21. Media

21. Media

profile: The influence of Modern Media

state: Broadsheet vs. Tabloid Journalism

• in the old days, we only had a few threats to fear when it came to media manipulation: the government propagandist and the hustling publicist

• they were serious threats, but vigilance worked as a clear and simple defense

• they were the exceptions rather than the rule—they exploited the fact that the media was trusted and reliable

• today, with our blog and web driven media cycle, nothing can escape exaggeration, distortion, fabrication and simplification

I know this because I am a media manipulator. My job was to use the media to make people do or think things they otherwise would not. People like me are there, behind the curtain, pulling the puppet strings. But that is about to get harder: I'm spilling my secrets to you and turned my talents from exploiting media vulnerabilities to exposing them—for your benefit.

• when the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals scuttle election bids or knock billions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about 'how the story unfolded'—media manipulation is the status quo

• it becomes, as Daniel Boorstin, author The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, once put it, a “thicket” ...which stands between us and the facts of life

• today the media—driven by blogs—is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more

• these incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online—and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning

• everyone is in on the game, from bloggers to non-profits to marketers to the New York Times itself

• the lure of gaming you for clicks is too appealing for anyone to resist

• when everyone is running the same racket, the line between the real and the fake becomes indistinguishable

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• almost 30 years ago Noam Chomsky a famous intellectual wrote about manipulation strategies used by the media

• a lot of time has passed since them and media changed tremendously but some of those strategies are still the same

• Here are 10

Creating a diversion

You can’t notice the important stuff among an overwhelmingly vast sea of smaller, less significant stories. The Internet only exacerbates this problem: we constantly switch our attention to funny pictures and jokes. When you are scrolling through the Instagram you more will more likely stop to see a picture of a nice landscape than a picture of a war.