Amerika

At this point, the near-uniformity of Western journalism has even begun to convince moderates that our system is as controlled as that of the Soviets. Somewhere in the power structure, whether government or Leftist charities, the word goes out and then all of the major media sources repeat some version of it.

Part of this can be explained by the grim fact that most journalists now paraphrase press releases more than do any original writing. You scroll through press releases, find ones that promise things that your audience will like, and then write them up. You can even do this on Twitter or Facebook.

However, in the years after JournoList, we have no reason to expect a lack of coordinate behavior; it is normal to think that it merely continued in another form using another forum that normal people do not see.

The press is a property. Not only because it is owned, but because it commands the attention of many, that attention is like advertising a property with tangible value. Whoever influences the press can achieve the equivalent of many millions of dollars in media purchasing.

Several paths to this end exist. You can be like an influencer, and post something so addictive and ironic that it becomes popular. You can repeat some prejudice or hope of the audience, knowing they will buy your article for confirmation bias. Or you can join in on the repeating trope knowing that you will be seen as reliable.

Humans can be easily fooled by this practice. A human, if they read something in one newspaper, will consider it possible. If they read it in ten, they will think it likely. If they read it in all the newspapers except the few that everyone else agrees are bad, they will think it fact.

This makes it easy to create a property. The media first acts to exclude anyone who does not toe the party line, and then sells the party line, usually in trade to those in power for first access to the important breaking stories that pay the bills in journalism land.

The press has long known of its power to influence masses and wielded it for its own profit regardless of the consequences:

It was virtually impossible for them to get a fair trial for two reasons. Firstly, their guilt was seen as self evident by both the press and the public to the extent that the judge remarked that, “if these statements of evidence before trial which corrupt the purity of the administration of justice in its source are not checked, I tremble for the fate of our country.” The newspapers had shown great interest in Thurtell’s case and every detail was lapped up by an eager public. Secondly, this was to be the last trial in England conducted under the old 16th century principals in which the accused has to defend himself against the prosecution, being allowed only to make a speech after the evidence against them had been heard and not being allowed to cross examine the prosecution witnesses. This was hardly conducive to a fair trial and neither man was represented by counsel. Thurtell made a lengthy and somewhat rambling address to the court in which he tried to shift the blame for the killing to Probert. He referred to his Christian upbringing and also made references, apparently, to Voltaire and Saint Paul, all of which failed to impress either the judge or the jury. A witness for Thurtell said, “I always thought him (Thurtell) a respectable man.” Being asked by the judge what he meant by this he replied, “He kept a gig.” Not surprisingly, this was not in itself enough to save him and it took the jury just 20 minutes to find both accused guilty.

If enough people repeat the same thing, the group synchronizes to that idea as an assumption, which makes it invisible to them and they do not realize that it was not of their own thought. At that point, they consider the assumption to be fact and are hostile toward any who have not adopted this perspective.

The journalism in the mention above consisted of steam-driven printing presses. The media blitz of today was nowhere near in effect, but still the repetition of ideas in multiple stories influenced the public in such a way that the trial was a slam-dunk.

Perhaps journalism always had this ability, but when it merged with the interests of the state and later state power, the age of propagand was born through yellow journalism:

The peak of yellow journalism, in terms of both intensity and influence, came in early 1898, when a U.S. battleship, the Maine, sunk in Havana harbor. The naval vessel had been sent there not long before in a display of U.S. power and, in conjunction with the planned visit of a Spanish ship to New York, an effort to defuse growing tensions between the United States and Spain. On the night of February 15, an explosion tore through the ship’s hull, and the Maine went down. Sober observers and an initial report by the colonial government of Cuba concluded that the explosion had occurred on board, but Hearst and Pulitzer, who had for several years been selling papers by fanning anti-Spanish public opinion in the United States, published rumors of plots to sink the ship. When a U.S. naval investigation later stated that the explosion had come from a mine in the harbor, the proponents of yellow journalism seized upon it and called for war. By early May, the Spanish-American War had begun.

The rise of yellow journalism helped to create a climate conducive to the outbreak of international conflict and the expansion of U.S. influence overseas, but it did not by itself cause the war. In spite of Hearst’s often quoted statement—“You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”—other factors played a greater role in leading to the outbreak of war. The papers did not create anti-Spanish sentiments out of thin air, nor did the publishers fabricate the events to which the U.S. public and politicians reacted so strongly. Moreover, influential figures such as Theodore Roosevelt led a drive for U.S. overseas expansion that had been gaining strength since the 1880s. Nevertheless, yellow journalism of this period is significant to the history of U.S. foreign relations in that its centrality to the history of the Spanish American War shows that the press had the power to capture the attention of a large readership and to influence public reaction to international events. The dramatic style of yellow journalism contributed to creating public support for the Spanish-American War, a war that would ultimately expand the global reach of the United States.

An entire nation cannot be goaded into war, but can be prepared for being goaded into war by the seeding of assumptions. In this case, it became accepted as fact that Spain had blown up the USS Maine, and therefore once that provoked others to call for war, the press could report on them calling for war and enthusiastically agree.

Consider it an early beta test for JournoList.

In a society such as a democracy, where if enough people believe something it must be treated as fact because of the demotic influence of the buying and voting of these people, the press attempts to meme ideas into reality through repetition and use of bad logic to make their case stronger.

For the press, it does not matter what the truth is; all they must do is create a surfacially plausible narrative that leads people to the conclusion that is desired. In this way, the modern media resembles magical thinking in its ability to shape reality:

magical thinking, the belief that one’s ideas, thoughts, actions, words, or use of symbols can influence the course of events in the material world. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s inner, personal experience and the external physical world. Examples include beliefs that the movement of the Sun, Moon, and wind or the occurrence of rain can be influenced by one’s thoughts or by the manipulation of some type of symbolic representation of these physical phenomena.

Magical thinking became an important topic with the rise of sociology and anthropology in the 19th century. It was argued that magical thinking is an integral feature of most religious beliefs, such that one’s inner experience, often in participation with a higher power, could influence the course of events in the physical world. Prominent early theorists suggested that magical thinking characterized traditional, non-Western cultures, which contrasted with the more developmentally advanced rational-scientific thought found in industrialized Western cultures. Magical thinking, then, was tied to religion and “primitive” cultures and considered developmentally inferior to the scientific reasoning found in more “advanced” Western cultures.

This ability gives journalists a taste of power, and in order to keep that power, they must make nice with government and get the news reports they need in order to keep proclaiming the word of God in print, on television, through radio, and across the internet.

From a management perspective, the problem here is calcification of the middle between upper leadership and the rank and file. If every manager from the top-down repeats the same ideas in order to work well with others, make friends, and keep the peace, then there is no room for reconsidering or taking in new data.

Not surprisingly, our journalists support the snowball of ideas — civil rights, liberal democracy, mixed economy, diversity — that have come about through our past politicial initiatives, world wars, and famous tragedies with equally hasty and panicked responses.

As a result, the media have become cheerleaders for neocommunism or mixed-economy socialist states driven by tax money and manipulation of voters through symbols of altruism:

A pseudo-ideology of control has taken root in democratic nations from Britain to Brazil, with the support and applause of transnational organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and the widespread backing of the intelligentsia everywhere. A few basic moves characterize the game. Those in charge of the established order declare a mortal crisis: Covid-19, say, or the climate, or white supremacy. They contend that the time to debate is over: immediate government intervention is the only ethical option. In a chorus of approval, prestige media, academics, and obscure experts in nongovernmental organizations provide arguments, statistics, and cross-references, joined by the occasional Hollywood star. Government-aided censors on social media identify and purge hostile views; extreme cases get thrown to the Internet mob to settle. The objective: a culture aligned with the dictates of power.

The cults of identity and ecology now serve as instruments of elite control in the United States. The elites have imposed conformity with astonishing rapidity. A majority of Americans report that they fear contradicting the orthodoxy, with the young—savviest about the information landscape—being most afraid. While the new censorship is often portrayed as the restoration of science and truth, the reality is that a panicked elite class has shredded constitutional norms, trying to cling to its old privileges. “Our democracy” is a closed circle, a cosa nostra, hostile to ordinary people and autocratic to the core. The ideology of control is the expression of a profoundly antidemocratic impulse.

In this system, government sets the pace by announcing what it wants to fund. This makes news, and the press supports the government, mostly to avoid being left out but also because after years of integration with Leftist government, the press has eliminated any dissident voices and fallen into groupthink.

At this point, the free press has inverted itself and follows the same fate as all categorical thinking that loses sight of its direction, which is that its method becomes its goal and the original goal is forgotten. Journalism existed to inform the population, but now it works in exactly the opposite direction: to control them.

Tags: control, journalism, journolist, media, propaganda