News Media Brainwash America..and the world.

[bradd512]

I agree that these media giants (even the small media corporations) benefit from certain candidates more then others, but I was saying that I don't think that is the entire picture. You can say that I buy into conspiracy theories or whatever. I have heard many, many conspiracy theories(in fact I own a book about 100+ conspiracy topics that range from aliens to 911 to Katrina to JFK, of course I don't believe them all. Actually I only believe 1 or 2% of them have enough evidence to support the theory.) But I do know that 1 to 2% of the US population owns 70% of the US wealth(that is fact). And who is not to say that that group of people have a large influence over who THEY want to run the country or media. And who is to say that these people have a large influence over political decisions or even over whole political policies?

As for the censorship, I was talking about the media only covering Republican and Democrats instead of Libertarians, Constitution Party, Socialist Party, Taxpayer's Party, even the infamous Ron Paul. Something is causing them to suppress these people and I cannot believe the only thing driving the suppression is money.

[webDOMinator]

I have a project I'm using to map out the propaganda matrix using some subject extraction and contextual mapping techniques I developed. It's based off of words or phrases and how many times they are used with each other in the same articles. I'm not going to go into detail about all of it, but I'll just say this. Looking at my graph I knew that obama was going to win because he was more contextually "close" to the word "president" in the major media sources than Mccain.

I don't know how many of you have read that book "A Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley? Basically, they did brainwashing in that book through tape-recorders in pillows which was a crude metaphor for the sleep-like state you go into when you're watching TV... and they keep just throwing these phrases at you together in certain sequence and repetitiveness. If you know anything about how the mind works, one of the most simple forms of long term memory commitment is to repeat the input you want to go in. And your memory is like a matrix of interconnected thoughts. They are connected by the details in those thoughts that are similar to the other thoughts. This is what I am mapping out... the contextual map of subjects, but it's not your brains thoughts, it's the media that a lot of us as citizens of our countries read in their news media and thus get brainwashed with the rest of their fellow citizens.

The link to the graph is at http://www.newsbubbles.org/graph.php?q=president&p=mccain:obama:bush:debate:election&start=2007-08-01&end=2008-12-20&unit=month

To explain what you're seeing... the different plots represent each of the subjects in the legend. The higher a subject is on the graph, the "closer" it is in context to the context word... in this graph the context word is "president" ... and as you can see, obama was just more related to the word president for the entire time they were even within proximity of the word. I included the plots for the "debate" bubble (subject), (which got a little bit of earlier coverage before it's spike a month before the election), and "election" which spikes in the weeek of the election, for some sort of visual reference of time. Also notice how "bush", also added for contextual orientation, was always really high up on the list each week, but the month of the election, obama soars, and overtakes bush... in the context of president.

There are many more interesting graphs I've done... one for the context of the word "crisis" shows that it has only recently... like in August, gained any real media coverage, because it is one of the new hot words just like "bailout"... you can use the selectors on the right to plot other words in the context of president to see what other things are more popularly related or closer to the word over whatever time period you want.

[bradd512]

Wow. Very interesting post webdominator, I have read that book and I saw some similarities, but not to the extent you have. Very scary and interesting topic. The graph is amazing. We really need to wake ourselves up and not listen to the propaganda that the media is spewing out at us.

[BryanB08]

I'm not very skilled at researching, but so far my opinion on the whole matter seems to be boiled down to one thing.

The power in a society and their goals seem to be the driving force behind the media. If there is a small percent of a population that holds the wealth (and in a capitalist society, that translates to power), then it only makes sense that what we see in the news is only what is beneficial to those who hold the wealth. I would argue that the source of the problem isn't any particular group of individuals, but the system entirely. If we had a more socialist society that was driven towards what is good for the well-being of everyone instead of what is good for those who have the proper capital, then it would be reflective in our media.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it seems that as long as the people with the most money have the most power to influence what does and does not make it on the news, then it will continue to cycle between the wealthy influencing the media and in turn, the media supporting the wealthy. I think the technical term for it is cluster-fuck.

[comperr]

webDOMinator - if you have any papers on the subject I'd like to see them.

If we had a more socialist society

Then people would follow their natural inclination to gain wealth, power, etc. You would then have the leaders whose job it is to make everyone happy taking the power for themselves.

[bradd512]

BryanBob, I see where you are coming from. But I do see a flaw in your logic. Who gets to decide what is better for the "society"? The Media essentially does promote a "better" society, but this "better" society image seems attractive only to the people who get their information from the quickest, easiest source; national TV. No one wants to spend 2 hours of their time researching 9 different parties' election candidates, or why the US is spending million of dollars every year to keep drugs off their streets, yet at the same time the US sends billions of dollars in foreign aide to countries that supply the US with those same drugs. My point is that the goal of both capitalism or "free market" and socialism is the same. And as history has shown anyone who has power will abuse it. The problem is not with the system, but with the greedy instinct of humans.

But the problem with the US, is that the 1 or 2% of the population that owns 70% of the wealth is somehow directly connected to the government that regulates private industry. Why are all politicians rich and a lot of them get caught in some kind of scandal? My point is that those top 1 or 2% percent, have the power to regulate industries a certain way to cripple new businesses or existing competition. The media reaches every US household and the population believes anything it spits out. Instead of researching every side of every political policy or decision, they take the one-sided view presented by the media. Under a socialistic society, it would have the same effect. Those who are involved in the government will be rich and use their power to keep themselves rich. Including using the media.

Humans are just greedy. No one can change it and everyone will blame it on the system instead of the actual people.


Look at comperr's post:

If we had a more socialist society

Then people would follow their natural inclination to gain wealth, power, etc. You would then have the leaders whose job it is to make everyone happy taking the power for themselves.

[BryanB08]

Then people would follow their natural inclination to gain wealth, power, etc. You would then have the leaders whose job it is to make everyone happy taking the power for themselves.

You're absolutly right about that, but I got a bit ahead of myself. I meant it to mean a pure democratic society, without the need for "representative" leaders. Then majority would rule.

I know we're supposed to think that most people are just stupid and greedy monsters who only look out for themselves and that's why true democracy would never work, but the more I look around the more it seems to be a lie.

I could be wrong, but if I am, it begs an important question. If the majority of a society were to vote and act twords a self-destructive end, is that society fit to exist to begin with?

I'm willing to take the side of the optimist (which I know, with everything going on lately, is a bad word) and say that without the ability for anyone to put up capital and with the power in the hands of the population alone, greedy people could be greedy, but there wouldn't be any room for them or their lust for money. They would have to work for it like everyone else. (and by work, I mean something other than just investing it)