"Alarmist Crap"
Do you watch or listen to the news and feel your blood begin to boil? Does it piss you off so much that you begin to "hate" the other side of politics? You may be subjecting yourself to "alarmist crap".
After my post yesterday about marketing and the news, I had a response from someone who called Fox News alarmist crap. I don't watch Fox News, but a light bulb went off in my head.
A year or two ago, I listened to Democracy Now. It is a free podcast that offered fairly liberal news. Every time I listened to the show, my blood began to boil. I was super energized saying, "How the [bleep] can they let that happen! That's absurd!" I was incensed about... even the smallest, most insignificant political things.
Finally, I realized that Democracy Now was just "alarmist crap." It didn't report the news. It was designed to get you pissed off and active with the news.
When I write it that way, I think, that's not too bad a goal. People need to get involved in their governments. But ultimately, it was the way it made me feel. I prefer my news to be as unbiased as possible. Obviously, bias is normal, but I don't want my news blatantly politicized. Then it is Not News. It is propaganda.
"Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion."So when my friend described Fox News as "alarmist crap". I understood. Fox News runs their company much like Democracy Now. It's a way to persuade people by exaggerating the events and pass them off as "news"... truthful. But propaganda, by it's nature is designed to manipulate.
Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996
So if you are watching or listening to the news and your blood begins to boil. Take a moment. Breathe. Then change the station or stop listening to the podcast.
Do you truly want to be manipulated by propaganda?
And if you "don't mind", remember that propaganda took on a negative meaning in the 20th century with the creation of the Nazi Party.
(Disclaimer: This blog is propaganda against propagandist media.)
Originally published at Marc Gunn .com. Read. Interact. Breathe. It's easy; it's free.
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posted by Marc Gunn @ Monday, July 07, 2008
5 Comments:
Wow, it's so nice to be quoted. Since I'm a part of this conversation by default, I'll throw in that if I'm going to listen to or watch news at all, I'll get one of the foreign networks. Usually BBC World Service because it's on XM Radio. BBC actually covers the entire world when they do "World News," and is willing to provide fairly unfiltered local perspectives on international issues. This is a concept far beyond any of the American news channels.
CNN.com is the only domestic news service I read regularly, and even their reporting is usually a bit slanted.
Back to the original topic, though, I would classify any news service that only provides one point of view, or supports either the "left" or "right" point of view as propaganda.
Getting people "involved" in politics through misinformation and alarmism is not a new concept, you can go all the way back through history and find it. In the information age, though, it's a lot easier for them to manipulate us.
Don't worry about it. Here in Belgium we do not have news, but only propaganda. We even have laws on how we should think. The least bad word on certain people can cost you much.
The problem is that they sell their crap so badly that they are getting the opposite effect, I guess.
One thing for exemple: when foreigners are involved in criminal action, they try not to say that it are foreigners, since they don't want to encourage racism, but by doing this, they give people the feeling that those foreign criminals are more protected than Belgian criminals.
On top of that, justice works that way that most of the foreigners commiting crimes get excused as victims of racism and Belgians commiting the same crimes get punished super hard as the worst racists and whatever on earth.
Now what do you think this unbalance is doing, especially since certain crimes like robberies, (gang)rapes, dealing, healing and things like that are mostly commited by foreigners from a certain origin and they use their background as excuse for it and call their victims racists? And they mostly get away with a small penalty or even a warning.
Here in Belgium it is even possible that you kill somebody and get free football tickets as punishment. The victim was 17 year old boy stabbed to death several times for his iPod. The murdrers: two Polish gypsies. Or some Moroccans kill a man on a bus, calling him a racist an some got away unpunished. Only two of the six spent a couple of months in jail for it.
And that is what they sell to to people with a message that we should be tolerant and that we are to blame for their crimes for being such racists.
Well, don't thinks like that make your blood boil and then they wonder why people are loosing their fate in the government, the justice department and are all voting for a party they consider as a nazi party.
And then I didn't even mention the communitary problems and propaganda between Flanders and Wallony. Here we don't have news, we have a show that makes your blood boil.
I must say that's even more disheartening considering the size of your country. One would think it would be easier to manage a smaller country. Mayhaps not.
Yep, it is sad. This country is pocket size and out governments can't get it organized.
Like: we have 5 ministers (a federal, a Flemish, a Walloon, one for the German speaking community and one for Brussels)for employment and a large unemployment rate.
The problem is that it's sort of typically Belgian to have the will to please them all, while this is simply impossible and sometimes they make stupid decisions on who to please.
The truth is that we have so many institutions, rules and whatsoever, that nobody seems to be able to make sense of it.
Hot news here is something like a dog being saved out of a pool, to distract people from the rest.
"(Disclaimer: This blog is propaganda against propagandist media.)"
^--- true brilliance :)
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