12 Sneaky Ways the Media Distorts Our View of Reality

Media savvy is allowing yourself to judge the worth and quality of media news and entertainment in terms of whether it opens your mind, uplifts you and doesn’t depress your energy. It’s being vigilant about an activity that is a potential time sink. It’s also an ability to detect the tactics the media use to desensitize awareness, narrow the mind’s focus, and depress energy on several levels.

If you are spiritually awake or aware, you may notice you develop a desire to cleanse your mind of the residual effects of what you watch sometimes.

Your sensitivity is higher and you may notice an undertone in some media products. After exposure to it, you may feel an emotion like flatness or even sadness and resignation.

This lowers your vibration which keeps you in third dimension thinking (duality) instead of fifth dimension thinking (unity). You would be trying to avoid negative and divisive media messages to keep your vibration higher as often as you can, for all sorts of spiritual and health reasons.

If you are already media savvy (and an increasing number of people are becoming so), there will be times when the lack of variety in choice will funnel you to consume one of their ghastlier products despite your preferences. After exposure to coarseness and violence, the effect on a sensitive person is to depress their energy and lower their vibration.

Media Savvy 101

Here are eleven of the more subtle but common strategies the media use to control and shape our view of reality.

1. Repetition

When the media wants to force an issue to the forefront of people’s minds, all it has to do is keep repeating it. It will run the same story (or pitch) for a week in different formats in a sequence such as this:

• breaking news
• feature story on current affairs
• exclusive interview with a media celebrity show host
• radio commentary on breakfast shows
• parading social media trends (‘gone viral’)
• follow up reports when nothing has happened.

This technique is not new. Nazi Germany pioneered it to engineer support for its fascist regime. As Joseph Goebbels (Nazi Germany Minister of Propaganda) said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”. 

2. Censorship by Substitution

Every day decisions are being made that affect public interest and much of it goes unreported even though the issues directly affect the quality of our life.

The news media have steadily increased the amount of air time devoted to opinion, sports stories, entertainment news, acts of violence, natural disasters and other victim stories. Then there is celebrity goggling and the staging of duality politics – their pièce de résistance.

Saturation with this type of dross gives the impression there is no other news to tell. But some would be asking ‘there’s got to be more than this happening in the world’.

This is what ‘censorship by substitution’ is all about. Instead of being blatant about it, you create enough ‘Mickey Mouse’ stories that there is no space or time left for the real meaty and relevant news.

3. Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is often used on the internet. When you search a subject, the search engine displays credible sources next to sources that look less credible. This plays with the importance of an issue because some sources turn the issue into a farce for entertainment.

This jarring effect is used in YouTube to great effect with its recommended videos on the right side of the screen of the one you are watching. 

We are not used to practicing discernment at this level, so we go from being concerned about an issue to becoming cynical over it.

They do the same in news broadcasts, a serious item is followed by a trivial story as if to say “enough attention to this serious issue, let’s get back to entertainment”.

4. Fragmented Audience

The Internet has helped bring on the ‘global village’ because we can bury ourselves in ever more siloed and specialised niche interests. The public is terribly fragmented. The only ones who have the means to get a message out to a very large number of people simultaneously is still the same old players. While the independents on the internet are being quietly absorbed into the establishment.

So why do they ‘allow’ the alternative and conspiracy sources to flourish for now? 

Firstly, they don’t have to worry as anyone who publishes on the internet has to work bloody hard to get noticed and few have resources to continuously market their message to gain a sizeable audience. Some worthy products have taken years to obtain a six figure ‘views’ count.

Secondly, there is nothing like information overload to bamboozle a person into acquiescence. You can be overwhelmed by the choice with just looking at a YouTube page.

Thirdly, even the establishment has learned the lesson about prohibition that if you ban something completely you only encourage it. The fact that so much controversial information is available makes many wonder, if I can access it so readily now, then it may not be of much value.

5. Lies, experts and statistics

When the media chooses experts to comment on an issue they prefer the liberal types. There is also an assumption that opinions from industry experts have more weight. In studio audience shows, very little time is given to audience questions, if at all. This is like telling the general public their common sense opinion has no collective weight and doesn’t count.

Subject specialists are highly trained (but not educated) to view and treat their subject through a specific template. They are not the only viewpoint worth considering. This turning over to experts dis-empowers people who are individually very loathe to state their views openly. Collectively it prevents us from addressing problems from another angle and worse, we can’t even exercise democracy.

Statistical lies: An example is a type of sampling, like the idea that marijuana causes schizophrenia. How did they get this ‘fact’? By questioning the patients in the schizophrenic ward of a mental hospital. (This was reported in a newspaper in the 1990s). They asked each of them how many had used dope, and ten percent of them put their hand up. From this the article concluded there is a ten percent chance a person who uses marijuana will get schizophrenia. Can you see the flaw in this?

6. Balance in the news

Presenting two sides to a story sounds like a balanced treatment, but it’s a technique to polarize views over an issue. The most common format is perpetrator and victim where the focus is on the behavior of the perpetrator and the impact on the victim; but not the root cause. It forces us to think in terms of duality and victim-hood, the opposite of open-mindedness.

Panel debates usually include panelists from two opposite and extreme points of view; the common sense middle-ground view gets excluded.

When debate is polarized like this it makes people go round in endless defensive circles as the extreme ones are given precious air time to squander on promoting their biases and stir people up. It narrows important issues into a useless tossing around of different points of view.

When people can’t align with or give voice to the middle ground of common sense and innate human goodness, they are forced to take sides. In so doing, many opportunities for progress and resolution are lost. This is doubly a loss when it’s often the media open forums that are the only means different interest groups can actually get together face-to-face to address an issue.

Balance in the news is based on duality: left and right, good and bad. Notice how ideas are bucketed into ‘left’ or ‘right’. If you consider yourself ‘right-wing’ then you don’t dare go near a left-leaning idea in case you get contaminated.

This makes people completely miss the point of the issue and divides them into an ‘us versus them’ outlook. Nothing gets resolved, and worse, doesn’t reach a new understanding. For example, the idea that war is an inevitable part of our culture, history and future, still goes on.

7. Subjective vs Objective and the Invasion of Personal Space

If you are under 40 years old what may not be as obvious to you as to someone from an older generation is the more frequent use of the ‘very close-up’ in movies and TV. If you look at older movies, say from the 1980s and earlier, there was less use of the close-up and more use of the wide-angle in filming.

When you take a wide-angle or panoramic view, this is associated with objectivity and context. A close-up of a person’s face, so close that you can see the pores on their skin, is a subjective viewpoint.

Everyone is aware of a sense of personal space. It is that distance from your body to the tip of your finger of your outstretched arm. Say you were in a public setting and a stranger sets foot within that field of space, you tend to instinctively step back to keep your personal space or move your chair further along to keep your personal boundary.

The very close up images that you see in some scenes of a movie, if transposed in physical reality, would fall within that personal space but you can’t respond to your instinct to step back or move along. Instead you subconsciously feel confronted or invaded. You can’t step your mind back so the person gets mesmerized.

Because it invades personal space it’s not so easy to be objective about it. You experience it but with limited objectivity. You get an immersive experience – one that you are happy to disassociate from once the scene has moved on or the movie ends.

8. Over-focus on dark aspects of human nature

Bad news sells they say, but did they ever try to sell good news instead of this daily spotlighting of war zones, street crime, domestic crime and terrorism? Then there is the use of dark symbolism and sexual debasement in most music videos. It’s quite an onslaught.

A story about a good deed or positive development is usually reported like a ‘by the way’ at the end of the news segment (before sports). It’s treated like it’s out of the norm and pretends to be light relief from the heavy negative news that preceded it. When the news reports a personal triumph it’s usually framed as an isolated case with no wider implications. Collective triumphs are rarely reported.

We’ve had TV for over 60 years, cinema for more than 100 years, yet we are still fed the same old ideological diet. War is still peddled as being part of the human psyche instead of its real nature, a heartless mass manipulation to feed an industrial war machine. Movies about crime, gun men, terrorism, revenge junkets and heists still dominate the media diet.

The worst aspect is the heavy and glutinous use of stylized violence that acts like a sledgehammer on the mind and emotions. It forces the audience to get used to excessive violence as ‘cool’ and entertaining.

The full expression of violence in film and TV has been defended as freedom of speech but is really a substitution exercise. As if expressing strong violence and violent ideas is a freedom of expression. As if.

In its wake ideals are destroyed. Remakes of classic stories and sequels are stripped down (goodness gutted) and a darker interpretation given. They have done this with children’s stories (the classics) like Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty (Maleficent), and a once popular Australian teenage TV series called H2O. There are no more heroes in the sense of role models.

In the guise of showing people as they really are, human drama stories will portray the main characters ‘losing it’ with families shown in screaming matches and stylized dysfunction. In the past they used to care about portraying qualities like dignity and stoicism.

9. Style over substance

If a picture tells a thousand words it can be photo-shopped. No wonder our media communication is getting more visual and iconic. A majority of action and science fiction movies since the early 2000s have disjointed or no story.

The in-your-face action sequences in movies forces the mind into subjectivity and undermines its ability to ‘join the dots’, or make logical conclusions. It’s also made pop out of most documentaries.

Granted there are some very good human drama films and documentaries made to this day, but often their story is boxed in by focusing on a personalised context even if it is set in historical times.

Visuals make the brain lazy, conditions it to be spoon fed and reduces mental processing.

Our mind is designed to be good at filling in the blanks and working things out for itself. If this capacity is starved then it becomes harder to do so. In the end the mind can’t discern or process an issue beyond the shallow surface and will tend to lunge towards expert opinion to be spoon fed. It gets tired and over-whelmed easily.

10.  Annoying Background Music

In TV and film, the dominant background music is used to force an atmosphere. Often the music and sound are louder than the voices. It’s frustrating to watch even the good action movies and documentaries when the dialogue is muted compared with the sound volume.

Why do they do this? Too much background music degrades the dialogue and makes sure people don’t hear bread-crumbs of wisdom which do come up in dialogue. While the news uses background music to trivialize the issue and disrupt concentration.

11. Shortening Attention Spans

In TV’s early years, advertisers would sponsor a program and their ads would appear before and after the show. Now they chop up the program with ads every 13 minutes or less. There are more ads in a break than there was 20 years ago (check this by replaying any of your old TV shows you taped on VHS) and then there’s the sly tactic of making their volume louder than the program.

The more ads there are the greater the displacement effect is on keeping up with the thread of a program, especially documentaries. It stimulates attention span deficits if you can only focus on a subject for ten minutes at a time.

The news format moves from story to story quickly, spending a few minutes on a subject. We are now fed more news bites, double-anchor news-persons, inset graphics, and live cross-overs. There’s also a creeping increase in the use of pop/rock background music to serious reporting – all to blur the lines between entertainment and news.

Then we have the showing of reward and success but without the effort that went into it – this is a biggie. We only see the good times, living the success, with little glorifying of the dedication and hard work to get that success.

This has a way of feeding into the tendency to feel spooky about silence and working alone. Some households always have a TV on in the background. That’s why TV is addictive for the young, it exploits their undeveloped self discipline and feeds teenage laziness.

11. Value Judgements

A subtle movement started in the 1980s to discredit the notion of value and quality. There was a series of people in the media (in a variety of contexts) who were asserting that it was ‘wrong to make value judgements’. I distinctly remember this as it stood out in my mind at the time. It was long before I started on any spiritual or self-help path.

They seemed to be conditioning the public to not make (value) judgements of quality and worth for artistic products like movies, books, TV shows or even behaviours of people in the spotlight.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that from that time onwards more of the quality of media started to drop and the intelligence of documentaries, news reporting, and story scripts started falling in the sense that simple stories were preferred over complex ones with subjective over objective points of view.

After that came the positioning of ‘freedom of expression’. Any mention of free speech or free expression was associated with the so-called freedom to be offensive and express violence.

It had little association with the freedom to express controversial ideas or alternative points of view. It was often used to squash criticism of stylised violence, that it was an attack of freedom of expression.

On the surface it appears that the media diet is catering to a global audience (whose first language is not English). For this they abandon plot, and notice the shrinking vocabulary.

There is a lot of verbalizing of nouns. I noticed two in the national news on TV – ‘glassing’ instead of ‘lacerate’ (with broken bottle), ‘sharps’ instead of ‘syringes’. The F word is no longer merely an expletive. It’s been promoted to a noun, a verb and an adjective.

On the subject of conditioning the younger generation, I was shocked one day when I sat down with my daughter (when she was little) to watch a kids show and saw they use more ad breaks and longer ones during children’s TV. Right under our noses they are conditioning our children to accept even more frequent and longer ad breaks. 

To not make value judgments about media products forces our tastes to become grosser so we are less able to pick up on or appreciate subtle things. It decreases alertness, dulls the senses, so it’s far easier to pass things right under our noses like the ramping up of these methods on the next generation. Don’t forget to tell your children about the nature of entertainment media.

If you want to know more how to guard yourself against media influence see Media Savvy to Liberate the Soul.