Alternative Perspective
 The Media: Living in the Matrix
Issue 37, June 24, 2003
Compiled by Madhukar Shukla

 Alternative Perspective is an attempt to widen our awareness about issues related to business, environment, role and influence of media, geo-politics, culture, etc. It aims to share, on a regular basis, some of those pieces of news and information, which do not find place in the highly monopolised mainstream media. Please feel free to share/ forward/ distribute this newsletter to others who may be interested.


In the Movie Matrix, Morpheus gave Neo the choice between the red and the blue pill. The red pill promised "the truth, nothing more." Neo made the choice and became aware of the controlled and computer-generated Matrix in which he was living... In our ordinary life, the Matrix in which we live, is generated by the Media - Newspapers, TV, PR Agencies, Internet... Often aimed and carefully planned to create the illusion of a "reality", which would serve the purpose of a few...

Note: The URLs of sources used in the text are numbered and given at the end of the Newsletter.

In This Issue:
  • The Fake Persuaders
    One may call it "Viral Marketing"[1] or "third party technique"[2] (as British Medical Journal referred to this widely used PR practice with grave concern). It is apparently becoming increasingly common among PR firms to invent fake citizens with an internet/email identity to communicate a message. This report of how the PR firm Beaving Group - hired by Monsanto - planted fake citizens to manipulate a scientific discourse on GM (Genetically Modified) crop. The effectiveness of he technique can be judged by the fact that it forced the science magazine, Nature, to do something it had never done in its 133-years history: It retracted a published research paper after it was published!!!
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,715153,00.html

  • War History as Popular Fiction
    Formally accepted history of Wars so often reads like the winning formula of popular fiction, with similar plots which appeal to mass-imagination. This article, which describes how during WW-I, the media fabricated a barbaric image of the Germans, who would bayonet kids and ampute women's breast. Reading it gives a deja vu feeling of re-reading the background truth behind Kosovo War[3]. Of course, PR firms did not exist during WW-I, and did not play the role they did in building the justification for NATO bombing of Kosovo[4]... and, of course, describing the parallels in media deception for the two Gulf Wars would be repeating what has been covered in many previous issues of this newsletter.
    http://hnn.us/articles/1489.html

  • Manufacturing News
    News media want news contents, PR Agencies want to influence information reaching the public, and the Clients (corporations, governments) want the public opinion to be molded in their favour. Thus, with this common/complementary motives, begins a symbiotic relationship, in which an information can become the "news", only when it is market-driven and profitable... In such an arrangement, the boundaries between news and lobbying get increasingly blurred[5]. And given that 90% - or more - of what reaches the public world-wide (news, entertainment, music, TV, movies, books, internet) is owned by just 10 corporations[6], it is always difficult to distinguish the facts from illusion and/or deception.
    http://www.newint.org/issue314/coverage.htm

  • How TV Networks become Megaphones for Official Propaganda
    Here is how it happens!!! When we watch the news on TV (listen on radio, read in newspaper), we are treated with the comments from "experts" to voice a viewpoint and an "objective" perspective. More often than not, the "expert" is a person unknown to the viewer (but then, if CNN/ BBC/ DD... says that here is an expert, it must be my ignorance not to recognise him/her as such, isn't it?). Here is an analysis of the "objective" viewpoints of "experts" which were brought in the news channels to mold the opinion about the just concluded (though, actually continuing) Iraq War... it works the same way for other issues as well...
    http://www.fair.org/reports/iraq-sources.html

  • Urban Legends, email Hoaxes, and Internet Folklores
    At a very conservative estimate, if one mail is forwarded by just two receivers to another two receiver every 30 minutes, it will reach 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2.... 48-times = 281,474,976,710,656 people in just 24 hours!!! - that's many times more than the total human population on the planet. Luckily, not so many people have access to email (that's why we often receive the same message repeatedly)... But numbers apart, this figure does underscore the power the Net gives to single individual to inform and shape opinions of others. On the one hand, this "power of one" found its expression when the mails exchanged between the MIT student, Jonah Paretti and Nike[7] circulated around the Net, reaching millions, and brought pressure on Nike for its sweatshop labour practices[8]. One the other hand, it also implicates us as participants in perpetuating the media-created Matrix, when we forward messages (ranging from Divya Singh's husband's tumor to Bill Gates giving $1000 to everyone who forwards "his" mail), which appeal our credibility-threshold without checking their validity...
    http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/


    Other Sources Quoted in the Newsletter:
    [1]: http://www.bivingsreport.com/search_view_full_article.php?article_id=73&keyword=%5E@
    [2]: http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7400/1205
    [3]: http://compuserb.com/bosnia/boslie01.htm
    [4]: http://www.greens.org/s-r/20/20-24.html
    [5]: http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/profiles/pr_industry/pr5.htm
    [6]: http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html
    [7]: http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,7541,440022,00.html
    [8]: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010409&s=peretti


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