Devil is not in the details...

[libertypirate]

By Wayne Collins [e-mail]

Take a moment and look at the structure of language and how stereotypes are reinforced. You might not think suggestive language can invoke a response, but we know that it does. There is a reason they don’t slip single frames into the beginning of movies to get you to buy popcorn; it can unfairly invoke a response and get you to buy popcorn. It is not rational it’s a very sick means of communication it's disingenuous. The techniques are used to create situations where you are less likely to want to be part of a group or think a certain perspective, politically. Please read bellow and remember the devil is not in the details it is in the structure of language!

This was the first publicly available news response I found from AP (Associated Press) on the Jeff Gannon story. It perfectly illustrates how the presentation of information can skew our individual view of the story being told, and how we unknowingly fall for it every time. Maybe we can do something about that.
Let me show you the difference between propaganda and news.
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Reporter Quits Amid Credential Questions
Thursday February 10, 2005 6:31 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) - A writer who attracted attention by asking President Bush a loaded question at a news conference last month has resigned amid questions about his identity and background.
James D. Guckert, who wrote under the name Jeff Gannon, said on his Web site that he was leaving ``because of the attention being paid to me.'' He had been Washington bureau chief for Talon News outlet associated with another Web site, GOPUSA.

Guckert frequently attended White House press briefings over the last two years and asked pointedly conservative questions. Called on by Bush at a Jan. 26 news conference, Guckert said Senate Democratic leaders were painting a bleak picture of the economy and he asked Bush how the president would work ``with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.''

The question prompted scrutiny, particularly from bloggers. Guckert was linked with online domain addresses suggestive of gay pornography. Guckert, a former resident of Wilmington, Del., told The (Wilmington) News Journal newspaper that he had registered the domain names for a client while he was working to set up a Web-hosting business.
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Now don’t blink, it is very subtle.
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Reporter Quits Amid Credential Questions
Thursday February 10, 2005 6:31 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) - A conservative writer who attracted attention by asking President Bush a loaded question at a news conference last month has resigned amid questions about his identity and background.
James D. Guckert, who wrote under the name Jeff Gannon, said on his Web site that he was leaving ``because of the attention being paid to me.'' He had been Washington bureau chief for Talon News, a conservative online news outlet associated with another Web site, GOPUSA.

Guckert frequently attended White House press briefings over the last two years and asked pointedly conservative questions. Called on by Bush at a Jan. 26 news conference, Guckert said Senate Democratic leaders were painting a bleak picture of the economy and he asked Bush how the president would work ``with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.''

The question prompted scrutiny, particularly from liberal bloggers. Guckert was linked with online domain addresses suggestive of gay pornography. Guckert, a former resident of Wilmington, Del., told The (Wilmington) News Journal newspaper that he had registered the domain names for a client while he was working to set up a Web-hosting business.
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Each is a story, but because I took the emotional hooks out of the first one, they read completely different.

It is important that you know propaganda is like character building designed to invoke an emotional connection to something about a specific character. The first character Gannon/Guckert is viewed differently depending on your emotional response to the words “a conservative writer.” If you are a conservative, you would tend to identify more favorably to the character and if you were liberal, you would see him less favorably. This is just how people associate with other people by what is common between them.

I had a Spanish teacher in community college that always reiterated this in class: Repetition is the process of recollection. Thank you for grinding this into me. Anyway, you all get the point; it is about reinforcing a response, behavior, or thought. In this case, what you have in common with the character: in each of the first three paragraphs the reference to conservative appears “a conservative writer,“ “a conservative online news outlet,” and “pointedly conservative questions.” Each statement is reinforcing what you stereotypically believe about a conservative and associating your beliefs to each of the previous statements.

When you get to the words “liberal bloggers” and they associate the word "liberal" to the character bloggers, it engages how you feel about liberals and labels the character with your felt response. The bloggers, writer, news outlet, and even the questions are characters and because of how you perceive them, you afford them your trust or skepticism.

There are also instances of misinformation used to describe some of the scenery and props that help portray the story. When they quote him saying “because of the attention being paid to me,” they actually changed the punctuation in the sentence and the words which changed the meaning. On the jeffgannon.com site, the sentence originally ends “paid to me, and my family.” I can’t think of a reason why one would cut that out, but changing the meaning of someone’s statement doesn’t quite add up if this is journalism. I checked the jeffgannon.com site and now the text on it has been altered to match the quoted statement in the AP article.

There is also a more notable error surrounding the problems with Mr. Gannon’s website addresses. They portrayed them as your average vanilla gay porn sites. When in reality, the names alone advertise homosexual prostitution of military men (militaryescortsM4M.com).

Conservatives are more then likely not going to sympathize with Mr. Gannon\Guckert and probably not going to look at anything about this any more seriously -- possibly ever. The liberal on the other hand is going to get stuck in the details, which will turn off the conservatives because they really don’t care. Altering the details could encourage the idea that there are two versions of the story, when notably there should not be this problem if this were journalism.

Although we all read the same text, we build characters individually, and because of how we perceive the world and others, determines the story we build. This happens to all of us without fail; it is part of who we are to associate the world to what we already think of it. Fortunately, though there is something that can be done to fight and expose it. When you read your news, try to subtract those extra words and ask yourself if it would change your opinion of the characters being portrayed or change the meaning of the information being presented.

I am not sure if this AP piece was just easy for me to see the manipulation, but I think I will be paying a little closer attention to the next report off the wire. I hope that many conservatives have the opportunity to understand this problem and reiterate it to other like-minded folks. This is not a liberal/conservative issue; this is really an American issue. The fault here should not be associated to anyone’s perceived notion of whom or what was the cause of this type of reporting. I am certain that they will brush everything off as coincidence and that the wire report was not meant to be manipulative. In fact, though I know it does matter and until unlike-minded folks demand that it stops, I don’t think it will.

The original wire I found from AP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-479 ...

What’s left of JeffGannon.com
http://www.jeffgannon.com

Let me know what you think

[Nimrod]

1. Very well written!

Bravo!

[libertypirate]

2. I just wish more peole would read it....

Thank you

Once people know what to look for it starts popping out at them, even the republicans at work. We can once again have converstations, it is very strange but what is great is they see it too.

This just defined it...

Wayne

[Old and In the Way]

4. Interesting deconstruction.

What passes as news today needs careful deconstructing, no doubt. I'm afraid that as the news gets more obviously a problem for the criminals in charge, the art of subtle word selection to frame the desired reinforcement of the status quo becomes more important.

You have to wonder if a simple 3 paragraph story on the news wires might take 3 or 4 hours to write in order to get the subliminal message correct.

[distantearlywarning]

3. I realized this kind of thing was going on some time ago.

This is why I have distanced myself from MSM.

And by the way, while I agree with many of your points, they actually are "slipping single frames" into the things people watch these days (or will be doing that soon). Yes, it's unethical, but not illegal, as many people believe.

The Bush campaign actually attempted to crudely use subliminal advertising in 2000 (the "rats" campaign, if anyone remembers that), but it was so poorly done that somebody realized it was being done and brought it to the attention of the media, etc. Not that the average person heard much about that (what a surprise, huh?)

In any case, a particular brand of social psychologists out there researching automaticity and stereotyping has made great strides in increasing the efficacy of "subliminal advertising" in recent years. It is now possible to do things in the lab like:

1) subliminally prime (with the insertion of frames or something similar) human subjects to have certain kinds of subconscious goals, thwart those goals, and then prompt the subject to attribute the resulting frustration to the actions of a third unrelated party. All this without the subject realizing that any of it has taken place until the experimenter tells them so in a debriefing (and even then they don't believe it)

2) subliminally prime stereotypes (for instance, that black people are hostile), provoking the subject to behave in stereotypical ways (hostile, in the above example).

3) subliminally prime the likelihood of other behaviors such as success-seeking or self-handicapping

I'e seen some of the recent research, and this is scary shit, people. If KKKarl Rove doesn't know how to do this yet, he's probably working on it now. If they start doing this in news broadcasts, for instance, even the smartest and most aware of us are in danger of having our conscious control somewhat bypassed.

I know this totally sounds like conspiracy theory, but it really isn't. There's been quite a bit of scientific research conducted about this topic since the late 1990's - you just don't hear about it in the places average Americans get their news.

[libertypirate]

5. Can you point me to some links?

Thanks

I would like to get some more specific background...