Venezuela case as an emphatic example of why the mainstream media propaganda in the West was so successful in previous decades
by system
failure
When you
have the monopoly of information you can literally transform people's
minds. You can make them believe whatever you want. You can even
reverse reality toward the narrative you have built to promote the
desirable agenda for your bosses.
In 1957, BBC
conducted a very interesting experiment. The spaghetti-tree
hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on
April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama,
purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting
spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". At the time
spaghetti was relatively little known in the UK, so that many Britons
were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water; a number of
viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own
spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the
biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled".
This
'innocent' farce showed dramatically the unimaginable power of TV and
the mainstream media to shape massively the minds of millions.
Earlier, Freud's young nephew, Edward Bernays had set
the foundations of modern propaganda.
During the
post-WWII era, inside the Cold War, the mainstream media in the West
had built a strong propaganda veil from which Western societies would
be impossible to escape. Entire generations have grown with the
perception of 'evil Communism' as a threat to the Western values and
way of life. Dirty wars conducted mainly by the US as the emerged big
power in the global scene, based on lies and deception manufactured
by the mainstream media, in order to secure the consent of the
majority, even after the collapse of Soviet Communism.
Yet, less
than two decades ago, the beginning of the rapid expansion of
Internet brought eventually the first serious cracks on the Western
propaganda monopoly.
Still, there
is a lot of hoax and propaganda on the Internet too, but there is
also alternative information as counter-propaganda, which is not
filtered by any certain hierarchy, as in the currently obsolete
function of the mainstream media.
The recent
case of Venezuela is very interesting because it shows that a
significant part of the alternative media actually aligned
behind the mainstream media narratives to unquestionably paint Maduro
as a 'dictator' and his government as an 'authoritarian regime'.
However, they have literally ignored the atrocities conducted by a
part of the supporters of the opposition and the fact that the US
empire has obvious reasons to oust Maduro, in order to re-open the
road to the US big oil cartel towards Venezuela's rich oil resources.
Non-Western
big networks assisted in the counter-propaganda, for their own
reasons of course, as being part of the rival bloc emerging to
challenge the US global hegemony. But you have to understand that
these networks don't need to produce their own narratives. Because
the Western propaganda and the real intentions behind it are so
obvious today that someone can expose them very easily by just giving
the real picture behind the common Western narratives.
Now, imagine
if we were back in the 'stone-age' of the Western mainstream media
propaganda monopoly without the counter-propaganda global network.
Venezuela would be depicted in the minds of the Western audience as
the most evil regime in the planet, while one of the most brutal
regimes for real, that of Saudi Arabia, would had been literally
vanished from the radar of that media, for obvious reasons.
So, briefly,
Internet, counter-propaganda networks, WikiLeaks, Whistleblowers, are
some key factors due to which Western propaganda rapidly collapses.
As we are currently inside that process, we don't know exactly the
rate and degree of the collapse, but we can guess that the Western
media have already lost much of their credibility.
A quick look
in the comments by people in various Internet discussions could give
us a first picture. For example, we picked a random comment below the
'Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino' YouTube video above. The commenter
writes: "More truthful than the BBC is now..."
But there
are also specific surveys showing that there is a collapse in
people's trust in the media. As Gallup reported
in 2016, “Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media "to
report the news fully, accurately and fairly" has dropped to its
lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a
great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight
percentage points from last year. Gallup began asking this question
in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the
entire trend, Americans' trust and confidence hit its highest point
in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of
investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.
After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into
the early years of the new century, Americans' trust in the media has
fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority
level since 2007.”
It seems
that the Western mainstream media has lost so much credibility that
even if they start telling the truth, it would be very hard to
re-gain the trust of the Western audiences. But instead of trying to
do so, they are choosing the same, now ineffective, tactics in their
anxiety to keep securing the consent of the masses. But this,
ultimately leads to one thing: the faster demolition of the last
remnants of their credibility.
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