Media Manipulation: You Only Think You Know What You Think

It seems like everyone has an agenda these days.

From the division in politics, to religion, to healthcare. Everyone seems to want you to "see it their way". Since this is obviously part of the human condition, it's something everyone will have to deal with. Every time you turn on the TV, read a newspaper, a book, or an online article.

Actually, right now-and with all of my articles- I want you to see it "my way".
See how that works?

"My way" is going to be an example on how the media can manipulate you.

No matter where you get your news from, it is biased.
CNN-Biased
NPR-Biased
HLN- Is essentially CNN
CNBC-Biased
ABC-Biased

FOX............well, FOX isnt really news is it? Im pretty sure its some sick social experiment.

These people put their own spin on things. They are able to edit, cut, copy and paste however they want. They may only be bending the truth, but sometimes a bend in the truth can cause a bend in your opinion.

Here is a photo example......

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/3a187097f032.jpg[/atsimg]

If you wanted to say that these soldiers were horrible people, and you were part of an anti-war campaign, you would use the left side of the photo.

However, If you wanted to say that our soldiers are hospitable, you would use the photo portion on the right.
*Thank you Mo'Illusions for the photo*

This is a technique used often by the media. How often do you see coverage of an event on one channel/paper/source, one way.....and then see it differently on another channel/paper/source?

How often do you catch a speech "live", but then when you catch it later, it has been edited.?

But this is all just visual, lets discuss the actual psychology of misdirection.



These distractions, and misdirections breed false security and delusional opinions.

This is not new. Misdirection has been used to control the populous throughout history.

The Third Reich
The French Revolution
Gustave Le Bon' studies
911 and "Islamic" Terrorist acts
The current unstable economic America

Ancient Rome had a saying about it: "panem et circenses "
"Bread and Circuses". Gives us bread, and the dog and pony show, and you have us under control. They tell us the economy is bad, and our actions reflect that. They tell us the economy is up, and we reflect that.

So what does this have to do with me?

Job loss, fashion faux pas, music, terror, disaster, illness, freedom, war, peace, god, the devil, cheating senators, healthcare, Obama, and frickin' American Idol......all reflections of YOU.

If you dont like Obama, you dont want change.

If you dont donate to Haiti relief, you are a bad person. You can afford 5-10 dollars.

If you sympathize/study/understand Islamic religious beliefs, youre a terrorist.

It's unamerican, and unsympathetic to question the acts on 911.

Calling the moon landing a hoax is crazy.

These are all reflections...unfortunately, of us.



Society, as a whole is a big mirror to the media. No matter how anti-this or anti-that you think you are, there is a market for you.

If there is a market for you, then there is a misdirection for you.

If there is a misdirection to evoke emotion in you, then there is a way to CONTROL you.


Gustave Le Bon said:

“As soon as a new dogma is implanted in the mind of crowds it becomes the source of inspiration whence are evolved its institutions, arts, and mode of existence. The sway it exerts over men’s minds under these circumstances is absolute. Men of action have no thought beyond realising the accepted belief, legislators beyond applying it, while philosophers, artists, and men of letters are solely preoccupied with its expression under various shapes.”

So, knowing how a group reacts, either to order..or disorder, lets you know how to control the group. They can get you riled up, they can appeal to your empathy, or they can anger you.
All they have to know, is how us- You and I and the rest of the nation/world-reacts.

This is why people like us search for truth. Hard, unbiased truth. There is a severe lack of truth in the world, so you need to learn how to filter for it. It's like sorting mail: throw away or send back the junk, save the bills and personal letters. People like us, here on ATS, have taken the first step.

We................... realize that we are lied to.

So I ask you, friends....

Fellow ATS'ers, do you have any examples of misdirection that you would like to share?

How do YOU filter these issues?

reply to post by InertiaZero


It would take you less than a second to realize that the media is manipulating everyone if you just look around your home...


There is no way or even any point in trying to filter out the media!

Your life as it is now is based around the media, so good luck!


[edit on 1-2-2010 by Wolf ]

reply to post by Wolf 


Im pretty sure that's what I was getting at.


You dont even have to look around your home. You can look around in your head.

Think about your childhood.
How many theme songs can you remember?
How about commercials?
What brands are you loyal to?

Most people today work longer hours than at almost any other time in history, usually 40 or more per week. These jobs predominantly involve repetitive and usually boring activities, whether balancing accounts, putting bolt A into hole B, or convincing some faceless person you will never see again to buy from your shiny new dishwashing range. If one were to ask most of the workforce today, they'd rather be doing something else with their time - possibly spending time with family, engaging in something they find interesting, perhaps even creating something of worth. Yet 'progress' has led us to an age where all these things are sidelined, and instead we are stuck doing something that is not very meaningful to us. Is there something else missing, something that the 'freedom', 'growth' and 'progress' of the modern age can never really provide for us?

reply to post by concernedcitizan


At first I thought your post was off topic, but I get it.

We have so many routine distractions in our lives. Does that make it easier for media to misdirect us?

Are we almost trained to be misdirected at this point?

Originally posted by concernedcitizan
Most people today work longer hours than at almost any other time in history, usually 40 or more per week. These jobs predominantly involve repetitive and usually boring activities, whether balancing accounts, putting bolt A into hole B, or convincing some faceless person you will never see again to buy from your shiny new dishwashing range. If one were to ask most of the workforce today, they'd rather be doing something else with their time - possibly spending time with family, engaging in something they find interesting, perhaps even creating something of worth. Yet 'progress' has led us to an age where all these things are sidelined, and instead we are stuck doing something that is not very meaningful to us. Is there something else missing, something that the 'freedom', 'growth' and 'progress' of the modern age can never really provide for us?

holy **** this is probably the greatest ****ing post in the history of the ****ing world.

Seriously that was like you grabbed some words from my very own head and threw them back in my face and made me realize life for what it is.
unfortunately for me i'm stuck putting bolt A into hole B for now, but i'm going to college for something I don't REALLY want to do (clean and renewable energy systems engineering) and it doesn't pay too too well but it's a living and at least mildly interesting.

if i really wanted to do what i wanted to do i'd own a farm and a greenhouse and be a farmer but thats expensive to start up.

reply to post by LususNaturae


I wouldnt mind having a farm either.

But then the Government would subsidize the corn, and my chickens would be owned by Perdue...

Yep not worth it.

reply to post by InertiaZero


I apologize. It was not my intention to derail your post. The media is only a small part of a whole. We see, with the media, that which we see in crowds, the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

reply to post by concernedcitizan


You are absolutely right. It's a process.

So how do we break free?

reply to post by LususNaturae


Most creations of the modern age have had a negative influence on the environment and even ourselves. This relates to the 'ease' of life, that idea that technology and industry give us an easier existence. By living along these lines, we destroy much outside and also within ourselves. Our environments are ravaged and destroyed, and we ourselves are left with an unfulfilling existence. For these reasons our productive capacity should be immensely reduced, and most of our newfound technology destroyed or abandoned.
But how many of these revoked conveniences would be altogether missed and yearned for? If everything we really need is in bicycling distance then we don't really require cars. Would we really miss the multitudes of basic television shows? While fast food and other such products might taste good, everyone knows that they will eventually screw you over. There is much to be had in the basic things around us, the beautiful sunset, ancient texts, and our families. People have been living in this manner for tens of thousands of years, and they rarely became suicidal or lazy.

reply to post by LususNaturae


Most creations of the modern age have had a negative influence on the environment and even ourselves. This relates to the 'ease' of life, that idea that technology and industry give us an easier existence. By living along these lines, we destroy much outside and also within ourselves. Our environments are ravaged and destroyed, and we ourselves are left with an unfulfilling existence. For these reasons our productive capacity should be immensely reduced, and most of our newfound technology destroyed or abandoned.
But how many of these revoked conveniences would be altogether missed and yearned for? If everything we really need is in bicycling distance then we don't really require cars. Would we really miss the multitudes of basic television shows? While fast food and other such products might taste good, everyone knows that they will eventually screw you over. There is much to be had in the basic things around us, the beautiful sunset, ancient texts, and our families. People have been living in this manner for tens of thousands of years, and they rarely became suicidal or lazy.

reply to post by InertiaZero


You think watching the News is bad? Trying going to high-school, its just one whopping spoonful of # after another. And then they set up the system so 'you need an education to live a successful life.' Ha! Really, you need to be brainwashed before they let you loose in society, or you might actually be a threat to mess up the big scheme. The worst part is, the sheer blind ignorance of the participants. Teachers think they're helping out the kids, setting them on the 'right track'. And students think that by getting a proper education they can 'make a difference in the world.' In actuality its a series of propaganda being forced onto the mind at one of the most impressionable points of your life. From Life Planning to Social Studies, even science teaches you to think a very specific way that challenges any real TRUTH. Not a single program that supports REAL learning. It got so bad, I just dropped out. It was bad enough having to spend 6 hours a day with zombies, never mind being brainwashed into becoming one yourself. And you know what? Nearly every person I personally know has since urged me to go back. And any person I dont personally know that has found out I dropped out has looked at me like a lazy unmotivated nutball. What has existance come to when the right to choose what goes into your brain has not only been entirely lost, but the people have been brainwashed into thinking thats the way things should be?

Ah...Gustave Le Bon...great quote.

I actually came to my own conclusions long ago that the real issue with...well, HUMANITY, is dogma. Dogma is the killer of freedom.

Terence McKenna once said....

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. And [I think] that beliefs should be put aside, and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems [in favor of] direct experience and this is, I think much, of the problem of the modern dilemma, is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kind of belief systems have been erected... If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief.

In fact while people may know McKenna for his Timewave Zero theory or for his Stoned Ape theory, or for even just being a heavy psychedelic user...McKenna was incredibly articulate and had a huge wealth of knowledge on a lot of subjects and how they all correlate and the thing about all of that is that he focuses on his own personal experiences and the experiences of others the most, and how when we look beyond dualism, look beyond systems of beliefs, as we break down the rationale and the logic we don't even knowingly use to keep the framework of what we believe is true...well McKenna says it again perfectly

I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there