The six o’clock television news is the single most powerful force in existence for manipulating public opinion. At no other time during the day are so many people tuned into one single source of information. This unique dominance means that whatever is spoken about on The News is spoken about at work the next day. The News sets the agenda.
The sad, bitter truth is that The News is not, in any sense, a genuine effort to inform honestly about the issues of the day. The News is, and always has been, propaganda, i.e. an effort to regiment the minds of the public and to persuade them to consent to certain actions.
This propaganda is put together by the television programmers – exceptionally skilled psychologists who order the segments of the television shows to achieve the best effect. Here, “best effect” is defined as whatever is desired by the beneficiaries of the programming – the corporate interests who buy the advertising.
The television news is a simple work, but it’s possibly the most effective and powerful one on Earth, if one measures how many people are affected by it. The work occurs in two phases: the first is when the viewer is made to feel tension by watching a news bulletin, and the second is when the viewer is given relief from the tension by watching an advertisement.
The news bulletins themselves are of two kinds.
The first sells fear. In this category are stories about rising Chinese military power, global climate change, Islamic terrorism and financial collapse. The News usually leads with one of these stories, to set the tone. Once the viewer is made afraid, the television programmer can then double down on the fear.
The second sells anger. In this category are stories about lesser humans getting away with it, such as dark-skinned people getting light sentences for violence or sex crimes, or welfare increases, or a lower-class person questioning whatever their society’s noble lie is (in our case, the noble lie is equalitarianism).
The advertisements can be anything, but their common characteristic is that they relieve the fear and anger generated in the previous phase. To this end, it doesn’t matter if the advertisements are selling power, leisure, excitement, style, class, friendship or any other emotion. They only have to release the tension built up in the first phase.
So long as the advertisement causes the body to release tension, natural physiology will lead to that person forming a positive association with whatever product is displayed at the same time. Even if only at a subconscious level, the person watching The News comes to associate the product advertised with a decrease in anxiety and stress. Having formed such an association, the viewer is effectively programmed to behave in a way that benefits the advertiser (usually by buying their product).
It’s all but impossible to avoid being programmed in this manner if one watches television. The only way to escape is to not react emotionally to anything displayed on the screen.
The usual result of such programming is that, when a person is at the supermarket and sees a product that was advertised during The News, they recall the pleasant, relaxed feeling that they felt during the advertisement and associates that with the product in front of them. This often leads to a sale.
Even if the programming doesn’t cause people to buy a particular product, it achieves a more sinister objective: to regiment the minds of the public.
Most people are far too busy with their everyday lives to conduct a philosophical investigation into what’s right or wrong, so they just go along with the crowd. But they’re also too busy to conduct an accurate and objective survey of what the crowd thinks, so they trust The News to tell them.
The News tells its audience what the issues of the day are, what most people think about those issues and what they should be outraged over. They do this by normalising certain attitudes and by abnormalising others.
For instance, by making a big deal out of race issues, and by prominently featuring people to speak about race issues, The News promotes race consciousness, and normalises viewing the world through a racial lens. At the same time, they minimalise or trivialise class issues, denying class consciousness, and abnormalise viewing the world through a class lens.
The result has been the intensification of race neurosis to race hysteria level. This myopic focus on racism has made it impossible for people to develop the necessary class consciousness to resist the ruling class and its depredations. The television news, by dividing the people up among racial and gender lines, plays a crucial role in destroying that class consciousness.
The television news, then, works by modifying the behaviour of its audience to the benefit of its sponsors. The corporate, banking and financial interests that buy television advertising get to decide how the viewers will be programmed, and then the television programmers schedule their programs to make this possible.
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