The mind is a wonderful and terrible beast. Besides the ability to logically reason, we have the ability to logically associate. Where reasoning often gets us from point A to point B in rational order, associational logic can get us from point A to the twilight zone. This is a great gift if you are a poet, or a creative thinker in some other field. However, if you like your ignorance and are lazy or if you believe opinions are more valuable than facts, surface associations can be incredibly shallow and even dangerous. Smart people know this and know how to use associational logic to further private agendas we often understand nothing about or don’t think critically enough to recognize. Think war in Iraq. Think health care “death panel.” Think “right to work laws” and Donald Trump for president. Think for-profit prisons and charter schools. The list goes on. These issues were born from private agendas that are against our best interest as a society. A vast majority of people came to quickly agree with the invasion because we were bombarded with misinformation about WMD’s and many other non-existent threats in the media and from the government. Whenever we saw or heard the words, Iraq, Hussein, or nine and eleven, we became afraid. We didn’t really understand why we were afraid since Saddam Hussein wasn’t in a speed boat off the Florida coast waiting to destroy us. We just knew something was scary and we associated that feeling with our own bullets and bombs.
Over 90% of the American people recognize that we are being screwed constantly by the health insurance industry and big Pharmaceutical interests and that we need some kind of reform going beyond the current Affordable Care Act. Yet, over 50% of us are now convinced that any health care reform being considered at this time still has some kind of secret death provision linked to end-of-life-counselling. Another 50% associate health care reform to socialism, which they associate with communism. The facts are readily available. These concepts are completely ridiculous. Why do otherwise intelligent beings believe it? People with private agendas have paid millions of dollars to media firms and public relations companies so you won’t be able to hear the words government-sponsored health care anywhere and keep yourself from instinctively linking that phrase to death or communism.
Here’s an example of how juxtaposition creates association and association creates subconscious linking that often becomes conscious opinion. Some time ago, a newspaper that favors animal rights editorially ran two stories next to each other. It was impossible to read one headline without reading the other. The story in the left column was written about Loung Ung, a Cambodian writer of good reputation and solid ability who, at the age of seven, witnessed first hand the horror of Pol Pot’s killing fields. The article included an interview with the writer and plenty of graphic details. The story in the right column reported on the problems the Dutchess of York caused by offending animal rights activists in Sweden on a recent visit when she bought a fur hat “because her head was cold.”
The effort to connect Pol Pot’s horrible imagery and the Dutchess of York’s actions by proximity was obvious and ridiculous. I think it may also say something about our priorities. The fact that the newspaper got away with implying by association that one affront to morality and civility is even remotely similar to the other one sort of proves that these kinds of tricks work, either because we’re not paying attention or we’ve been so numbed by this stuff already that both stories are fairly meaningless. Regardless, it will now be impossible to hear something about the Dutchess of York in the future without thinking that she’s mean and cruel, like Pol Pot. To the thousands of people her charitable work aids each year, this will be a travesty.
For more information on this topic, I suggest consulting the writings of Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the creator of the ideas that have formed modern public relations and advertising. Here’s a verbatim quote from his seminal book, Propaganda, written in 1928:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
When the concept of where to place information is coupled with the concept of providing only select information, in other words exactly where with exactly what, a particular type of journalism is at play. It has been labeled “yellow Journalism” by historians and sociologists and it remains a tried and true practice in our world today despite the exponentially increased ways of communicating news.
Every school child is taught the term yellow journalism in history class when their teachers cover the Industrial Revolution. Maybe “was” would be a better term since education has become a thing of the past in America. Yellow Journalism is the practice of using scandal mongering, sensationalism, gossip, innuendo, and plagiarism to present opinion as journalistic reportage and it reached its heyday in the Pulitzer and Hearst era of newspapers at the end of the 19th century. Many history texts try and make the case that public pressure and the demand for integrity caused journalists to form a new code of ethics for the 20th century and consequently ended this deplorable practice. I would argue that public pressure merely put yellow journalism to seed and it lay dormant until the invention of TV and has run rampant in the 21st century via the internet.
In the beginning TV networks maintained their news stations separately from the entertainment divisions and above the economic considerations that often corrupt people who are otherwise decent. However, once the broadcast moguls realized the profit potential of cable TV and 24 hour news channels spoon feeding an information hungry world, the blurred line between education and entertainment was erased. We have now discovered that yellow journalism was not eliminated, but rather absorbed until it could once again be cultivated for cash. It has been successfully regrown in the 21st century. The lush gardens of so-called news networks are now overwhelmed with unkept weeds like the vicious and crazy Ann Coulter, the drug-addled hypocrite Rush Limbaugh, little Mister horny-toad Bill O’Reilly and various species of worthless wannabe’s that look strangely like Sean Hannity and Glen Beck. These incredibly phony manipulators make big bucks for entertaining us with vitriolic lies and passing it off as news. We lose in the process, big time. But, it is not money that we lose. It is our humanity. This current overgrowth of flim-flam artists who have no conscience will only get worse until the public once again demands that yellow journalism stop.
This demand must come in practical, economic ways because money is all that matters in the corporate arena. Corporations have no inherent morality even though the Supreme Court ruled recently that they are people—of a sort. Turn off these stupid and hateful programs. Quit buying from their corporate masters that use them as spokespersons. Read real books, poetry and literature, and researched history, instead of their ghost-written garbage. Make their programs economically unfeasible. The danger today is much greater than it was in the 19th century. These people reach millions of viewers and pretend to be giving them accurate information (remember, over 60 million people recently elected Donald Trump). As for my three favorites—Ann, Rush, And Billy Boy—some advice: Ann, buy a vibrator. Rush, try smoking opium. It’s a better high than your present drug regimen. Billy, put some pants on under that desk.
When 24/7 cable news is coupled with the freewheeling and never vetted internet where a blogger with an IQ considerably below Forrest Gump’s can pretend expertise on any subject, the whole idea of journalistic integrity becomes even more ridiculous. News becomes complete fiction. That’s not necessarily the horror. To quote Mr. Kurtz in the Heart of darkness, the horror, the horror rests in the fact that many people believe it as news because they have been indoctrinated to accept opinion as fact. It’s as if Jonathan Swift became Walter Cronkite.
Consider some of the intentionally false headlines that people have actually assumed were real—I know this is accurate from personal conversations—penned by the satire fake news site, the Onion: Kitten Thinks of Murder All Day, Babies are Stupid, New president Feels Nation’s Pain and Breasts, Drugs Win Drug War, Dolphins Spend Amazing vacation Swimming with Stockbroker, Exercise Ball Over There. Now, contrast those with some headlines from “legitimate” internet news blog stories: Woman Has Plastic Surgery to Giver Herself Three Breasts, Stephen Spielberg Kills Dinosaur, France bans All Work After 6PM, Doritos Can Give You Ebola, Redheaded People Face Extinction. Don’t forget the political articles written without any credible sourcing or evidenceby people who claim to be highly credentialed reporters on sites like the Drudge Report and Breitbart News Network.
Where do these two tactics, headline juxtaposition and yellow journalism leave us in today’s world? Observation indicates that we are left in one messy shit show after another Much of that fault belongs to us because we aren’t living up to our responsibilities as citizens in a democracy. We refuse to use critical thinking processes and we continue to THINK with our feelings rather than with our intellects. There are myriad reasons and excuses for this phenomenon of ignorance, but none of them provide us with a way out of the morass we call the modern world. To succeed in finding a path worth walking we need to follow Einstein’s advice when we read any news from any source. “The important thing is to not stop questioning.” Until we are willing to research evidence and hold journalists accountable for their objectivity and integrity, we will continue to drift backwards as a society. By the way, it’s my opinion that backwards is the wrong direction.
Jim McGarrah, Author 