Essay: Lying Without Lying (Link)
Lying Without Lying: the Manipulation of Framing, Context & Depth in Corporate Media
During my most recent prolonged absence from writing, I spent a significant amount of time reading about and thinking about the nature of pro-establishment propaganda in the US and the US-inspired corporate media. To be clear, I use that word, propaganda, quite deliberately in this context because the vast majority of the media we are exposed to on a daily basis amounts to propaganda supporting the interests of the influential, powerful and wealthy in our society (regardless of which side of the public sector/private sector revolving door they happen to reside on at the moment) – often at the expense of those at the very bottom of our social and economic pyramids.
Of course, you didn’t need me to tell you that the media lies; literally everyone knows or is at least beginning to suspect that the media lies – which leads us to ask a simple question: does the media always lie?
In a word, yes, but naturally reality is a bit more complicated because the devil is usually in the details; the basic idea that western corporate media is engaged in the act of deception, against its own audience and on behalf of a ruling class that itself owns the media, is as real as penitentiary steel – but that deception doesn’t always take the form of an outright lie. After all, a media that always told you the opposite of the truth would be no more useful to the affluent and powerful people who own the for-profit news, than one that always told you the absolute truth.
So what do we really mean when we say “the media always lies?” Corporate media is almost invariably dishonest in a way that always favors this establishment, but they do not always “lie” – it is the mechanics of this dishonesty, this ability to “lie without lying” that I’d like to discuss with you today. The important truth-distortion techniques we need to understand here are framing, context and depth; the media doesn’t “lie” in a traditional sense as often as most people think they do, there’s a practiced methodology involved here that goes beyond mere “lying” and borders on hacking the human psyche in distressingly predictable ways.
Framing
In the simplest possible terms – framing consists of using the words and ideas surrounding or associated with a story or fact to influence how that story is understood by the media consumer; to “frame” the facts with phrases that automatically bias the reader towards a given, desired conclusion about the original subject itself. When done well, skillful framing allows a propagandist to present the story or fact in a way that if read straight without nuance is technically true, but is so poisoned by the surrounding “frame” that the general ideas readers take from the story are often actually false in any real, practical sense.
While the possible permutations of this technique are quite literally endless, some easy to understand examples might include war correspondence reporting where foreign civilian casualties from American bombings are reported as simply “dead” or “killed,” as if there may be some sort of ambiguity about how that happened. By contrast, western civilian casualties created by our geopolitical enemies are described as “murdered” or “slain” and even Pig Empire troops who die in the act of prosecuting an imperialist war become “victims.” Another example can be found in crime reporting, where outgroups are reported as “suspected” or “charged” criminals but members of the unofficial American aristocracy are merely “alleged” to have committed crimes – a wording that clearly indicates where the media producer in question would prefer your sympathies lie, in either case.
Furthermore, this type of framing can be nested within already existing frames to easily and efficiently generate an entire subconsciously registered, background tapestry of ideas and emotional responses to a given story. Consider for example the contrasting images and impressions invoked when media tells you that “the Macron government has employed tough tactics to quell violent rioters in Paris” as opposed to reporting that “the Assad regime is brutally suppressing its own people in Damascus.” After numerous pro-Macron, positively spun stories about France and near endless anti-Assad, negative stories about the (democratically elected) Syrian “regime” most people are already primed to reach the desired, divergent conclusions about either government’s actions without too much fuss – specifically that the French government’s actions are justified and the Syrian government’s actions are not, even though both states are purportedly engaged in violently suppressing protests in this example. This use of framing is really quite insidious because it works on two levels – by encouraging an active bias towards a desired understanding of the current story, and by exploiting the longstanding, pre-established biases the media have already created around previously framed stories.
Naturally these are all very simple, even extremely obvious examples of the use of framing in corporate media to shape a desired response towards or perception of a given story or fact. The professional writers and more importantly editors tasked with producing a news environment that exults, protects and justifies the existence of our western establishment are however, dark masters of the twisted art of framing; even direct quotation can be manipulated by a talented propagandist to make you want to believe, or disbelieve the statement simply by whipping out a thesaurus and changing the words that frame the quote. Furthermore, unless the media consumer is extremely wary, they’re inclined to absorb all of this framing without even noticing; the reader believes the propagandist is an honest dealer, a “straight shooter” focused on delivering “the facts” – even though the writer or editor has made a subconscious, emotional appeal to alter the audience’s initial and thus most important, perceptions about a story.
Framing isn’t magic, and contrary to popular elitist sentiment, it’s not effective because the public is stupid or gullible – actually, framing only works because you are very smart, or at least the average human brain is capable of processing far more ideas per second than we can consciously register and examine. Indeed, your mind is engaging in all kinds of free association of words and ideas at pretty much every waking moment in which you’re consuming media; you’re generating perhaps thousands of impressions about that information per minute, and each one of those impressions further affects your attitudes towards and understanding of a story or fact. Because however the task of relating ideas to one another, putting new information in context, adopting beliefs and choosing the correct course of action based on that information is so complex, and happening on so many levels in of your subconscious, a lot of it is going on in the background of your mind and you do not perceive it. In layman’s terms, your eye is no longer strictly on the ball and this allows the propagandist to essentially “hack” your brain and steer, if not control, your thoughts, assumptions and ideas about a particular story or fact.
Context and Depth
I’ve grouped these two techniques together because they’re both essentially about controlling the media consumer’s access to information, but in such a way that conforms to or at least avoids conflicting with, our pre-established expectations – and thus doesn’t trigger any mental alarms or psychological defense mechanisms in most observers.
Manipulating context in corporate media offerings is simply a question of which surrounding facts about a story, person or issue are reported or highlighted, and which surrounding facts are omitted or minimized. To understand the mechanics of this manipulation, let’s take a look at horrifyingly generic sample situation that has become all too common in modern American society – a white police officer responding to a minor criminal violation, shoots and murders a young black male.
In light of the media’s inherent bias towards the establishment, there’s a pretty good chance that most of the stories you read about the accused murderer will go out of their way to paint the cop in the best possible light. Stories, particularly early stories, will focus heavily on the officer’s long service record, possibly justifications (even to the point of ridiculousness) for his or her actions and the importance of protecting officer safety even if it means an “accidental” police shooting here or there. Minimized, or more likely omitted entirely from early mainstream media coverage will be the officer’s extensive disciplinary record, history of spousal abuse and objectively racist comments shared with friends or coworkers. If these pro-cop propaganda stories are also offered alongside media products that assure the consumer that the victim “was no angel” and thus, on some level brought his own murder on himself, it’s safe to say that the vast majority of unwary consumers are going to side with the murderer and against the victim – furthermore, they are likely to retain this bias, and even defend it, long after additional facts emerge that call this pro-authority, pro-establishment understanding of the murder into question.
For an entirely less “hypothetical” example of this phenomenon in action, readers need to look no further than the endless, fawning obituaries for former US President George Herbert Walker Bush recently on offer from the mainstream media. While Pig Empire hagiographers in the corporate news focused on Bush’s service in World War II, his (entirely theoretical) rejection of right wing extremism and his supposed global “leadership,” it was up to left wing counter-culture media sources to remind observers about his lies, his war crimes and his role in bringing death squad terrorism to Latin America.
Naturally, this abuse of context technique is used in conjuncture with an insidious, almost mind-blowing amount of framing to steer media consumers in to thought patterns and idea groupings favorable to the establishment. Whether we’re talking about reporting political violence committed by Palestinian dissidents without even mentioning violent oppression by the Israeli apartheid state as a motivating factor, or bemoaning the absence of African American fathers without discussing the modern Jim Crow style mass incarceration complex that actively targets young black men to warehouse for profit, context (or lack thereof) is a powerful, perception-shaping tool in the propagandist’s arsenal.
As in the case of framing, context manipulation also works by exploiting your subconscious mind, specifically your brain’s tendency to fill in missing gaps of information with ideas that enforce what you already know about a story, even if what you already know amounts to very little information. After all, you can’t consider evidence that you don’t know about or facts that you’ve never heard; this allows the propagandist to choose which facts they’ll share & which they won’t and thereby significantly limit, even eliminate, the possibility that you will come to conclusions about a story or fact that lie outside of a range considered acceptable to their elite paymasters.
Finally depth, or in the case of cable television news programming, repetition, is the simplest manipulative tool in the media propagandist’s toolbox; once again the key principle here is that media consumers can’t respond to information they don’t know, or can’t remember.
Stories that reflect negatively on the media’s wealthy patrons, affiliated political causes, and the establishment agenda are reported briefly and often outside of prime time, or are at best covered heavily and inaccurately for a day or two, then dropped. By contrast, stories that are easy to frame for positive effect on behalf of these same establishment forces are given full, week-long coverage with constant updates and repetition of key story elements. In this way consumers absorb the ideas wealthy elites want you to absorb over and over and over again; while you must rely on your memory to remember the ideas the establishment-owned media were forced to report, but would prefer you forget.
For timely examples of this technique in action, readers need look no further than the endless, largely speculative and repetitive coverage of the Russiagate scandal in western corporate media as opposed to minimal coverage of US initiatives to fight impending climate catastrophe and the potential death of most life on earth. Alternately, you could contrast the amount of time, effort and verbiage expended on protecting Jim Acosta’s right to ask questions Sarah Huckabee-Sanders will refuse to adequately answer during White House press briefings, with the dearth of mainstream news coverage of the US and Ecuadorian government’s joint attempts to arrest Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for helping to expose Pig Empire crimes, abuses and deceptions by leaking government documents.
Taken together, these three simple techniques allow propagandists and media manipulators to perpetually “lie” to the public on behalf of the ruling class that employs them – all without ever actually having to utter a bald-faced lie. This isn’t to say that the corporate media never directly lies, they do; but openly lying is not the only or even most effective tool at the corporate media propagandist’s disposal. It is far more effective to steer public thought patterns and emotional responses to a story, issue or fact, in a way that automatically causes them to side with the establishment and adopt the response billionaire media moguls would prefer consumers adopt, seemingly on their own.
The only downside, as our elite thought leaders and opinion influencers are learning, is that subconsciously people also seem to somehow perceive that they are constantly being lied to by a smug punditocracy that presents news by the rich, for the rich and generally at the expensive of working class concerns. Of course, many media consumers can’t quite put their finger on the “what” nor the “how” of this constant deception, but they inherently know that it’s happening and they hate the establishment media for its role in manipulating their thoughts and opinions on behalf of class enemies.
Unfortunately for both the establishment and those who would oppose fascism, this subconscious recognition of the general untrustworthiness of corporate media has also come with disastrous consequences. The public’s (rightful) hatred, mistrust and anger towards media propagandists and their modern aristocratic masters, has created a news environment where absolute truth appears largely unknowable and consumers are left with few options except to subscribe to comfortable opinions that already match their existing worldviews.
It is this partisan world in which what individuals acknowledge as “reality” becomes a question of group identity in an ongoing culture war, that allows circus clown fascists like Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson to ride a tidal wave of latent public resentment to fame, power and influence. Capitalizing on a deeply submerged, but still-continuous sense that “the media is lying to you,” these revanchist demagogues are able to lie, smear and denigrate outgroups freely under the guise of “fighting the establishment”- effectively twisting that pre-existing, anti-corporate media animus towards “criminals, refugees, welfare bums, globalists” and “coastal elites” (read: African Americans, migrants, the poor, Jews and liberals) and mobilizing the resulting anger and bigotry into a unified base of quasi-popular support.
The obvious problem here is that Herr Donald and right wing media propagandists are absolutely correct when they say mainstream liberal media lies to you; naturally, the caveat is that this doesn’t make the blatant lies influential fascists tell you any truer. Tragically, this fact doesn’t seems to matter in a commodified, greyscale world that encourages each of us to subscribe to our own preferred version of the truth because “everybody lies” – at least, so long as that truth supports one faction of wealthy maggot elites, or another.
– Nina Illingworth
