The Fourth Estate of Manipulation

(The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media in their explicit capacity, beyond the reporting of news, of wielding influence in politics.)

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 the safety of your ignorance or if you believe opinions are more valuable than facts, associations can be incredibly shallow and even dangerous. Smart people know this and know how to use associational logic to further private agendas. These are plans and programs we often understand nothing about or don’t think critically enough to recognize.

Think war. Think health care “death panel.” Think “right to work laws” and Elon Musk’s DOGE. 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 can agree quickly with the invasion of another country because we were bombarded with misinformation about many minor or non-existent threats in the media and from the government. Do we really want to invade Canada, Greenland, Mexico, or conquer the Panama Canal? We don’t really understand why we should or shouldn’t since none of these countries seem to be in a speed boat off the Florida coast waiting to destroy us. We just know there is a vague need that gets more urgent when we watch Fox News.

Over 90% of the American people recognize that we are being screwed constantly by the health insurance industry and big Pharma 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 not 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 to the point of bias 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 firsthand 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 severity of 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 who benefit from her charitable work each year, this will be a travesty, especially if it causes her to re-evaluate her contribution to that work. 

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. It reached its heyday in the Pulitzer and Hearst era of newspapers at the end of the 19th century. Many historical 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 21^st century via the internet.       

In the beginning TV networks maintained their news stations separately from the entertainment divisions and above the economic considerations that 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. Think Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch. Hell, Jeff Bezos who created the Amazon shopping monster bought the Washinton Post recently. What was once a world-respected newspaper has been coerced by consumerism.

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, little Mister horny-toad Bill O’Reilly, Ben Shapiro, Charley Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingram and various species of worthless wannabe’s that look strangely like Sean Hannity. 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 consciences 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 research 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 70 million people recently elected Donald Trump with his reported promises of Making America Great Again.

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 to be expert 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. But it may be one that is far more insidious. Our horror rests in the fact that many people believe headlines and sound bites as news because they have been indoctrinated to accept news 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 real headlines from “legitimate” internet news 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 evidence by people who claim to be highly credentialed reporters on sites like the Drudge Report and Breitbart News Network and Newsmax and everybody’s go-to super-duper bullshit dumpster, Fox News.

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. Most 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 intellect. 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 only my opinion that backwards is the wrong direction.