How the media guides our thoughts and keeps society under control EVEN YOU FREE THINKER! An anarchist critique and solution for the media problem.

I see a ton of flailing and complaining about the "mainstream media". Most of these articles are bigger shite than what comes from the MSM they are complaining about. It is simply a complaint that their political heroes are not being treated nicely by the media and a call to treat these heroes nicely. This is elite factionalism trickling down to their supporters. Let's take a look at what the real problems are and how we could fix it.

Let's start with what Michael Parenti calls "suppression by omission" which is not what the media covers and how they cover it, but what they leave out. As Michael Parenti said "The most common form of media manipulation is suppression by omission. The things left unmentioned sometimes include not just vital details of a story but the entire story itself. Reports that reflect poorly upon the powers that be are least likely to see the light of day." I would add reasons and actions that caused the problem are the most common omissions. For example, the latest #shithole outrage currently keeping everyone up at night criticizes offending nations such as Haiti and Iraq by calling them shitholes but how these countries became a place some people consider shitholes and why there are people leaving them never comes up. Everyone in Haiti and Iraq knows how this happened but in America it is seldom talked about honestly and openly. We hear often leaders of other nations using political repression or threatening peace with military aggression but information about U.S. involvement in supporting dictators, funding and training rogue militias, and other crimes committed by the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies are hidden from view. We are intellectually assaulted by a never ending stream of outrages and horrors completely disconnected from their historical roots and causes.

There are "universal truths" or truisms that we are taught to believe upon our first steps being born or immigrating into the USA. There is an acceptable spectrum of ideas and anything outside this framework is slandered, attacked and ridiculed. The goal is to create "necessary illusions" and emotionally potent "oversimplifications" to keep us, the unwashed masses in line and to normalize the violence used to maintain this control over the world and its wealth. We are taught of the uniqueness of the United States as a moral and good nation and its mission to spread this goodness via "democracy" across the globe. Terms like 'democracy', 'peace', and 'the peace process' simply mean whatever the United States is doing. Terms like 'terrorism', 'evil', 'rogue state', and 'oppressive regime' simply mean any group or nation that disagrees or criticizes the United States. If you don't believe me fire up your favorite search engine and search for anytime the United States was against peace, the peace process or democracy or supported terrorism or oppression. How is this possible when describing a nation that has attempted to overthrow over 50 sovereign nations, has been successful removing democratically elected governments in at least 7 nations, and has interfered in at least 81 foreign elections since WWII? That the U.S. is good and moral is a universal truth therefore these facts cannot be true inside the same mind. Combined with the myth of the "American dream" and hard work bringing success in America we end up with a country who believes the myth of their own exceptionalism compared to the rest of the world. Things that happen elsewhere as a direct result of U.S. actions are "necessary evils" and things would without a doubt be worse without Americas fingerprints on them. These often unspoken values are always there controlling the narrative and never allowing alternative opinion to be taken seriously. There is even a new group of clownish "conspiracy theorists" who are given ample media coverage like Louise Mensch and Alex Jones who help discredit any legitimate thought "outside the box" from either end of the spectrum. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." - Noam Chomsky

Fear is another favorite method used by the media to guide our thoughts and opinions. The screenwriter of one of my favorite TV shows to come out recently, Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror describes what amygdala hijacking is and how it’s used by the media to control us: "Rather than use calm reason, most corrective television uses fear to hammer its message home. It’s one of the most powerful ways to grab an audience’s attention. But why? Well, for one thing, no matter how sophisticated we humans appear to be with our fancy shoes and Nintendo Wiis and what not, our brains are still cursed with a paleomammalian limbic system which the modern-iPad-owning part of us can’t control. Our fear responses are governed by twin almond-shaped clusters of nuclei known as the amygdalae, sort of primitive reactionary mind-nuts beyond the reach of human intellect… The point of the amygdalae is protection. You’re supposed to be stimulated when confronted by a loud noise or a sudden movement, because, well, it could be a lion leaping in to attack you. That’s why it’s almost impossible to ignore anything that seems like a threat – be it a lion or a scary newsreader … The amygdalae are also thought to be closely associated with memory. So if you have an unpleasant experience and your amygdalae are stimulated, an association quickly forms in your head. That’s why the man uses scare tactics to mould your behavior from an early age." From local to international news there are an endless list of evils that only the police and state can protect us from.

Jingoism, empty talking points, and slogans hammer these techniques home. "Stronger Together", "Make America Great Again", "I'm With Her", "A Better Deal" "I Support The Troops" "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength" are endlessly repeated ad nauseum. What exactly do they mean? Does anyone repeating them know? At the core they all essentially attempt to make people believe their interests are the same as the ruling elite who use them. That is the essential message of jingoism, slogans, and the talking points endlessly repeated by politicians. We are working for the interests of both you and I. As Noam Chomsky points out they were first used effectively as strike breaking techniques against the IWW: "They were called "scientific methods of strike-breaking," and worked very effectively by mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like Americanism. Who can be against that? Or harmony. Who can be against that? Or, as in the Persian Gulf War, "Support our troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? Anything that’s totally vacuous. In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I don’t support them? It’s not even a question. It doesn’t mean anything. That’s the point. The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don’t mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don’t want people to think about that issue. That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about. So you have people arguing about support for the troops? "Of course I don’t not support them. " Then you’ve won. That’s like Americanism and harmony. We’re all together, empty slogans, let’s join in, let’s make sure we don’t have these bad people around to disrupt our harmony with their talk about class struggle, rights and that sort of business." These obviously work very effectively, look around you and I am sure you will see many people repeating empty slogans like parrots in a Birds like horror film.

This all combined ends up doing what Edward Herman called normalizing the unthinkable. "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public." In this process business elites and politicians who ruthlessly murder thousands and sometimes even laugh about it afterwards are described as heroes and people who we should look up to instead of the sociopathic murderers that they are. Sometimes an individual ends up commiting an unusually evil act and having to take the fall and be marked as evil for a short time but they are quickly rebranded by the media when the next one comes along (see George Bush II).

So what do we do? Well, how much different do you think MSM corporations would report on things if they were owned, managed, and run by the workers? There would be no corporate interests that forced reporters to only cover certain topics and leave others alone because they would hurt profits. Why would a reporter use suppression by omission under worker control? Why would she try to spread false universal truths about the rich and powerful interests in her country if doing so would not end in financial gain? Why would he try to spread fear amongst his friends and neighbors? Why would she try to fill my head with stupid jingoistic slogans and report on them as if they were philosophical miracles of thought? Why would anyone try to normalize extreme violence and oppression if their paycheck didn't depend on it? Worker/society run media would solve this problem like it solves many problems we are told are "unsolvable". In the mean time we must hold government officials and elites to the moral principles that form the basis of international and human rights law which most of the world has long agreed upon without partisanship and nationalism while strongly condemning and then ignoring any media institutions who do not. We can search out and learn factual history from different sources and ideology like anarchism which gives us the grounding to understand most current problems from a true framework and gives us tools to solve these problems.

Sources:
Michael Parenti - Make-Believe Media
Noam Chomsky - Media Control
William Blum - America's Deadliest Export: Democracy