presentation for western balkan conference 2014

1. Media (manipulation?)
EDUTUS College
Western Balkan Information
Literacy Conference on Una
River 2014
Speaker: Esther Molnar

2. Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Media=manipulation?
-Media manipulation tools
-Mind Control
• What you never hear in the
media
“The most effective way to conquer a man is to
capture his mind. Control a man’s mind and you
control his body.” (Steven Jacobson)

4. Media manipulation tools
• What is manipulation? : a certain social attitude,
created on purpose in order to influence the reactions,
behavior of an individual/social
+converting the target [ourselves], turning it into one dependent
on the influence of the source transmitting the message
• Forms of manipulation:
a) persuasion
any attempt to convince somebody to
accept your ideas or adopt certain behaviour.
+clearly seen in the means of propaganda
e.g: Reagan’s Cambodia- and Nicaragua warfare
in the „Rambo” movie

5. b) misinforming
any attempt to influence the enemy’s decision, in
other words, “creating a false reality so convincing
that the enemy considers it fair
• it can be a dangerous weapon because it can be
used to find excuses, distracting attention,
discredit a person or create conflicts between
nations and finally, manipulate public opinion
• in order to manipulate the masses successfully, it
has to be done on society’s level

6. • the intensity of the information transmitted in the media ?
Its means can be making exaggerations and „news”
according to Bernard Goldberg
• The press likes to use words like „scandal” or
„tragedy”
• The source will be forgotten but the information
stays like the created opinion

7. • Howard Koch once mentioned in his
book “The Panic Broadcast” that “we are
ready to believe almost anything if it
comes from a recognized authority
“The man who
never looks into a
newspaper is better
informed than he
who reads
them”(Thomas
Jefferson

8. • Dangers of the media:
Dependency!

9. Mind Control
• Steven Jacobson
„Mind Control in the United
States”
is a deliberate process created by
communications technicians, by which you
receive and respond to information and
instructions without being consciously
aware of the instructions

10. Principles of mind control
• Distraction:
the attention of the conscious mind on one or more of
the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell and taste)
in order to program the subconscious mind
Repetition of the information “imbeds it in your
subconscious mind so that your acceptance of its
truth (accuracy) becomes a conditioned response.
You accept this information as true without thinking
whenever it is presented to you again
• Tools for it are the TV, radio, (3D) movies
• James Vicary marketing researcher’s experiment (
„Hungry? Eat Popcorn” and „Drink Coca-Cola”).

11. • Neil Postman pointed out when he said that
television changes the form of information and
turns everything into entertainment
• Jacobson extended this idea and stated that
information control can be found in the areas of
education as well.
• The same principles apply here: to program
students to accept information that is not true

12. • Education of the young is used to condition them
to what comes later, thus eliminating the
difference between propaganda and teaching.
The interrelation of propaganda and education
can be seen for both aim to distract attention by
which the mind is conditioned with vast amounts
of information posing as ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge’
dispensed for ulterior motives.
• Repetition: that is the real „brainwash” for the
information gets into our subconscious without
noticing it and turns into a belief without even
questioning its truth.

13. Psychological uniformity
• America has always been facing the problem of
cultural variety for the numerous settlers across
the globe.
• Solution: psychological standardization
• + the dominance in the American market was
carried abroad by the major companies and
has cultural, social and political consequences
• +”colonizing the subconscious”/”cultural
invasion”

14. The Lords of the media
• Why is that every music and movie is so
similar? Because they are in one hand. Only
through concentration in a few hands of a large
number of media can there be an orchestration
and continuity to propaganda and the
application of scientific methods to influence
the public

15. The 5 biggest companies
• AOL Time Warner :
Time, Life, 64 magazin,
Warner Bros, 40 zenekiadó,
HBO, Cartoon Network, CNN,
Sean Paul, Madonna
• Viacom:
CBS, Nickelodeon,
Paramount Pictures, 1800 mozi,..
• Walt Disney:
ABC, Disney Channel,History Channel,
Touchstone Pictures, Selena Gomez,..

16. So a limited number of sources have fewer content but when
it comes from more sources the message is more effective so
it does not matter which tv-channel you see or newspaper
you read
• Vivendi Universal:
Universal Studios, internet/mobil companies,
Lady Gaga, The Black Eyed Peas, Rihanna,..
• Sony:
Columbia Pictures,
Beyonce, Shakira, Christina Aguilera

17. • Who controls these companies? Jacobson stated
that the companies are in the hands of the global
elite and the aim is that “the new dynasties of
political control through international financial
alliances. The goal was to create a world-wide
system of financial control in order to dominate the
economy of the world and the political system of
each country
• E.g.: relationship between governments and
companies is conducted by Council of Foreign
Relatons United Nations, IMF are also Council
projects. Members are former CIA agents and
CEO-s of companies (Nike, Coca-Cola, CBS, Visa,
stb..).

18. What you never hear in the
media• „The news and the truth are not the same things."
Walter Lippmann
• Noam Chomsky „Media Control” (1997):
The role of propaganda in democracy
• What is democracy?
„specialized class” and
„bewildered herd”
according to
Walter Lipmann

19. • the public has the means to participate in some
meaningful way in the management of their
own affairs and the means of information are
open and free
• it must be barred from managing of their own
affairs and the means of information must be
kept narrowly and rigidly controlled

20. • The role of propaganda in democracy
• it has the aim to bring about agreement on the
part of the public for things that they did not
want
• at the top is the “specialized class” (a class of
“responsible men”) who control society, it is
composed of a small elite, an intellectual
community who can understand the common
interests, what all of us care about, and these
things elude the general public. The mass of
the public are just too stupid to be able to
understand things

21. • The main task would be to tame the heard through
the manufacture of consent (media, education,
popular culture) and have to provide them some
tolerable sense of reality. E.g. Woodrow Wilson’s
war against Germany
• + hysterical Red Scare
• so the solution is distraction of the masses like in
PR
• The problem: people began to wake up!

22. • Mohawk Valley method:
Mobilizing community opinion
The main thing is to shout empty slogans that nobody
is going to be against and everybody is going to be
for (in reality, nobody even knows what they mean).
Mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid,
empty concepts like Americanism”
the population ought just to be sitting in front of the
TV and having drilled into their heads the message,
which says, the only value in life is to have more
commodities or live like that rich middle class family
you are watching and to have nice values like
harmony and Americanism

23. • And if we ran out of distraction tools then we
invent a „parade of enemies” like Hussein, Bin
Laden., „internal aggression”
• Problem: we ran out of enemies 
And then America
invented terrorism