Posted on 02/14/2013 9:30:04 PM PST by blam
Who Tells Us What To Think? Does The Mainstream Media = The Matrix?
By Michael Snyder
February 14th, 2013
Do you believe that you really think for yourself? Did you come up with your attitudes, opinions and beliefs on your own, or are they continually being shaped and molded by someone else? Could it be possible that you and everyone around you is actually hooked into a real life version of "the matrix" that is constantly defining your reality for you? Sadly, the truth is that almost all of us have willingly hooked ourselves into a colossal media system that literally tells us what to think.
In the United States today, the average American watches 153 hours of television a month. We also spend huge amounts of time watching movies, surfing the Internet, reading books and magazines, playing video games and listening to music. Many Americans are so addicted to being "connected" that they will actually become physically uncomfortable if they are at home and there is total silence. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in a previous article, somewhere around 90 percent of the "information" that we are allowing to be endlessly pumped into our heads is owned by just 6 gigantic media corporations.
So could it be possible that the thousands of hours of "news and entertainment" that you are allowing these gigantic corporations to fill your head with each year is having an effect on you? Does the mainstream media have more control over you than you ever dreamed possible? If you want to continue on in blissful ignorance, stop reading now, but if you want to take "the red pill", keep on reading because the further down the rabbit hole you go, the stranger that things get.
When you go to work or to school in the morning, what is everyone talking about?
Usually, people are talking about something that they saw on television or that they heard about in the news.
In our society today, the limited interactions that we do have with other people are usually defined by our mutual connection to the media.
The mainstream media literally defines for us what is important and what is not. If the mainstream media does not talk about something, then it simply does not matter.
I don't know how many times over the years I have heard someone tell me some version of the following statement: "If that was true we would have heard about it on the news."
Has anyone ever said something similar to you?
The funny thing is that most of the time I won't even mention something important that I may have heard in one of my articles unless I can back it up with a "mainstream source", and I don't even trust the mainstream media.
I know that the mainstream media often distorts the facts and often tells outright lies, but I regularly link to them because that gives my articles more "credibility" in the eyes of those that are still fully hooked into the matrix.
In a world where the big media corporations have so much power, is there any hope for us?
As long as the big corporations that control the media are dominating and controlling the conversation, is there any chance that there will ever be a mass awakening among the American people?
Our young people seem particularly addicted to being constantly "connected" to the media matrix that is being constructed all around us. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article by Daniel Taylor...
According to a 2010 LA Times report, young people spend on average 53 hours a week watching TV, playing video games, and sitting at the computer.
Facebook users spend about 15 hours a month on the social networking site.
People are walking – and driving – blindly while texting, sometimes walking into fountains and even falling off cliffs.
Wow - our young people spend more than 200 hours a month connected to the mainstream media?
But we only have about 480 waking hours a month to work with.
If they are being exposed to that amount of continuous propaganda, what hope do our young people have?
In the old days, kids actually played with each other in the streets and adults actually left their homes to interact with one another.
But these days we spend nearly all of our time sitting passively in our homes staring at flickering screens.
Is that a sign of a healthy society?
We were created to be social creatures. We were designed to love and to be loved. But these days people "love" their favorite sports teams or they "love" their favorite television shows but we have an increasingly difficult time having real relationships with each other.
Meanwhile, the global elite rely on the mainstream media to keep us distracted and to control the boundaries of public discourse. Most of the time, the mainstream media focuses on the latest celebrity scandal or the latest dogfights between the Republicans and the Democrats and they systematically ignore many of the more important things that are taking place out there.
Let me just give you one example of how the mainstream media shapes the news. For decades, there was almost a complete and total media blackout on the Bilderberg Group meetings that happen every year. Top newspaper executives from the United States would actually attend these meetings, but then their newspapers would not say a single word about them.
If anyone out there did bring up "the Bilderberg Group", they were dismissed as wacky "conspiracy theorists" and were told that it simply does not exist.
Of course now we all know that it does exist, although the mainstream media in the U.S. still mostly ignores it. In fact, this has been by design. The following is what David Rockefeller is alleged to have said during a Bilderberg Group meeting back in 1991...
We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. … It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.
Even today, many prominent "journalists" in the U.S. mock people when they bring up the Bilderberg Group. For example, Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC says that he is "way too lazy" to look into the Bilderberg Group and that he "doesn't know about it, so it must not exist".
For much more on the connection between the mainstream media and the global elite, please see this article: "Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Is Pulling The Strings".
Instead of telling us what is really going on in the world, the mainstream media keeps us endlessly distracted. The following are just a few of the headlines that can be found on the front pages of major mainstream news sites right now...
-College student creates condom delivery service
-Michael Douglas is feeling 'good'
-Golf tournament delayed by kangaroos
-Rock 'n' roll hamburger experience
-Lady Gaga cancels tour, set for surgery
Wow - those are some examples of some really hard-hitting journalism right there.
So why do most Americans continue to fall for this nonsense?
Sadly, part of the reason is because we have become so "dumbed down" as a society.
Recently, the Guardian conducted an evaluation of the reading level of every State of the Union address in U.S. history. What they found is that Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses have had the second lowest reading level average in history, and that in general the reading levels of the speeches have been significantly declining over time.
But it is not just our presidents that appear to be getting stupider. The truth is that our public education system is a total joke at this point. Many of our high school students are as dumb as a rock, and if you can believe it, 23 percent of all Americans cannot even read beyond a fourth-grade level.
Of course the elite are quite pleased with this, because a stupid public is a public that is easier to dominate.
When a large segment of the population can barely read and is accustomed to letting others do their thinking for them, it becomes easier to lie.
For example, on Thursday Paul Krugman of the New York Times made the following statement...
"Growing dependence on government is mostly a myth"
Of course most of you that are reading this know that is a flat-out lie. The charts in this article clearly show that the number of Americans on food stamps is at an all-time high and the percentage of the population that is on food stamps is at an all-time high.
Back in 1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a household that got money from the federal government each month, Now, an all-time high 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives money from the government each month.
For many more stats and charts that demonstrate the stunning growth of government dependence, please see this article and this article.
Sadly, the truth doesn't seem to matter too much to the media these days. The mainstream media tends to be incredibly arrogant, and most of the time they don't even pretend to be "objective" or "neutral" anymore.
Fortunately, more Americans than ever are becoming dissatisfied with the mainstream media and are starting to seek out alternative sources of information. According to a recent Gallup poll, the level of trust that the American public has in the mainstream media is now at an all-time low.
So perhaps there is hope after all.
What do you think?
MSM hell. Pick a random thread on a conservative website and you’ll read how Palin is a problem, the GOP will not cave in on X after they already caved on X, that we must moderate on immigration and abortion and any number of other ‘realities’.
We have our own “Matrix”. No MSM needed.
Van Jones
There is a somewhat related phenomenon recognized by anthropologists, linguists and computer programmers, that vocabulary translates directly into the “dynamic range” of thought. Cultures for example that have no word for something simply never discuss it.
There is an exception to every rule. In the arab language, there is no word for homosexual or homosexuality even though it is so rampant, it is virtually a way of life, as is pedophilia.
Yet you will often hear of homosexuals being publicly stoned or hung for being OUTWARDLY homosexual.
We have words for it:
Propaganda
Indoctrination
I was a child living on Cape Cod, when JFK was shot, and when Teddy went-a-swimming without Mary Jo Kapeckni. The papers drummed a single assassin, but I knew that you don’t go opposite of the direction of being shot. Teddy’s swimming lasted only that first day, and was gone into oblivion the next. I knew that something was wrong with that. I had my first taste of misinformation. I know what I saw that one night, while living in base housing, even with this “Rocky and Bullwinkle” 6 by 6 general with all the I’ve Been There ribbons, tried his best to tell me, that I saw nothing.
I’ve been watching a long time. I know that this so-called media has not been reporting anything that really means anything, ever since the Fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, as so happily reported by Peter Jennings. I grew up knowing that Communism is a bad thing. A lot of folks these days couldn’t tell, or care.
It is time to wake up. Those of us who are awake have a lot to do.
I do agree that technology has changed society, and enslaved it, to an extent.
I am thankful that someone hasn’t had the bright idea to remove the “off” switch, yet!
It’s not the News Reports, it’s Who Reports the News.
Anyone that thinks they are not brain washed... (( IS ))..
The propaganda is so deep its almost like bewitchment..
Obama speaking anything is very much like a comedy routine..
“Breathtaking” the scope and obvious untruth in the details..
wasn’t there a book about this like 45 yrs ago...”The Media is the Message” or something similar?....never read it, it was my sisters book, but I recall it being about how the media is making the news, not the news being in the news...IIRC...
Marshall McCluhan
white racism.....like the reports of all the rapes that white men did to black women......now, if white racist felt that blacks were so inferior, why would any white guy go after a black woman?....it just seems like that would be extremely rare....but yet, we were told it so it must be correct, right?...
and that whites were responsible for slavery....very few southerners had slaves...most were poor farmers themselves....slavery was the action of very, very few whites...
even today we're told we're racist...that our society is racist against the blacks, even though a whole bunch of the richest people in America are black, that blacks get unprecedented amounts of free govt stuff, and are well over represented in govt jobs...
I remember always being told how the Jews are treated so badly in Russia, Germany etc...then we learn that the Bolshevicks were in large part Jewish, that even today most of the major banks in Russia are Jewish....
and then there's global warming...and there's the wide spread saintification of teachers, like they're nearly godlike in their purity and they work for so little...NOT!
our lives are filled with truisms that have been pummelled into us over the decades...
I've always questioned everything and I still do..if the media and the majority accept something as true, then I question it...
In “The Matrix”, accepting the red pill means facing reality and living in the real world, and accepting the blue pill means living in a fantasy world which has nothing to do with reality.
When Obama was trying to sell Obamacare, he used a red pill/blue pill analogy — and he urged people to take the blue pill.
Not kidding.
The internet is a gift from God, yes there is evil, yet it is all there for one to wade through, both good and evil,light and darkness, it’s your path to choose, a revolution has occurred and the elites will never recover, God has cast off our chains, He is in control and the elites will be gnashing their teeth!
Don’t know ANY kids that read the news on the internet. Go to facebook and they just talk about junk. I did the same when I was their age and regret every minute of it. Wonder if it was public school indoctrination, not learning to question and research.
For many years I’ve said the MSM is the conscience of America.
They determine what the majority gets happy/upset about. Rarely does public opinion run counter to MSM propaganda.
And most of the MSM distortion comes by omission.
It’s become blatant, esp. TV news. With a huge illiterate population now the networks are the primary news source of the Country. Not many read newsprint, or anything for that matter.
The media will complain that they have just so many minutes and have to pick what stories to cover or how much to edit.
Of course the editor’s political leanings determine what is left out of the news shows.
People that watch TV are in a literal trance. The brain goes into an alpha state and the information presented goes directly into the unconscious mind without the filter of critical thinking. They don't call it TV programming for nothing.
The Corporate Media is not a money making enterprise. That is a side benefit. The Corporate Media is a gigantic worldwide social control device 95% of which is owned and operated by 6 Corporations.
Look to who owns and controls these Corporations to find out who is programming the Matrix.
I know that when I go for a long time without watching TV, the very first time I watch a program, I can almost hear the switch snapping in my brain turning it off.
Must mean that eskimos talked about snow a lot!
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