How media deceives us

We can do "The Innuendo," we can dance and sing When it's said and done, we haven't told you a thing We all know that crap is king, give us dirty laundry

--Don Henley

For much of my humble existence I consumed the nightly news over the air from a local broadcast station. I would get home from work and listen to the local and national news while I make dinner. Our educational system taught me that this is what normal people do because this is how you get reliable information about the world. It didn't even occur to me that they may be broadcasting propaganda. We were taught that these news broadcasts are reliable. That I could trust them. It was heresy to claim that errors in news media were anything but honest unintentional mistakes.

The terrible truth is that corporate news media deceives you, and they always have. There are several examples on this YouTube Channel

How The Public perceives news media​

We can consume media actively or passively. The example from the introductory paragraph is a passive scenario. I'm making dinner and not actively analyzing the information presented to me. In my mind they were a trusted news source and I did not have to worry about the integrity of the message. If I thought the broadcast source was not trusted, then I would have been more critical. Unfortunately, I was brainwashed by our school system to consider these sources reliable. Most people consume information in this way. The talking head presents a bunch of information and they accept the information without challenging it.

People pay attention and critically analyze information in a few scenarios. They tend to be more critical when it's a topic that they have expertise in. A doctor is likely to critically examine a report on a new drug. A software engineer will critically analyze a report about hackers. A professional in media or a politician will analyze news media because it makes them better at their job. They don't have to think about doing this, they just do it out of habit.

When we analyze information critically, we come to wildly different conclusions than people who consume it passively. The doctors and software engineers above often conclude with, "this is so wrong." where the passive viewer just accepts it. One might conclude that the answer is to teach everyone to actively consume media all of the time. This is great, but there is an important principle to consider:

An example of this principle is the computer account password. For years we were taught to make better passwords with symbols, numbers, and whatever our human brains could do to make them complex but memorable. Despite this, the most common passwords we discover from data breaches today are "123456" and "password".

The solution to the computer password problem wasn't teaching people to make better passwords. It was making authentication systems inherently more secure by requiring a second factor like a one-time pin code or passkey.

If we are to analyze this properly then we must examine media from the passive viewer perspective. I do this through a process I call normalization.

Normalizing media analysis​

We need to step out of critical thinking mode for a moment to properly analyze video news media from the general public's perspective.

The experience is more about how you feel about the content rather than what you think about it. We are firmly in the realm of personal subjective opinion. With this baseline opinion established we can then apply knowledge and experience to move it toward objective reality. We can use this applied knowledge perspective to measure the quality of the original media from the general public point of view.

What you should find here is that the experience from the average viewer's perspective is often wildly different from that of a more educated and experienced person. This is not the fault of the viewer. It is the content creator's responsibility to communicate information such that the target audience understands it.

A quick recap on why content producers create propaganda​

Corporate and Independent media both produce propaganda for different reasons in practice but it comes down to two core issues:

1. Corporations and private companies have a business interest in promoting information favorable to them, and suppressing information that is unfavorable.
2. Corporations and individuals want to make money.

These are not inherently bad things on their own, but when they override their duty to a public trust they are perverse.

How Media deceives the public​

Here are several ways that entities intentionally mislead the public:

• Astroturfing: Manufactured content pretending to be a popular grassroots movement. Often seen when videos about tax breaks have been up for 15 minutes and weren't produced by anyone notable with 20 comments.
• Keyword Stuffing: Trying to drive a narrative by using specific words excessively. I am guilty of this when I talk about the rapists and pedophiles in the Epstein Files using those words as often as possible.
• Implied Narrative: Creating a narrative by implying something is a fact without establishing it. A simple example is from a diamond wedding ring commercial: "How can 2 months salary last forever?". It implies that this is an existing social norm that you should follow lest you appear unsophisticated. It isn't. It was an ad campaign invented by DeBeers to sell expensive diamond rings to suckers.
• Exploiting ignorance: Using the ignorance of an audience to implicitly push a narrative. Tax videos often exploit public ignorance about marginal tax rates to imply that they will pay more tax than they actually will. It takes about 5 seconds to clarify this, but content creators exploit this instead.
• Exploiting legitimate desire: Using a legitimate concern to push a narrative. Broadcast media pushing narratives about social media harming children is an example.
• Misdirection: Also known as a red herring. Politicians use this when they don't want to discuss a topic, so they move the discussion toward one of the 3 or 4 topics they prepared for.
• Stereotyping: Assigning properties to a group when the group as a whole does not have them. A belief that people in the south are inherently racist because of activities that happened 70 years ago would be one example.

The really scary propaganda:​

I call these out specifically because they are particularly dangerous and unintuitive.

News organizations are particularly dangerous because they have a strong implied public trust. I am limiting this to broadcast news organizations and their local affiliates because those are the organizations that people trust. The education system brainwashed us into believing they are near infallible. I will demonstrate that they are not only fallible, but actively corrupted and untrustworthy. Here is how.

• Forced Narratives: Paid Content: This occurs when news organizations overwhelmingly push one side of a story where the population has a legitimate interest in both sides. Whenever the news starts talking about taxes, the overwhelming majority of the coverage is against the tax when it affects rich people. I wonder who is paying for this content that they run like little whores?
• Forced Narratives: Self-Interest: Seen very recently with attacks on Independent Media. Independent Media is the biggest threat to their business model and instead of changing it, they would rather destroy the competition by dragging them through the mud under the guise of news.
• Omissions: They don't talk about how Independent Media covers the stories that they won't go near. They leave out any coverage of information derogatory to them. Don't worry, Independent Media will still cover stories about bribes you paid the President through lawsuits against your companies that you did not challenge but should have. Wanna hear something neat?

Your major shareholders are participating in a federal racketeering scheme. Why? Because corporations have a fiscal duty to their shareholders. The shareholders should be up in arms if it was a legitimate lawsuit because it was without merit, but they paid it without a peep. This indicates that the value gained by their company was in paying the lawsuit rather than challenging it. Realizing value from paying an elected official is bribery, and your executives and major shareholders are participants in this scheme. Your corporation is no defense against RICO and they can be held personally liable.

The people's position is rarely covered fairly. If you want to be a foundation of Democracy, then you better start being in service to our Republic instead of wealthy plutocrats. I will destroy your corporations if you do not show deference to The Public.

Christian Nationalism is a Perversion of christianity​

Christian Nationalism is an invention by extremists to steal the government from the people. Your leaders are opportunists and charlatans! False prophets using your faith against you so that they can gain power. They don't use their power to serve God, they serve themselves. Evangelical Christianity in federal government hasn't helped their neighbor, they use it to suppress the people. Christians and non-Christians alike!

The Bible is not important. The messages within it are what is important. Christian nationalists use convenient pieces of scripture to connive congregations of people into giving them money and putting their buddies into positions of power so that they can be rewarded for their service to crooked men. Christian nationalism is wholesale grift and an affront to the lord!

The church is about men and women of the local community getting together to make the world a better place. It is the place to find fellowship with other people who want to do the same. Find the pastors and people that are truly spreading the message of Christianity through attraction rather than marketing or coercion. It isn't a top-down organization ruled by a pastor and his minions. It's a ground-up community that chooses the leaders who best reflect their community values.

We all make mistakes and the lord forgives even when I find it difficult. Honestly accept your mistakes, make things right with the people around you, then learn from them and don't repeat those mistakes. The Lord will forgive you.

If you don't believe a non-Christian telling you these things, I understand. Here is a Christian that can help guide you spiritually: Rev Ed Trevors

Group Stereotyping and Misdirection​

A form of stereotyping based on misdirection and a favorite of corporate broadcast media and politicians alike. It works by inspecting a topic, and then misdirecting it to a group position and assigning attributes to that position instead of the topic. An example topic here is a fringe extremist position very unpopular with the general public as a whole that a propagandist then attributes to the Republican or Democrat party. At that point their slam-dunk criticism of the topic is incorrectly associated with that party as a whole. This causes very serious problems for the American Public.

Republicans get labeled as racist because of fringe racist group preference for the party. Democrats get labeled as people who want to mutilate children because of fringe transgender positions. These are not positions of the parties and they never were. I don't care about stupid examples of why you think these statements are wrong that just popped into your head. Your brain has been bombarded by propaganda for so long that you don't have an objective opinion on it and you never took the time to grok the truth based on an objective source. You are repeating propaganda.

Politicians like to denigrate the other party this way. Corporate media likes this because it puts every issue into neat little party buckets for their fundamentally flawed analytics systems. They spew propaganda on a constant basis and then wonder why the American Public no longer believes anything that they say.

It keeps the public ignorant of the world around them. Analyze almost any video from mainstream media on any topic, then ask yourself what you learned about the topic. It's vague and shallow at best. We've been talking about the SAVE act on the news for the last 6 months. Ask yourself how much you actually learned about it in that time. Would you need to reregister and is the driver license in your pocket sufficient for that purpose? No cheating by declaring that you have a passport.

It makes American Citizens hostile toward each other. Democrats and Republicans at each others throats so that billionaires can make more money that they won't use productively. People are dying over this shit you greedy assholes!

Target issues and organizations, not your fellow Americans.​

I have a better idea: How about instead of regarding our fellow Americans as the enemy, we acknowledge the true enemy: The corporations and wealthy individuals that usurp our Democracy through the media and the media entities that enable it. I think we have a winning position here that benefits everyone in the American Public except for a few sociopaths. Instead of attacking Democrats or Republicans, go after the major news corporations including CNN, Fox News, Paramount, Disney, and NBC. They are traitors to the Constitution of the United States and my enemy! I ain't asking nobody to fight my battles, but these companies and wealthy individuals are pretty highly leveraged at the moment and it wouldn't take much more than everyone turning their television sets off and getting their news from independent sources on the Internet permanently to bankrupt them. Just saiyan.

Do not attack your fellow Americans, even the ones you don't like. Attack opinions, but not the people who hold them. Corporations on the other hand are fair game. I really wat to test the doctrine of corporate personhood. Can a person be held criminally liable for murdering a non-human business entity? Inquiring minds want to know.

The phenomenon of Fake News aka Manufactured Realities​

A popular view among media is to dismiss the MAGA complaints about fake news. They certainly aren't going to put MAGA's side of this on the news because it's bad for business. The narrative that corporate media pushed suggested they just didn't like the news they were hearing. The problem runs deeper than this. The narrative describes a logical refutation of the news, and indeed the opportunists leading the movement used it for their own gain, but the underlying gut feeling is indeed a false reality and the core of their complaint.

We are bombarded with propaganda all day long. Everything you see on the news is manufactured to funnel a commodity of people into a buckets that they sell to advertisers. The world as presented on the evening news does not represent the real world. When we compare the experiences in our daily lives with the news, they do not agree.

It's easy to show this with pieces produced by the New York Times. Here is an example from Ezra Klein. There's a dreamlike quality to the content that doesn't feel like the real world as if separating you from actual reality and pulling you into a different world. I reject this attempt to hijack my agency. When you zoom out and understand what's going on here it's clear: It's a hit piece on AI because AI is the biggest threat to his business. ChatGPT can summarize an entire Senate hearing in seconds and do it better.

Maybe you didn't consciously know you were being hijacked, but your brain knows. Your brain is telling you that something is wrong when while you watch it. It just "feels" like you're looking at a fugazi. It's more that just dissociative from reality, it creates kind of uncanny valley news mimics reality. It's like a zombie, or an AI-generated human with extra fingers. It's unsettling.

Educated people are the biggest fools​

This is one of my favorites. Educated people think that they are immune to propaganda. They are above it. The truth is that they are the biggest suckers of all. They think they know all about the world and that there's no way they could be duped by misinformation. They are wrong. How many of you actually watch the evening news with a critical eye? Do you test their claims every single time or just accept them? Do you see through paid content, or only think you would spot when it exists? Paid content is all over the place, yet you rarely spot it because you didn't think you needed to worry about that on your local news station.

Here they are targeting Democrats or Republicans while wealthy entities pushing propaganda through corporate and independent news laugh all the way to the bank. We should be pushing media to focus on the issues instead of vague area targeting against parties and groups. We get a subscription to Ground News patting ourselves on the back for being so resourceful without even recognizing that liberal or conservative it's all corporate propaganda. Smart people are so easily mislead because they think they are smarter than it, but they saw you coming.

Wake the fuck up, pull your heads out of your asses, and start paying attention to the world around you because we are in tyranny! Apply your knowledge to the situations around you like I am doing here. You don't think one person can make a difference? Watch me. You cannot throw money at some group claiming to solve these problems, because they are probably just stealing it anyway. YOU need to do WORK personally if you want to see change. Money can buy people to do work, but it's pointless without goals and planning.

We need educated leaders to serve the people.​

What the people need right now is bona-fide Populist Leadership. The boomers grew up in a culture where leadership was top-down. You found a shitty job and your boss told you what to do and when to do it or get fired. You don't really learn to lead. You just get thrust into a leadership position one day and figure out something that works, or you undermine enough coworkers to get promoted. It's a world that favors opportunists and showmen. You never really learn to lead, just manage. People in this space telling you something different are trying to sell you something.

We do things differently in Generation X. We learned how to do things on our own from an early age because we had to. Leadership is an important principle from the ground up. Work is about a team of people with goals to accomplish. You aren't waiting for the boss to come around and tell you to drop more fries. You recognize that you are running low on fries and drop them or ask the boss if necessary. You aren't in competition with coworkers, you are all contributing toward goals and people that contribute the most and learn the right skills move ahead in the company.

We need Generation X leadership in politics and that is Populist Politics. Policies that benefit the people. We need professionals who can identify the work we need to do and do it leading future generations to do the same. You can't throw money at this. You must give your time for the public good. You cannot lead through a video presence because leadership cannot be expressed this way.

The neoliberal economic policies that we have practiced until now have led us into tyranny. We relied on others to lead us and drive change. Scumbags were happy to fill this leadership role because they are motivated by grift rather than service to The Constitution. It is a culture invented by capitalism that trains us to believe personal enrichment should be the focus of everything. The real focus should be helping your neighbor, and letting them help you. I willingly left a job making 300K per year to make the world a better place and save our Republic from corporate tyranny. That money would do little to make me happy, but I find a lot of joy in seeing the changes that I want to see in the world.

We have seen the end result of Capitalist Politics and how it leads to all of our wealth hoarded by a few sociopaths. First with the robber baron monopolies, and now with modern corporations. Consumer spending makes the economy go brrr. If consumers don't have money to spend, our economy simply stops working. Lead your fellow Americans from the ground up!