- Jul 15, 2003
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It’s a pivotal part of the story on Donald Trump’s camera-lit path to the White House. The media, of course, rarely if ever uttered the taboo term on air, even as demonstrators shouted it at cameras during women’s marches and scrawled it across protest signs they brandished outside the White House.
But here we are, two years in, tiptoeing around The Word That Cannot Be Said. Let’s just call it what it is: Propaganda.
The state-sponsored spread of deliberate misinformation is not a “half-truth,” “distortion of reality” or “the president’s loose relationship with the facts,” as many a mainstream news correspondent and pundit have said. It’s also not “a bold truth” or simply “The Truth” as many voices on the right have asserted.
The doctored “karate-chop” video of CNN’s Jim Acosta allegedly manhandling a White House intern at a press conference, posted by press secretary Sarah Sanders last week, was not a matter of differing perspectives, dueling truths or conflicting political beliefs. Nor were the White House transcripts of public meetings where Trump’s flubs were mysteriously omitted, altered presidential approval ratings posted by Don Jr. before the midterms or the cropped photo that Sean Spicer insisted was proof of the biggest inaugural crowd ever. “Period!”
They were all cases of purposefully manufactured narratives, disseminated from the highest levels of government, sometimes with the help of adversary nations, to sway public opinion, quash dissenting voices and consolidate power.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-propaganda-fake-news-tv-culture-20181116-story.html
My thoughts:
Americans are assaulted with a constant stream of information from the moment they wake up until the second they crawl back in to bed, and many of them continue to abuse their eyes with information in the bed as well.
This is not my opinion. There are many books, articles, and documentaries about the phenomenon of information overload in the 21st century.
I think the biggest issue is that because we are overloaded with data some of us become less critical and shrewd about what we absorb. If we like it or it supports our already established world-view, we are more likely to blindly accept such data and never question it.
Never has this been more apparent than with the MAGA hat-wearing, loud, obnoxious, violent, hostile, threatening, modern-day Republican voter and some of the politicians.