Bigotry By Numbers: How Fake News Creates A Prophecy of Hate
by Amelia Vandergast
I remember a time when I used to turn on the TV to find out what’s going on in the world, I felt safe in the presence of the kind smile of a news reporter in my living room. I felt as though I was connected to the outside world. I made a point of finding out what was going on. I became consumed by the News footage, bombs dropping, cities falling, children starving as I watched from the comfort of my living room. Even when I turned off the TV, I’d see it as I scrolled through social media pages, there was just no reprieve for my impressionable mind. The media loves to tell us about different health warnings that can come through eating the wrong food, living the wrong lifestyle, but they never thought to tell us just how damaging watching the news could be.
The constant stream of violence that we’re exposed to in our ‘switched on’ society is seriously messing with our heads. Remember when our parents told us how terrible video games were? They were full of violence, and they’re so aggressive. But no one bats an eyelash when it comes to viewings of shootings, beheadings, and other macabre images of destruction, violence and war.
So, it turns out that nice news reporter that we’ve grown fond of isn’t quite the person we hoped they’d be. They’re a mouthpiece of the media, who are all grappling for the best story. And by the ‘best’ story, this would be the most heart-wrenching footage they could muster that they will then play on an incessant loop, just so it resonates in our brains the same way it does when you’re watching it over a bowl of cornflakes as it does when you watch the evening news. The Media are just as keen as the creators of Game of Thrones to make it more dramatic, with more bloodshed, and more terror, but their end goal isn’t entertainment, its fear. Fear that has been proven by psychologists to contribute to the development of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
Ultimately changing how we interact with the world outside of our living rooms, but when we REALLY start to look at the inner workings of the media, it all seems to make sense.
Only 6 corporations control 90% of the media in the USA, that’s the music you listen to, TV, News, and Movies you watch, and the Papers and Magazines you read. The entire country is under the influence of a handful of billionaires with their own agenda to reshape public opinion, which is why you should be more cautious than ever about the extreme voices and biases that are now becoming rife in the media thanks to the new media infrastructure made up of establishing elite organizations, cashing in on the social capital i.e. fear.
They are guilty of inciting fear and hatred to create misdirected angst which is why our discourse on different religions, ideologies, and creeds has changed dramatically ever since the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn’t long before ill-educated members of the public rose up in right-wing splinter groups after they’d been so heavily affected by the emotional messaging in the reporting of the events. Whether 9/11 was real is another debate altogether, but undeniably there was a cultural shift in hatred, and to support it, the media was all too willing to support the evidence to ‘validate’ their emotions.
Then this is where the shift from mainstream media to peer to peer social media takes place, people then look for a release to all of their anger, they need an outlet for their newly found bigotry which is why we’ve seen an explosion in hate groups on social media, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups being the most prolific. This society has been engineered by the New World Order with a little help from the media, don’t become part of their self-fulfilling prophecy.