News lite & infotainment

So journos have been running shifty techniques for years

no one doubts that


But with the ever advancing techniques of market research and what not the line between fact and specific emotional appeals to targeted demographics has all but dissapeared.

Product placement warrants as much if not more air time than news stories and factual information is rarely put forward objectively


SMS polls ask you to vote on your opinion of symptoms surrounding current hot issues and the news is spun to appeal to the populist opinion.

Tell them what they want to hear in the way they want to hear it


Perceptions trump facts when it comes to sales and ratings
Sensationalism dominates, playing to the fears and anxieties of what is already an incredibly neurotic society
sure facts suggest on average crime rates have remained steady if they haven't dropped over the past few decades
the average sentance across all crimes is six months longer than it was 10 years ago

What does that matter when you've got a ten year old photo of a youth with a gun next to a story about video games inciting violence?


Reporting obligations to truth and balance have been completely forgone in favour of the standard business imperatives

why not right?
Society runs on fear, so why wouldn't politicians stage PR political promises that play to the anxietey created by the media.
People want to hear their own vices and bias justified back to them

Makes us nice and comfortable and stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality
Though that's only motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat of a lack of social acceptance.


Wake up to a nice news lite show in the morning, homely living room soon with some Kochie clone who acts like an old friend, discussing techniques for raising drug proof children and so forth
Slide a few news bulletins in bewteen budgeting tips that suggest you go to the bank that owns the show and a clearly objective demonstration of the capabilities of this weeks cook-o-matic.
human interest pieces directed by marketing departments based on a demographic appeal and audience share


By the time the evening news rolls around moral panic has arisen due to the emerging 'wet willy' phenomonen kids seem to be engaging in everywhere despite there only being one 7 second clip being replayed on all the stations.



Philosophers worked out how to be happy a long time ago (alot of other people did too but for arguments sake; shutup)
Marketers worked out how to appeal to the things that make us happy without actually providing them
Now journalists manipulate the anxieties we have about not having the things we think will make us happy



Personally i think this kind of neuroticism is bordering on schizophrenic...so detached is the ego from the self.

The potential for growth is more present now than ever before, but when you look at the bigger picture rationality has been thrown to the dogs.

cartel esque cronyism of the corporate political alliances, ridiculous incompetence on behalf of our leaders is accepted practice, Orwellian propaganda campaigns and none of this warrants the batting of an eyelid amongst the cynical mildly satisfied

The education system is deisgned to breed apathy
remember the dates of wars without asking why we have perpetual war

The media is beyond embarrassing
the fact they can get away with the kind of chequebook premeditated journalism they do is testament to the lack of concern on behalf of the public

no doubt ignorance is bliss and so forth but why does that mean raising these topics in the discussion forum is a no no?

Couldn't be the same interrelated objectives of the state and corporate capitalist 'ideaological network' programming that caused Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model to be hastily dismissed as a conspiracy theory and stricken from scholary debates on media behaviour for it's overly deterministic view when in reality it's a logical free market analysis.

The term itself, ‘conspiracy theory’, is precisely that, a label, one that has been used as a means of dismissing the PM without granting a minimal presentation of the model or a consideration of evidence.

My work (and Ed Herman’s, and others’) is about as much of a
‘conspiracy theory’ as a study of GM that suggests that its management
seeks to maximize profit and market share. But to the intellectual classes,
to suggest that institutional factors enter into policy is like waving a red
flag in front of a bull– for very good reasons.




specifically i'm talking about increases in things fear appeals, emotional selling propositions, sacrifice of objective factual journalism in favour of skewed stories emotionally geared towards the results of the sms poll they conducted the week before, global reach of misinformation and more importantly less and less time for people to reflect on what they take in, forming opinions based on the clips which are more and more focused on emotinal sensibilities.
News segments and entire shows that are nothing but extended advertisments clothed as entertainment.
trial by media and the ability of various institutions to shift public opinion for and against causes as they say fit


A little more than a century ago, as political unrest brewed between America and Spain over Spain’s brutally repressive actions to suppress the Cuban fight for independence, two American media giants seized the opportunity to stoke the fires of public sentiment in effort to be the first to boost circulation of their newspaper over one million readers (“Spanish-American”).
During the 1890’s, these two newspaper moguls, Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World, and William Randolph Hearst, the infamous owner of the New York Journal, in their efforts to outdo each other created what historians now point to as the first “media war.”
The competition was fierce and neither man was beneath coloring, or even fabricating, news to increase profits. It has been written that Hearst became so anxious for a Spanish-American war to break out to boost circulation (Schiffman) that when Frederick Remington, one of his illustrators, cabled him from Cuba that there was little to report on, Hearst allegedly cabled back, “Please
remain.
You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” (“Spanish-American”). The sensationalistic
journalism of the time, designed to propel America toward a news-making war with Spain, came to be
known as yellow journalism.
Although PR-conscious news media corporations no longer so blatantly seek to boost profits by such dubious means, there does seem to remain a more discreet self-serving undercurrent visible in modern media coverage.
Of course in a perfect world, news media outlets would exist to selflessly serve the public, delivering important, unbiased news to the public. But that is not reality.
News media corporations are in reality profit seeking companies, concerned with maintaining a
healthy bottom line.
And to maintain a healthy bottom line, corporations must create a market, figure out what the public wants to consume, and maintain good relations with their sources to ensure a constant supply to meet public demand

The more hegemonic and homogeneous the media institutions become the less critical reflection of the opinion pushed, because it is supported from other angles.

There is a ridiculous amount of literature on this

http://books.google.com/books?id=XGQ...AgE5jlOWPOl7Xw


http://books.google.com/books?id=7iv...fpqQVyoR4EY5H4

http://books.google.com/books?id=4a9...CC gpKfjNdgkU

http://books.google.com/books?id=ksL...7 YuAF11VmS2Q




The ultimate example of all this is the selling of Iraq War:

-Hussein demonized
-spurious rhetorical link asserted between him and al-Qaeda
-Innuendo links Hussein to war on terror despite al-Qaeda/bin Laden maintaining intense hostility to Hussein's secular regime
-spin doctors persude population of Saddams implication
-attempts made to mobilize refugees/exiles as alternative government
-creat victims (Iraqi citizens) to be rescued from villian(Saddam). Recylce decontextualized format of Kurds story to build memory association in mind of public
-Psy-ops techniques extensively deplopyed to maintain associations

In addition to all this the PR games of identity politics, rapid increases in social construction of hyperrealities and spectacle culture all contribute to the psychological burden pushed on anyone who sets foot in society; virtually or otherwise.

IMO all this has a massive impact on the collective unconscious