INFORMATION WARFARE
 

The Media

Perception Management

 

 

 

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Anatomy of a Photograph

 

 

 

   

Democracies work only when the voters have reliable, accurate information upon which to base their decisions. 

In the United States, reliable, accurate information is getting harder and harder to come by.  It is not that we aren't bombarded with information because we are - it's that the information is being used to create a false reality - a virtual reality. 

The manufactured version of reality is presented on television.  Newspapers publish canned and sanitized stories from a monopoly provider - American Pravda.

The truth - if one is interested, must be ferreted out on the internet by reading the same stories from different sources.  The cognitive dissonance that results from the two entirely different realities is reminiscent of Rod Sterling's Twilight Zone.  

In an article titled "Without A Doubt", Ron Suskind quoted an senior Bush advisor which confirms the suspicion of a false reality.  

“The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

 

The creation of a virtual reality became government policy during the Reagan Administration as reported by James Kelso in an article titled 'Control of the American News Media'.  The following is an excerpt from that article:

A covert policy, formulated by Ronald Reagan in conjunction with the CIA, was termed “perception management” and was formalized on January 14, 1983 when President Reagan signed the National Security Decision Directive No. 77. The Reagan White House and the CIA felt that a resurrection of anti-war activism in the United States as had occurred during the prolonged and futile Vietnamese war could curtail or halt the Reagan/CIA policy of “aggressive containment,” specifically in Central America.

 This project was also called ‘public diplomacy’ and while it was ostensibly created to develop American public support for Reagan’s foreign policy, it also was constructed to effect control over the opinions of the American public through control of the American media, both TV and press reportage.

 Under the “perception management/public diplomacy” program, the CIA was instructed to take a number of steps to bring the American public’s perceptions into line with an official U.S. governmental policy.

 The first step in this program was to fully analyze the cultural, ethnic, political and religious backgrounds of the general population and attempt to discover what themes resonate best with the greatest number of Americans. When this was been achieved, the next step was to create specific themes to address these cultural weak spots, or “points of public concern.”

This sounds more like a policy of the Soviet Union or Communist China than it does the United States but the Iran-Contra scandal nearly brought down the Reagan Administration.  Leaders in power are all the same, they want to stay in power.  The media - TV and press exposed the corruption of our foreign policy and as such, they represented a threat to that power and the ability to abuse it.