The NEWS con - Corporate mass-media and the anxiety induced consumption

I am now almost 3 month deep into my voyage and have never turned on a TV set once and never missed it. Many of you will be appalled by how much disconnected from “reality” I must be by now and maybe also by how as an active person I can live with such an abdication from one of our unchallenged prerogatives: the one to stay “informed”.

I have news for you my friends. Corporate mass-media are playing an enormous scam on most of us, our perceptions and our minds. They fooled us into an undiscerning bunch of idiots when it comes to the “News” concept. If when it comes to other TV programs we are allowed some level of diversity in choice, some preferring sports over soap operas and some the documentary over the fiction series or feature film, the “NEWS”(!) don’t allow any deviation from the hypnotic obedience the “X” o’clock title animation and grave-alert accompanying jingle generates. Dr. Pavlov would be thrilled and flattered by the scale of this mass experiment. They fallaciously have us believe that we actually “need” to know what they want to tell us in order to better function in the world we live in, small and large scale alike.

Having worked in brand and corporate communication industry for many years I studied and became aware of some of the psychological effects of information and the varied reactions different communication processes trigger. And slowly over time the picture got clear by closer investigation of the subsequent truth known in the business about media not primarily providing useful information to it’s recipients but delivering audiences to advertisers.

We live in a world of polymorphic international corporations that own the companies producing the goods filling our stores and supermarket shelves along with the ones responsible for pulling the strings on the puppets we see on our TV screens. And you have the innocence to believe they are not using their mass-media strength, the mightiest lever this side of tyranny, in determining people’s actions and choices, into making us frantically buy whatever products they churn out? If yes, think again.

I am not talking here about all kinds of overt or more subtle advertising like the already well known (but not less effective) product placement technique that makes any pimpled, teenage Tom Cruise wannabe go buy a Triumph SpeedTriple, even if he doesn't know how to ride a push bike, after seeing Mission Impossible, or a middle-aged accountant dreaming about stories of courage, intrigue and seduction, "empower" his wrist with the latest Omega watch or even indebt himself to the bone only to be able to feel like Bond... James Bond, behind the wheel of a DB something Aston Martin. No, I am talking about the much more perverse technique of scaring us away from each other and into buying (more and more) "things". The more they show us in their news(!) programs an unfriendly and perilous world “out there”, populated with natural or human generated disasters, with murderers and rapists, with gruesome accidents and the like, the more they turn us into a bunch of scared dummies, locked alone behind our doors, desperately munching on their pre-cooked, frozen food and guzzling on their carbonated chemical beverages, replacing any true and fulfilling experience and/or human contact with staring at their mass produced “safe” entertaining programs that do nothing else in reality but enslave us even more.

Divide et impera. Divide and conquer it is what they accomplished when they scared us into pathological levels of distrust towards our peers that we now come to perceive more as potential aggressors than potential allies, and into the consequently solitude, by feeding us their catastrophic “news” happening in our own neighborhood or on the other side of the planet alike. When the whole world seems nothing but a continuous menace, what can one desire more than the sweet comfort he/she might draw from the security of a new three-door-wattercooling-icecubepopping-digitaldisplay new refrigerator, wall size flat LCD-TV set, cold and “refreshing” Coca-Cola and pre-cooked Maggi dish or even worse, the ubiquitous “healthy” burger, pizza or spicy chicken wings?

I urge anyone to take a moment and ask themselves how much of what they see on TV news programs really and truly make them if not a better person then at least a more prepared one to face everyday life. Specialized professionals as airplane pilots or stock exchange brokers rely on specialized services for weather prediction or market analysis, they don’t get their vital information from TV! Emergency services, law enforcement agencies and finally coroners have direct means of dealing with accidents, catastrophes or crimes and never wait for the news programs to point out such unfortunate occurrences. So who really and positively needs the tide of catastrophic shit flowing out of the TV screens from the so called news channels directly into our subconsciousness? Well, the ones who want (and need) us scared and alone, protecting ourselves from a supposedly frightening world with whatever stuff they have to sell us, they need it!

Congregating people are less an easy to manipulate bunch, they don’t replace human contact with merchandise, they debate opinions, question what they are presented with as being the “truth” and ultimately forge up a live conscience hence a strength which is not to the liking of the mass merchants, the slaves of the spread-sheet reports and the mongers of the profit margin pie-chart.

We need to repel the attack of push media, we need to go back to reading (be it the printed word or the internet) and make our own choices about what we want to know. We shouldn’t accept brain-washed or cynical editors push their more than questionable choice of events in our ears, eyes and ultimately brains and souls because there is no single true benefit for us in this. We should be more open to other people even when not personally knowing them, gather and talk more, challenge the status-quo of how mass media presents the world, and maybe we’ll come to a point when we’ll need less “stuff” to shelteringly come between us and a world we might stop seeing as a constant threat. And maybe foremost we need to take the time to travel more as there is no better way of severing the ties that keep us pinned to our prejudices, our mental inertia and ultimately to our artificially induced feeling of insecurity. Abandon the "club-med"s, the sanitized impersonal resorts and make the true experience of the world as it is lived by the natives of the places we visit, and we’ll exhilaratingly discover that there are many more yet undiscovered friends out there waiting for us, than we have ever imagined.