I’ve figured out a way to quantify how Establishment news organizations manipulate the contents of our minds: just track the use of tendentious phrases over the years.
Since 2016, there has been much talk of “fake news.” For example, The New York Times used the phrase “fake news” 901 times in 2017. Both sides of the political spectrum believe the other is outright making up events that never happened to promote their worldview.
That does happen…to some extent. For example, many of the most publicized hate crimes blamed on white men in recent decades have been either outright hoaxes or badly misreported.
A subtle but likely more important issue, however, is the question of which true news gets emphasized. There is always vastly more news than a person can remember. Thus your picture of reality is inevitably distorted to some extent by the power of the media, what I call the Megaphone, to pound over and over into your head certain true news, but not other true news.
Moreover, the press furnishes us with convenient concepts, such as “white privilege,” that make it easier to remember the facts they prefer you to know and harder to remember the facts that undermine the concepts.
For example, consider two black teens who once were true news.
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In 1955, Emmett Till was murdered by two white men who were quickly acquitted, making his story memorable for being one of the last examples from a long era of state-excused white-on-black civilian violence over black males hitting on white females.
In 1987, Tawana Brawley launched our present era of making up hate hoaxes against whites by claiming that the reason she got home late was because she was being gang-raped by six white policemen.
Which incident is more rationally relevant to 2018? But which does the prestige media consider more au courant?
Tracking the numbers isn’t as easy as it ought to be.
In 2012, The New York Times graciously offered a tool called Chronicle for graphing its frequency of use of words since 1851. But as I pointed out in 2016, that made it almost too easy to document the Times’ increasing obsession during the Late Obama Age Collapse with words such as “racism,” “sexism,” and “transgender.” By 2015, in the sound of the Establishment suffering a nervous breakdown, the NYT was treating “racism” as five times more newsworthy than it had in 2011.
Not long after, the Chronicle web page was disabled.
