Ch 13.1 - Media/News
"News headline if social media were in Jesus' times --> Local Carpenter with Extremist Views Continues to Spread Disinformation Deemed Harmful by Religious Experts!" - Unknown
Narrative: People believe anything they see on TV or read in the newspaper. Unfortunately, our constant need for novelty keeps our controllers busy feeding us bullsh*t.
---------------------------
a. News/Media
---------------------------
"It takes million dollar smiles to convince you of lies. It only takes some dude on a laptop in Japan convince you of truth." - Unknown
jour·nal·ism - noun - the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast. From the Latin diurnal or daily. The Acta Diurna, a handwritten bulletin, was put up daily in the Forum, the main public square in ancient Rome, and was the world's first newspaper.
"Imagine 5,000 years ago. You've got a town or village in some fertile valley and you're doing great. But your visibility is such that you only have maybe like a half a day's worth of warning if there are any threats on the horizon. So your town has a village idiot who you all decide, hey dude, go to the top of the ridge line and tell us what you see. We just want you to go up there, look out and report back what you're looking at and when it happened. You know what you call that guy? A journalist. That village idiot is just telling you what's happening and when. You don't need them to interpret. You don't need them to advocate anything or being a force for good in society. Just tell me what's going on. And that's been valuable job for several millennia. Why does journalism need to be more than that?" - Unknown
“A famous saying in old journalism schools is, ‘If your mother says she loves you, verify it with three sources.’” - Unknown
"I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.” – Christopher Hitchens
"Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession." - Thomas Sowell
“A good journalist is a conspiracy theorist and then looks for the facts that disprove the conspiracy.” - Unknown
"BBC - British Brainwashing Corporation" - Unknown
"In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view, the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all." - George Orwell
"If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed." - Mark Twain
“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” - Thomas Jefferson
“Watching the news to be informed is like eating Mcdonald's to get fit. Watching the news is just asking the TV what to worry about today.” - Unknown
"Life is easier if you accept the news. It takes bravery to see the world for what it is and say it. " - Unknown
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world." Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Norvell
"There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with…The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon…You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an 'Independent Press'! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - Attributed to John Swinton on April 12, 1883, at the Twilight Club, New York City
“You can only reach billionaire levels of influence and wealth control in the current system if you collaborate with existing power structures; if your collaboration is trusted, you'll find yourself targeted like TikTok and WeChat. This is why all the libertarians and free market types who say Silicon Valley censorship can be fought by moving to a different platform are false; no platform is going to be allowed to rise to the level of Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube unless it aligns itself with the same power structures that are pushing censorship on those platforms. This is why attempts to compete with them keep failing. A few giant platforms sucking up all human conversation to censor those conversations in alignment with establishment interests is a precious asset to the powerful, and they're not going to let it go easily. It's a highly effective weapon against dissident thought. These platforms were built with the help of established power structures, and they are maintained with the consent of those power structures. First, the wealthy controlled the newspapers. Then they controlled the radio. Then they controlled television. Now they control online speech. It's been the same story for centuries, and in each instance, they collaborated with existing power structures to protect the status quo upon which their kingdoms were built. They did this because they understood the real secret of power: whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Humanity will only transition into a healthy collaborative way of functioning on this planet when everyone else also awakens to this truth.” - Unknown
“The news in 1960: Good evening. Here is what objectively happened in the world.
The news today: Good evening. Here is what we want you to believe.” - Unknown
"The American public don't believe anything until they see it on television." - Nixon
"Think! It ain't illegal yet. But they working on it." - Eddie Griffin
"Unfortunately, you guys quit reporting the news. When I can read a news story and I have no idea what side of the story the reporter is on, that's a good news story. You'll be hard-pressed to find a lot of news that looks like that." - Sanders
“If my government says X, I assume Y or negative X unless I find independent proof otherwise. Same with mainstream media. You earned my distrust. I doubt there is anything you can ever do to earn my trust back. But keep on gaslighting me and proving me right.” - Unknown
"The greatest weapon is not a gun or a bomb. It is the control of information. To control the world's information is to manipulate all the minds that consume it." - Unknown
"5 major players control the mainstream media: AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Walt Disney, Vivendi Universal, and Sony. Monopoly isn't just a board game for kids. It's real life!" - KaraHelenMosher
"Comcast 155b, Disney 147b, TimeWarner 64b, 21st Century Fox 47b, CBS 25b, Viacom 14b" - Google Finance Market Capitalization of Major Media Companies
"Holy Quadrinity—YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok." - Unknown
"monopoly on the means of communication, may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of 'monopoly in the means of production." - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote in "Leviathan," their 1975 novel
"For propaganda to be effective, there needs to be central coordination of narratives, and that’s where public relations agencies come in. Few appreciate the power that these companies have. Two-thirds to 80% of the content broadcast and published by corporate media comes from public relations firms, so most of the so-called 'news' is brainwashing propaganda." - Unknown
“Because the news media are controlled by plutocrats vested in protecting the status quo upon which their kingdoms are built, almost everything in the news is useless narrative fluff. It doesn't tell you what's going on. It instead tries to influence what's going on by manipulating the audience's perceptions. It does this by either (A) distracting from what matters by focusing on what doesn't matter or (B) actively working to manipulate how the audience thinks about a given issue. When you strip away all the empty fluff and manipulative spin, there are only four often overlapping pieces of information that matter in the big picture:
- Where the money is going.
- Where the resources are going.
- Where the weapons are going.
- Where the people are going.
When understanding world dynamics, accurate information about these four things is the only real news you'll ever encounter. Everything else is an empty narrative spin meant to justify, distort, or distract from information about these things.” - Unknown
“The essence of press power lies in authority to select, elevate and promote one set of ideas, issues, and personalities and to ignore others. The press determines what 'people will talk and think about because of the monopoly it holds over the news and information flowing out of Washington." - Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed
"The more the Powers That Be want to draw something to your attention the more suspicious you should be of the underlying motives." - James Delingpole’s Second Law
"<--- Hunter Biden laptop news.
---> Squirrel
<--- Pfizer admits they're doing gain of function on covid...
---> fjb's depends overflowed into his socks again
<--- Blinken offered a peace proposal to Russia, which Lavrov politely declined...
---> Chinese weather balloon" - Unknown
"If it's 'leaked' and makes the news, it's a distraction. Edit: If it makes the news, it's a distraction." - Unknown
"Therefore you always have to ask yourself: Why do I get this specific information in this specific form at this moment? Ultimately, it's always about questions of power." - Dr. Konrad Hummler, Swiss banking and media executive
"Would you blindfold yourself and eat whatever someone fed you? No? Then stop letting the media do it to you." - Unknown
me·di·a - noun - the main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the internet) regarded collectively. Literally meaning medium or middleman. That is, an agent between two parties, esp. a dealer or company intermediator between the producer of goods. From Latin media meaning ‘middle sheath (or layer)’.
"We own everyone of significance in the media." - William Casey, Director of the CIA
“Friendly reminder: the media's goal is NOT to keep you 'informed.' Their goal is to make you *feel* like you're informed. And getting you addicted to the news by toying with your emotions and fears. The reason they do this is simple: they get paid selling your attention to advertisers.” - Unknown
"Shortly, the public will be unable to reason or think for themselves. They'll only be able to parrot the information they've been given on the previous night's news." - Zbigniew Brzezinski, KGB Defector
“The media has ceased to exist, and the public plods on by assuming as true whatever the media suppresses and as false whatever the media covers.” - Unknown
"They:
Network -> to create a net that works
Broadcast -> to broadly cast across society
Television -> to tell a vision
Channel -> to channel energy into you
Program -> so you're programmed
Story -> with ‘stories’ loosely based on reality" - Unknown
"The most important stories are the ones they never talk about." - Unknown
"Accusation is projection is confession." - Unknown
“The media's job today is to ensure that if anyone threatens to expose how fraudulent and corrupt our democracy has become, and if they offer an alternative to the destruction wrought by neoliberalism at home and abroad, they are ridiculed, smeared, and destroyed!” - Unknown
“In other words, investigative journalism is a Potemkin Village of circular sources conjured out of thin air by Big Media. Here's an example from my own experience of being shadow-banned.
1) an utterly bogus organization pops up out of nowhere and doesn't bother identifying its owners, managers, or sources.
2) This complete travesty of a mockery of a sham fabrication then issues a list of websites it claims, with zero evidence, are stooges/outlets of Russian propaganda.
3) With zero investigation of this slanderous, evidence-free 'source,' the venerable Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) publishes an evidence-free hit piece glorifying this fabrication on Page One.
4) The other Big Media giants then amplify the bogus slander because it came from a "legitimate source," the Washington Post.” - Unknown
b. Advertising
---------------------------
"Whenever you’re exposed to advertising in this country, you realize all over again that America’s leading industry is still the manufacturing, distribution, packaging, and marketing of bullshit." - George Carlin (the invisible man is watching, and he does loves you! Not sure why he always needs money tho…)
ad·ver·tise - verb - describe or draw attention to (a product, service, or event) in a public medium in order to promote sales or attendance. From Latin advertere meaning ‘turn towards.’
"But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in 8 hours (the average office worker gets less than 3 hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work." - David Cain
“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct, or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind." – Edward Bernays – Propaganda – 1928
"When life hands you lemons... Make Lemonade?... No. First you roll out a multi-media campaign to convince people lemons are incredibly scarce. Which only works if you stockpile lemons. Control the supply. Then a media blitz. Lemon is the only way to say I love you. The must-have accessorry for engagements or anniversaries. Roses are out. Lemons are in. Billboards that say she won't have sex with you unless you've got lemons. You cut DeBeers in on it. Limited edition Lemon Bracelets. Yellow diamonds called Lemon Drops. You get Apple to call their new operating system OS Lemon (little accent over the O). You charge 40% more for organic lemons. 50% more for conflict free lemons. You pack the Capitol with Lemon lobbyists. You get a Khardasian to suck a lemon wedge in a leaked sex tape. Timonthy Chalaway wears Lemon shoes again. You get a hashtag campaign. Something isn't cool or tight or awesome. No... It's #Lemon. Did you see that movie? Did you go to that concert? It was f*cking Lemon. Billy Eilish. Omg hastag #Lemon. You get Dr. Oz to recommend four lemons a day and a lemon suppository supplement to get rid of toxins because there's nothing scarier than toxins. Then you patent the seeds. You write a line of genetic code that makes lemons look just a little more like tits. Then you get a gene patent for the tit lemon DNA sequence. You cross polinate. You get those seeds circulating in the wild. And then you sue the farmers for copyright infringement when that genetic code shows up on their land. Sit back. Rake in the millions. And when you're done and you've sold your Lempire for a few billion dollars… then. And only then - you make some f*cking lemonade." - The Fall of the House of Usher
"We don't do commercials because our target audience isn't sitting around watching TV." - Lamborghini
"Brace Yourself Arthur as Corporate America tries to sell us its wretched things!" (Turns on TV) — The Tick
"Just consume product and then get excited for the next product. Sincerely, Your Corporate Overlords." - Unknown
"Advertising Has Us Chasing Cars And Clothes, Working Jobs We Hate So We Can Buy S*#T We Don't Need" - Tyler Durden, Fight Club
"Ever wonder about those people who pay $2 for a bottle of Evian Water? Spell Evian backwards." - George Carlin, Evian -> Naive
"BestBuy; the irony starts before you even walk through the door." - Unknown
The commercials we watch on tv make no sense. Their purpose is no longer to sell cars, food, insurance, or medicine. Their goal is to humiliate, propagandize, and remind you of the inverted world we live in lest you forget.
"For the most part, advertising spending is rarely about actual 'advertising' and instead it is about endorsing, encouraging and funding certain ideologies and party lines which corporations agree with, encourage and seek to make default. It is about influencing the content decisions and editorial slant by implicitly threatening that the ad money can disappear at a moment's notice if something is published the company disagrees with. It's why when Pfizer or Moderna spend tens of millions for advertising in the NYT it is not so people are aware that Pfizer makes a covid booster shot - they know that from non-stop news coverage; it is to make sure that the NYT never questions the corporate party line. In other words, it is public relations in an advertising wrapper." - Unknown
“[Advertising is] public relations in an advertising wrapper.” - Ubkbown
“There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud... to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom." - Milton Friedman's 1970 article 'Responsibility of Business is to Increase It's Profits' on why corporate managers should not use company resources to engage in social activism
"He [Musk] realizes that advertisers have no spine and can be easily cowed by special interest groups in cahoots with political allies – if you don’t believe me I got two words for ya – Tucker Carlson." - Greg Gutfeld
"Here's the playbook:
1) Remove God from every institution by implementing perversion (above)
2) Implement communism (which is a Godless institution) to enslave all
These ads are by no means a mistake or a marketing miscalculation" - Unknown, on woke marketing campaigns
"Sunkist Logo - It isn't Sun-Kist. Look closely. It really says Sin-Kist..." - Unknown
"R.I.P. - WHITE COUPLES IN TV COMMERCIALS - 1950 - 2021" - Unknown, written on the tombstone of traditional advertising
"Commercials are the only way I would have known that white people are only allowed to marry black people now, with possible exceptions allowed for marrying Hispanics or Asians. Blacks, however, may marry anybody. Also, I've learned that all wives are geniuses and all husbands are idiots. Except for gay husbands." - Unknown
"As a white Christian male, I have wondered, are we rich privileged people or not? Because no company ever was successful by alienating those with money." - Unknown, on the recent Bud Light ad campaign featuring transgender actor Dylan Mulvaney
"To those of you who say, 'Why do you make such a big deal over one can?', I'll reply with, what would you do if Bud Light came out with a can that celebrated 365 days of being 'born again', with some MAGA hat wearing god-fearing evangelist on it? I'll answer that question for you: you'd lose your shyt, and call for a boycott of Bud Light." - Unknown
"Weird how Bud Light airs one ad with a transgender person and everyone wants to boycott them. But when Amazon airs that moustache girl commercial 24/7 no one does sh*t. It's almost like they're daring us to boycott them and none of us can because we need Amazon too much." - Unknown
"Q: Why is Bud Light having trouble selling bottled beer?
A: Because all their new customers prefer to take it in the can..." - Unknown
"A man pretending to be a woman promoting a beverage pretending to be a beer." - Unknown
"Heinerscheid said that she had a 'Mandate from day 1' to woke the Bud Light brand. Who issued the 'mandate'? Yeah, the 'top execs' that just put her 'on leave'. Why not fire her? Because then she'd have a lawsuit and we'd find out the 'mandate' came from the very top of InBev." - Unknown
"The mask finally slips - UFC is not the bastion of masculinity/freedom or any of that ******** that they always try to espouse, they are Empire through and through. Expect to see more painted nails, make-up, and dog *******" - Unknown, on the $100m Bud Light spent to be the official beer sponsor of the UFC
"The real product that InBev is selling here is transsexualism, not beer. Other products these giant multinational corporations are selling include homosexual sodomy, abortion, the destruction of the family, mental and moral incapacitation, and self-incrimination (all social media and computer technology is a vehicle used to rat you out to your overlords). They all just use different physical vehicles to sell these products. In this case, the physical sales vehicle is beer. Money doesn't really matter to the corporate oligarch managerial class that runs these giant multinational corporations. They are willing to lose money in the short run in order to enslave you in the long run. Eventually, their goal is to use their products to kill you. These people are Malthusians and Eugenicists, and by their lights, the general public is disease that must be eradicated." - Unknown
"Corporations go woke and employees go broke. That was the plan all along. Destroy America one brand at a time." - Unknown
"Boycotting our store is violence." - Target
"it is time to boycott the boycotters: below we have summarized the names of those companies which have publicly signaled their 'virtue' by pulling their ads from X/Musk: Disney, CNBC/NBC parent Comcast, Warner Brothers, Discovery, Apple, Sony, Lions Gate, Paramount, IBM, Paris Hilton" - Unknown on the companies boycotting X/Elon Musk
"Offer me money. Offer me power. I don't care. I'll say what I want to say and if the consequence of that is me losing money so be it." - Elon Musk, on why he posts tweets that negatively impact his ad revenue on Twitter
"Vote with your pocketbook. It's the only vote that counts." - Unknown
c. Machiavelli
-------------------------
Our media looks like something straight out of Machiavelli. And below, I've tried to paraphrase Machiavelli's 12th Dialogue in Hell in case you don't believe me (it's a bit long, but is remarkably close to the system we live under today):
"In the parliamentary countries, governments almost always perish due to the press; so, I foresee the possibility of neutralizing the press by the press itself. Since it is as great a force as journalism, do you know what my government will be? It will be journalistic, it will be journalism incarnate...
I would count the number of newspapers that represent what you would call the opposition. If there were 10 for the opposition, I would have 20 for the government; if there were 20, I would have 40; if there were 40, I would have 80. This is how -- you will now understand -- I would make use of the faculty that I reserved for myself of authorizing the creation of new political papers... it is necessary that the public masses do not suspect this tactic; the arrangement would fail and public opinion would detach itself from the newspapers that openly defend my politics...
I would divide into three or four categories the papers devoted to my power. In the first rank, I would place a certain number of newspapers whose tone would be frankly official and which -- at every turn -- would defend my actions to the limit. These would not be, let me tell you, the ones that would have the most influence on public opinion. In the second rank, I would place another phalanx of newspapers whose character would no longer be official and whose mission would be to rally to my power the masses of lukewarm or indifferent people who accept without scruple what exists, but do not go beyond their political religion... It is in the following categories of newspapers that the most powerful levers of my power would be found. Here the official or unofficial tone would be completely lost -- in appearance, of course -- because the newspapers of which I speak would all be attached by the same chain to my government: a visible chain for some; an invisible one to others. I would not undertake to tell you what would be their number, because I would assign a dedicated organ to each opinion, in each party; I would have an aristocratic organ in the aristocratic party, a republican organ in the republican party, a revolutionary organ in the revolutionary party, an anarchist organ -- if need be -- in the anarchist party. Like the God Vishnu, my press would have a hundred arms, and these arms would place their hands upon all the nuances of opinion throughout the entire country. One would be of my party without knowing it. Those who believe they speak their language would [actually] be speaking mine; those who believe they were acting in their party would be acting in mine; those who believe they were marching under their flag would be marching under mine... they would only make a polemic of skirmishes, a dynastic opposition within the narrowest limits...
People [would then say]: "But you see that one is free, that under this regime one can speak [freely], that the regime is unjustly attacked, that instead of repressing -- which it could do -- it suffers, it tolerates." Another, no less important result would be to provoke observations such as this: "See the point at which the bases of this government, its principles, are respected by all of us; here are newspapers that allow themselves the greatest freedoms of speech, but they never attack the established institutions. It is necessary that these institutions are beyond the injustices of the passions, because the very enemies of the government cannot help themselves from rendering homage to them..."
With the help of the occult devotion of these public papers, I can say that I would direct public opinion to my liking in all questions of domestic and foreign policy. I would excite or lull minds, I would reassure or disconcert them, I would plead for and against, the true and the false. I would announce a deed and I would deny it, according to the circumstances; thus I would sound out public thinking, I would try out combinations, projects and sudden determinations, finally what you in France call trial balloons. I would combat my enemies to my liking without ever compromising my power, because -- after having made these papers speak -- I can, if need be, inflict upon them the most energetic denials;[3] I would solicit opinions about certain resolutions, I could reject or retain them, I would always have my finger on the pulsations, which would reflect -- without knowing it -- my personal impressions and they would sometimes be astonished at being so constantly in agreement with their sovereign. One would then say that I have the popular sensibility, that there is a secret and mysterious sympathy that unites me with the movements of my people... Journalism is a kind of Freemasonry: those who live in it are more or less attached to each other by the links of professional discretion; just like the ancient augurs, they do not easily divulge the secrets of their oracles. They gain nothing by betraying them, because for the most part they have more or less shameful secrets. It is quite probable, I agree, that in the center of the capital, in a certain circle of people, things would not be a mystery; but everywhere else, one would not suspect anything, and the large majority of the nation would march with the most complete confidence along the guided routes that I will have provided... When there has been an extraordinary suicide, some gross financial affair that is too wormy, some misdeed by a public functionary, I would prohibit the newspapers from speaking of it. Silence on such matters would show the public's honesty much better than noise would do." - Unknown
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Table of Contents