Chapter 15. Propaganda as News and Entertainment
In the winter 2004 issue of 2600, a hacker wrote an article about how to break into the website of CBS and alter the voting process for a reality show called Star Search. Although the article was technically accurate and informative, it showed the true limitations of hacking and aptly demonstrated what author Thomas Pynchon once said: “If you can get people to ask the wrong questions, they’ll never find the right answers.”
After describing how easy it was for hackers to manipulate the online voting process, the hacker wondered, “Why is the CBS Star Search online voting security so lax?” Here are two possible answers:
Security is lax because CBS and Star Search don’t know how to make it better because they don’t even realize there’s a problem.
Security is lax because online voting doesn’t count in the first place.
Where the hacker made his mistake was in assuming the first answer to be correct—assuming that CBS had set up a valid online voting system for Star Search that conscientiously made an effort to accurately count votes from viewers to determine the ultimate winner of the competition.
But what if he had assumed that the second answer was the truthful one, that CBS didn’t really care about the security of its online voting system because no one ever bothered to count viewers’ votes anyway?
In the fine print of every reality TV show application, there’s a disclaimer similar to the following, taken from an application for the CBS program The Amazing Race:
All decisions by the Producers concerning selection of participants and other matters is final and not subject to challenge or appeal.
That sounds harmless enough, but it really means that the producers have the final and ultimate authority to decide which contestants get picked for the show and which ones get eliminated. So, regardless of whether the show has a panel of judges, telephone voting, or online voting open to the public, the producers still reserve the right to override any decisions made by anyone other than themselves. Comedians Drew Carey and Brett Butler found this out when they served as talent judges for the now-canceled NBC reality show Last Comic Standing:
LOS ANGELES (March 8, 2004) – At least two big-name comedians, Drew Carey and Brett Butler, are fuming that the joke was on them when they served as talent judges for a new edition of the NBC reality show “The Last Comic Standing.”
The two sitcom veterans complained Monday that NBC executives and producers of the show overruled their votes for the 10 aspiring comics worthy of advancing to the televised competition set to air this summer.
“I thought it was crooked and dishonest,” Carey, star of the ABC sitcom “The Drew Carey Show,” told entertainment trade paper The Hollywood Reporter.
Separately, Butler, the former star of “Grace Under Fire,” posted a message on her website saying the judges were “both surprised and disappointed at the results and . . . we had NOTHING to do with them.”
NBC said it was up to network brass and producers to decide who made the cut, weighing the opinions of the celebrity panel as just one factor. An NBC spokeswoman said a disclaimer to that effect airs as part of the show’s credits.
(Read the full Reuters article on MSNBC: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4483013.)
Stacey Stillman, one of the contestants on CBS’s Survivor, claimed that the reality show was rigged because Mark Burnett, the producer, coached contestants to vote her off and keep Rudy. (You can read her deposition online at http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/survivor/segstillmanbeendp525.pdf.)
Bob Jaffe, a producer for the reality show Manhunt, claims that executives from Paramount Network Television “felt that there wasn’t enough conflict among the contestants,” so they asked him “to fake entire segments of the game, create phony story lines and misstate the game rules.” (Read the entire story here: www.thestingray.net/manhunt.probe.)
To learn more about claims that various reality TV shows are rigged, contestants are coached, and voting decisions are overridden, visit the Reality Blurred site at www.realityblurred.com. (In case you’re wondering why more reality TV show contestants don’t reveal how they were manipulated, they can’t because of the contracts they signed. To appear on the TV show, contestants are barred from discussing the show without the television networks approval.)
In Hollywood, it’s an open secret that reality TV shows are rigged for purely pragmatic business reasons. Throw a bunch of strangers together and what usually happens? If you’ve ever been to a party, you know that, almost always, the answer is “not much.” But watch a reality TV show and what happens? Someone always turns out to be a villain and someone else always turns into an underdog. There’s always conflict between contestants involving backstabbing, vicious gossip, and exciting dramatic events that capture our imagination and encourage us to watch the next episode.
Most reality show contestants aren’t ordinary people but aspiring actors and actresses whose managers and agents got them on the TV show to gain national exposure and jump-start their careers. With actors pretending to be ordinary people and producers coaching them to behave a certain way, you’re guaranteed to end up with a show full of conflict and drama. If hacking is the ultimate in manipulation and control, then reality television producers have hacked the viewing public, because nothing you see on reality TV shows is real.
If a network is going to invest millions of dollars in a reality TV show, they can’t take the chance that something exciting won’t happen. They have to take control and actively manipulate the results to make something exciting happen. Check out the job notices at EntertainmentCareers.net, and you can even find ads searching for reality TV show writers, such as this one:
This is a FULL TIME JOB Location: Miami FL Date Posted: 2/14/2005 6:07:48 PM Description: New show is seeking a seasoned writer with a background in dramatic non-fiction writing. Will write the script and storyline for a new program.
Requirements: Must be able to create dramatic stories with strong climaxes and resolutions. Experience in writing for a reality show is preferred.
Once the writers have mapped out storylines and character conflicts, the director takes over and films the contestants in such a way that viewers only see scenes that follow the writers’ recommendations for creating phony plots around each contestant. What you see on TV isn’t necessarily what happened. It’s only one version of many possible alternatives that were filmed. The games and contests you see are just what the writers expected would generate the most conflict and drama to fit their preplanned storyline.
Some reality TV shows also invite the audience to vote for winners through a 1-900 number phone line or a website. Here’s where you discover the real reason why Star Search and many other reality shows have such lax security for online voting: They don’t care because the votes don’t count.
The purpose of telephone and online voting isn’t to choose a winner. The producers, with the aid of the director and a team of writers, made that decision months earlier when the reality show was filmed. Instead, the purpose of telephone and online voting is to give the audience an emotional stake in the show’s outcome and encourage them to watch the next episode
If you dial the 1-900 number to vote, you’re just paying money to the producer, not having an impact on the final outcome of the show. If you vote online, you can vote as many times as you want and even hack into the voting system, and nobody cares because nobody’s counting the votes. Voting for a reality show contestant is like trying to vote today for the Nixon-Kennedy election of 1960. It’s already happened, and nothing you can do will change the result. If you’re looking to influence the results of a reality TV show through voting or hacking, you’ve already lost before the game’s begun and you don’t even know it.
Reality TV shows are a business, and business is about minimizing risks for maximum financial return. If computer hackers really want to affect the evolution of a reality show, the best way isn’t to manipulate the votes; it’s to stop everyone from voting in the first place and expose the deception of the reality show producers when they publicize the so-called results. If you can prevent 100 percent of online votes from even being cast, anything the producers say occurred can be revealed as the lie it really is. (But even then, the reality show producers are one step ahead of you. They grant themselves the right to ignore online voting due to “technical difficulties.”)
The lesson to learn from reality TV shows is that hacking is more than mere technical skill; it’s seeing beyond the obvious, questioning unspoken assumptions, and exposing lies. Hack away at all the reality TV voting sites as much as you like. It won’t matter; the outcome has already been decided, and it’s never going to be decided by you. (To learn how American presidential elections can be eerily similar to reality TV show voting, visit ElectionArchive.org at http://uscountvotes.org.)
Before you hack any system, make sure that someone hasn’t secretly hacked you first. In the world of reality TV show programming, you’ve been hacked and deceived from the start, and I guarantee it. Oh, wait a minute. I don’t have to guarantee that because reality TV show producers have done that for me already.
The News as Reality TV
There’s nothing wrong with suspending belief when it comes to watching TV shows for entertainment. The problem comes when people mistake illusions for reality and accept deliberate deceptions as the truth. Whereas reality TV lies to viewers in the interest of greater entertainment value, news sources lie for a variety of reasons, none of which benefits their audience.
On September 8, 2004, the CBS television news show 60 Minutes failed to verify the authenticity of National Guard memos that appeared to prove that George Bush didn’t serve his entire term in the National Guard.
Between 1999 and 2003, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair faked facts, quotes, and entire interviews for as many as 36 stories.
In 1994, ABC journalist Cokie Roberts wore a coat, stood in front of a fake backdrop, and claimed she was reporting live from Capitol Hill when she was really standing inside an ABC studio.
In 2003, the White House released video showing President George Bush receiving a standing ovation from a cheering crowd after he signed a Medicare bill into law. White House officials later admitted that the people portraying the crowd and journalists were actually actors hired for the videotaping.
On October 27, 2004, President Bush’s reelection campaign released a television ad called “Whatever It Takes,” which depicted a crowd of American soldiers listening while President Bush said, “I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes.” The images of American soldiers in the ad, however, were doctored so that identical soldiers turn up in multiple locations to make the favorable crowd seem larger, as shown in Figure 15-1.
On October 13, 2005, President George Bush held a teleconference billed as “a conversation with U.S. troops.” The White House later admitted that the soldiers had been coached to ask the President only those questions choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and the upcoming vote on a new Iraqi constitution.
In December 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Pentagon had hired a Washington-based contractor, the Lincoln Group, to plant “positive news stories” in Iraqi newspapers without attributing the source as being the US military itself.
With so many documented cases of deliberate lies and distortion of the facts by the news media, it’s hard to know what to believe. The only sure fact is that the news has never been and never will be 100 percent trustworthy. (Read newspapers around the world, and you’ll often get widely varying interpretations of identical “facts.”) If you accept that, you’re already way ahead of anyone who wants to believe otherwise.
Corporate Influence on the News
Most news media outlets (newspapers, television and radio stations, and magazines) are owned by corporations that rely on advertisements to pay the bills. So what are the odds that a newspaper will run a story criticizing a major advertiser or run a story exposing malfeasance by the media’s corporate owner? More important, what news outlet is going to risk raising the ire of its own government, jeopardizing its access to future press conferences that the competition will surely be allowed to attend?
Note
Ever wonder why news reporters never seem to ask tough questions of presidents? It’s because reporters are screened for “trustworthiness” and their questions “approved” beforehand. To prevent further embarrassment, most government press conferences are taped to hide any problems that could occur during a live broadcast.
Project Censored: the news you never read about
If you want to know what bias, influence, or subtle censorship may be influencing your favorite news media, don’t look at the stories they print or broadcast. Look at the stories they won’t print or broadcast. Every year, Project Censored (www.projectcensored.org) offers its list of the top 10 stories that the news media conveniently ignored, which often turn out to be major environmental, political, or social disasters that make a prominent corporation or government look corrupt, exploitative, or criminally incompetent.
Some recent stories that Project Censored highlighted include the following:
A report by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy that discloses how CEOs in the defense industry have seen a 200 percent pay increase since September 11, 2001, compared to a 7 percent increase for CEOs in other industries.
That the US military has been secretly dropping napalm in Iraq, despite a 1980 United Nations ban on the use of incendiary weapons. Of course, the US never signed the UN protocol and calls the weapon “firebombs” or MK-77s, which is just the military term for napalm according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website (www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/mk77.htm), shown in Figure 15-2.
News that the World Health Organization has approved genetic modification of the smallpox virus, while the Department of Homeland Security claims they are experimenting with the virus in order to develop smallpox vaccines in case of a terrorist attack. Scientists estimate that the accidental release of the smallpox virus could threaten millions of lives.
Drink milk—the chemicals are good for you
Rather than stir up trouble, many newspapers and television stations simply avoid any controversy related to their advertisers, readers, or corporate owners.
In 1997, according to SourceWatch.org, husband-and-wife journalists Steve Wilson and Jane Akre claimed that they were fired from FOX-owned WTVT Channel 13 in Tampa, Florida, for refusing to broadcast a diluted version of their story, “Mystery in Your Milk,” which warned about the Monsanto Corporation’s synthetic bovine growth hormone (BGH), called rBST. Wilson described the story:
We set out to tell Florida consumers the truth a giant chemical company and a powerful dairy lobby clearly doesn’t want them to know. That used to be something investigative reporters won awards for. As we’ve learned the hard way, it’s something you can be fired for these days whenever a news organization places more value on its bottom line than on delivering the news to its viewers honestly.
FOX forced Wilson and Akre to rewrite their story 83 times over the course of nearly a year, and not one of those 83 rewrites was to correct factual errors. Instead, they were intended to downplay the story’s findings about the potential dangers of BGH contamination in the nation’s milk supply. A Florida state court jury unanimously determined that FOX “acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs’ news reporting,” according to SourceWatch. To learn more about Monsanto and WTVT’s efforts to hide the truth about BGH-contaminated milk, visit the BGH Bulletin site (www.foxbghsuit.com), shown in Figure 15-3.
The objective news from ABC and Wal-Mart
The Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting site (www.fair.org) reported that Wal-Mart sponsors the “Person of the Week” segment on ABC’s World News Tonight (which sports multiple ads for Wal-Mart, as shown in Figure 15-4) and the “Only in America” series on ABC’s Good Morning America, and even sells a line of perfume that was featured on one of ABC’s soap operas.
Given this cozy relationship, how did ABC News report the largest class action suit in US history, in which more than 1 million workers accused Wal-Mart of sexual discrimination?
ABC News interviewed three people who criticized the case, including Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s CEO; Steve Bokat from the US Chamber of Commerce, who called the suit “fundamentally unfair”; and Tim Kane of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who said, “It will make the management risk-averse, that adds cost to you and I.”
ABC News reporter Geoff Morrell added, “Economists say that could have a chilling effect on big retailers, forcing them to raise prices and implement stricter policies for promotion.”
Only plaintiff Chris Kwapnoski spoke out against Wal-Mart in the ABC segment. Even then, Morrell helped undercut her credibility by mentioning, “Ironically, Chris Kwapnoski was promoted three days after filing her suit.” ABC News failed to question whether her promotion was part of Wal-Mart’s strategy to buy her silence.
The mystery bulge on George Bush’s back
During the 2004 presidential debates, photographs appeared showing a mysterious bulge underneath George Bush’s jacket. White House officials immediately dismissed rumors that the bulge was a secret communications device that allowed Bush to receive answers from someone else. Other reports claimed that the bulge was nothing more than a strap for a bulletproof vest. The White House tailor even claimed that the bulge was nothing more than a wrinkle in the fabric.
One explanation for the bulge that nobody heard about from the mainstream media was from Dr. Robert Nelson, a senior research scientist for NASA and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who also happens to be an international authority on image analysis. His recent work has involved analyzing digital photos of Saturn’s moon Titan to determine whether different shapes are craters or canyons.
“I am willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate,” Dr. Nelson stated in a Salon.com article (www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/29/bulge/index_np.html), shown in Figure 15-5. “This is not about a bad suit. And there’s no way the bulge can be described as a wrinkled shirt.”
Outside of Salon.com’s readers, most people have never heard about Dr. Nelson’s analysis. The Pasadena Star-News didn’t print the story because senior editors killed it right before its publication. The New York Times almost ran the story, but also killed it at the last minute. Why would the news media kill such an interesting story based on credible analysis? Perhaps the real story isn’t the bulge underneath George Bush’s jacket, but who gave the orders and why for making sure the news media never reported it.
For more information about media bias and sources of alternate news, visit the websites for Chicago Media Watch (www.chicagomediawatch.org), Free Speech TV (www.freespeech.org), and WebActive (www.webactive.com).
The News Only Reports the Facts—And Anything Else Anyone Will Tell Them
No matter how much you trust a particular news source, it can be wrong, whether knowingly or unwittingly. The news media gets its information from its own reporters, from wire services, and from anyone else who contacts them with an interesting story. Slip misleading information to the news media, and it’s possible that the reporters won’t bother to verify the facts and will simply present the information as news in the interest of higher ratings.
One self-proclaimed multimedia artist, Joey Skaggs (www.joeyskaggs.com) has turned misinformation into an art form, using the media itself as his canvas to demonstrate their frequent gullibility in broadcasting “news” without verifying the source’s credibility. Joey Skaggs has appeared on Good Morning America and CNN, and in print in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Post, discussing such outrageous “news” as a vitamin pill made from cockroaches; a brothel for dogs; a new genetically engineered chemical, dubbed BioPEEP, that gets people addicted to eating certain foods; and a “celebrity sperm bank,” where Bob Dylan and The Beatles had allegedly left deposits.
Joey Skaggs boasts that he leaves plenty of clues for news reporters to identify his pranks, yet they never find this information simply because they never bother verifying the “facts” he provides. One television station even won an Emmy for reporting on Joey Skaggs’s brothel-for-dogs story (“A cat house for dogs featuring a savory selection of hot bitches”). Later, when Joey insisted that he had made up the whole thing, the news station reported his denial as further “evidence” that he was trying to avoid criminal responsibility for running his (fictional) dog brothel.
Next time you form an opinion based on something you’ve read, seen, or heard from your favorite trusted news source, remember that it could be the truth, it could be partial information lacking crucial facts, or it could just be another media hoax perpetrated by someone like Joey Skaggs. Whatever the case, read the news carefully and be aware that, no matter how strongly you hold an opinion, you could always be completely wrong.
The News as History
There’s no better way to learn about the past than by seeing what people were reading and watching back when historical events actually occurred. For a trip back in time, visit the Internet Archive (www.archive.org). You can get a feel for the mood surrounding a particular newsworthy event, such as the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, by browsing through old web pages, as shown in Figure 15-6.
The Internet Archive also stores video clips of old television reports, along with a library of TV commercials and government films distributed since the 1940s. From these old government films, you can see how much (or how little) the American government has really changed.
Some classics include the infamous “Duck and Cover” film, which taught children to survive a nuclear attack by holding a jacket over their heads, and another short film explaining the hazards of biowarfare, which warns that Communist agents could attack the United States by pouring toxins into our water supply or by using crop dusters to spray an entire area with germs. Substitute the word terrorist for Communist, and you can see how relevant this particular film remains today.
Fear, Future, Fun, and Fakes: The Weekly World News as a Role Model for the News Media
They’ve skewered the news to avoid upsetting corporate sponsors, gotten fooled by media manipulators like Joey Skaggs, and buried anything that might embarrass the government, so what’s left for the news media besides focusing on ratings? To understand how the news media works at a base level, check out the Weekly World News (www.weeklyworldnews.com), a sensationalist tabloid, as shown in Figure 15-7, which uses tactics similar to those of the more “respected” news media in order to attract an audience: Fear, Future, Fun, and Fakes.
Fear: attracting an audience
Whether it’s the Weekly World News or the New York Times, the news media have to get people to pay attention to them, and the best way to do that is to appeal to people’s fears. Fear headlines frighten but intrigue readers in much the same way that looking at a traffic accident can horrify but fascinate people at the same time. Consider these headlines from the Weekly World News:
| “Aliens using e-mail to seduce Earth women!” |
| “Real reason for war in Iraq: Bush wanted to protect the Garden of Eden from Saddam” |
| “Dolphins are growing arms and legs” (“If they learn to walk and make weapons, they would become a formidable foe for all mankind!”) |
If you browse the headlines of “respected” media around the world on sites such as WorldPress.org (www.worldpress.org), World Headlines (www.worldheadlines.com), or Science Daily (www.sciencedaily.com), you can find similar fear-inducing stories, including:
| “Cheney appeals for torture exemption” (Seattle Times) |
| “Bush said God told him to invade Iraq, Afghanistan” (BBC) |
| “Scientists show how thinking can harm brain cells” (University of Rochester Medical Center) |
What makes the Weekly World News headlines funny is that we know they’re fake. What makes the headlines from “respected” news media horrifying is that they’re real (assuming you believe anything the news media report in the first place).
Future: distracting from the present
People can stand only so many threats of global warming, killer flu epidemics, or terrorist attacks, so the news media also serve up healthy doses of stories focused on an imaginary future. These headlines can take people’s minds off the present, as shown in the following Weekly World News headlines:
| “Bigfoot to join the cast of ‘The Sopranos’” |
| “Bill Gates to buy Mars!” |
| “Moon will hit Earth in five years!” |
The “respectable” news media also speculate about the future, but since the future changes so rapidly, predictions made today often get buried and forgotten behind newer predictions made tomorrow. The result is that the news media rarely have the time, space, or even desire to follow up on the accuracy of previous predictions, such as the following:
| “Economic ‘Armageddon’ predicted” (Boston Herald) |
| “Experts warn of cyber terrorist attacks” (Datamation magazine) |
| “Many in India getting ready for the coming upheaval of 2012—will we survive?” (India Daily) |
Did any of these headlines about the future come true? More importantly, did anyone even bother to check and run the follow-up story? As the Weekly World News knows, people will quickly forget past predictions as long as you keep bombarding them with new ones.
Fun: keeping people happy
After frightening readers and distracting them with meaningless predictions about the future, the media finally needs to give people something to feel good about. Such trivia, also called human interest stories, focuses on entertaining stories and topics that appeal to the emotions, such as the following Weekly World News headlines:
| “How to tell if you’ve been abducted by aliens” |
| “Are demons talking to you? (Useful things you can learn from them!)” |
| “How to fool babes into thinking you’re a doctor” |
In the “respectable” news media, the fun trivia stories provide a respite from the constant barrage of negative news and keep the audience from fleeing. You probably won’t learn much from such trivia news stories, but then again, that might be the point, as the following headlines demonstrate:
| “Einstein Managed His Inbox Just Like You” (FOX News) |
| “Hunting Season Opens for Mythical Creature” (Associated Press) |
| “Think your house is haunted? Find out now” (CBS News) |
While everyone agrees that the Weekly World News distorts the truth and fabricates lies just to sell papers, few people want to admit that traditional news media do the exact same thing. The Weekly World News is just more upfront about it.
Fakes: lies are more interesting than the truth
No one’s really fooled by the poorly doctored “photographs” that appear regularly in the Weekly World News showing the president meeting with space aliens at the White House, a World War II B-17 bomber found on the moon, or a Titanic survivor peering through the closed porthole of the ship.
But plenty of people are fooled by photographs that have been subtly altered to distort reality and portray a vision that never existed in the first place, especially when those distorted images appear in “trusted” news outlets.
TV Guide and Oprah Winfrey
For its August 26, 1989, cover, TV Guide featured a picture of daytime talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. Unfortunately, it wasn’t real. TV Guide later admitted that its editors had combined the head of Oprah with the body from a 1979 publicity shot of Ann-Margret. Neither Oprah nor Ann-Margret had given TV Guide permission to use their pictures. The fraud was detected by Ann-Margret’s fashion designer, who recognized the gauzy dress shown in Figure 15-8.
Newsweek and Martha Stewart
The March 7, 2005, issue of Newsweek had a picture of a laughing Martha Stewart for its cover story about the domestic diva’s imminent release from prison. However, the picture was actually a picture of Martha Stewart’s head pasted on the body of a model who had been photographed in a Los Angeles studio, as shown in Figure 15-9. Newsweek did mention (in fine print) that the image wasn’t real.
O.J. Simpson and Time
On June 27, 1994, Time displayed an altered version of O.J. Simpson’s police mug shot, darkened to make it look more sinister. This alteration might have gone unnoticed if Newsweek hadn’t used the exact same mug shot on its cover too, as shown in Figure 15-10.
Diversity at the University of Wisconsin
In an attempt to show diversity in the student body of their school, editors at the University of Wisconsin’s magazine Wisconsin digitally added a black man’s face to a photograph of cheering students. The altered image appeared on the magazine’s cover, as shown in Figure 15-11.
Bobbi McCaughey, Newsweek, and Time
In 1997, Bobbi McCaughey gave birth to the first set of surviving septuplets. Unfortunately, Bobbi’s looks were deemed not suitable for publication by Newsweek, so when the magazine put her on its cover, editors straightened and whitened her teeth. Time published a similar picture, but only whitened her teeth, as shown in Figure 15-12. Ironically, the only newspaper that showed Bobbi’s teeth unaltered was the National Enquirer.
Using Satire to Report on Reality
Humor is most effective when it reflects either the truth or what people believe to be the truth. As a result, humor can often expose events in ways that ordinary news stories cannot. Perhaps one of the best satirical newspapers around is The Onion (www.theonion.com), which prints articles with just enough facts to make its news stories credible and hilarious at the same time, as shown in Figure 15-13.
Other headlines from The Onion include “Iraqi Cop Moonlighting As Terrorist Just To Make Ends Meet,” “Pope Condemns Three More Glands,” and “Mom-And-Pop Loan Sharks Being Driven Out By Big Credit-Card Companies.”
The Abrupt website (www.abrupt.org) also uses humor to satirize current events, which its writers refer to as “culture jamming.” The idea is to twist corporate logos and marketing psychology to surprise and shock people into looking at the message from a fresh perspective, as shown in Figure 15-14.
Blogs as News Sources
Rather than deal with the self-censorship and timidity of the established press, many people are reading eyewitness accounts posted online independently. These individual diaries, known as blogs, as shown in Figure 15-15, provide raw, unedited stories from ordinary people who just happen to be caught in the crossfire of world events.
Blogs are uncensored and unedited so you get one person’s thoughts, along with his or her misspellings and grammatical errors. By reading blogs from people on both sides of a conflict, you can get a more complete and possibly accurate idea of what’s really happening in the world.
To give you an idea how truthful (and thus dangerous) blogs can be, bloggers have even been detained and arrested by governments all over the world, including Libya, Egypt, and China. To find a blog, visit Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com), Technorati (www.technorati.com), Daypop (www.daypop.com), or Bloogz (www.bloogz.com).
By definition, blogs are one-sided and opinionated, but if you read several blogs written by different people, you’re sure to get a more balanced perspective. In many countries, blogs may be the only way to get news out to the rest of the world and represent one way to overcome a government’s censorship.
Freedom of speech means nothing if nobody has anything to say, and freedom of the press is useless if the media gives you entertainment instead of information. Blogs combine freedom of speech with freedom of the press to form a new medium of communication, entertainment, and information. Considering how easily fooled the traditional news media are, blogs may be your best source for the unvarnished truth. Unless, of course, someone writes a blog specifically to distort the truth or lie about it.
In an effort to sway public opinion, Martha Stewart, HealthSouth’s Richard Scrushy, and Enron’s Kenneth Lay all started their own websites and blogs to present their side of the story before their much-publicized trials. Kenneth Lay’s site even listed his community service awards, including his association with local churches, being named “Father of the Year” by a local community group, and his work as Houston’s finance committee chairman for George Bush in 1988. By promoting such “wholesome” images of accused criminals, these websites and blogs hope to convince the public that they couldn’t possibly be guilty. After all, would someone named Father of the Year really deceive a company like Enron for his own personal benefit?
While blogs often represent “grassroots” campaigns, corporations and public relations firms have noticed the influence such blogs can have and have started to fight back by using blogs of their own. Corporate use of blogs, to mimic grassroots campaigns, are often “astroturfing,” to emphasize their fake grassroots origin.
In 2001, Microsoft was accused of astroturfing when newspapers received a flood of letters, protesting the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Microsoft. When traced, the names and addresses of these letters eventually led to dead people and nonexistent towns.
In 2006, bloggers suddenly started attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health insurance. “All across the country, newspaper editorial boards—no great friends of business—are ripping the bills,” pro–Wal-Mart bloggers claimed, and they used those exact same words because it was later revealed that they had been written and distributed to the bloggers by Wal-Mart’s public relations company. While there’s nothing wrong with bloggers reprinting someone else’s words, there is something wrong when they don’t reveal the source of those same words and pretend that they’re original thoughts of their own.
After exposing Wal-Mart’s astroturfing of blogs, the New York Times later revealed the contents of an internal Wal-Mart memo that focused on these same health care issues. According to this memo (www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/26walmart.pdf), Wal-Mart suggests that one way to discourage unhealthy job applicants is to make sure “all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering).”
The memo further states that “it will be far easier to attract and retain a healthier work force than it will be to change behavior in an existing one. These moves would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart.”
Trying to sort out facts, lies, and altered perceptions on blogs will likely become a new Internet pastime. Many blogs are now as unreliable as the traditional news media when it comes to reporting the truth, and as the effectiveness of using blogs to propagate one’s view becomes more widely known, they will increasingly tend toward the same weaknesses that keep the traditional media from reporting the truth. Reality is only what you choose to see, and alarmingly, what people choose to see is what someone else decides they should see.