Combating Media Deception

1.  Don't believe everything you read.  Do not do everything it says.

(Seems obvious until you examine the spam phenonemon.  If it says "send this you everyone you know," it is a hoax, every time.  Yes, every time.)

2. Consider the source.  What is their motivation for publishing?  What it their worldview?

(charter school debate...)

In Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media (hulu, gvid), the propaganda model views the private media as businesses selling a product — readers and audiences to other businesses/advertisers (rather than news to readers) and relying primarily on government and corporate information and propaganda. The theory postulates general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media: Ownership of the medium, the medium's Funding, Sourcing of the news, etc.

(Is East Timor forgotten?)

3. Look up references.  Do they really say what it says they said, or it is taken out of context.

(Noam Chomsky / Finklestein story: Understanding Power, pp. 244-248)

4. Does it make logical sense?  Sometimes it sounds so good, and we want so hard to believe it, but that doesn't make it true.

(multiple epistomologies?)

5. Listen to multiple points of view.  (Everyone has a bit of truth, so it is ok to acknowledge those bits without agreeing with everything.)

New Sources

Recommended News Sources

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/02/27

Media Watchdogs: AIM and FAIR

Questions

What tactics are used?

How to identify tactic such as whitewash?

Propaganda Techniques

censorship

The most effective means of censorship is simply to pretend it doesn't exist.  No reporting of the event will appear in popular news.  (e.g. Ron Paul coverage: Who does the media talk about?  Who is really ahead?)

whitewash / spin

ad hominem / smear campaign

Big Lie

Make the lie big, repeat it constantly, and people will believe it.

"in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick – a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of." -- Hilter

Hilter's "big lie" was blaming Germany's troubles on the Jews.

"America does not torture." -- Bush

false dichotomy

Republican vs Democrat, right vs left, etc.

concensus

When the only real evidence is that "everyone agrees".  (plus a lot of cherry-picked factoids)

Polls show that 90% of the population wants X.

statistics

short attention span

secrecy

If someone tells you they have secret information which would prove their point, they are lying. If it really would prove their point, they would tell you; if it was really secret, they would not reveal that they know it.

Chomsky's Filters

• Selection of Topics
• Distribution of Concerns
• Emphasis
• Framing of Issues
• Filtering of Information
• Bounding of Debate

Determine, select, shape, control, restrict, to serve the interests of dominant elite groups in society.

Ownership.  Large Corporations.

Sports: pay attention to something not important, building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, group cohesion behind leadership elements

Chomsky's suggestions:

don't be isolated; think for yourself, discuss with others

grass root organizing, interact with others

intellectual self-defence

independent, listener-supported media

Quotes from 1988 interview with Bill Moyers

Chomsky: It is an absolute necessity that groups form in which people can join together, can share their concerns, can articulate their ideas, can gain a response, can discover what they think, can discover what they believe, what their values are.

This can't be imposed upon you from above. You have to discover it, by experiment, by effort, by trial, by application, and this has to be done with others.

Furthermore, surely central to human nature is a need to be engaged with others in cooperative efforts of solidarity and concern.

Moyers: Does a citizen need far-reaching specialized knowledge to understand the realities of power--to understand what it really going on?

Chomsky: It's not absolutely trivial, but compared to the sciences, it is pretty slight.  There are things you have study and know something about, but by and large what happens in social and polical life is relatively accessible.  It does not take special training or unusual intelligence.

What it really takes is honesty.  If you are honest you can see it.

People have the capacity to see through the deceit in which they are ensnared, but they have to make the effort.