Until the rise of first conservative forums such as Free Republic in the mid-1990s (who would later instantly pounce on Dan Rather’s forged documents in September of 2004), and then Matt Drudge and eventually the Blogosphere, most consumers of news had little idea of how the sausage was made, other than sensationalistic Hollywood productions such as All the President’s Men and Lou Grant. The one exception prior to the rise of the Web might have been during the early 1980s. That was when the first commercially available satellite dishes went on the market, and savvy users with early VCRs recorded television journalists beaming their videotaped reports across the country and anchormen prepping for the nightly news, before the networks started scrambling their product to prevent unwanted downloads. The sort of “found footage” collected by Harry Shearer is typical of this genre.
But once the Blogosphere took off, and people who had an interest in exploring how the media actively shapes the news (or attempts to create it, in the case of Dan and his producer) could start trading blogposts, moments such as this became increasingly common. Here’s the image of Cindy Sheehan and Al Sharpton the way that the MSM (and Sheehan and Sharpton) wanted you to see them in 2005:
Here’s the sausage being made:
In the Middle East, manufacturing dissent is done on an assembly line basis. Occasionally though, it’s possible to pull the camera back a bit, in some cases, literally. As Ben Domenech writes at Ricochet, “Stop what you’re doing and watch this pretty incredible video on photojournalism and propaganda, from Ruben Salvadori:”
At Power Line, Steve Hayward adds:
There were a few reported instances back in the late 1960s and early 1970s where TV crews showed up at college campuses with anti-war signs to pass out to students to make sure they got the right visuals. And then there’s this devastating expose by a young Italian journalist named Ruben Salvadori about how photojournalists have become not merely part of the story of Palestinian unrest on the West Bank, but the instigators of it.
I hadn’t heard reports of the MSM actually handing out protest signs, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. I do know the story that Tom Wolfe told Bill Moyers of PBS, when he was promoting The Bonfire of the Vanities, which we’ll quote right after the page jump.
I am reminded of a period, back in the ’90s, when I was making frequent trips to South Korea at a time when our TV news was carrying a running story on the student riots in Seoul, advocating union with the North. “Weren’t you worried about being caught up in the fighting?”, I was regularly asked. Well, no. Every day the ame group of students would concentrate in one long street, near government offices, off a main thoroughfare. There they would go through a ritual half hour or so of throwing stones and bottles at a line of police officers with body shields while the cameras rolled, while back at the end of the street the busses, and cars and bicycles were running their regular schedules. The “riots” were staged propaganda, totally ignored by South Koreans, but given prominent showing in Pyongyang and the U.S.
No one in their right mind would compare Obama with Hitler, but his propagandist,David Axelrod, may fairly be compared with Herr. Dr. Goebels and the major networks are eagerly complicit.
“No one in their right mind would compare Obama with Hitler,”
Which Hitler, the statesman from the late 1930s, the schemer and manipulator of the mid 1930s, or the madman dictator from the early/mid 1940s?
The Hitler as he was or the Hitler as the anti-German propaganda made him out to be (propaganda that was later taken as fact and entered the history books as historically accurate)?
I see a lot of what Hitler did in Obama’s actions. Nationalising industry, favouritism to his cronies and supporters, both are/were incredibly self centered, see themselves as constantly attacked for no other reason than that others can’t comprehend their greatnesss, both are extremely manipulative, both have radical leftwing agendas (yes, Hitler was far left, not right wing), both push a racially motivated agenda, etc. etc.
Is Obama Hitler? No. Does he have tendencies that make a comparison with some things Hitler was and did meaningful? yes.
JT,
The thing is, when you mention any comparison to Hitler, people tend to tune you out. Even if the comparison is valid.
That’s political correctness used to shut people up. There are definitely dangerous similarities between Hitler and Obama and people had better start talking about them and educating themselves about them before it’s too late.
There won’t be any America to rescue America from Obama, like there was America (& Russia) to defeat Hitler.
I agree with you. Everyone gets all bent out of shape when you compare Zero to Hitler. They’re very much alike. Hitler was a drifter created by the media. Zero is pretty much the same. If he is the image, why the reluctance to show his college transcripts.
Hitler is most remembered for killing 6 million Jews. He murdered others as well. He implemented socialized medicine. He took over industries.
I was watching a documentary on the Military Ch. last week about NAZI collaborators. I couldn’t walk away from it, because it was so much like what’s going on here now. Germany was once a thriving country before Hitler came into power.
When Hitler invaded Russia, the NAZI’s were welcomed. The people thought Hitler had come to liberate them from Stalin. The Russian citizens were in the street giving them flowers, blowing them kisses. Before long, Hitler was seizing their farms, just like Zero is seizing our natural resources. I heard he wants the Dept. of Agriculture to implement a regulation where no child under the age of 18 can work on the family farm. Does that sound American to you?
Anyway, back to the NAZI’s. They turned citizen on citizen, even having one citizen kill another, all to stay in Hitler’s good graces.
What makes anyone think there would only be one Hitler? The world is full of them. What makes anyone think it can’t happen here? Those that know history are destined to ignore it I guess.
If he’s not Hitler, he’s Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple.
http://youtu.be/6rEGt2NePl0
Friday, October 29, 2010
DEMOCRAT KOOL-AID by Dr. Jack Wheeler
DEMOCRAT KOOL-AID
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
http://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2010/10/democrat-kool-aid-by-dr-jack-wheeler.html
The problem is the unskeptically credulous population. I take some comfort – illusory, of course – that the increasing sophistication of our youth who steep themselves in the software of image creation and manipulation will result in a much less gullible group in the next decade.
For many older gen-Xers and older still former glue-sniffers, the damage has been done. It’s irreversible.
No wonder these dimbulbs think Obama is a stinking genius. He is at least capable of reading words from a teleprompter, even if he doesn’t know what the hell they mean. A lot of voting-age citizens have brains far too scrambled to tie their own shoelaces. Explains why Velcro straps have come to be the preferred fastening system for sneakers and clothing.
“The problem is the unskeptically credulous population….
No wonder these dimbulbs think Obama is a stinking genius….A lot of voting-age citizens have brains far too scrambled to tie their own shoelaces.”
The problem with that argument is that those same citizens with scrambled brains also re-elected Bush 4 years before. Was that a sign of unskeptical credibility and stupidity too?
In politics, it’s commonplace to congratulate the American people on their wisdom and sound judgment when your party wins–and then damn those same people for their stupidity and unskeptical credibility when your party loses just a few years afterward.
The South won the peace, and the result is the endless playing of “the race card” by the Democratic Party. See http://clarespark.com/2008/05/03/margoth-vs-robert-e-lee/ or more recently, this one: http://yankeedoodlesoc.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/the-race-card/. Read the last one first if this subject is of interest.
Eye opening,i really didn*t know,sure learned a lot this morning!
So the recently famous photo of the woman in the blue bra being abused on the street is a fake as Dan Rather?
Mad Fiddler it was the gullible naive youngsters who were mainly responsible for Obambi winning last time not the older generation you seem to despise. Fresh from their College and School brainwashing by the left wing cabal that runs education their mushy young brains swallowed the incoherent ‘Hopey Changey’ thing hook line and sinker. Add to them the 13% of voters who are the Racist Blacks and vote for Obambi ‘cos they think he is one of them (poor deluded fools) and the 20% or so dyed in the wool left wing moonbats and the 10% irredeemably stupid and you can see how Obambi could get elected again.
There has been a disturbing increase in so-called “fauxtography”–news photographers deliberately doctoring their photos with Photoshop to better tell the narrative they want.
Here are some of the worst offenders:
http://mediamythbusters.com/index.php?title=Fauxtography
The photo of Beirut was deliberately (and crudely) Photoshopped to make the smoke from Israeli bombs look much worse than it really was.
The blog LittleGreenFootballs caught it–and Reuters admitted it, and fired the photographer. It turned out that he had been a “stringer”–a local nonprofessional whom Reuters had paid for the photos.
Due to budget cutbacks, the Western news media is increasingly reliant on such stringers to send photos of war zones and other difficult-to-access places. That makes the news media vulnerable to being fooled by stringers with their own political agenda–or even by enemy agents paid to disseminate their own propaganda.
I long ago lost any illusion of journalism being any sort of “profession”. I rank it on the scale of despicable occupations only slightly ahead of child molesters, but behind con-artists and ambulance chasing lawyers. I have zero. ZERO respect for anyone claiming to be a “journalist”.
Back after the Iraq war started, I watched in disbelief on 60 Minutes as Amanpour flogged a clearly setup street demonstration in Pakistan. Shouting, fists held high, flags burning: the whole enchilada. I guess they got so many complaints that the next week they showed the wide angle shot. On the sidewalk watching the 20 or so “rioters” were shopkeepers and pedestrians laughing at them and mocking them and saying “We love America!”
When will the rest of America wake up?
And, once in a while, the subversive leftist press finds itself on the wrong side of the gun barrel while working with our enemies–as was demonstrated in this outcome:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/06/us-iraq-usa-journalists-idUSTRE6344FW20100406
Proving that “you CAN make this stuff up” and that “there is a sucker born every day”. Our TV media is just doing their jobs, you know. There is a lot of TV air time to fill and there is only one Kardashian family. We should stop watching this bilge and wait to see if the TV networks, like the banks and General Motors, are also “too big to fail”. By the way, the photojournalists working for the print media are even worse.
It may not be a reversible situation. By no means is it certain that the blogosphere and alternative media have the money and means to overcome the hundreds of thousands of trained professional leftists. And by that, I mean the media and their political overseers.
How many professional blogers are there on the right? A couple thousand maybe, most of whom labor in complete obsurity? How many professional leftists are there in the media? Certainly tens of thousands. Ten thousand would be only 200 per state, a number that is clearly low. But that doesn’t count the professional marxist political operatives and their allies in the intelligensia and the various subversive organizations sponsored by Soros and his many allies. And then there are the soft allies of the marxists, school teachers, bureaucrats and SEIU-types, people who aren’t hard-core marxists but who have been indoctrinated with marxist doctrine. They number in the millions.
The real number of professional radical leftists is certainly over a hundred thousand, and their trained allies are many millions. We are outnumbered 50 to one, at least, in sheer numbers, but by much much more in money and resources.
2012 is the last chance. But we are pretty busy being obsessed that Pawlenty, Bachman, Palin, Perry, Cain, Newt, and now Santorum seem to have actually lived human lives, with all that entails, unlike Romney who, so far at least, seems to have lived a life without flaws. Somehow, however, I have a hunch some flaws will crop up for Romney, unlike the lightworker who descended to earth in 2008 as chaste and pure as the baby Jesus.
I’ve felt that this was happening for years and I love seeing it confirmed, but my question is “HOW?”. How did this monolithic, lying media get imposed on this supposedly free country and nobody knew?
What this all is and has been is the manipulation of a willing and sympathetic liberal Media using KGB training in crowd agitation and visual media propaganda techniques that was taught to US leftists and anti-American Arab nation states and Arabic/Islamic revolutionary groups back in the 50s, 60s and 70s by the USSR. They called in “strett theater” on the 60s. Note Putins open support of OWS who are using these tactics.
This is the leftover lefts legacy of the cold war. It’s all they got.
I have long maintained that the so called Main Street Media is nothing of the sort. It has not been mainstream, nor reporting the news, for a long time.
People want to know what is going on, but must turn to alternative sources to find it. They don’t want to be lied to, scolded like children by pompous jerks, or lectured to by people who know less than they do.
Now, on-air “reporters” get their talking points on their blackberries from the White House in real time, and dutifully report what they are told. They lie, under report, censor what is really going on, etc. Newspapers and television “news shows” all report the same “news” with the same pejoratives.
These “reporters” belong to organizations such as Center for Public Integrity and Pro Publica and not only neglect to mention their affiliation, they certainly won’t mention Soro’s funding of these organizations.
We must understand that they no longer report the news, nor represent the mainstream in any commonly understood fashion.
The so-called MSM is now properly defined as the:
*** MoP (Ministry of Propaganda) ***
They are no more than that. Goebbels would be proud.
This is especially troubling as the Founders understood the value of a free press and gave them special protections in the Constitution. They have abrogated their responsibilities to the country.
One cannot solve a problem unless the problem is properly defined and stated. Once everyone understands that what you see and hear from the MSM is nothing but propaganda that should be promptly and summarily dismissed, America will be on the road to recovery. I am personally surprised that anyone still watches MSM broadcasts and reads their drivel.
Why bother trying to argue facts with a liberal, leftist, progressive, MSM parasite servicing them (take your pick). For them there is no truth, no right or wrong, no morals, no values, only the power they so desperately seek to justify their belief in being better, smarter, and the certainty they need to be in-charge of everyone.
Transnationalism, post-modernist thought, Alinsky rules for radical community organizers, the “it takes a village” type thinking all revolves around the attainment of power of the group over the individual, in the end.
History repeats itself for those who fail to learn its lessons. The outright corruption of truth, that is actively enabled by the state-run media under this administration reminds me of the slow descent into fascism of the state that resulted in the rise of Hitler, of Stalin, of Mao, PolPot, Chavez-
inevitably evil triumphs when the truth dies, and we are slouching towards it, it seems inevitably.
You forgot one of the most blatant recent examples, namely the closeup of the gun-toting person at the (racist) Tea Party protest that was actually the cropped picture of a black man carrying a gun.
One other similar example is the book “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” by Michael A. Bellesiles.
The book is a pack of lies, but professional historians and the elite media praised it.
What’s the difference between a fictional TV show like CSI and modern broadcast “journalism”? Basically, nothing. Well, maybe the actors in CSI belong to a different union than the ones on “Meet the Press”?
We all realise that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times are the three heads of ‘Der Voelkischer Beobachter” The question is: Which outlets are the heads of ‘Der Stuermer”?