Herd Mentality Brainwashing Americans
What is brainwashing? Webster defines brainwashing as:
  1. A forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas
  2. Persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship
It is my theory that Americans today have been brainwashed by the news media. This process has occurred over several years. Here are some important news-related events:
  • John Chancellor anchored NBC until 1976.
  • Harry Reasoner anchored ABC News until 1976.
  • Walter Cronkite anchored CBS News until 1981.
  • MSNBC was established in 1996.
  • Fox News was established in 1996.
In my opinion, John chancellor, Harry Reasoner, and Walter Cronkite were news anchors who presented the news and who did not offer their personal views while broadcasting. Much has changed since their departure.

In the latter part of the 20th century, I believe the news media selected niche markets and began pandering to their audiences. For example, Fox News and One America News are known today as conservative news outlets whereas ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC each present a liberal news bias to varying degrees. Here is a picture showing a collection of news media and their ratings.

chart showing news media bias ratings

After settling on their media markets, each news organization competes for audience rating and audience share.

Audience rating is defined as the number of households who tuned in to watch the content -- as a percentage of the entire population of TV-equipped homes.

Audience share is defined as the percentage of households with television sets in use or tuned to a particular station during a specific period of time. Share is expressed as a percentage of the audience that was actually watching TV at the time.

Audience rating and share measures are important because advertisers pay to place their ads based on the size of a media outlet’s audience. For example, “as of June 2019, Fox News was the most-watched network for the third consecutive year and continues to do well in terms of its prime time audience, with almost 2.57 million primetime viewers in that month.” Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/

This means that Fox earns more advertising revenue for a 30 second spot than CNN or MSNBC. What is the impact? CNN has recently announced that they are reducing their staff.

All news media outlets report factual events. However, each has employees who are responsible for selecting which stories are broadcast by the network. This is why some networks will carry a story and other networks will not broadcast that same story. They may claim they are selecting stories of interest to their audience but it is still censorship.

Additionally, people presenting the news (reporters and anchors) often give their personal conservative or liberal slant to the news. This is done by facial expression, word emphasis, or using other subtle nuances.

A steady diet of watching one specific network will result in you being brainwashed to the extent that you will always agree with the information broadcast by that network.

“There are things you can do to stop yourself from being brainwashed:

  1. Don’t believe all that you read
  2. Don’t believe the hype
  3. Don’t buy into fear or scare tactics
  4. Watch for someone’s agenda
  5. Look out for subliminal messages
  6. Follow your own path
  7. Do your own research
  8. Listen to your own intuition
  9. Don’t follow the crowd
  10. Don’t be afraid to be different.”
Source: https://www.learning-mind.com/brainwashing-signs/

Joe R. East, Jr.
7/15/2019


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