For Political Activists and Media: The Magic of Being Focused Gets You to Your Goal
The information below ought to be on the front page of every newspaper right now, on every news show and on protest signs at bipartisan political demonstrations across the country.
With the Kavanaugh hearings and everything else that’s been going on, it’s hard for media to focus. But they need to start to focus first and foremost on the most serious problems this administration is causing. And the gutting of Social Security and Medicare is the biggest one.
Here is why this lack of focus is happening. Steve Bannon said in the interview below, that the media were the enemy, not the Democrats, and that the solution the Right Wing would use would be to “flood the zone with sh*t.” Well, the Right Wing is doing that, and it’s been working on the media.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-09/has-anyone-seen-the-president
What can media do about this? As I mention in the article below, media need to educate themselves about con artistry and propaganda, so they don’t continue to be vehicles for propaganda and victims of con artists.
To help them to focus, media need to develop a triage system like the systems medical personnel use in emergencies, to decide who to treat first. Media need to make conscious decisions about what to emphasize most. There is far too much news now, for media to cover it all.
How Mainstream Media Strategies Enable Political Propaganda
I mentioned in that essay some books that journalists could use to educate themselves on propaganda and con artistry. Here is another great one.
Media need to put their chief focus on actions by our Right Wing government that are most likely to destroy democracy quickly. Impoverishing large numbers of people by gutting Medicare and Social Security is one of them.
The Right Wing is apparently going to constantly keep trying to distract media from the most important issues of the day by flooding the media zone with bs. Journalists need to learn how to keep themselves from being duped.
Here’s another example of a situation where the media were duped. It looks like the New York Times got played, by people in the Trump administration who may have given them inaccurate stories about Rod Rosenstein, under cover of anonymity. Rosenstein denies the story about him that came from other sources within the White House.
Trump has certainly shown himself to be untrustworthy, as have some other members of his administration. So news media need to decide whether they will EVER publish anonymous reports from administration officials.
Propagandists often act in ways that are goal oriented, not truth oriented. Journalists need to wake up to that.
For example, in this instance, media might have considered: What is the purpose of officials in this administration anonymously leaking this story? Are they leaking the story to provide Trump cover for firing Rosenstein? Stories could be getting leaked in order to attain goals like this, even if the stories are untrue.
It’s possible that officials in this administration will keep leaking stories that will keep being denied later, or will be proven to be false later. The story about Rosenstein this week sounded as if he were getting fired, or else resigning in the next few days, which has apparently turned out to be false.
If officials in the administration do keep anonymously leaking stories that officials later publicly deny, one possible motivation could be to destroy the credibility of the New York Times — something that Trump has already shown he desires to do. Editors at New York Times seem to want to focus on getting stories, rather than on understanding the motivations administration officials have for revealing stories. But what if they are not getting factual stories at all?
If con artists who happen to be officials within the Trump administration may be giving journalists false stories in order to destroy the credibility of news organizations, do journalists really want to play along with that game?
Journalists, you may think you’re just doing your job and reporting news. But maybe what you are doing is more like playing Three-card Monte — but with the news or the facts instead of with playing cards, and with your reputation instead of money.
My own expectation at this point is that the Republicans will confirm Kavanaugh no matter what, because they have the power and they will use it to get what they want. If we can spread the word about the most important most impactful betrayals of the people by Trump and the Republican party, such as the gutting of Social Security and Medicare, then that can help the rest of us to get some power back through our Blue Wave in November.
