To help you counter the detrimental effects of the mainstream media (TV, print, radio TPR ), the Emergent-Culture News Website will publish a monthly report with feature stories, commentary and headlines pertaining to the wide-spread negative effects of the media on culture and the individual.

I do not classify the Internet with TPR  for three reasons.

The first has to do with the lack of economic restraints on Internet usage. The Internet is available to all who can click enough buttons to log on.

The second reason is dialogue. The Internet is a real mass communications system. In contrast MSM is monologistic. To say the MSM is dictatorial in nature is not an exaggeration.

Thirdly, one has access to a far greater number of news and assorted content sources.

The mainstream media is a mono-culture of sex titillating voyeurism, violence, fear, drama and social manipulation–nothing more and nothing less. Oh yes and some comedy to help release the tension from viewing all the other stuff.

Only the most economically powerful agencies (gov-corp or US-GORP) can use MSM.  US-GORP has a very specific agenda when it comes to its employment of the MSM. Their agenda is the reason for my publication, Media Hazards. Of the three mediums (TPR), television is by far the most dangerous to our freedom, our community and our mental-emotional-physical well being.

Television was not originally devised to exploit, but the prevailing culture could not resist the temptation to do otherwise. Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television had other visions for what would eventually become his problem child—-for society that is.

Philo began laying out his vision for what television could become.  Above all else… “television would become the world’s greatest teaching tool.  Illiteracy would be wiped out.

The immediacy of television was the key.  As news happened viewers would watch it unfold live; no longer would we have to rely on people interpreting and distorting the news for us. …..  Television would also bring about world peace.

If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings?

War would be a thing of the past”

[from  The Last Lone Inventor, ~by author Evan I. Schwartz]

Unfortunately Mr. Farnsworth invention was not used as he had hoped for.  Instead we have the opposite of what he had envisioned.  The following topics are testament to the legacy of television, print and radio and those who employ MSM.

INDEX

• Advertising Effects
• Bias against Women
• Censorship
• Consumerism
• Dangers Reporting Truth
• Desensitization
• Family, Children and Media
• Inaccuracies, Misleading claims
• Internet
• Mainstream Media Monopoly
• Media Effects on Health
• Mental-Emotional-Behavioral Effects of Media
• Political Mis-use of the Media
  
• Propaganda & Misinformation
• Sexualization
• Site Wide Index of Subjects & Themes

Featured

The Persuaders or How Marketers Manipulate the Way You Think
By Dosh Dosh
Three years ago, PBS Frontline produced The Persuaders, a 90 minute documentary which examines how the cultures of marketing and advertising not only influence what Americans buy, but the way they view themselves and the world.

Giant corporations spend billions of dollars by employing an army of copywriters, consultants, linguists, anthropologists and ad gurus, all in a bid to influence what the average citizen thinks.

Their end goal is simple: to craft messages which persuade people towards a favorable course of action. They not only want you to do what is most beneficial for their goals (trust me/buy my product) but also to believe that you’re doing the best thing for yourself under all circumstances. And they’re actually succeeding.

I recently wrote about The Century of the Self, a brilliant four part documentary on the marriage between psychology, big business and politics. The Persuaders operates in a similar vein by examining how marketers create campaigns that focus on heightening a consumer’s emotional attachment to a product or personality.

Taking the 2004 Presidential elections as a case study, the Persuaders examines how politicians tailor their message to each demographic group, a technique known as narrowcasting: the crafting and delivering of customized messages to individual voters/buyers based on their demographic profiles.

This method is used extensively in the private sector. Data mining companies like Acxiom hold detailed historical information on a consumer’s buying habits, age and income and this ammo is used by politicians and businesses to develop messages that are incredibly targeted, in order to incite a specific response from the buyer.

While a good ad campaign strategy, marketers know that brand fervor is still key: “What consumers want now is an emotional connection—they want to be able to connect with what’s behind the brand, what’s behind the promise,” says Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising. “The brands that can move to that emotional level, that can create loyalty beyond reason, are going to be the brands where premium profits lie.”

Apart from the documentary, there’s a good deal of extended interviews with political consultants, media critics, professors and famous authors like Naomi Klein. They are worth a read if you’re interested in learning more on this fascinating topic.

The whole documentary itself is available on the PBS website, although I’ve found it difficult to stream the videos at times. I’ve had no trouble watching it a year ago so hopefully you’ll be able to get it loading. It’s also available on DVD at Amazon.

I’ll leave you with what Douglas Rushkoff has to say about the documentary: When the same persuasion industry is engaged to influence these very different kinds of decision-making, it’s easy for our roles as consumers and our roles as citizens to get blurred. By revealing some of the most effective practices of the persuasion business, we may better understand our choices and perhaps make wiser ones.

Giant corporations spend billions of dollars by employing an army of copywriters, consultants, linguists, anthropologists and ad gurus, all in a bid to influence what the average citizen thinks.

Advertising Effects

Effects Of Unconscious Exposure To Advertisements….Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, shows why direct exposure to repeated ads initially increases a consumer’s preference for promoted products, and why the most effective advertisements are the ones consumers don’t even realize they have seen

Subconscious Encounters: How Brand Exposure Affects Your Choices
Products with visible brand names are everywhere; many times we don’t even notice them. But how much do those unnoticed exposures affect brand choices? Quite a bit, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research

Tobacco marketing causes kids to smoke
Several scientific studies released today provide powerful new evidence that tobacco marketing causes kids to smoke, while anti-tobacco advertising campaigns prevent smoking.

Bias against Women

Mutilating Oneself for the Social Order
“The gaze, the libidinal economy of patriarchal sexuality that greases the wheels of the multi-billion pound sex industry has never been so powerful and pervasive. Literally every inch of women’s bodies are commodified and pronounced upon. This culture, which distorts sexuality by casting women in an inferior position is a big obstacle to building the humanistic, fulfilling and liberating socialist society our species deserves. How do we halt the juggernaut?”

CIGARETTE ADS: THEN AND NOW
First, they compare vintage ads that try to sell cigarettes by pointing to the fact that they suppress your appetite with contemporary-ish Virginia Slims ads which seem to suggest so indirectly.

The Bitch and the Airhead: Blatant Women-Bashing Makes a Gut-Wrenching Comeback
Change may well be coming to Washington. But the public discourse about women has taken several steps backward.

Women Film Critics: An Endangered Species?
The lack of female voices in film criticism is a manifestation of an industry that favors male-oriented movies and audiences.

Big Pharma Pushes Drugs That Cause Conditions They Are Supposed to Prevent
Yet again, women are the industry’s main targets.

Censorship

4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images……News and news media united states marine corps
Some journalists say the American military is making a growing effort to control graphic war images from Iraq.

100 self-serving anonymous edits performed by corporations and governments on Wikipedia.
Readers used WikiScanner to uncover the shenanigans: that’s the searchable web mash-up crafted by CalTech graduate student and internet superhero Virgil Griffith. Griffith  merged a database of Wikipedia edits with internet address records, allowing anyone to  search on the name of a company or agency, and see all of the anonymous Wikipedia edits made from its address space.

What the Chemical Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know about Everyday Products
The chemical industry has spent years trying to suppress information about a certain chemical. Will Congress help the public know the true dangers?

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2008

Consumerism

Consumerism: an Historical Perspective
The Pacific Ecologist, whence this article came, provided this editorial note: Sharon Beder explores the history of consumer societies from the 1920s when over-production of goods exceeded demand. Instead of stabilising the economy, reducing working hours, and sharing work around, which would have brought more leisure time for all, industrialists decided to expand markets by promoting consumerism to the working classes.

Remove, Flog and Dump: The Story of Stuff
Related to a recent post on the idiocy of anthropogenically induced climate change, the lunacy of our current economic system and the complete lack of valuing undervaluing of ecosystem services on which our lives depend, I invite you to watch the highly entertaining Story of Stuff.

The True Cost Of Gold
Survival Acres Blog 11/20/08 6:30 PM admin General Environment Comments
Gold is always thought of as a “precious metal” due to it’s rare nature and the difficulty (human labor) in obtaining it.
There is a real-life hidden cost of gold however, one that is almost always overlooked. Mining for gold, in this case, an entire mountain, requires the forest to be be clear-cut and laid [...]

Deeper in Debt: Two-Planet Lifestyle by Mid-2030s
WorldChanging 10/29/08 1:01 PM Julia Levitt Planet Comments
New figures show that we are barreling toward a two-planet global society. Simply put, the worldwide demand for resources will soon require the equivalent of two Earths to sustain.

Dangers Reporting Truth

Another journalist slain in RussiaNovaya Gazeta’s lawyer Stanislav Markelov, and Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old traineejournalist, were gunned down in the centre of Moscow by a masked killer while walking towards the metro from a press conference on Monday.

India not a  Country for Good Men
There is an alarming trend in India of arresting and detaining without bail human rights activists that challenge state authority. The unjust imprisonment of Dr Binayak Sen is the latest example says a commentator.

Blogger Beware: Arrests on the Rise
According to a University of Washington annual report, since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for things they wrote on a blog. And the numbers are on the rise. 2007 saw three times as many people arrested for blogging about political issues than in 2006. The university cites the “growing” political importance of blogging as a cause for the uptick.

Blogger fired after criticizing US Attorney

Desensitization

Violent Media Numb Viewers To The Pain Of Others
Violent video games and movies make people numb to the pain and suffering of others, according to a research report published in Psychological Science.

HOW THE MEDIA ACCUSTOMIZES US TO TYRANNY
One of the things the conventional media does extremely well is to normalize the disintegration of our culture. This article is a classic example. Through tone and language, the writer trivializes a major assault on democratic rights, buries objections to it, and makes it sound like just one more interesting thing about living in a city.

Family, Children & the Media

The construction/commodification of modern kids and good parents
Elizabeth writes:  I’m most interested in the way that the ad copy defines childhood, the supposed “problems” of childhood and “Attractions” as the cure.

Advertising, Alcohol And Adolescents
The advertising of alcohol, the marketing of alcoholic products, peer pressure and parental influence all play a part in the level of alcohol consumption among young people. Researchers found that advertising seems to be most effective in the case of alcopops and cider.

Targeted Web ads & critical thinking
“Behavioral targeting,” believe it or not, could be a great topic for family discussion. Sounds like a big, nasty sociological term, but it’s really about critical thinking, or knowing how others might be trying to manipulate us. When teens are wise to that, they know how to protect themselves from manipulation……

TV junk food marketing targeting children
University of Sydney researchers have found that advertisements for junk foodthat usecompetitions and give-aways are 18 times more common during the 20 most popular children’s programs compared to popular adult programs.

MARLBOROS FOR MOMMIES…I recently heard that Marlboros were originally marketed to women.  Amy L. sent in these examples from the 1950s (found here).  She writes:  Notice how “in one picture the baby actually asks mom to have a cigarette instead of scolding him. It plays up the women-as-hysterical stereotype and also shows changing expectations about good motherhood.”

Inaccuracies, Misleading Claims & Sheer Deception

How Big Pharma Is Fooling You — and Your Doctor — with Junk Science
To the pharmaceutical industry, “research” is just a code-word for “smart-sounding marketing.”

The Dubious claims of ‘natural’ products

PBS Screws Up Report on Financial Crisis
At a time when we need hard-hitting investigations into our financial catastrophe, we are getting superficial reporting — even on PBS.

Lose weight while you sleep?
NBC gave 5.5 minutes of free publicity to Glamour magazine’s pseudo-scientific experiment, then made bold, baseless projections that women would “probably add about 7 years to their life.”  Amazing.

Internet

Fruity Link Too Juicy for Kids
A healthy food website promoted to children on hundreds of bags of pre-packed mandarins has turned out to be a link to hardcore pornography.

Facebook: All Your Content  Belong To Us, Forever Word reached me through the grapevine that Facebook has altered its terms of service (that legalese you don’t read when you sign up) to essentially grant itself a perpetual and all-encompassing right to use any content you upload to the site for all time, even when you delete your account:

Mainstream Media Monopoly

David Sirota: We Are a Nation of Junkies Hooked on Media-Fabricated Outrage…..As the Phelps ’scandal’ proves yet again, our narcotic of choice — creating controversy where none exists — packs a punch.

Faux News
“Deceive one and you’re a liar. Deceive thousands and you’re a cable news channel.”

Fox News on the other hand is clearly conservatively biased and has unapologetically exposed themselves as a Republican propaganda machine. Yet, they have the audacity to classify themselves as being “fair and balanced”. How is this possible? It’s based on a very simple explanation really. Allow me to elaborate:

Is America Still a Beacon for Press Freedom?
The United States of America — land of the free, home of the First Amendment — is supposed to be a beacon for the rest of the world. So where do we stand in the latest global rankings of press freedom–   ..36th.    That’s not a typo. It’s a national disgrace.

CONGRESS GIVES AWAY 5,100 TV CHANNELS TO BIG MEDIA
The biggest theft of the public airwaves in U.S. history is nearly complete, a crime perpetrated in semi-secret, that transfers a brand new universe of the digital broadcast spectrum into the possession of wholly undeserving corporations. As a result blacks, other minorities, unions, community organizations and all other non-rich societal stakeholders may be shut out of the main streams of television for the foreseeable future. . .

Media Effects on Health

Watching too much TV is causing some university students to pack on the pounds
Television commercials are a common method for advertising food products. According to a team of University of Alberta researchers, these food advertisements have a powerful influence on its viewers, especially university students.

Children Fed Diet of Poor Nutrition on Saturday Morning Television
Nine out of ten food advertisements shown during Saturday morning children’s television programming are for foods of poor nutritional quality, according to researchers. During a sample of 27.5 hours of shows aimed at pre-school and elementary school-aged children, 91 percent of food ads were for foods or beverages high in fat, sodium or added sugars or were low in nutrients, according to the study.

Teens Who Have TV In Their Bedroom Are Less Likely To Engage In Healthy Habits, Study Shows
Older adolescents who have a bedroom television are less likely to engage in healthy activities such as exercising, eating fruits or vegetables, and enjoying family meals. They also consumed larger quantities of sweetened beverages and fast food, were categorized as heavy TV watchers, and read or studied less than teens without TVs in their bedrooms.

A contestant from “The Swan” speaks out
A B O U T – F A C E  When Lorrie A. appeared on cosmetic-surgery reality show “The Swan” back in 2004, she didn’t know what she was getting herself into. Now she’s scarred and damaged. Have a look at her (very short) interview on E! News from Sunday:

Mental-Emotional-Behavioral Effects of Media

Out-of-Body Image: Women See Themselves Through Eyes of Others
This sort of self-objectification impairs women’s body image, mental health, motor skills and even sex lives.

TV Confuses Children About Which Foods Are Healthy, New Study Finds….Despite — or perhaps because of — the barrage of information about food that they consume while watching television, kids are getting the wrong message about healthy eating.

Bikini-clad Women Make Men Impatient
Images of sexy women tend to whet men’s sexual appetite. But stimulating new research says there’s more than meets the eye. A recent study shows that men who watched sexy videos or handled lingerie sought immediate gratification — even when they were making decisions about money, soda, and candy.

The Unseen Behavioral Influence of Company Logos
Situationist contributor Grainne Fitzsimons and her research on the effects of popular company logos on human behavior are the subject of an interesting article by Joseph Brean of the National Post. We excerpt portions of his article below.

It’s black and white: TV influences your dreams
Watching monochrome film and TV as a child seems to imprint on the mind, and makes people less likely to dream in colour throughout their lives

Men and eating disorders
As many as one in five young men are unhappy with their body image, according to a leading eating disorders expert, and that is leading to an increase in eating disorders among men. Dr Morgan believes that some men’s relationship with food and exercise is not recognised as disordered: -

Political mis-use of the Media

Branding
That the word “branding” is commonly used now in media discussions of political candidates and campaigns says it all. There was a time when such concepts were avoided in public discussion. The public wasn’t supposed to think that candidates were being sold like laundry detergent. But no more. It’s all a sales job. Openly. It’s all Bull……..

Cheney’s Office Said to Edit Draft Testimony
The office pushed for major deletions in Congressional testimony on climate change, a former E.P.A. official said.

Science & the Public: EPA Gagged
Some Environmental Protection Agency officials have been directed not to talk to the news media without prior authorization. That’s according to a memo that was allegedly issued by Robbi …

No Strings Attached? How U.S. funding of the world press corps may be buying influence
The U.S. government is secretly funding foreign news outlets and journalists.

Propaganda, Bias & Misinformation

Hollywood Is Becoming the Pentagon’s Mouthpiece for Propaganda
In the new film Iron Man, the people cast as terrorists take the fall for what the U.S. has done in the real world.

Martin Amis & Chris Hitchens: Vicious Racism Concealed by a British Accent
The American right wing, desperate for articulate hate mongers, is importing UK polemicists to stir the base up against the Muslim/Arab “enemy.”

Pens and Swords – How the American Mainstream Media Reports the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
90% of Enviro-skeptic Books Have Think Tank Roots
If the author is skeptical of mainstream science, is there a conservative think tank behind them?

In the study, the authors first offer a conceptualization of environmental skepticism as an ideology and movement:
A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes….

….that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT).

Sexualization

Watching lots of sexual content on TV linked to subsequent teen pregnancy
Adolescents who have high levels of exposure to television programs that contain sexual content are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the following three years as their peers who watch few such shows, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

Sex-hibitionism

It is appalling — yet not surprising at all — that middle and high school girls are sending nude pictures of themselves to their boyfriends. What I wonder is: Who started this trend? Was it Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical)? Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana)? Is it simply a product of technological advances and exhibitionism, as a recent CNN article proposes? Or is it a combination of the two? I’m thinking it’s a combination, supplemented by the fact that girls and women are continually sexualized in today’s media culture and feel that their worth is based on how sexy they are or can be.

Sexpot Virgins: The Media’s Sexualization of Young Girls
Professor M. Gigi Durham discusses the corporate media’s sexual objectification of girls and how to help young women fight regressive media messages.

Sex: America’s #1 Addiction
Porn Nation: Conquering America’s #1 Addiction  by Michael Leahy. You may not know Michael Leahy’s name, but if you saw a picture of him, you would know exactly who he is. He has appeared on the 20/20 and The View discussing America’s problem with sexuality. He also has been on Oprah

Partial Index listing of site wide titles, themes and subjects that existing or subsequent articles will cover under the principal theme of….

Our Culture, Our Inheritance, Our Burden

The Way In and a Way Out from the Nightmare of History

The Remergence and Rise of the Feminine Power; Gender balance as a prerequisite to a healthy and just society.

The Cave Walls of Culture

A Maze 6000 years in the Making

Socio-Economic Engineering or simply Cultural Engineering

How Deep is the Rabbit hole? “The Matrix” as cultural commentary

The Invisible Process of Indoctrination and Enculturation: Mind Control at its best

The Grand Illusion

Who’story?, Origins of Religion & Myth: Why you believe what you do

Warrior King as God: Anthro-theocracy the Roots of the Abrahamic Religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam)

The Judeo-Christian Culture Complex: In a Class by Itself

Westernization: The Plague of Colonialism Past and Present

All the way to Plutocracy: A Primer in Cultural Engineering

The Cradle of Imperialization 2500BC: Birthplace of the Military-Industrial Complex or Economic Militarism

A Brief story about the Long History of War: The Engine of Western Civilization

The Ultimate Consequences of Civilization as we know it.

The Genie is Out but for How Long. Why Governments Fear the Internet

Disinheriting our History

The Rise of Emergent Culture

Showdown: Prevailing Culture Versus Emergent Culture

What the Scientific Principle of Self-Organizing Criticality has to say about the coincidence of our Global Predicament and the Mayan Calendar cycle end date of Dec, 21 2012.

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