The modern media is the bane of Human cultural evolution

Mass media tabloids portray the world in an unrealistic way. Studies have shown that education, and reading respectable news instead of trash, results in a more sensible view of the world in all matters, including views on the economy and crime rates. Research reveals that excessive television dulls the mind, causes stupidity, causes failture at school and perpetuates ridiculous and simplistic stereotypes. Educating people that TV is fiction, and that violence is wrong, can reduce some of these effects and break the link between TV violence and criminal aggression.

1. Trash Culture & Mass Media Products
2. The Pessimism Syndrome
3. Enslavement - TV Causes Stupidity
4. Violent Films and Violent Actions
5. Politics
6. The Truth dies, The drama of modern journalism
7. Indoctrination, Indoctrination in its WORST FORM - unsuspected
8. Example two, GM food
9. How to stop this!
10. Example three, Mother Theresa
11. Example Four
12. Example Six, The Dark Ages, Religion, Jews and Satanism

Trash Culture & Mass Media Products

“There is a massive market for mass media products aimed at the low-attention-span trash culture types. Male-dominated trashy tabloids depict female nudes, fictional short stories of the most banal and stupid kind, advice columns designed to shock rather than educate, and news stories that are widely known to be entertaining rather than true. The Sun, The Star, The Daily Sport, for example, are three of most popular "news" papers, and almost entirely devoted to the decadent content just mentioned. Television has become the resident priest of Trash, nearly all programs cater for people with short-attention spans. Adverts are quick and shocking, programs are simplistic and moronic. Although more educated content exists it is unpopular. Thankfully the government takes a strong hand in monitoring domestic channels for content and worth, otherwise I suspect local TV would be almost entirely lost to stupidity & contentless entertainment. British soap operas are famously violent, angry, shocking, melancholic tragedies depicting casts of characters that are all stupid, short-sighted, emotionally challenged failures at relationships and all intellectual pursuits. The masses are taught every way to fail a relationship and shown none of the compassions or developed attitudes expected of responsible relations. Petty crime, short-tempers and stupidity on the TV soaps reflect perfectly the mentality of trash culture, the self-perpetuating cause-and-affect cycle of this coupling is hard to break without serious top-down change.”

"Trash Culture" by Vexen Crabtree 2004 Nov

In the principal book on the UK political scene, Bill Jones (editor) examines the mass media at length; reporting on the 'tabloids' and on the 'quality' press. The following are listed as the 'qualities': [Jones, 2004, p202]

• The Guardian
• The Times
• The Independent
• The Daily Telegraph.

The Growth of Trash Media

Between 1990 and 2002 newspaper sales decreased by 20%. The three worst-quality tabloids were the only papers in this period to increase their sales: The Daily Star, the Daily Express and The Sun [Jones 2004, p202]. The increase in sales of trash tabloids is indicative of a cycle: they sell more, because trash culture is growing, and, trash culture is growing because of the successful marketing of trash-targeted mass media. Marketing expert Winston Fletcher said in 1998 that what wins readers is "scandals, misfortunes and disasters" [Jones, p205]. This trend is also the third-biggest problem facing democracy in the West.

The Pessimism Syndrome

Poor quality press and news reports portray a biased and skewed vision of the world. Research shows that the contents of the news that people read does effect their opinions and attitudes. "Surveys also regularly show that over 70 per cent of viewers trust television news as fair and accurate, while only one-third trust newspapers" [Jones 2004, p202]. Although surverys of trust show that people do not trust much they find in newspapers, in reality, the contents of those papers effects their worldviews nonetheless. Despite intellectual doubt, the contents of trashy, poor-quality news is insiduous and subconsciously absorbed.

“In 1991 the [Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, DC] did an exhaustive analysis of network news and New York Times stories on the rapidly recovering U.S. economy. An astounding 96 percent of stories about the general economy were negative in tone; pessimism occupied 87 percent of the stories on real estate, 88 percent of the features on the auto industry, and a perfect 100 percent of stories on manufacturing. [Now] the intervening years have produced one of the longest economic expansions of the postwar era, [it] looks positively foolish.”

"Global Trends 2005" by Michael J Mazarr, p265

Mazarr describes the classical studies that have been made into the Pessimism Syndrome.

“What, then, is there to do? Quite a bit - if we recognize the danger posed by the pessimism syndrome and work towards solutions. The first element of the solution involves a demand for more objectivity on the part of the news media. It would be wrong, and simplistic, simply to ask network news broadcasters or weekly newsmagazines to report "happy news"; ignoring problems is no alternative to exacerbating them, and one of the media's most important roles is to uncover social ills. [...] More fundamentally, the real solution to the pessimism syndrome is education. Citizens of developed and developing nations alike need a context to understand information they receive, a basis of objective facts that help moderate the news”

"Global Trends 2005" by Michael J Mazarr, p272

Mazarr points out that education is the key to shattering the dark glass that the popular press portrays the world through. Another example from the prevalence of crime from the Home Office highlights another aspect of this. It shows us an undercurrent of the pessimism syndrome: That the trash tabloids are its principal acolytles.

“The Home Office says that [...] Crime in England and Wales actually peaked in 1995 and has now fallen by 44% in the last 10 years. 'Despite the number of crimes estimated by the British Crime Survey falling in recent years, comparatively high proportions of people still believe the crime rate to have risen. This is not true.' said Jon Simmons, head of Home Office research and statistics who put part of the problem down to media reporting. 'Readers of national tabloids were around twice as likely [39%] as those who read national broadsheets [19%] to think that the national crime rate has increase 'a lot' in the previous year', he said.”

The Guardian, 2006 Jul 20

Two major points:

1. The Pessimism Syndrome affects tabloids and popular opinion, resulting in outlandishly negative slants even on economies or crime trends that are doing well

2. Readers of national tabloids fall victim to this mis-reporting more than readers of broadsheet newspapers

We have seen two factors that help prevent this skewed representation of reality:

1. Education in general facilitates a more objective and realistic reading of the news

2. Avoiding the tabloids and trashy news services results in a more realistic outlook of events and trends

Enslavement - TV Causes Stupidity

The media is the biggest influence on most of us, greater than both peer pressure and parental controls. How many parents sit their children in front of the TV in their most formative years just to keep them from being a 'nuisance'? It thoroughly informs all of us with specific cultural mores that are stoic, commercialist, short-term, thrill-seeking, unintelligent and moronic.

“The chief problem of human beings is passivity [...]. If you watch television all evening, or read too long, you feel a 'freezing' of your mind; it congeals; your eyes become capable only of a blank, dull state.”

"The Occult" by Colin Wilson, p186

“Much academic research is now devoted to finding out how people read the popular press. One view, that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school, is that the popular media exist to dull people's minds and get them to accept the work and consumption patterns that are needed to sustain capitalism. Yet people are not as stupid as journalists believe, argue the Frankfurters, [despite intentions] readers take their own meanings and pleasures from the popular press.”

The Economist 2004 Dec 18th, p151-152

“They don't call it the idiot box for nothing. Three studies suggest that watching too much TV makes you stupid, at least as measured by school grades and test scores. In the longest-running study [by Bob Hancox's team at the university of Otago in New Zealand, ] children who watched the least TV between ages 5 and 11 were the most likely to graduate from university, while those who watched the most TV at ages 13-15 were most likely to drop out of school. [...] Two US studies [...] draw similar conclusions. [...] Persuading children to watch quality TV is easier said than done, says Barry Milne, who worked on the New Zealand study. "The type of TV kids actually watch is not good for them"”

New Scientist, 2005 Jul 09

The counterculturalist and fouder of the Church of Satan, Anton Lavey, explains how TV has replaced the modern dark ages Church:

“In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Today we have television dictating fashions, thoughts, techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of "sins" to keep people in line, we have fear of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right running shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant), and fear of imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. Borrowing the Christian sole salvation concept, television tells people that only through exposure to TV can the sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved.”

"The Devil's Notebook" by Anton LaVey, p84

Violent Films and Violent Actions

There is an on-going debate in the popular press about whether violent TV causes violent behaviour. This study is one of the classic areas of study in sociology, and findings have largely found that viewing TV violence does indeed cause aggressive behaviour.

“Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann (1980, 1985) found that violence viewing among 875 8-year-olds correlated with aggressiveness [even after checking for other causes]. Moreover, when they restudied these individuals as 19-year-olds, they discovered that viewing violence at age 8 modestly predicted aggressiveness at age 19. [...] Aggression followed viewing, not the reverse. They confirmed these findings in follow-up studies of 758 Chicago-area and 220 Finnish youngsters (Huesmann & others, 1984). [...] They found that at age 30, those men who as children had watched a great deal of violent television were more likely to have been convicted of a serious crime. [...]

The convergence of evidence is striking. 'The irrefutable conclusion', said a 1993 American Psychological Association youth violence commission, is 'that viewing violence increases violence.' [...] This [effect] is strongest when an attractive person commits justified, realistic violence that goes unpunished and that shows no pain or harm (Donnerstein, 1998).”

"Social Psychology" by David Myers, p412-5

Educating children that TV is inaccurate and fictional reduces the agression that children display as a result of violence programs₄. The psychologist Richard Gross confirms this in his overview of the types of studies involved:

“Field experiment [studies are those] in which children or teenagers are assigned to view violent or non-violent programs for a period of a few days or weeks. Measures of aggressive behaviour, fantasy, attitude, etc. are taken before, during and after the period of controlled viewing. [...] Almost without exception, they confirm the results of laboratory studies - in general, children who view violent TV are more aggressive than those who do not. [...]

The longitudinal panel study [can] tell us about cause and effect and which normally uses sound sampling methods. The aim is to discover relationships which exist over time between TV viewing and social attitudes and behaviour and so it is concerned with the cumulative influence of TV - [...] for example, in a 20-year follow-up of 400 children, heavy exposure to TV violence at age eight was associated with violent crime and spouse and child abuse at age 30, at all socioeconomic and intelligence levels (Huesmann and Eron, 1984). Sims and Gray (1993, cited in Newson, 1994), in a paper presented to the House of Lords Broadcasting Group, pointed to a vast world literature linking heavy exposure to media violence to subsequent aggressive behaviour. [...]"

[In contrast:] "According to Gunter and McAleer (1990), studies have shown that portrayals of kindness, generosity, being helpful and socially responsible can exert both short-term and longer term influences on similar behaviours among children.”

"Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour" by Richard Gross, p424-426

Politics

In the wake of the media frenzy against John Prescott, early 2006, David Aaronovitch wrote about the role of the media in precipitating crises where there should have been none, and rightly labels it "story inflation":

“The voters' problem is how well they are being served by the present self-perpuating media fire-storm. I'll give an example from the Clarke imbroglio. Several newspapers have featured the call for Mr Clarke to resign, from a woman who was raped by a man who had been released from prison after serving a previous sentence - but who had not been considered for deportation. The details of the case were shocking, but somehow the fact that Mr Clarke was not Home Secretary at the time either of man's release, nor of the subsequent rape, passed the papers by. Readers were left with the clear impression that all this had happened on Charlie's watch. It hadn't. [...]

He's doomed, say the media, if we go on about it. He will look too ridiculous to carry on. So let's go on about it. I thought it was wrong and hypocritical then and I think so now. [...] Prezza [Mr Prescott], whose adultery is no one's business, becomes by degrees Prezza the serial predator (the Daily Mail) and then Prezza the Unprofessional. It's the way David Mellor - a good minister if an occasionally unlovely man - was forced from office a decade ago.”

David Aaronovitch₆

The Truth Dies

The mass media that revels in the ignorant gullibility of the masses is responsible for disseminating many of the stereotypes that cloud our judgement. Have paedophiles became, in the last few years, solely comprised of child-killing violent immorals? Are they, now, trying to "convert" people into their own lifestyle? Or is this simply the recent Media-Hot-Topic, the next-best-thing of media coverage? Do all people who wear black really listen to Heavy Metal, and vica versa? Are all goths suicidal? Do all punks have mohawks?

It seems that British journalists consider the truth to be worthwhile only to the extent that people buy it. The more people who buy it, the more factual it becomes. The media is based on exaggeration, everyone knows that, yet still people believe it! Watching which papers people buy is as good as an IQ test.

The media effect every aspect of our lives, it shows us how to live, how to be a "good" person and how to rebel.

• TV soaps are the worst, making us all watch how we should act. Limiting our horizons to the plot writers opinion of normal Human action.

• The media shows teenagers the glitz of rave and drugs, shows football fans that the most dedicated fan will attack and hooligan-ize foreigners.

Indoctrination

TV films are only fiction, right? It's not the storyline that is the subtlety of fiction, but the rest. Here are some example of "false morals" and indoctrination: