used to make a film not only believable but emotionally compelling were originally designed by propagandists.

The history of the moving picture art form itself is entrenched in manipulating the senses to achieve a desired effect.

Once you see it, you can never unsee it.

Once you study it and work in it and realize how that world functions, you can never unsee it.

If you know the detail work that goes into crafting even a single minute of broadcast television, you can never unsee it.

When people tell me it’s not deliberate, I laugh.

It is painstaking and intricate.

The word ‘deliberate’ doesn’t even do it justice.

After a while, I studied the reverse of this - how to use the medium to break it, to expose it, to show people how it can be manipulated in order to demonstrate that they can be and are being manipulated by it.

But people would need decades of media literacy training for it to even land for them that the act of editing itself is a form of manipulation - you are choosing, based upon a perspective, based upon even the inherent bias of merely being yourself (let alone having any sort of agenda), which information to keep in, which information to omit, and which information to juxtapose with other information in such a way that it becomes more emotionally impactful - and leads people to draw very specific conclusions.

On some level, this acts as a consciousness arms race.

The more you expose the tricks they already use, the more the people manipulating the media feel the need to develop more sophisticated tricks that are even more difficult to spot.

The manipulation has only become obvious, heavy-handed, and loud in the past nine years.

And I’m sure it’s out of desperation to maintain control - the act of being overt itself has the drawback of exposing the tactics being utilized for what they really are and how they function.

But when people can’t even tell how emotionally impacted they are by even the simplest thing as a music choice, how do you expect them to glean that they are being led by the nose off a cliff by people intentionally influencing their beliefs?

I can tell you, even with a lot of people “waking up,” inasmuch as they profess to have done so, many are still not understanding these mechanisms of public opinion manufacture and that, no matter which “side” they are on, they have been corralled into certain controllable, predictable belief sets by people whose specific job it is to make that happen.

Here is an example of how impactful editing and music selection can be upon emotion.

I love this example because it’s a film most people already know and love, so they are already familiar with the material and can readily see how the editor here is intentionally bending that material to create a different emotional impact from what was originally intended.

Apply this to all facets of media production, and you’ll get a better sense of what is happening to your consciousness as you take in doctored content all day long.

To anyone reading this who feels black pilled by this information, try not to go there.

Don’t let it victimize you. It’s counterproductive.

Reframe that emotion and use it as fuel to develop better media literacy skills.

Understanding the tricks being used to manipulate you so that you won’t fall for them anymore is where the self-empowerment is.

Jim Davidson replied:

Yes. It was a different time in life thirty-five years ago when I began to see through the lies. And then I asked myself whether to fight. So I tried to see if they were making a sincere effort to do a good job with the power they were so determined to keep.

I did look. I even tried to put myself in their shoes as it were and ask who would do a worse job. Which led me down all the rabbit holes in a Watership Down on steroids rabbit warren. Which was mostly reading and meditating for guidance.

When I saw what they did to extend world war one by three full years and saw how they built both sides for world war two, and looked at all the dead people it came close to tearing my guts out. And I lost hope.

Which is when I invited Jesus into my heart. And now I know that it's actually been much worse than any of us thought. It hasn't been two centuries of this crap. It's been twenty eons. Two hundred thousand years.

We rise again and again and they hide until they see how high we're going. And they buy and cheat and deceive and murder their way into power. And they slaughter and maim and kill again and again and again.

We did err. God told us not to bring them here. The people who were running things would not obey, partly out of corruption and partly out of anger. So the cycle began.

I didn't come here to tell you how it ends. I came here to tell you how it begins. It begins with God showing everyone what kind of people and things have been ruining their lives for 200,000 years. I came here to show people a world without limits without terror and without demons. A world where men and women have the power to do and the freedom to choose and the demons are banished.

We have an opportunity to turn the hearts of the adults to the children and the hearts of the children to the adults. To carry the good news of eternal salvation and the immortality of the soul to the whole universe. Or God will smite the world with a curse.

It's a pretty good time to be alive. And it's a good deal when you think about it.

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