The media

Quoting Wosret

I also think that the news media has to retain some semblance of accuracy, and reliability, or they'll lose all faith.

[...]

I also question the notion that "unbiased objective" reporting is possible, or even desirable.

I think that there is a sort of scale. Say, from Fox News to BBC News. I also think that there is a responsibility to do what it says on the tin, or at least earnestly try. If your slogan is "Fair and Balanced", but you're far from it, and don't even seem to be trying, then something's not right.

I was also sent a link to the drafted chapter I think you're referring to, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. [I]The Establishment[/I] by Owen Jones has a chapter called "Mediaocracy" which might be of relevance. It's been a while since I read it, and I've forgotten most of it. Maybe I'll refresh my memory.

I didn't read it all, just enough to be bored with it, the first couple of pages, lol.

Having to assert that you're being fair or balanced is rather just rhetorical. It will seem fair and balanced to those that hold similar political, religious, and moral sentiments to the presenter though, and won't to those that don't. Being generally smarter, or maybe just more cynical, a left wing presenter is much more likely to say the same thing ironically. They tell you how they're biased, and such, but this is meant as an ironic statement, declaring more self-awareness, and objectivity by implication. Saying that they're biased is suggesting themselves to be more fair and less biased than someone that would claim that they're fair and unbiased for being so self-aware. It is also a rhetorical move, in order to inspire confidence.

I, being a cynical leftist am much more prone to ironically asserting my credibility as well -- and further recognizing this upgrades my credibility yet a step further!

Point being is that some people are going to consider the Fox stuff perfectly fair and balanced, and be more open to certain kinds of rhetorical appeals, and I'm going to consider like minded presenters far more fair and balanced, and be much more conducive to their bullshit -- and when we look at each other's favored sources, we're going to think the complete opposite, and be far more immune to their more shallow opinion-swaying maneuvers.

A few steps down the rabbit hole, but hopefully still sensible.

There are three parts to "Media". Which part are you talking about?

1. The first part are the businesses of publishing and broadcasting (including digital platforms). The business sell entertainment, music, and information in various formats. One hopes that the entertainment divisions are not running the news content divisions -- but it's hard to tell, sometimes, that they are not.

2. The second part are the advertisers who buy time and space from media companies to promote their products and services. They have no formal connection to media businesses, but they share a great deal of... "harmonic convergence" shall we say?

3. The third (sometimes last and/or least, depending) are media professionals. These are the people who majored in journalism in college, learned how to write, illustrate, produce, edit, interview, etc. They are the content producers. They are not necessarily employed by your favorite newspaper, television, radio station, or web site, but somebody employs them to produce THE NEWS -- the content.

We can carp and bitch about all three, but really, our bitching and carping should be differentiated.

As a commie pinko faggot, I disapprove of the raison d'être, motives, and methods of the media businesses and advertisers. The people I find a lot of fault with are the journalists--not because they work for money-grubbing capitalists, but because they can be so obtuse, at times.

All the great journalists of the past who produced the gold standards of their field worked for money grubbing capitalists who were at least as philistine as contemporary capitalists are. Sometimes the companies are the same. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) used to be called "tiffany network". The reference was to the distinguished high quality products of the Tiffany jewelry and furnishings business. They may not be up to Tiffany standards today, but it is the same company.

Good question, my lack of nuance shows my lack of much knowledge or insight into the subject, but that never stopped me from thinking I'm the most right about something before!

The book was about the news media, it seems to me. I know that I conflated the issue some in mentioning studies about entertainment media sources, but I thought them still relevant, or evidence of my opinion that people's values are not too easily swayed by such influences.

So, the news media, and the idea in the book was about how they're basically all owned by the same people, and manipulate and control what people know and believe about world events, politics, and the like. I more or less think it's basically all entertainment. Whether it's accurate, true, complete bullshit, or whatever doesn't ultimately matter as long as it's captivating, and people are willing to watch (read it/listen to) it and take it seriously. So that it really depends on your faith in the viewer to decide the quality of the news, in my view.

Quoting Wosret

I suggested studies that showed that people's values are not significantly altered by media exposure.

Last year, the advertising industry had revenues of 180 billion dollars. I don't believe that companies would be making these huge outlays if they could not see a relationship between consumer behavior and advertising. It works on me -- highly intelligent, anti-consumerist commie pinko faggot -- why wouldn't it work on everybody else?

I suspect the evidence is the usual 'middling' sort of stuff -- it's hard to nail down exactly what caused someone to have or alter a particular opinion. There is some evidence (so I have read, but not just recently) that individuals who watch the most local news on television (like, Eyewitness News at Six and Ten) tend to believe that the world is much more dangerous than it is. Why? Because of the tendency for news editors to go with action stories -- if it bleeds, it leads. People who watch a lot of local TV news thus develop a skewed view of their world. Journalists could do better.

But then, there is the intersection of the business and the journalist: "Joe," the producer says, "We're dying out there. Ratings show people are bored to death of your sociology reports on the 6 pm segment. You'd better come up with better material fast, or you will be dead meat yourself."

The News can't be too boring to sit through--even if you're telling the absolute truth.

Chicago has seen something like...600+ shootings this year, of which 135 were fatal--and this isn't the worst year so far. A 60 year old woman living on the 80th Floor of the Hancock Tower in Chicago who watches the local news every night might well conclude that she should never leave the building, or at least go no more than a block or two away.

Of course: people make sense of their experiences, and their experiences are more real than news stories or advertising. But... what guides our interpretation of experience? Well, other experiences, of course. Experiences like seeing news stories; experiences like seeing advertisements; experiences like seeing political debates.

Steve Jobs said that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. When it comes to plenty of products, I think that it has a lot to do with brand recognition, and advertisers themselves are shooting in the dark. When some product comes out with a successful ad, which really drives sales, they don't know why that happened. Did it make people happy, did it make them sad, was it funny, gripping, was it the music, or setting? There is tons of guess work involved. This is all I mean by the necessity of appeal. They have to figure out how to appeal to people's values, and dispositions. They can't just tell you to do things, believe things, and like things. I'm sure they wish they could. This is what generates advertising trends. Someone does something successful, and then everyone tries to copy it based on their perception about what it was precisely that made it successful. Attractive people tend to be a pretty big stable. So, it's, I think, a combination of product recognition, and presentation. People can't buy things if they don't know that they exist. So the first step is just getting it out there, so that people know about it, and the second is doing it in a way that appeals to them, and makes them pay attention to it, and want it.

I'm not convinced that only since the advent of local news have people thought that the world is more scary and dangerous than it is, and others are more frightening and dangerous than they are. Other people than the ones we know have always been weird demonic sub-humans that don't share our higher values, sophistication, or intellect. People want to see train wrecks, and not train building. That's why the former will be all over the news, and the latter will get a small blurb.

We are definitely all parrots of things we've read, and watched, but that isn't so much in my view that we've changed our values, as much as we think they formed our sentiments in a better, more persuasive way than we could, and they're authoritative. People's opinions definitely change, but no so much their values We can all be lied to, and believe things that aren't true, but appeals to strongly held values and opinions are a little different. It takes some world shattering sky-opening up revelations to change those.

Quoting Wosret

Whether it's accurate, true, complete bullshit, or whatever doesn't ultimately matter as long as it's captivating, and people are willing to watch it and take it seriously. So that it really depends on your faith in the viewer to decide the quality of the news, in my view.

You, obviously, have no faith in the viewer who is only interesting in watching captivating content, whether it is totally non-sensical farce or not.

Now, I am a cynical believer in H. L. Mencken's view that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the average American's intelligence." He thought we were mostly a nation of rather stupid rubes. (He covered the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925. That's the famous "Monkey Trial" -- should evolution be taught in schools case.) But... if we really believe that people are hopelessly duped into believing whatever crap they see, then we have nothing to discuss here. All is lost for 80% of the people.

But I don't think that. People do want to watch entertainment -- so do I. My entertainment is a lot more highbrow than the dreck that is on in the early evening, (much of the time, unless I'm slumming) but we want the same thing: Pleasant escape. I think most people, at least, can tell the difference between bullshit and sensible content. But maybe my perceptions have been very skewed by too much highbrow entertainment.

Everybody has to perform reality tests, every day, all the time. You're walking your white self down the street at 1:00 in the afternoon. A black guy is approaching you. Is he a threat to you or can you safely pass him by without getting shot or stabbed? If you live in Chicago (about a third of the population is black) you'll probably make a quick scan and decide he's not doing anything you need to be worried about. That's going to be right about 999 times out of a thousand. (I'm assuming you are not wearing very expensive clothing while walking down the street on the South Side of Chicago at midnight. If you are, then you maybe aren't testing reality very well.)

Reply to Bitter Crank

Most of the time when I am talking about others, I'm just talking about myself, and projecting it. I'm just really really honest. Not entirely though, I'm squeamish and have no interest in watching real life violence and death, or even if it's too realistic in fiction. I do though, know that it captivates, even me in the right formats, and media.

I don't really underestimate the average viewer, that's why I said that news can't be too full of shit, or it will lose people's faith -- a war of the world radio broadcast will never work like that again, because it changed everyone. Just like the first propaganda campaigns changed everyone. I think that it has to appeal, and lots of people disagree about lots of things, but it has to be representative of what a significant portion of viewers think and feel, or no one will watch it, and certainly won't believe it just because it's on tv. So I do most assuredly think that the news has to maintain some semblance of accuracy, and reliability, or they'll lose our faith. This is my major objection to the notion that large conspiring rich people can just manipulate us all through the news media into believing and feeling whatever they want us to (which seemed to be the thesis of the book).

Funny thing about that... I'm white trash, so when I lived in cities it was always the worst parts of town. I lived in a street in Halifax were people smoked crack on the sidewalk, and were knifed all the time. I spent a lot of time at friends houses in the projects too, which were pretty rough areas. I was never too worried though, people don't actually do random violence unless you're really weak looking in my experience. There is plenty of violence, sure, but it's always over some dispute. I used to get drunk in the bars down by the water front and then go walking the streets in the middle of the night trying to buy drugs of sketchy looking people. I'd walk around the projects in the middle of the night too. Once I was going to meet a friend of mine, though this was completely during the day, and I saw someone in the distance that I thought was him, so I started flipping him off for a good couple of minutes, before I got close enough to notice that it was actually a huge black guy, and not the huge white guy I thought it was... so I crossed the street, and pretending like nothing happened, but when he got close to me he approached me and I was kind of worried, but then he just asked me if I had a dollar, so I gave me two.

And I moved to a better part of town, I found the white college students in groups of ten were a lot mouthy drunks than I experienced in the shitty parts of town, though I never wore expensive cloths, I'll admit.

Another thing that super awkward, is when you scare people walking around at night. I walk pretty fast, so I usually overtake people, and sometimes lone people in the middle of the night would get noticeably uncomfortable and worried about you coming up behind them, which always made things super awkward... like what do I do? Slow down? Can't do that, it would probably make things worse... usually I just gave them a wide birth if they seemed worried.

Reply to Wosret So, what you said in your two posts above indicates that you are a fairly good reality tester. You had learned that you were on reasonably safe ground in the bad parts of town -- probably because your clothes, behavior, general appearance identified you as "belonging" and "not a risk" to everybody else. I've had some of those experiences too -- where, when you look like you belong, you do, more or less, and people don't bother you.

The trouble with the conspiracy theories about the media is that the ruling cliques that supposedly are in charge of the conspiracies would have to be extremely and unbelievably knowledgeable to have enough insight to know how to manipulate 300 million people in the right way (for their advantage). They would have to know how millions and millions of people would react to a given story, and know the upsides and downsides of all their media manipulations. They would have to be unnaturally imaginative, insightful, ingenious, clever, inventive -- all the time, for decades on end.

99.999% of the population, including the wealthiest people, just aren't that clever. wise, smart, ingenious, insightful, inventive, or anything else. Besides, we know there are simpler ways of controlling people. Like the police, like bread and circuses, like debt, and so on. Privileged people, and this certainly applies to wealthy parasites, do not seem to have their heads screwed on very well.

Having said all that, the way stories are shaped into narratives does affect the way people think. It isn't so much the content of the story as the form of the narrative. For instance, the stories about shootings I hear follow the "crazy behavior" narrative. We hear on the news, for example (and this is an actual example) that some guys drove by a corner in the black ghetto and opened fire at a group of children. "Crazy. Bizarre. Irrational. Stupid. But that's what happens down there. They are insane."

Well, it is kind of insane, but there was probably more to the actual story. We only heard the narrative about crazy black youths shooting children as they drove by. Another situation here in Mpls: Someone had gotten into a fight at a party and had gotten hurt. The police were called; an ambulance and police arrived. While the EMRs were dealing with the injury and loading the injured into the ambulance, some guy from the party was doing something (never made clear) to interfere with the medics, and was shot. Dead.

Big uproar. Black Lives Matter has been shutting down freeways, the airport, subways, bridges, etc.

Nobody knows (or isn't saying) what this guy actually was doing. All we hear on the news is the narrative of the irrational, "Crazy black guy was interfering with ambulance and was shot." It may very well be the case that the guy was crazy. Don't know. But nobody in the media has been able, or willing, to go out there and question people and try to develop a rational narrative of what happened.

All news stories are not like this. A lot of the stories follow a narrative form where "real problems lead to unfortunate results". Like, a building owner cut corners on fire safety and the building burnt down. Or a house was set on fire in order to collect insurance. Or the gas company had been negligent and a gas leak had caused the house to explode. Cause and effect. They don't just say, "Terrible, a building exploded on Third Street this evening." or "A car came out of nowhere and crashed into the store." No, buildings explode for a reason, and cars don't just appear out of nowhere and crash into store windows. There are causes, and these are usually detailed. It's a difference in narrative.

Much different than the ghetto drive by shooting. Oh hum, another crazy drug dealer/gang banger/... whatever flipping out. Next!

While I'm talking about crazy narratives, a lot of what I hear about the Middle East follows a pretty shallow narrative. "Moslems in X country are blowing up women and children in markets, parks, etc." It's all religious bigotry. They're all crazy." (They don't say they are all crazy -- one infers that.) Take Assad in Syria. They never tell us why people are against Assad. Why is Assad doing what he is doing? These people are not (possibly) all crazy. Presumably there is more at stake than just petty religious bigotry.

It is difficult for people to make sense of what they hear when news stories about real events are structured in such a way that the active agents involved don't seem to have apparent and rational reasons for behaving the way they do.

You got me with the middle east thing. I forgot how selective I am about that. As I matter of course I always tell people that I don't believe pretty much anything I hear about the middle east, and consider it mostly war propaganda. I work with a guy from Iraq, got to see him today, in fact. His name is Osama, but he of course has gone by Sam now for years. Moved her in the early nineties I think, but has an accent. I also once worked with a tiny Iranian guy, that spent time in Russia before Canada. When I was working with him, he went to visit his Parents in Iran, and on the flight back there were an layover in NYC, and they deported his wife for not having Canadian citizenship, and split up his twins. I knew a Muslim girl in Halifax too, though she married a muslim and was a white Canadian. I got her to show me her hair, lol.

Maybe there are a lot of evil terrorists over there, and lots of terrible shit, but we don't seem to be doing anything about it, and the way the news, and mainstream media portrays things, even making them our new go to movie villains, when the Nazis or Russians aren't available, neither of which you can really tell by looking at them that they aren't from here. All I know is that it makes people racist, and I don't like it. I have no interest in hearing anything about the middle east, or middle easterners unless it's about them being normal fucking people. That's all I've seen in my life.

Quoting Bitter Crank

While I'm talking about crazy narratives, a lot of what I hear about the Middle East follows a pretty shallow narrative. "Moslems in X country are blowing up women and children in markets, parks, etc." It's all religious bigotry. They're all crazy." (They don't say they are all crazy -- one infers that.) Take Assad in Syria. They never tell us why people are against Assad. Why is Assad doing what he is doing? These people are not (possibly) all crazy. Presumably there is more at stake than just petty religious bigotry.

It is difficult for people to make sense of what they hear when news stories about real events are structured in such a way that the active agents involved don't seem to have apparent and rational reasons for behaving the way they do.

One of the very common alternative narratives has the same effect, structures real events in the same way, and is equally shallow. The idea is that the acts of ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Palestinian terrorists are the rage of the oppressed, that the West (and its allies) has made them crazy. It ignores the logic of Islamism and how it fits historically in the specific circumstances of the Middle East.

Reply to jamalrob

Well maybe you consider it shallow because you don't understand the specific circumstances in the Middle East. If you actually read the scholarship on the relation between Western intervention and the Islamic Terrorist groups (respected scholars like William Polk, Robert Pape, and Scott Attran for instance, along with many others) you wouldn't think that the so-called alternative narratives are shallow at all but backed by significant empirical evidence and analysis, and their analysis is not ideological but scientific in essence.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/u-s-war-on-terror-has-increased-terrorism.html

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/17/falling-into-the-isis-trap/

Quoting Saphsin

like at all

Speak English boy.

Otherwise, those links don't contradict what I said, and I've been very impressed with Scott Atran's analysis in particular.

Reply to jamalrob

Hmm? Maybe I misunderstood the intentions of your words then (if so, I apologize for coming to rash assumptions) or the way your words were constructed were misleading (before you clarify yourself, this is what appears to me).

Since you argued that the alternative narratives to the mainstream media were equally shallow seemed to me to suggest that much of terrorism has its roots in Islam more or as deeply than as an outraged reaction to Western invasion & occupation. I think this is empirically false. The willingness of peasants in remote villages who formerly refused to join terrorist groups to partake in terrorism only after Drone Attacks lead to casualties in their families and communities (over 90% of the casualties Drone Attacks consist of killing innocent civilians that are not even the designated targets) is one illustration of such a case. For these people I think it's true. It has little to nothing to do with Islam but Western Oppression that has made them participate in Terrorist Organizations. Even if Islam tends to fit in somehow, how is such a narrative "equally shallow"

Again I might have misunderstood your intentions or you may be wrong, so I'll just wait for your explanation.

If you read that research more carefully you'll see that what it shows is that recent Western intervention has opened up space for the spread of terrorist activities that have a special character owing to the historical development of Islamic culture and ideology. Throwing gay people off the top of buildings, destroying pre-Islamic cultural heritage, trying to wipe out non-conformist sects, or executing boys for listening to pop music, are not ordinary, general, knee-jerk reactions to destructive foreign inerference. Indeed they are not primarily attacks on the West at all, except insofar as it is seen to represent modernity and pluralism.

And your story about peasants rising up against the West by joining terrorists is too simplistic to be a useful general characterization of what has been happening.

Quoting Saphsin

Since you argued that the alternative narratives to the mainstream media were equally shallow

I did not argue that. Although I would argue that many of the competing narratives are equally shallow, I specifically described the particular narrative I was criticizing.

Oh I wouldn't go far to completely deny that, I thought you were talking mostly about the incentives that initially drove the proliferation of terrorist organizations and attacks on Western cities, to which the mainstream media highly distorts the truth of. The alternative narrative to the truth behind that is not equally shallow in my opinion.

I think it was because I didn't make sure what you meant by "acts" of the terrorist organizations.

Quoting Saphsin

the incentives that initially drove the proliferation of terrorist organizations and attacks on Western cities

Do you mean the incentives of the people who did it? Again, if you look at the history of al Qaeda and ISIS you'll see that the incentive was not centrally to resist Western military interference.

I said the incentives that drove the proliferation of the terrorist organizations and surge in terrorist attacks. If we're talking the incentives of the organizations, Jason Burke convincingly goes through the research that Islamic militancy in organizations like Al-Qaeda is not centrally controlled, except that one organized attack by Osama Bin Laden. It was never more than a collaboration of twenty or thirty militants that were indirectly associated to each other with many of the terrorist acts attributed to them.

Yes, I've been readng Burke's excellent New Threat from Islamic Militancy, and I don't have any serious issues with what he says.

What I'm trying to say is probably not that far from what you believe (and what you're trying to say to me) I'm probably just having a hard time communicating what I mean by incentives and reactions as a result of Western Imperialism and who they belong to. I'm not saying that the emotions and rationales that occupy their minds are in the narrative that you criticize.

Even if I don't think Islamic terrorism can be seen as anti-Imperialist resistance, the West is crucial to the Islamist narrative. In that narrative, Islam has been humiliated (militarily) and overtaken (in terms of success, wealth and power) by a morally degraded culture.

Funny how the second most used language to look up gay porn is Arabic. Making something taboo, the stronger the powers that be attempt to enforce an unreasonable restraint the more interesting it will become. The reason areas like Japan don't have as progressive LGBT rights is arguably because it was never opposed as strongly as it was in the west. There are 1.3 billion Muslims, to paint this as "Islamic" is obviously highly simplistic, and promotes the racism and terrorism many middle easterners experience everyday, just trying to live there lives, and not even suicide bomb anyone at all.

Reply to Saphsin There are, granted, more thoughtful appraisals of world events than what one sees on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Fox, PBS, New York Times, et al. However, I don't really think government-university publications count as "part of the media". Not being "part of the media" doesn't place them on Mount Olympus; the tanks of policy wonks have their own virtues and vices apart from "the media" which is another good topic.

Quoting jamalrob

If you read that research more carefully you'll see that what it shows is that recent Western intervention has opened up space for the spread of terrorist activities that have a special character owing to the historical development of Islamic culture and ideology.

Quoting jamalrob

One of the very common alternative narratives has the same effect, structures real events in the same way, and is equally shallow. The idea is that the acts of ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Palestinian terrorists are the rage of the oppressed, that the West (and its allies) has made them crazy. It ignores the logic of Islamism and how it fits historically in the specific circumstances of the Middle East.

It seems to me that the average peasant in the Middle East would be hard pressed to decide whether Western imperialism and colonialism (with its attendant flaws) had oppressed them less, about the same, or more than their home-grown, traditional, usual, and customary oppressive tyrants and corrupt, rotten, deadbeat regimes.

Some ME governments are better than others, of course, but a good many of them are a malignant burden on their populations. Obviously this is not unique to the Middle East. Corrupt, incompetent, and oppressive regimes exist on all continents. And clearly, ISIS, al Qaeda, et al are not liberation movements inspired by ideas of freedom, liberty, equality, democracy, enlightened values, or any of "that crap that the West keeps trying to force down their throats" (as one narrative would have it).

Speaking of terrible news no one seems to be talking about, you know that a transgender person is murdered in the world, one every about 27 hours? Almost fifty in the first month of 2016 in brazil alone -- and these are probably low numbers. Complete systematic misgendering of trans people in reported crimes prevents clear accurate numbers. The numbers have been seemingly skyrocketing in the last few years, but it is more likely that misgendering has just been less prevalent by police and in the media over the last couple of years.

Quoting Wosret

Funny how the second most used language to look up gay porn is Arabic. Making something taboo, the stronger the powers that be attempt to enforce an unreasonable restraint the more interesting it will become. The reason areas like Japan don't have as progressive LGBT rights is arguably because it was never opposed as strongly as it was in the west. There are 1.3 billion Muslims, to paint this as "Islamic" is obviously highly simplistic, and promotes the racism and terrorism many middle easterners experience everyday, just trying to live there lives, and not even suicide bomb anyone at all.

As far as I can make sense of this it looks like you might be responding to my use of the term "Islamic terrorism". On that assumption...

If I talk about Christian fundamentalists, will you tell me that there are billions of Christians who are not fundamentalists? If I talk about Hindu terrorists, i.e., those who terrorize Muslims and Sikhs in the name of Hinduism and precisely because they are not Hindus, will you tell me that it's got nothing to do with Hinduism? Or more generally, if I talk about, say, a Ugandan dictator, will you tell me that most Ugandans believe in democracy and that I'm encouraging anti-Ugandan prejudice?

I think you've forgotten how language works. ISIS and al Qaeda are religious fundamentalist organizations (or loose affiliations if you prefer) committed to the use of terror to enforce a strict version of Islam, thus it's Islamic terrorism. There's nothing Islamophobic about saying so. The charge of Islamophobia is often effectively now an attempt to stifle debate. Some of the those who are currently being most vocally accused of Islamophobia are Muslims and ex-Muslims who are speaking up against Islamic conservatism and extremism, like Raheel Raza and Maajid Nawaz.

If one thinks that the terrorists are going by a questionable interpretation of Islam--as today's Popes think about much of what the Spanish Inquisition did--then it is of no help in promoting a peaceful interpretation to deny that the extremist interpretation is an interpretation at all, i.e., to deny it has anything to do with Islam.

On the other hand I do agree that the American media generalizes far too much, and encourages a fear and suspicion of Muslims in general, and can be very propagandist in nature.

Yes, I would tell you that. Some people are assholes, and often about the very same issues, from entirely different foundations. One wishes to simplify the issue, and find the source of superstition and tribalism in a scapegoat, and preferably a scapegoat that they feel no affiliation with, and don't mind slaughtering. It is naive, and distancing. Religion isn't the cause of prejudice, tribalism, violence, and hatred. Pretty sure that religions actually don't come from extra human sources, people made that shit up out of their own pre-existing prejudices, and in contextual response to things and people they deemed disgusting, enemies, or too different.

Carl Sagan makes a good case for why religion has little of anything to do with superstition and tribalism in Demon Haunted World.

You must have misunderstood, because what you are saying is absurd. Using an adjective to qualify a noun in no way implies that other nouns correctly qualified by that adjective are also associated with that noun. To say "Swedish knife" does not imply that all Swedish things are knives.

This is the problem with political correctness. People are not thought to be able to understand or use language properly, or the risks are thought to be too great in letting them do it freely, so all ambiguity is pre-emptively removed.

The problem you're concerned about--and I would have thought this was obvious--is the idea that all or most Muslims are terrorists or are sympathetic to terrorism. Focussing on a usefully descriptive term like "Islamic terrorism" is silly.

But let me ask: if it were shown that sympathy for ISIS and Islamic ultra-conservativism were significantly higher among Muslims than among other people, would you want to suppress this fact for fear it would cause bigotry?

Reply to jamalrob Absolutely. In the present context of the Western media, that would do nothing but stir-up anti Muslim sentiment. The public gains nothing by having that fact trumpeted loudly at them. Present narratives of Islamic extermism would be unchanged. It would do exactly nothing with respect to dealing with radicalisation or sympathy of some Muslims have towards Islamic extremism.

In the Western media, we are dealing with this issue terribly. We simultaneous split the ideology of terrorism away from Islam (i.e. extremists, who are utterly disconnected from the acceptable group of moderates), while presenting lslamic extremism as the only ideology Islam has, creating a monster which doesn't take the connection of Islam to terrorism seriously (all contained in the extremist box, envisioned to have no relation Islam as a cultural force) AND creates the Muslim boogeyman where anyone related to Islam is thought of as an existential threat.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness I'd like to say I'm shocked, but of course I'm not at all.

In hiding facts from people you consider less enlightened than you, you only make things worse. Open discussion is the only thing that can help here. Not only that, but in trying to sweep facts that you find embarrassing under the carpet you disarm the Muslim critics of conservative and extremist Islam. They are the only ones who can lead the internal attack on the likes of ISIS, and against the spread of its ideology. You are suggesting that we pretend that the Islamist ideology is not spreading. That's not a great start for fighting against it.

Reply to jamalrob Shouting out all over the place that a small but greater percentage of Muslims is not an open discussion. It's fear mongering with no benefit to the task of preventing Islamic extremism. We know about the spread of Islamic extremism. News of radicalised locals reaches us everyday. The cultrual connection to Islam is known. Information that X amount Muslims, a small group which is bigger than other groups, makes no difference to our understanding of the issue.

It does have relevance to particular in-depth policy discussions to dealing with radicalisation, or to nuanced analysis of the relationship of Islamic extremism to Muslim communities, but as a headline which supposely captures the nature of a great threat, it is utterly useless. Merely a detail some people will latch onto to "prove" how dangerous Muslims are.

And no, it does not shut down criticism of conservative Islam. Refraining from plastering headlines which characterise Muslims as necessarily dangerous terrorists doesn't stop anyone taking about problems within Islamic culture.

Indeed, I would say it is actually helpful in that regard, as the discussion doesn't become mired in an ineffective blame game. Instead of sitting on releaving but shallow accusations of terribleness, the discussion can move on to people talking about living with under Islam and problems it may have with its values.

As an editor I similarly might make the decision not to run with such a headline, for the reasons you state. But that's not what I meant by suppression. It's about context. What concerns me is the misguided liberal wish to deny the facts.

Quoting jamalrob

But let me ask: if it were shown that sympathy for ISIS and Islamic ultra-conservativism were significantly higher among Muslims than among other people, would you want to suppress this fact for fear it would cause bigotry?

I would not suppress the fact (if it were shown to be a fact).

Hindu India has a number of appalling social practices owing to it's religious-cultural history. Of course it is not the case that every Indian Hindu is responsible for the caste system, for instance, nor the sufferings of the untouchable castes. The Brahmin castes deserve the benefits they receive as little as the untouchable castes deserve their neglect. The caste system is a fact, like it or not.

Within the Muslim world, there are groups of people whose religion, social experiences, suffering, history, grievances, and so forth lend themselves to extremism. It is sometimes surprising that there are not more Islamic extremists than there are, considering how fucked over they are, by oppressors both near and far away.

Christian Fundamentalism didn't just spring into existence from a manure pile either. There were events such as Darwin's publications on evolution, new biblical criticism, secularism, modernity, and so on that greatly disturbed a variety of conservative, less-educated, socially insecure Christians. The fundamentalist Christian ideology spread, over the course of decades--eventually a century. It happened that a lot of the conservative, less-educated, and socially insecure Christians were southerners--deep south and southern California. It is factually wrong to equate southernness with fundamentalism. Many southerners (in THE south and in southern California) are not at all conservative.

Change may be the only constant, but quite often it is very destabilizing. Groups experienced unwanted and forced change quite often rebound into rigid, doctrinaire positions in order to resist change and preserve their core belief systems.

The fact that there are processes that produce fundamentalist ideology and perhaps violent opposition doesn't make it OK -- it just makes it comprehendible. ISIS has a history. History doesn't make bad things good, but it can be instructive.

Quoting Wosret

No one can force you to watch, agree with, or listen to anything. I suggested studies that showed that people's values are not significantly altered by media exposure. For instance, people are not made violent by watching violent movies, or playing violent video games. Studies I saw suggested that exposure to political propaganda increased people's knowledge of issues, and view points on the subject, but didn't really sway their opinions of them.

I think when it comes to looking at the broad cultural effects of media, it is a bit wrong-headed to rest our conclusions on being able to demonstrate a direct and (mostly) immediate causal link between the consumption of some media and an individual's actions. It doesn't really work like that, although, it does happen at times. Arthur Bremer was moved to shoot George Wallace after watching "A Clockwork Orange", he published his memoir which provided the inspiration for "Taxi Driver", John Hinckley in turn became obsessed with the film and Jodie Foster, wishing to impress her by attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Although even in these cases, I believe there is something more complex and pernicious going on that gets at the broad ideologies and values of a cultural environment, of which these particular films and individual actions are just symptoms.

There's a difference between saying:

(1) The media directly causes individual acts of 'X'

and

(2) As a culture, we treat acts of X as normal or natural because of a host of different reasons, one of which is X's frequent reproduction in the media in normalizing ways.

The type of evidence you're looking for is more relevant in attempting to prove claims of the sort (1), while we don't necessarily need a wealth of such evidence to prove (2). If we hold (2), we can say that 'the media causes violence' only insofar as it proliferates ideologies and value systems that reproduce inherently violent social relations; on a whole, rape is more likely to happen in a culture that considers it normal and even hides the violence inherent in the act.

Quoting Bitter Crank

The trouble with the conspiracy theories about the media is that the ruling cliques that supposedly are in charge of the conspiracies would have to be extremely and unbelievably knowledgeable to have enough insight to know how to manipulate 300 million people in the right way (for their advantage). They would have to know how millions and millions of people would react to a given story, and know the upsides and downsides of all their media manipulations. They would have to be unnaturally imaginative, insightful, ingenious, clever, inventive -- all the time, for decades on end.

Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, penned the following in his book Propaganda:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...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."

Bernays was one of the principle architects of modern advertising, and a conscious switch from war-era models of nation-state propaganda and mass cultural manipulation through totalizing political grand narratives to the commercial 'exploitation' and 'channelling' of crowd libidinal energies by a corporate elite into a consumer culture. He used Freudian psychoanalytic theories to develop advertising for major corporations after working for the Wilson administration, and later working with United Fruit Company and the CIA in overthrowing the democratically elected government in Guatemala in the '54 coup, leading to a series of US-backed right-wing dictatorships that committed forms of genocide.

Many corporations and advertising firms still use psychoanalytic techniques developed by Bernays, in efforts to subliminally influence and seduce consumers, obviously now more modulated by empirical and statistical methodologies, using test-groups and so on.

'Conspiracy' has a tinge of the secret cabal, of a completely organized (and competent) malicious intent at the highest levels. There is a 'conspiracy' in the sense that advertising and what's prioritized in the media, and how narratives are constructed, are done intentionally by "cabals" (boards of directors, corporate PR teams, etc.). But the word 'conspiracy' also betrays the observation that power and its ideologies are reproduced in more autonomous ways, by actors and structures all the way down the pyramid. It may be the case that 'intentions' at the top are 'good', but institutions of information and ideological diffusion are still hierarchical structures, the narratives are controlled (even if in self-selecting mechanisms) by a certain strata who exist in a peculiar social milieu and moral universe. It is in this sense that the 'ruling ideology of a culture is the ideology of the ruling class'. It's not the sexy mythic illuminati with robes committing blood sacrifices to Moloch in secret subterranean Medieval chambers, but corporate suits in skyscrapers answering to their investors. Whether they like cosplay and exclusive clubs with rituals is of little consequence to the truth of the matter.

Reply to Shevek

Crazy's watch movies too, identify with movie crazies, and emulate them. If it wasn't for watching one movie, and emulating their actions, they've have just emulated something else, a book, someone else they saw in the media, or get creative.

I don't find it likely that someone could be a non-violent stable person, watch a violent movie and then decide that those are super cool things to do, and then go and do them.

Sure, normalizing certain activities so that everyone's doing it makes their wickedness less visible, especially when regardless of the visceral quality of the acts, they're praised or shamed in order to gradually over time condition people.

I just don't think that I know of any culture that actually upheld cruelty, malicious violence, or unfairness up as ideals. I think that we are all capable of enjoying the misery and harm of people that deserve it, and it requires misinformation, propaganda, and the overshadowing of the visceral force of actions by ideological commitments, and rationalizations.

We're all capable of being mislead, and deceived. Engaging in tribalism, dehumanization, and wickedness -- or just being terribly wrong in ways that leads to evil.

There are of course institutions, organizations, and cultural influences which are wicked, and wrong, but they must not be distanced from ourselves, and seen as something those assholes do, as this is the beginning of their dehumanization by us. Saying that "of course they aren't all like that, but I suspect a statistical significant amount to be complicit" is to legitimize prejudice. It is by no means an unwarranted fear, completely innocent people are the victims of general prejudice every single day, and we must be just as weary of ourselves as we are others.

Quoting Wosret

I just don't think that I know of any culture that actually upheld cruelty, malicious violence, or unfairness up as ideals. I think that we are all capable of enjoying the misery and harm of people that deserve it, and it requires misinformation, propaganda, and the overshadowing of the visceral force of actions by ideological commitments, and rationalizations.

Our culture does it, and pretty much every culture in some form or another and to some degree of severity or another. The point is that in doing so, we're conditioned to not see such ideals as 'cruel, malicious, and unfair.'

Very few people with power (or otherwise) fully believe they're playing the part of the villain. Even Hitler thought he was doing good.

The problem with a mythical elite pulling all of the stings, and having such a wide influence on the unwashed masses is that these supposed elite didn't grow up on mars, they're just as much products of their cultures and environments, and just as easily manipulated by tall tales, and conditioning. We all condition each other everyday in subtle, and unsubtle ways, and no one is immune. I think that the socially powerful more so than the unwashed massive underestimate their own vulnerability, and overestimate their influence. They of course have the power and the means to scream the loudist, and be the most visible, and ever force compliance or complicity with economic, class, and violent incentives, but that isn't the same as genuine persuasion.

They'll never have the influence of good author, artist, or musician -- whom are surely corruptible, and even with the best of interests are writing from their own value sets, and dispositions, though in a far less conscious way than such corporate cabals.

The greatest downside I think to being too powerful, too attractive, or too famous is that you can say goodbye to ever hearing the truth again. The more people want you to like them, and the more risky they think that it would be to upset you, the less likely they are to ever tell you what they really think about anything. There is nothing more alienating, and shielding from reality than power.

Quoting Wosret

The problem with a mythical elite pulling all of the stings, and having such a wide influence on the unwashed masses is that these supposed elite didn't grow up on mars, they're just as much products of their cultures and environments, and just as easily manipulated by tall tales, and conditioning. We all condition each other everyday in subtle, and unsubtle ways, and no one is immune.

This is a central part of my point and I don't think it contradicts my view of ideology and control. The elite grow up and exist in an idiosyncratic social milieu and moral universe. They select and reproduce these value systems when operating the institutions of cultural diffusion.

In many ways "genuine persuasion" in the sense that you mean it isn't required, even though it happens. With the 'attention economy', the mass of endless proliferation of images and narratives is more compromised by the market and dominated by large-scale corporate structures and state institutions. By dominating the standard for what's acceptable, setting the frame (setting up the audience to view something in a particular way), and ordering things in terms of value and attention, they can set the limits of ideological possibility, order our conception of the world on a cultural scale, and delegitimize and isolate counter-narratives. Many people think of themselves as sophisticated consumers of culture and are incredulous to the mass media, but nobody can escape the influence of one's environment (especially, in my view, if they are philosophically illiterate, but that's another discussion).

It's a difference between Edward Smith the III inheriting his father's media conglomerate, and Joe the construction worker having control over..what, his Facebook posts? One can make raids on the consciousness of a culture, the other can get a few 'likes'.

Quoting Wosret

They'll never have the influence of good author, artist, or musician -- whom are surely corruptible, and even with the best of interests are writing from their own value sets, and dispositions, though in a far less conscious way than such corporate cabals.

The artworld itself is not immune to recuperation and compromise but is fully enveloped in this process, not just through commodification and mechanical reproduction, but also as a world largely dominated by a privileged leisure class. Our world is a much different world from, say, the modernists, where many of them were publishing in widely-distributed political and literary magazines (Joyce's Ulysses was first serially published in an anarchist magazine, for example). The author today now must navigate between large corporate publishing companies who produce easily digestible mass-marketed popular novels with editors that assume a large degree of control over content for 'profitability', and potentially not being read and persisting in marginal irrelevance by self-publishing or going with smaller publishers who do not have the organizational and institutional resources for wide distribution to compete on any scale compared to that of the big conglomerates.

But aren't you saying that they are in fact immune, and progenitors of the value systems and narratives in which they isolate and proliferate, rather than being just as much subjects and products of them as everyone else? They definitely have more power to influence than most individuals, but this doesn't mean that they are less susceptible to influence themselves. It's also the inverse of how things actually work, the proliferation of values and norms are bottom up. People adopt and embody them on the individual level and infect, and recruit others with them memes, which catch on because they appeal. At best all elite cabals can do is attempt to appeal to people in a similar fashion, concealing best that they can the direction towards their result that they aim for. The most influential powerful means of manipulation at their disposal is the same thing that is at everyone's disposal: lies.

Yes, corporate influence is indeed ubiquitous in art, but it is renowned for being overwhelming deleterious, and degrading of it. Lessening the quality, lessening the appeal.

Reply to Wosret Think of it like a giant echo chamber, with the elite having control of the most sophisticated and powerful instruments and sound equipment, and endless funds to hire paid parrots to repeat what they're saying, producing 99% of the noise. They can pick up what other people are saying, but when they incorporate it and rephrase it in a game of telephone, what they say will (rationally) reflect their own interests.

Yes, everyone picks up signs from their environment and echo it, this is vital for ideology and power to function in the first place.

They do listen to what's coming 'from the bottom', only to the degree that it's necessary for mass-marketing. Yet the 'people at the bottom' are also socialized in the same echo chamber, responding to dominant cultural threads.

Occasionally you get art that derives from a counter-culture (some group of people making their own echo chamber), or just frustrated individuals shouting into the void in rebellion. But their lack of resources mean that they are unable to translate these narratives into material infrastructure that can continue to reproduce them. The result is that much of it is 'recuperated' by the elite, or whatever dominant institutions are there to suck it up, chew it, and spit it back out for its own purposes (Che t-shirts, the pacification of MLK featuring him in Apple and McDonalds commercials, etc.). Sometimes contrarian artists are lucky to have their work picked up and praised by institutions, but only when those institutions believe it will be profitable.

Originally subversive signs undergo a process of pacification, institutions stamp them with new mythologies and auras, changing their meaning in the popular imagination to confirm or reinforce whatever processes they need them to.

Lol, no... I find your borderline deification of the rich absurd, and precisely the opposite of the truth. Wealth and power is what insulates one from reality, not the other way around.

Reply to Wosret I don't know what you mean by "deification of the risk".

And I would agree that wealth and power insulates one from reality, or at least a major aspect of it.

EDIT after your EDIT (or maybe I misread it): I don't deify the rich, but their interests and value systems are organized into super-human structures (that is, mass institutions, governments, corporations). Super-human in the sense that they extend their power and influence in degrees immeasurably more powerful than single individuals (especially compared to members of largely powerless and marginalized groups). This isn't a function of some inborn supernatural qualities of the rich, it's due to their structural location in a nexus of power.

With my ideas, without the level of wealth and material control of elites, I can maybe convince a few people. I can even maybe make a viral post that gets seen by hundreds of thousands before it quickly disappears like a drop in a torrential stream of information and images. But I can't make multi-billion dollar deals with governments and have my ideas instantiated in mass infrastructure that organizes society.

To me, the truth comes from these places of the margins.

Quoting Shevek

Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, penned the following in his book Propaganda:

I am generally familiar with Edward Bernays; I grant some truth to his theories about the relationship between 'mass messages" (advertising) and mass behavior. There are, oh, maybe a dozen different methods governments, corporations, religious leaders, parents, peers, teachers, and so on have at their disposal to manipulate behavior. There is modeling, threat, suggestion, leading questions and pat answers, limiting or distortion of of factual information, repetition, group dynamics, stimulation of existing desires, experience, personal fantasy, and so on. We are exposed to these various influences, having sometimes very contradictory aims, simultaneously.

Let's say a conventional ground war is in the making. A Quaker youth taught, modeled, and encouraged by his parents and religious peer group, intends to become a conscientious objector. The Selective Service Administration, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard will be airing notices about registration and all kinds of information encouraging youth to sign up with a particular armed service. (All depictions will involve similar nouns -- valor, bravery, courage, loyalty, service, and so on.)

The SSA and Armed Services messages will fall on fertile ground in many cases. Why does the Quaker youth resist these messages and register as a CO -- something that will involve few if any personal benefits, considerable derision from the public, and risk? Because there are competing contradictory messages, and he sides with those most deeply inculcated. The general's son will immediately sign up to join the marines. Why? Because there are both individual and public messages which happen to be complimentary.

Why doesn't everyone buy the same car? The same computer? The same shirt? The same dog food? Because there are competing messages, and personal preference is capable of discarding most of the messages as 'irrelevant'.

Much advertising runs parallel with desires that are independent of advertising. Ego enhancement, for instance, doesn't require advertising to exist. Someone intent on ego enhancement, however, will be susceptible to whatever enhancement that strikes his or her fancy -- and 'fancy' will vary across the board.

People fantasize about how to enhance their ego (their sense of importance, their engagement with the world, etc) and when they fantasize, they prime the pump for advertising. Someone intent on enhancement may begin looking at ads for $35,000 cars rather than $10,000 cars (new rather than used). Ads for big Macs (from Apple) may have more appeal than a generic off-the-shelf assembled computer that costs $450, rather than $2000.

Both the used car and the cheap computer will fulfill the individual's practical needs, but not provide many ego-strokes. The big Mac will be just much nicer. Especially if ambitious parents planted the seeds for high quality goods.

Reply to Bitter Crank I'm picking up what you're putting down.

I'd add though that, while 'ego-enhancement' (and wanting to gain the most social capital or whatever), doesn't need the market to exist (and it existed in pre-modern, pre-capitalist times), such social drives change character and are conditioned by new social relations (basically, reordering the terms on which something counts as ego-enhancing or social capital).

As contemporary subjects of the postmodern capitalist consumer society, we're much more likely to see our commodities, our property, as extensions of not only our ego but of our self-constructed identities. Erik Eriksson of pre-modern agricultural Scandinavia is much less likely to have a crisis of identity (he knew 'his place', he's a farmer, like generations in his family before him, he prays to Odin and the gods, and so on). He gains social capital so long as he best fulfils his part in a larger whole.

With the introduction of the pressure of social mobility as a perquisite for social capital, we see an explosion of an invention called madness (and, I mean literally, mental and psychological disintegration). Identity is destabilized, narrowed from a relatedness to a community to a function of individual taste/belief, self-reliance and capacity to outcompete. It does not arise from the local community but a matter of patchworking and pastiche. We go out into the buffet of signs to incorporate them, to color our feathers and paint ourselves in a certain way. A function of 'the society of the spectacle' is that we're constantly concerned with engineering and patching our projected selves in the eye of the other.

Everyone's an expert on social media.

Of course Erik Eriksson probably wanted more cows than the other, and maybe even a bigger house and to be more respected in his community than others. But hoarding and lording (going outside of 'his place') would invite derision and social isolation.

The market seems to tailor to almost every possible desire and identification. But sometimes I think of how identity creation happens (at least in the US). Which usually happens in high school, and as we know, it is much more of a matter of falling into ready-made forms, premarketed identities with their own lines of consumption and associated commodities (the jocks, the nerds, the goths, the punks, the..well you get the idea). Identity-types that undoubtedly have a life in the popular media which instantiate their status as coherent forms, complete with sets of subculture mores and behaviors, attitudes, and codes of dress and consumption. The basic form persists into adulthood from this education in identity creation, basically the terms of being 'cultured' in America.

Quoting Shevek

?Bitter Crank I'm picking up what you're putting down.

I don't really disagree with what you have posted so far. My main reservation is that I don't believe advertisers can jerk us around like puppets. I am not dismissing advertisers, PR, opinion makers, et al as irrelevant. They are not.

Quoting Shevek

we're much more likely to see our commodities, our property, as extensions of not only our ego but of our self-constructed identities.

God yes, and too bad, too. Too bad because the commodities come with a lot of pre-loaded meanings (developed by advertising, PR, etc.) so that someone is authoring our self-images more than we know. Google and Apple have some code in my self identity (even though I'm 70) and so do a slew of others. My self identity was formed long before Google and Apple were conceived, but hey -- never too late to update one's self-image. It might be VW or Toyota, Trek or Bianchi, polyester or linen, Buddhist or Baptist, Payless or Allen Edmonds, Kmart or Bloomingdales, blue chips or junk bonds. Whatever.

This isn't all bad, of course. Bloomingdales is a fine store and I am sure there are nice Baptists. Lots of guys like Ford pickups (hauls them to the office).