3 Common Manipulations by Reporters in the Corporate Media

thepholosopher (66)in #news • 5 years ago (edited)

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I go over 3 common manipulations by reporters in the corporate media. Make sure to share this video!

Reporting by the mainstream media, that is, reporting by journalists and newscasters who are a part of the major broadcast corporations like Disney, CBS, Comcast, and so forth, is chock full of manipulations, half-truths, and outright lies.

Being able to discern truth from falsehood requires understanding precisely how those people in corporate media are tactically using their platforms to emotionally manipulate people toward their desired ideological ends.

For a basic understanding of this situation, let’s look at three of the more common tactics employed to push central-planning propaganda through deceptive language:

First up, is the nature of selective reporting.

By virtue of time limitations on both the communicator and receiver, it is simply not possible for news agencies to cover all possible events that affect people’s lives. What broadcasters and reporters choose to cover, therefore, has an impact on what people focus on because that selection will educe a reaction from people and cause them to pay attention to whatever is being covered.

This means that, if those in control of the media companies wish for people to think about a certain topic, all they must do is order coverage of certain events from a particular angle while excluding other topics.

This selective reporting is no greater seen than in the coverage of gun use, as major broadcast agencies will not show effective defensive gun usage on the front page of magazines or on prime-time news shows.

Mainstream reporters will only cover tragedies from mass shootings or mass murders, and this is purposeful – to get people to believe that mass murder is the norm and that defensive gun use simply does not take place. As the idiom goes in the news industry, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Some may try to argue that newscasters are covering only rare, newsworthy events and, thus, mass shootings would be covered over more common defensive uses. This argument cannot hold water though as there are many instances of defensive gun use where multiple attackers are thwarted. This would make those defensive situations fall into the same category of covering “mass shooting” events such as with one man in Houston who used an AK-47 to shoot 5 home invaders, killing 3.

Whenever you see the mainstream media covering tragic events, always ask yourself if you see the media covering comparative situations where a good guy with a gun saves lives.

You’ll quickly see first-hand that those in the corporate media are trying to hide the truth about offensive versus defensive gun use.

Language manipulation takes place where reporters will intentionally hide the nature of an event with a misleading headline or will change their language in a story to cover up facts they do not want people to realize.

Take for example this headline from a CBS local affiliate: “Suspects knock on apartment door, resident starts firing shots.”

One would think, based on the title, that someone casually knocked on a door and a deranged resident started shooting.

This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reality of the situation is that 3 men with guns rang the doorbell of a man’s home at 2 a.m. in the morning as they were attempting to surprise the man, overtake him, and commit a robbery.

The resident carefully looked out of his peephole and took note that the men were holding guns and so grabbed his own gun and shot at them first, causing them to flee.

These kinds of headlines are written intentionally to cover up the fact that people can and do use guns for self-defense to ward off violent, threatening attackers.

In another prime example of language manipulation, Time Magazine featured a story about the Texas Church Shooting where reporters covered the specific gun Devin Patrick Kelley used, a Ruger AR556.

When the reporters covered that another man used his own gun to chase Kelley down, they did not inform the readers that he used an AR-15 to do so. Instead, the reporters called it a “weapon,” hiding the fact that it was a good guy with an AR-15 who stopped a bad guy with an AR-styled gun.

Time Magazine was not alone in this misdirection, as most major agencies employed the same tactic of either calling the AR-15 used to stop Kelley either a “weapon” or a “rifle” without more.

Only the alternative media honestly reported that the person who chased down Kelley was himself using an AR-15 to stop the attack.

So whenever you see reports about an attack and someone using a “weapon” in defense, be sure to investigate further to see whether or not the mainstream media is trying to hide what kind of “weapon” was being used in defense.

Statistical framing bias takes place when reporters intentionally display data in a manner that does not give the full picture or is a bait-and-switch from the argument of the article. Two of the most common tactics used to create statistical framing bias in the mainstream media are scope switching and leaving out unfavorable examples or variables that would undermine a line-of-best-fit correlation plot.

To see how scope manipulation takes place, look no further than how reporters will talk about “homicides” by gun but then put down a graph that is labelled “gun deaths,” which also includes suicide. As suicide makes up nearly 66% of the general “gun death” statistic, reporters often like to make it seem as if violence against others is extremely high by talking about mass shootings and gang violence but incorporate “suicide” into their graphs to pump the reported numbers up. This clever trick deceives people into thinking that there is mass chaos in the streets so that the government needs to intervene to stop the bloodshed.

The reality is that violent crime is actually at a relative low and the issues with suicide are wholly severable from the worries of mass public shootings. Most people are not concerned about their own life being in jeopardy because someone far away decides to kill themselves in their own home, so this tactic of incorporating suicide to inflate fears is a deceptive trick that deserves exposure.

The mainstream media also manipulates by leaving out unfavorable data and examples when constructing lines-of-best-fit plots.

For those of you unfamiliar with this term, a line-of-best-fit plot is a graph where data points are placed and a line is drawn that appears to match a pattern or correlation between two different topics such as murder rate and gun ownership rate.

And speaking of murder and gun ownership rate, many mainstream news agencies will leave out unfavorable examples when constructing their charts. For example, if they want to show a correlation between gun ownership and murder rates, they will conveniently leave out countries like Mexico and Venezuela because that doesn’t fit their narrative due to their restrictive gun laws yet high murder rates.

When it comes to higher rates of gun ownership and lower murder rates, reporting agencies will often leave out countries like Norway and Iceland because it does not fit their narrative.

When that’s not enough, reporting agencies will also include suicide, police shootings, and accidents to skew data lines when their story was originally reporting on mass shootings or other acts of murder.

So next time you’re having a discussion with others about mainstream media coverage of tragic events, be sure to bring up these kinds of manipulations put forward by the corporate media so that you can help others cut through the manipulations, tricks, and outright lies.

Happy philosophizing! ^^
~The Pholosopher