The Media's Subtle Propaganda Tactics: See if this sounds familiar...

[True Blue Door]

Event: Something bad happens.

Headline: "Noun, verb, Obama administration."

Body of story: Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama administration. Obama administration, administration, Obama Obama.

Observations: Does not require even the remotest semblance of a rational connection to the Obama administration, let alone to the President himself for his name to be dropped throughout the story in connection to the negative event. If a mailman shot someone's dog, the story would be "Obama administration employee accused of shooting dog."

Although more often it's just very disingenuous, e.g. name-dropping the President in connection with scandalous law enforcement actions where there is no evidence the White House or even direct Presidential appointees played any role whatsoever.

---

Event: Something good happens.

Headline: (No mention of Obama, administration, or Obama administration).

Body of story: (No mention of Obama, administration, or Obama administration).

Observations: When the significance of the story is positive, the authors (or more likely the GOP-vetted corporate editors) suddenly become allergic to the President's name even when the story directly concerns White House policy, let alone more tenuous connections that somehow lead to name-dropping when the story is negative.

Gotta love our "liberal media" here in America.

[BumRushDaShow]

1. That's it in a nutshell.

And also in the case of the 'negative", it's always some "anonymous source in the Obama administration" that supposedly validates the M$M assertion.

I read various articles yesterday from self-same M$M that during the debt ceiling debacles before the 2012 election, vehemently insisted that "the economy" is "always" tied to the President who is in office. And these shills insisted that no President would be re-elected with an unemployment rate "above 7.2%" and on and on.... Yet with the continued (slow) but "positive" movement forward of the economy, there is the sudden disconnect and "the economy" no longer gets tied to the President.

[True Blue Door]

8. I would be curious to see some investigative journalism

into who these people are in the media who execute such a consistent program of propaganda across so many sources. In particular, I want to know who the people are who keep imposing nakedly propagandistic terms like "enhanced interrogation" into ostensibly mainstream media sources.

[BumRushDaShow]

10. The media uses "style guides" or "style books"

with AP's StyleBook apparently an industry standard (where they even have an app for that). The NY Times recently updated theirs last year and had a little article about it.

They use these to supposedly bring consistency across their utterances.

[True Blue Door]

11. Hmm. Then I'd be curious who inserts things like "enhanced interrogation" into them.

No actual journalist would independently use such naked propaganda in the narrative phrasing of a news story.

[fredamae]

2. Now "MSM" is nothing but a

M.E.S. (media entertainment system)

[riqster]

4. "Infotainment".

[fredamae]

5. I agree-however

I can't bring myself to place any reference to "information" associated with "news"...not any more I call it a mess (M.E.S.)

[riqster]

6. Good point.

[fredamae]

7. And in memoriam

of the once valuable and reliable Fourth Estate

[True Blue Door]

9. It died over 15 years ago.

I had been apoplectic over the brazenly pro-Bush coverage of the 2000 election throughout the media. Not even merely "biased" - it was nakedly propagandistic.

The LA Times, in a front page article that wasn't even labeled as an editorial, called Al Gore names like it was written by a five-year-old. I'm not even exaggerating.

We've since sidestepped that rot through the internet (and replaced it with a different kind of rot - utter solipsism), but there was a period of about 5 years where we were seriously faced with coordinated, Ministry of Truth-style Newspeak in every major US publication.

And it's still there in those sources, but at least we no longer depend on them.

[JHB]

3. It's not ALL about Obama...

"Man bites dog! Will hipster puppy-noshing hurt Hillary in 2016?"