Mass Media Manipulation

Examples of the media manipulating you!

‘Nudge Theory’ at work on us:

This short explainer video brilliantly demonstrates just some of the dozens of ways psyops, propaganda, and gaslighting have been systematically used on the We the People in earnest since early 2020. It is helpfully juxtaposed over a real-life advert from the UK:

Staying with the UK as an example, this ad is but one of hundreds of such ads, planted articles, and manipulated news segments where government and media have collaborated surreptitiously to employ a sustained campaign of psychological manipulation on an unknowing and unsuspecting population. The collaboration continues unabated to this day.

Until relatively recently, the US and UK governments were both legally permitted to use propaganda only on foreign populations. Its domestic use was prohibited. (How considerate of them that was while it lasted.) Readers who follow the legislative breadcrumbs hidden in plain sight will find that the UK and US governments, respectively in 2010 and 2011/12, quietly made it legal to use propaganda to manipulate and control their own populations, without their citizens being aware of what is being done to them. Astonishingly, our failing media hardly took any notice.

Over the last two years, neither government has hesitated to employ the systematic use of fear, something which is known to be harmful in a multitude of ways, including immunosuppression, during a pandemic no less, as part of these wider efforts. The same playbook - the legal shenanigans and propaganda exercises, including the deliberate use of fear, has been used in many other ostensibly democratic nations.

Similarly, if readers follow the money trail they will see that most, if not all these governments have quietly joined Big Pharma, Bill Gates, and Big Tech in buying out the mainstream media lock, stock, and barrel, with ad revenues and other sources of funding since early 2020. Each of these already enormous power bases has expanded their wealth and power immensely in the process.

Yes, it is true, governments have gotten poorer insomuch as they have made their citizens poorer and pushed their nations ever closer to insolvency, but they have also become much more powerful in their relationship dynamic with We-the-People. Meanwhile, many high-ranking politicians and government bureaucrats have not just further cemented their power, they have also certainly enriched themselves as well in the Covid era.

The ‘Vaccines’ are “100% effective”:

Don’t miss this. It’s a 2-minute montage that powerfully shows just one of the many ways We the People have been systematically played by power on matters of great importance in the Covid era:

The above clip offers a big reveal in terms of just how susceptible we all are to manipulation when we are up against a fast-paced big budget 24/7 news cycle predominantly controlled by a powerful few. Furthermore, much is deliberately operating at the subconscious level, making it almost impossible for unsuspecting readers and viewers to focus on anything other than whatever shiny object is put squarely in front of us at any particular moment and the carefully laid narratives which are systematically cultivated over a longer arch.

The amount of investment, effort, and science, yes, science, that goes into hooking us onto the never ending stream of activist media and vacuous ‘infotainment’ is not too dissimilar to the efforts the tobacco industry used with impunity for decades in making their cigarettes highly addictive in stealth.

In both cases, the corporations in question lost sight of their core products and showed complete disregard for their consumers by diverting focus towards heavily hooking them on whatever they could sell the most of, as opposed to providing genuine products. I am not advocating tobacco in any form. That notwithstanding, I think the comparison is valid, with one distinction that is noteworthy for my purposes here: cigarette smokers knew they were hooked and many suspected what had been done to them. In both cases, however, governments were or are guilty of looking the other way at the expense of We-the-People while simultaneously benefiting.

‘Fear-Porn’ Much?

I know we’ve all seen so much of it and we’re tired of it, but mash-ups like this 80-second clip can offer perspective on the cumulative and long-lasting effects such sustained manipulation can have on each of us over time without us knowing:

This was one of the master strokes of Laura Dodsworth’s ‘A State of Fear’. Among other things, that book effectively laid bare the total sum of the first year’s worth of government and media propaganda during the pandemic in a single place, where for the first time it could be assessed in a measured and meaningful way by We-the-People (in the UK) who were subjected to it.

This was in stark contrast to the on-again-off-again roller coaster of the 24/7 news media, which is not meant to be scrutinized and is instead is easily exploited in equal measure by governments and the media to gaslight and manipulate us. The techniques used are powerful and they are many. Skeptics of those of us who are concerned skeptics are encouraged to study gaslighting and to investigate Neural Linguistic Programming (NLP) to start to get a flavor of things.

Dodsworth’s book lifts readers from a valley and puts them on a mountain top revealing a much bigger terrain that completely changes one’s perspective. The short clip above offers a tiny glimpse into one of the many ways ‘A State of Fear’ does this.

A Former ITV News Director Concurs:

Mark Sharman is a British broadcasting veteran and former Director of ITV’s Network and Regional News. This is a 5-minute segment from his presentation at the inaugural Better Way Conference, which took place in Bath, England, in May of 2022. Here Sharman discusses the scandalous BBC Trusted News Initiative, how the legacy media has been taken over by Big Tech, and how it has embraced censorship and suppression, and comprehensively sold out to power and money.

I was at the London protest in April 2021, which Sharman shows clips of in his presentation above. Sharman is right. Despite the widespread censorship and suppression of the event, there were well over a hundred thousand of us in attendance. It was the happiest, most peaceful, most glorious, and most human day of my life in the Covid era to date. Young children were dancing and singing, clearly full of joy at the change from what their daily lives had become. Not one in a hundred people was masked, yet there was no ‘super spreader’ outbreak. Had there been, we can be certain the UK government and its media would have been all over it. Mothers with babies in their prams were there in droves - a clear indication of a peaceful protest if ever there was one. It was a demographically neutral event, which is to say it was as diverse as London itself with people of all ages and races present.

It was not until I saw the near total news blackout of the event that evening, followed by a trickle of completely slanderous press coverage tucked away on the back pages of a few smaller mainstream outlets in the days that followed, that I truly began to realize the magnitude of the coordinated power We the People are up against.

Dozens of US News Outlets Parroting the Same Script Word for Word:

I know many will have seen this clip, but I bet most either laughed and regarded it as a kind of entertainment, or tacitly scoffed, before moving on and forgetting about it:

The clip can still be found on YouTube today. That is probably at least in part, because it has been made a partisan issue and is being used as a cudgel by liberal media against conservatives. It is indeed, highly ironic that in responding to the legitimate issue of media manipulation, Sinclair, the conservative leaning news corporation used, um, media manipulation. However, this should not be a partisan issue. It is much bigger than that. Yet, in an industry act of mass hypocrisy and a seemingly flagrant lack of self-awareness, PBS, CNN, the NYTimes, and many other mainstream outlets covered the story without blushing even though each of them is equally guilty of the very same group-think and activist or agenda-led ‘news’.

Yes, this was definitely a legitimate news item that is certainly in the public interest. However, the more I study our mainstream media, the more apparent it becomes to me that what’s in the public interest is seldom, if ever, what drives the news. Having confessed my cynicism, I will further surmise that many of these outlets were more concerned with indulging in an opportunity to stick it to Sinclair, a major competitor, and also attempting to deflect attention away from their own flaws which, again, are not dissimilar to Sinclair’s.

The late great Hannah Arendt wrote at length about how power pushes its absurdities on to people to break our resolve and achieve acquiescence. The shoe certainly fits here in that the widespread airing of the clip did not result in any significant uprising or movement for change. Instead, it gave power a green light, by merely further conditioning us to accept that our media is tightly scripted and controlled by a powerful few and inuring us to idea that there is nothing to be done about it, when in fact, there is much that can be done.

In closing:

I hope the videos above illustrate just how corrupt the media is writ large, something which should be worthy of a deeper contemplation on the part of anyone who cares about democracy, and especially by those who may source their news and information predominantly from the mainstream media.

Currently, six corporations control 80% of the mainstream media in the United States, while Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Big Tech, and the government provide circa 90% of the ad revenue. I would suggest that it was the Republicans who predominantly paved the way for media consolidation in the United States, whereas it is the Democrats who now predominantly exploit it. Which one’s the good guy here? I’m not sure I see one. I see power trumping party, nearly every time.

We should all look at the reality of what our media (and Big Tech) squarely in the face and consider carefully what could be done and is being done with this kind of power in the wrong hands. Since it is axiomatic that unchecked power ultimately corrupts, we should consider whether such power should ever be so tightly concentrated over our Fourth Estate. In the United States, our Founding Fathers intended the press to be not just a check and balance against corrupt governments, but as a bedrock for democracy itself. At what point does the Fourth Estate lose all that meaning? When it does, what does that mean for We-the-People?

Still think the ‘News’ is the News and that the mainstream media is trustworthy? Please give it some thought, and if you are not already doing so, please consider expanding your sources to include independent and alternative journalists.

For anyone who may be interested, now or in the future, here below are some of the books and other sources which have helped inform my understanding of the subject-matter covered in today’s post:

*The Mattias Desmet book is due out in June. In the meantime, his papers and interviews on Mass Formation Psychosis are very enlightening (and concerning).

The history of the CIA’s infamous covert activities in Operation Mockingbird are also instructive.

Perhaps, above all, it has been witnessing first-hand how so many honorable, highly accredited scientists and medical professionals who I have been closely following have been silenced or had their legs pulled out from under them right before my very eyes, that has most alarmed me and contributed to my own personal awakening.

My list of such people includes Nobel Laureates, as well as many other world renowned experts in their fields from some of our most esteemed learning institutions, whether they be Harvard, MIT, Oxford, or Stanford. They and dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of others in the public domain have been systematically suppressed, censored, and even ‘cancelled’ from public discourse, many with their careers threatened or ended. Even the primary inventor of mRNA vaccine technology is ostracized and denied a platform. Likewise, the alarms repeatedly sounded by the late Kerry Mullis when he was alive about the dangers of misusing PCR, which he invented are now so-called misinformation.

Science itself did not fundamentally turn on a dime when Covid arrived. It has been systematically abused and under wholesale assault by powerful people, institutions, and corporations for decades. Whoever they are, in late 2019 and early 2020, they made a big move and in doing so, revealed much about their existence, their motives, their collaboration, and the extent of their power.