Media manipulation

Thursday, September 10, 2020

Mainstream media is desperately trying to spin the news to help the democrats in November. Even though most people have made up their minds and the polls suggest Biden is ahead, there is a panic among the Democrats and their media outlets that things might go the way they did in 2016, and both are doing their best to stir up as much dirt and manipulate the public to stop it.

Media picks and chooses what stories it plays this is why you can manipulate the public so much.
This plays into the ability of media to create kind of false narrative when it comes to such things as police shootings.

We see only those shootings that involve police and black people and so come to think there is a trend of racism in the police department when statistics (the ones that are legitimate) suggest otherwise.

We don’t get to hear reports about a white man gets shot – which one study suggests is 25 percent more likely.

We don’t even get the full narrative of the stories we do get such as the Rochester death of a black man from an overdose that media tried to sell as cops killing him by putting on him a spit mask.

Even the infamous case of George Floyd was reported wrong, suggesting the cop killed him when the medical examiner said his blood contained a lethal dose of drugs.

Whenever there is a police-black confrontation in the country, no matter how trivial, mainstream media reports it, building a string of stories to imply there is a pattern, when it is actually the media cherry picking stories.

The illusion is created by the fact that that's the only stories anybody ever sees.

Since people's perceptions of reality are shaped by media, these stories create an impression of institutional racism that other experts claim simply doesn’t exist.

But the parade of stories – leaving out those in which police acted properly, or even heroically, leaves a lasting impression in the public’s mind that all cops are racist and are out to kill black people.

Unfortunately, people make their decisions by what they read and see on TV. None of them actually have personal connection with these except when it's actually happens in their neighborhood – and even then, media’s barrage of negative stories colors their perceptions.

Eyewitnesses to events are rarely reliable because they often see what they want to see – such as believing a suspect is unarmed even when more objective video shows he was armed.

Media has even tried to manipulate the response to these incidents, claiming a protest is peaceful even when the reporter is standing in front of a burning building.

Except for blunders like this, there is no way for a person who watches MSNBC or CNN or reads the Washington Post to verify this information.

The audience has no way to tell whether the story is true, accurate or even deliberately distorted such as The Atlantic story on Trump and veterans which used unnamed and questionable sources.

Journalism provides a number of tools to make up for this built-in bias in reporters and in reporting.

One of these has to do with “on the record” comments people. By putting a name next to a statement, the public gets to decide if that person is bias or not. They can review that person’s track record to determine if he or she has a history of lying or some other motive that may invalidate the statement.

The Atlantic story did not allow people that ability, instead left it up to a well-known bias reporter on a well-known biased publication to decide.

There is no such thing as objective truth or objective reporting, but this is made up for by balanced coverage. When a publication like The Washington Post constantly publishes only negative stories about someone such as Trump, you know already this is not balance or unbiased.

Mainstream media also manipulates stories by leaving out relevant facts, details that would call into question the angle the story is trying to sell. You get portions of quotes, or even misquoted information that over time builds a negative picture in the audience’s mind that no denial can rectify.

Media is also a club. Reporters rarely disparage other reporters’ coverage. Instead, media circles the wagons and protects media that clearly is biased, hiding behind The First Amendment.

Media can also give life to an illegitimate story such as The Atlantic hit piece or previous pieces filtered through The New Yorker to go after Kavanaugh by having these publications break the fact or dishonest story and then have major media follow up on them as if they were valid – a kind of money laundering scheme.

You can also tell a publications’ bias by the people on the staff. The author of the Atlantic story clearly had a bias and was connected to the Biden campaign. Other staff members have also launched attacks of their own, like the gossip columnist who punished in a new book a charge that Trump had tried to rape her in the 1990s, a crime she never reported at the time, and which only appeared in a book she hoped to sell in time for the election.

Mainstream media, of course, doesn’t have the monopoly it once had, which is part of the reason why media is at war with Trump’s ability to use social media to challenge the mainstream narrative.

This may be why Democrats are pressuring social media to censor conservative outlets in order to restore control of the narrative to mainstream media.

But even alternative media such as Fox News is rapidly falling into the hands of liberal crowd, as was indicated by their coverage of The Atlantic story.

Ultimately, there is no way to avoid being manipulated, and since most people are too lazy or busy to seek out alternative information, they tend to take for fact the misreporting they get from mainstream media such MSNBC, The Washington Post or The New York Times – all of which are anti-Trump.