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23. Propaganda & media manipulation: 2 + 2 = 5

Today I want the share the most wonderful presentation by Professor Jerry Kroth, from the Psychology Department at Santa Clara University. Entitled "Propaganda and Manipulation: How mass media engineers and distorts our perceptions," it is based on his book Duped! I promise it will change the way you view the world—and watch TV.

Kroth begins his presentation with the display of old ads: sodas for mothers to give to their infants, cigarettes recommended by doctors, and women portrayed as stupid enough to find it challenging to open a ketchup bottle. "You would think that in the past people were brainwashed and lived in a trance," says Kroth. How could they give a beverage packed with sugar to infants, doctors recommend poison, and women be demeaned with no sense of women's emancipation at all? Those people were crazy, right?

Now here's his idea: we are just as much in a trance and hypnotized by the media as the past generations that bought into those Mad Men commercials. "Things are not any better for us. We are not more liberated and more aware of the world. We're just as much victimized by it," Kroth suggests. According to statistics, kids spend 45 hours a week in screentime (TV, internet and social media); the average American spends 9 hours a day using the media; 50% of American children from the ages of 8 to 18 report that the TV is on constantly in their home.

We are really deluged with that. Some people say outside of sleep and work, they spend the majority of their time glued to screens. Kroth asks: "Are we getting dumber?" For example: 90% of fourth-graders could not identify a photo of Abraham Lincoln, and half didn't know the meaning of the word puzzled; 75% of 17-year olds could not identify who was the head of Germany in World War II; and 30% of high school students didn't know how long it took the Earth to orbit the Sun. However, 75% of 17-year olds knew what city was in the zip code 90210 thanks to a TV show, and 96% of American school children could identify Ronald McDonald.

Paul Joseph Watson, editor of Infowars.com, quotes in his video "The Dumbest People Ever" studies showing that Western IQs have dropped 14 points, people's attention spam is minimal, and since 2006 the average SAT scores also fell 20 points. In Japan, high school students are the same educational level as Americans who hold 4-year college degrees. The human brain has been physically shrinking. Americans picked at random on the streets had never heard of World War II, didn't know how many world wars there have been, didn't know what democracy is, couldn't name one single country in Europe, didn't know who Fidel Castro was, didn't know what GMO and Monsanto are (and were not interested), how many sides a triangle has ("four," "there's no sides"), and were ready to vote for Obama's third term—by law a president can only serve two.

The interviewer would ask: "When the founding father signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776, we declared independence from England. What date did they sign the Declaration of Independence?" People couldn't answer, and they guessed: 1419, 1536, 1978...? A man knew that KFC stood for Kentucky Fried Chicken but couldn't tell from which state KFC comes. People also didn't have the foggiest idea of what the TPP is (I confess I didn't know that either, and once I researched it, it made me worry). About the TPP, the interviewer clarified to a young man and a young woman that it was "a new way to screw up people" and asked if they cared. Both said no.

"It's as if we're living in a playhouse: the fantasy world created by the media where we spend 9 hours a day," Kroth concludes. "We know everything about that playhouse. We know who Kim Kadashian is but have no idea who Scott Carpenter is. We've substituted our fantasy reality for real reality. We're increasingly living in the trance without realizing it."

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

"The ultimate goal of propaganda is to make us feel good about bad things. It's like a bandage," says Kroth. He lists the propaganda tools that keep us in this fog: reframing, repeated affirmations, vicarious and imitative learning, distraction and denial, classical and operant conditioning. Keep reading, as we now are in the process of media literacy, pulling off the veil of propaganda, clearing out the fog and starting to see what's really going on with the mass media, with us and our consciousness.