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24. Propaganda & media manipulation: the Matrix

On this post I will share the rest of the great presentation by Professor Jerry Kroth, from the Psychology Department at Santa Clara University. Entitled "Propaganda and Manipulation: How mass media engineers and distorts our perceptions," it is based on his book Duped! So far we have covered his definitions and examples of several tools used in propaganda to explain how they shape your worldview and behavior: reframing, repeated affirmations, vicarious and imitative learning.

Distraction & Denial is the next item in the propaganda toolbox. Basically, the media makes a big fuss about something irrelevant to distract us and make us look the other way while something important is happening. Kroth mentions Coca-Cola's campaign to donate for the protection of white polar bears at each white can of coke sold. What a beautiful and progressive... distraction. What's being denied here, Koth points out, is that Coca-Cola produces 25 million plastic bottles per day, that is over 10 billion plastic bottles per year, that are discarded in landfills and take between 450-750 years to decompose.

Coca-Cola is a gross polluter, and after repeated pleas, it currently recycles only 10% of the plastic waste it generates. One 12-ounce coke contains 10 tablespoons of sugar, more than an adult male's entire recommended daily allowance, and drinking a 12-ounce can per day raises diabetes rate 15%, not to mention the weight gain. "Twenty years ago, more teenagers drank more milk than coke, but currently it is the opposite. That's the power of advertising—and of distraction and denial," Kroth concludes.

This reminds me of the bottled water industry, which is basically fooling people and destroying the planet. Watch the amazing animation The Story of Bottled Water presented by Annie Leonard and find out how you are being duped. And for Christ's sake, stop wasting water. In my hometown São Paulo, in Brazil, a severe draught threatened to paralyze the city. Can you imagine life without water? It is a FINITE commodity, and the day it becomes scarce, the bottled water industry will have you by the balls. You will be forced to pay whatever the price tag is in order to survive.

Back to Kroth's presentation, another case of distraction and denial is the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed 250 thousand people and left one million homeless. The media covered it, then got bored and went somewhere else. One year later, the media dedicated more than twice as much prime time to Whitney Houston's death than to the Haiti survivors, who were still living in tents. Lance Armstrong was involved in a doping scandal and received almost three times more attention from the media than a quarter million people in Haiti. And we think there's nothing wrong about our consciousness and we are not misprioritizing things.

PROPAGANDA AS ENTERTAINMENT

You have anchors earning millions of dollars a year whose job is to distract us. Their purpose is to entertain us with the news. See Diane Sawyer, for example, and her "in-depth" interview with Amanda Cox about her sex scandal, watched by 8.5 million people. Cox was in a ménage with 2 people, one of them murdered, how titillating. Let's not talk about Haiti, 8 thousand people died of cholera there and that's no fun. The media has commercial slots and is trying to sell products. Cholera is not good for marketing. Two-headed dogs, Whitney Houston, Lance Armstrong, Miley Cyrus and her new hairdo, on the other hand, is entertainment that sells: that's what's on in the national news, not reality, and we continue to live in our fantasy bubble without being aware of just how much it's got a hold on us.

Note my emphasis in Kroth's words: news is entertainment, not meant to inform but meant to sell products. Bear in mind that propaganda today is not inserted in entertainment. It's the opposite: entertainment is inserted in propaganda. Everything you see in the mass media, from the news to music to film, is propaganda and social engineering in disguise.