THE PUTRIFICATION OF THE MEDIA
When milk is left out of refrigeration, it will turn sour and go bad. That is common knowledge.
The old saying, “One bad apple will spoil the whole bunch,” is also well known.
What kind of axiom can be applied to the media? What about proven psychological facts?
What about “Illusory Truth Effect”, a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth.
Repetition is what makes things feel true.
Hitler knew it, saying, “Slogans should be persistently repeated until every last individual has come to grasp the idea.”
The news media believes this theory and it is what makes “fake news” plausible to those who will not take the time to verify the facts with alternative sources, and those who prefer to take at face value false verification of their misguided values.
Even before the Trump war on “fake news”, a study was conducted by Central Washington University in 2012 of the effects of repetition.
This gives rise to the question of WHEN.
When did the media turn on the people in their charge who were depending on them for current and world events?
With the advent of radio, the world became a little smaller. Communication was faster than before with telegraphs, and newspapers delivered by whatever means available.
The radio gave rise to journalists who were correspondents from areas of interest, especially during the rise of Hitler in Europe and the Second World War. http://history.journalism.ku.edu/1940/1940.shtml
Edward R. Murrow and his crew, dubbed “his boys” William Shirar, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collinswood, Larry Lesueur, Howard K. Smith, Cecil Brown, Winston Burdett, Ernie Pyle and Robert Capa brought the war into family’s living room, by use of descriptive words and phrases.
Murrow hired the first woman photographer and videographer, Mary Marvin Breckenridge. He also added two other women to his team, Margaret Bourke-White, who was the first female photojournalist, flying in air mission and bringing the gruesomeness of war to readers.
Later Marguerite Higgins, who had a degree in Journalism, made a name for herself when she was finally allowed to go to London. She accompanied the troops and covered the liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, moving on to report from the theatre of Korea and Vietnam, winning her a Pulitzer Prize.
The 50s gave rise to names that would endure into the 60s and 70s, such as Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley among others.
The 50’s was the era of television and with that medium the world began to change and grow even smaller.
However, the era where everyone was expected to conform caused seeds of rebellion to begin to form in society.
Therefore, the answer to the question of WHEN can be theorized to right around the foremost years of the 60s.
While information in reporting is vital, it is more important that the sources and data are correct.
There was a movie, Broadcast News, , which came out in the 1980s starring Holly Hunter and William Hurt.
Hunter played a true-to-form realistic journalist who made sure her facts were in order. Hurt played a pretty boy talking head, one that morphed into a successful, albeit less than on target, news anchor who only wanted to “sell” whatever story he was given.
In the movie, Hunter’s character, Jane Craig, complains about the society of news personnel that listen to something official like a state of the union address, then get together later at cocktail parties, network whatever opinions they have, then write their articles quoting that, “Washington sources claim,” when really it is all hearsay and speculation of their peer group and not based in facts. Ironically, art was imitating life dead-on-the-nailhead.
A perfect example of how the media can literally turn the course of events is found in the strategy as described in the 1990 interview by Stanley Karnow of the Vietnam General Vonguyen Giap.
Giap knew that there was no way that he could win against the United States. He never planned on a full scale attack as US firepower would have ground his army down in minutes. However, part of his hopes were that the US would lose interest in the war and want to end it.
The idea that the adverse media coverage of Vietnam and personalities like Jane Fonda, who posed for press pictures with the North Vietnamese, and John Kerry, whose time served in the war and his leadership in the protests combined to bring the American people to be discontent with the situation, thereby weakening public support of the war, can be attributed to a Vietnamese colonel named Bui Tin.
Today the media has been caught repeatedly fabricating news, retracting their fabrications and resigning their jobs from the fallout. This is not speculation, this is fact.
If anyone thinks that the media cannot shape the course of the future of the world, they would be a fool.
The last example of the media’s error in judgment came to a head on November 8, 2016. Predicting a Hillary sweep, the majority of the network stations melted down into a big Boo Hoo, sniveling cryfest when Trump won.
The media, like the Democratic Party, were so out of touch with society and real people issues that they tried to follow the example of Hitler and repeat “slogans” or “facts” enough so as to make them come true.
The people had a different point of view and history was made, yet the media continues to try and prove themselves correct with lies, innuendoes and finger pointing.
It is a shame that a faction of society seems to be so easily influenced by those who do not have their best interests at heart.
In the case of the mainstream media, it is better to verify every story with an alternative news source. Deception has been their wheelhouse since the 60s.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5910832
