The Real Disinformation Agents: Watch as NBC News Tells Four Blatant Lies in a Two-Minute Clip

submitted by BravoVictor from (greenwald.substack.com)

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[–]StillLessons 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

The interesting thing about the current information environment is that it is accepted wisdom that the networks have lost the battle for the popular consciousness. It is now well known that MSM have horrific believability metrics. The population sees them as the liars they are.

So why are they so powerful, and how do they get to continue with this project? Start looking at the networks as the voice aimed at keeping the controllers themselves in line, and it begins to make more sense. This now is their role. The majority of the population may have seen through them at this point, but as long as they still have the ear of the 10% managerial class, they serve a valuable purpose: maintaining ideological purity.

These lies are designed to maintain a coherency to their story. That's it. That's all.

Even in this, they will eventually lose, because the truth has a beautiful ideological purity inherent within it that illuminates for the evil it is the artificial purity they aim to instill. But the agents pushing this crap are not talking to us. They are talking at this point to our "managers".

Watching it that way all begins to make sense.

[–]BravoVictor[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The interesting thing about the current information environment is that it is accepted wisdom that the networks have lost the battle for the popular consciousness. It is now well known that MSM have horrific believability metrics. The population sees them as the liars they are.

How I wish that were true. They've been weakened, mostly through their own incompetence, but most of the public still believes them, as we saw by the routine lies throughout the Trump term coupled by virtual silence or outright cheerleading during the Biden era. It's so stark, some of the public is waking up to it, but most aren't because most people have little long term memory.

[–]StillLessons 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You and I have slightly different interpretations. I see where you're coming from, and I respect it. Maybe you're right. But my interpretation is that people do know the media is lying. The piece that was not in place during the Trump era is personal pain. In other words, people said yes, the media is lying through their teeth, but it's not hurting me, and Trump is not an angel either, so who cares? People will allow them to lie as much as they like as long as it has no negative effect on our lives.

This is what is rapidly changing now. The lies they are telling are dramatically affecting how our personal lives look. Thus, although the MSM has been lying equally now as they were under Trump (the basic tone or volume of the lies hasn't changed, just the subject matter), people are waking up to the fact that this is no longer tolerable.

The leader who catches this wave correctly is going to have one hell of a backing behind him. DeSantis is trying to be that leader. We'll see. He's still relatively new to the game, and I'm not confident I recognize the many warts he must be hiding, as all politicians are majority wart, with just enough humanity to tell us what we want to hear.

[–]BravoVictor[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

But my interpretation is that people do know the media is lying.

They might suspect the media in general is lying. They may even strongly believe certain outlets are lying. A few may have even abandoned some of the more egregious liars. However, I suspect most haven't reached that third stage.

I think of my sister, a very stereotypical dyed-in-the-wool left winger. Even she knows CNN is complete garbage and can't be trusted. So where does she get her news instead? Salon. MSNBC. Huffington Post. And other sites that are even more left wing than CNN, because she's doesn't have a complete frame of reference. She's so far left, she knows all the woke jargon and sworn alllegiance to the alphabet crowd. Sites moderates would see as biased she sees as moderate and unbiased. She only thinks CNN is garbage is because they're so sloppy, they get routinely caught in outright lies, not because she disagrees with their overall slant.

I'll never forget talking with her in late 2019. She hated Trump, but she told me she "wasn't against his wall. I just think Republicans should pay for it." Ok, nevermind the fact that national defense is an explicit tax-funded responsibility of the federal government, but whatever. That was sort of a moderate opinion of Trump at the time. However, 6 months later, after the election cycle was in full swing and her media outlets had reprogrammed her, she was in full-on, "Trump is a racist Nazi asshole who must be defeated at all costs". I was in a lot of "Facebook debates" with her, and every time she'd mention some fake news story about Trump, I'd try to politely debunk it, and even though I'd use sources I knew she'd be receptive to, it didn't matter. If anything, that only made it worse. She would never try and counter-cite me. She'd just get more and more angry, attacking me personally or responding with word salad.

That's a classic sign of cognitive dissonance. Nonsensically lashing out in anger when someone presents you with compelling evidence you might be wrong.

My mom, a generally very pleasant woman, thinks she's has an objective and balanced viewpoint because she gets news from "both sides", NBC and MSNBC. Sometimes, just to be safe, she'll also watch ABC. I wish that were a joke.

To your point, I don't know what could really get through to some people short of something that actually affects her personal life. But I've learned to never under-estimate the power of self-delusion.

My mom's spent most of her life moving out of terrible Democrat-run areas, every time moving into more and more Republican controlled areas. And each time, she remarks on just how much nicer the Republican-run areas are. And yet her politics never change. She's now retired and lives in a deep red congressional district. Yet she still votes Democrat. She's made a lot of friends, virtually all of who are Republicans, yet hates her local congressional Rep because Rachel Maddow has assured her he's the devil incarnate.

So yes, some people are waking up to bias, but fewer are waking up to the direction of the bias or how they're manipulated or how it effects their lives. Media fragmentation is helping to eat away at the audience of the large media outlets, but it's doing very little to wake people to overall bias.