We all have “frames” of reference that describe various life scenarios. When we walk into a restaurant we have a “frame” that pretty much explains how we expect the restaurant experience to go. We each carry around a lot of subconscious “frames” about how we think the world works. Effective propaganda messaging links to the frames we expect the target to already have. This is not all that surprising but what is old is now new again 🙂
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman after the November 2016 election: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” Today, all three major stock indices reached record levels.
Healthy able-bodied activists climate shaming asthmatics for their use of life saving medication is not a successful propaganda strategy. From a survey of social media, this story has produced a high level of outrage.
Social media has become a vector for epidemics of mass hysteria.
Woman makes a dumb remark about a teen girl’s t-shirt. This in turn is blown up on social media and quickly devolves into a community of outrage in the real world and takes on a life of its own.
Zohnerism is the “the use of a true fact to lead a scientifically and mathematically ignorant public to a false conclusion”.
This is a good example of why we must practice “factfulness” and verify what we are told daily by media and activist propaganda urging us to adopt someone else’s agenda.
The Guardian announces that it requires their staff to use pejorative propaganda terminology rather than the facts of atmospheric CO2 levels rising, sea level ice and temperature changes, ice mass changes and so on. Anyone who does not 100% adopt The Guardian’s perspective is to be labeled a “denier” (name calling, transference from “Holocaust denier”, get on the bandwagon). The word “climate” should be associated with “crisis”, “emergency” or “heating” (transference, fear). Shrill terminology designed to inflame and create emotional outrage is a turn off and causes readers to tune out from the issues.
This is how fake news service Newsweek reported on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize today. Seriously. They did not write a single headline report on the actual winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps this is because Thunberg is white and Prime Minister Ahmed is black and Newsweek is racist?
We live among the best of times in world history yet even positive economic news, as in this article, are all translated into negatives. Journalism focuses on negativity, causing anxiety and a culture of outrage where everyone is upset all the time. The linked article is an amazing example showing how the news was deliberately spun into negatives; each item listed is then rewritten in the positive, dramatically improving the emotions of the reader.
The media continues to drum beat a meme that wildfires are growing every year but the data shows otherwise. Always remember to practice “factfulness”. What we think we know, especially that which we learn from the media and social media, is often incorrect.