Today, at H-367, we had a LLA lecture taught by Rab with Stream 2. The lecture was on propaganda and Managing the Machiavellian MSM, basically how information we get is controlled by mass media. The first thing Rab mentioned is "effects of time." Books, articles or any documents that talk about this issue can easily go out of date. So instead of reading the article on ELA Reader, he recommended us to read the first chapter of Larson's "Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility." How new that source is influences its reliability.
In this lecture, we learned 5 major problems of mass media: Ownership, Advertising, Access, Flak and Ideology. Each of them is a big issue, but I thought the first two are more evil than the others. Ownership, on the one hand, is basically described as "owning the media means controlling the media." Every mass media has somewhat of a bias with every topic; the example Rab gave us is, supposedly Rab establishes a newspaper company, he would order his journalists to write articles that praise Macs and degrade Windows. No one can disobey because Rab owns the company and journalists work for him. This is how information is dominated by power. Advertising, on the other hand, is all about money. There is an inequality, "money > fact." Mass media get advertising rates from companies that want to advertise their merchandises, but at this point, there is an unspoken contract. That media promise not to criticize anything about those companies; otherwise, they lose money. We later watched a video on Monsanto's rBGH incident, which exemplified this problem. I was surprised when I learned that lying in a news in not a crime.
The way we stay informed is to find the alternative media solution, one without an access to big companies or money. When we look up something and think it sounds trustworthy, we should carefully examine that information because it might be censored by these 5 filters listed above, especially when we are using outside sources to support our thesis in a writing.
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