Over the last decade, media concentration has become even more prominent. The scholars in their ivory towers have been sounding the alarm bells for quite some time. They've discovered that media ownership concentration wields immense power. It's like a puppeteer controlling the strings of editorial boards and newsrooms, restricting the range of content, shoving less popular (but equally important) stuff to the margins, and turning the entire cultural industry into a commodified circus.

If you thought media concentration was slowing down, think again. The numbers tell a different story. At the global, national, and local levels, media ownership concentration is increasing. The digital age hasn't saved us from this power imbalance; instead, it's just handed over the reins to a new set of rulers. Digital communication platforms are like mirror images of the old media structures, reflecting and perpetuating the same dominance.

The video is based on this chapter:
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1641183/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The film deliberately raises and comments on a number of contemporary (and timeless) political issues, and most notably provides a scathing indictment of the toxic combination of greed and political ambition.

Clones, furthermore, as the fifth instalment of the Star Wars saga, is also an epic commentary on American and international politics and economics, past as well as present, and on the rise and fall of political empires in general as an ongoing, cyclical process in human history, based on human greed/appetite, aggressiveness, hatred, and fear.

#starwars #politics #clonewars

It has been widely claimed by those on the political right in the United States that social media platforms are biased against conservatives. Many conservative activists, including former President Donald Trump, have filed lawsuits against social media companies, accusing them of censoring users with an anti-conservative bias. This view is shared by many Republican voters. For example, in an August 2020 poll, roughly seven-in-ten Republicans said major social media sites tend to favour liberals over conservatives. Allegations of platform bias against conservatives have become an important part of the American political landscape, as such allegations are now regularly used in the rhetoric of Republican politicians. Many social media companies are also very concerned about being perceived as having an anti-conservative bias, and such concerns may sway the decision-making of such companies. Yet these charges of political bias are based on anecdotal instances of particular platform actions (e.g., Twitter’s permanent suspension of Trump’s account), rather than any systematic evaluation of how rates of platform enforcement – such as account suspension – vary based on users’ political orientations. Thus, it is unclear whether social media platforms are in fact more likely to suspend users that are conservative or Republican.

You can find the research papers here:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2025334119

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304954815_Shifting_the_blame_Populist_politicians%27_use_of_Twitter_as_a_tool_of_opposition

Noam Chomsky's manufacturing consent filter 4 discusses how flak causes the media to self-censor and how this forms a filter regarding which news is published.

Flak and the Enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.

Journalists Under Pressure
https://rm.coe.int/168070ad5d

The Guardian shows its mettle
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2009-09-04/guardian-shows-its-mettle/
Accountability and the organ theft controversy
https://electronicintifada.net/content/accountability-and-organ-theft-controversy/8427

Big companies ‘buy influence’ with funding for think tanks
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/big-companies-buy-influence-with-funding-for-think-tanks-6x85mpx9q

John Humphrys reveals Blair's Labour threatened to withdraw co-operation from Radio 4's Today unless they dealt with the 'Humphrys problem'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4110540/John-Humphrys-reveals-Blair-s-Labour-threatened-withdraw-operation-Radio-4-s-Today-unless-dealt-Humphrys-problem.html

BBC, Blair call truce as heads roll over Iraq
https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20040130/local/bbc-blair-call-truce-as-heads-roll-over-iraq.131148

Russia Today threatened with Ofcom sanctions due to bias
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/10/russia-today-ofcom-sanctions-impartiality-ukraine-coverage

RT sanctioned by Ofcom over series of misleading and biased articles
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/sep/21/rt-sanctioned-over-series-of-misleading-articles-by-media-watchdog?CMP=twt_a-media_b-gdnmedia

BBC spent £350,000 on legal battle to keep report on its 'biased' Middle East coverage secret
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2101629/BBC-wins-battle-report-biased-journalism-secret.html
Guardian 'changed Iraq article to avoid offending Apple'

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/media/11425580/Guardian-changed-Iraq-article-to-avoid-offending-Apple.html

Data Firm That Helped Trump Threatens to Sue the Guardian Over Investigative Series About Brexit
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/06/14/data-firm-helped-trump-sues-the-guardian-brexit-cambridge-analytica/

I won’t keep my silence: Michael Fallon lunged at me after our lunch
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2017/nov/04/michael-fallon-lunged-at-me-jane-merrick

The increasingly close ties between leading politicians and journalists in Britain have been to the detriment of the public interest

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/politicians-and-journalists-in-britain/

#chomsky #propagnda #changethemedia

Socrates in Plato's Republic attacks democracy and has become known as anti-democratic. Socrates famously characterises democracy as the rule of the unwise, corrupt mob. The reason for this is that Socrates believes that most people do not have the kinds of talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves.

Therefore if people did have those abilities would he have been against democracy as much?

Plato’s democracy, it is worth noting, is not the modern notion of a mix of representative democracy and republicanism, but rather direct democracy by what he terms “the poor masses” by way of pure majority rule.

The fact that we have a different government than Athens doesn’t mean we don’t share similar problems. Socrates was worried about the problems posed by an uneducated and easily led population having power over the state.

Manufacturing Consent for Brexit, Corbyn and The Iraq war. I use some recent examples from the British media to show their bias and why they serve elite interests only. Many people says that the media is right or left bias but here I will hopefully show that they are elite biased and that the elites have a disproportionate influence on the media agenda, It is corporations, not leftist academics which enforce politically correct limits on speech.

The video is based on the ideas from the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media from 1988 by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.

It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922). The book was honored with the Orwell Award.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

#Chomsky #ManufacturingConsent

Noam Chomsky's 1st of 5 manufacture of consent media filters. Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large companies operated for profit, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners, who are usually corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.

CREDITS:

Video based on this Research Paper:

Reeves, A., et al., ‘It's The Sun Wot Won It’: Evidence of media influence on political attitudes
and voting from a UK quasi-natural experiment, Social Science Research (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.11.002

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X15001854
An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Celebrity Support for Political Parties in the United States
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X11429371

CIVITAS PAPER LAYS BARE 18 YEARS OF BBC ANTI BREXIT BIAS
http://news-watch.co.uk/civitas-paper-lays-bare-18-years-of-bbc-anti-brexit-bias/
IEA releases analysis revealing Brexit bias on flagship political programmes
https://iea.org.uk/media/iea-analysis-shows-systemic-bias-against-leave-supporters-on-flagship-bbc-political-programmes/

BBC has received £2m in EU funding in run up to referendum, fueling accusations of bias
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/12059280/BBC-has-received-2m-in-EU-funding-in-run-up-to-referendum-fueling-accusations-of-bias.html

This terrifying Rupert Murdoch quote is possibly the best reason to stay in the EU yet
https://www.indy100.com/article/this-terrifying-rupert-murdoch-quote-is-possibly-the-best-reason-to-stay-in-the-eu-yet--WyMaFTE890x

Taking Sides
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/apr/22/iraqandthemedia.politicsandthemedia

Study deals a blow to claims of anti-war bias in BBC news
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/04/Iraqandthemedia.politicsandthemedia

Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/pdf/JeremyCorbyn/Cobyn-Report-FINAL.pdf

Making Sense of Statistics, BBC Trust Report
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/stats_impartiality/report.pdf

BEATING UP THE CHEERLEADER
http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2003/285-beating-up-the-cheerleader.html

#politics #news #Noam #Chomsky

The trolley dilemma allows us to think through the consequences of an action and consider whether its moral value is determined solely by its outcome.
The trolley dilemma has since proven itself to be a remarkably flexible tool for probing our moral intuitions, and has been adapted to apply to various other scenarios, such as war, torture, drones, abortion and euthanasia.

The trolley dilemma and its variations demonstrate that most people approve of some actions that cause harm, yet other actions with the same outcome are not considered permissible.

Text and data taken from the below links:

https://theconversation.com/the-trolley-dilemma-would-you-kill-one-person-to-save-five-57111

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/would-you-kill-one-person-to-save-five-depends-if-you-re-a-millennial-or-not-1.4173661

"Two Concepts of Liberty" was the inaugural lecture delivered by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958. It was subsequently published as a 57-page pamphlet by Oxford at the Clarendon Press. It also appears in the collection of Berlin's papers entitled Four Essays on Liberty (1969) and was more recently reissued in a collection entitled simply Liberty (2002).

CREDITS (Text):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/repository/isaiah-berlins-two-concepts-of-liberty/

https://cluelesspoliticalscientist.wordpress.com/category/political-philosophy/freedom-liberty/

http://www.howardism.org/appendix/Cohen.pdf

Credits(video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QugooaNRnsk&t=7s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq46jJ1l0SQ

Master–slave morality is a central theme of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, particularly in the first essay of his book, On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche argued that there were two fundamental types of morality: "master morality" and "slave morality". Master morality values pride and power, while slave morality values things like kindness, empathy, and sympathy. Master morality weighs actions on good or bad consequences (i. e., classical virtues and vices, consequentialism), unlike slave morality, which weighs actions on a scale of good or evil intentions (e. g., Christian virtues and vices, Kantian deontology).

For Nietzsche, a particular morality is inseparable from the formation of a particular culture, meaning that a culture's language, codes and practices, narratives, and institutions are informed by the struggle between these two moral structures

Edward Bernays, often referred to as “the father of public relations,” in 1928 published his seminal work, Propaganda, in which he wrote

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”

Check Out the Book: http://www.whale.to/b/bernays.pdf

CREDITS How One Man Manipulated All of America

https://www.freedominthought.com/archive/the-man-who-manipulated-america-edward-bernays Edward Bernays

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations

https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-mind-edward-bernays-and-the-birth-of-public-relations-44393

Propaganda by Edward Bernays

https://medium.com/@obtaineudaimonia/propaganda-by-edward-bernays-308eaedff79

Social Media has been linked to changes in the brain. Neuroscientists are studying the effects of social media on the brain and finding that positive interactions (such as someone liking your tweet) trigger the same kind of chemical reaction that is caused by gambling and recreational drugs.

So-called ‘social media addiction’ has been referred to by a wide variety of studies and experiments. It is thought that addiction to social media affects around 5% of young people, and was recently described as potentially more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes.

Heavy social media users perform worse on cognitive tests, especially those that examine their attention and ability to multitask. Compared to moderate to light social media users, heavy users need to exert more effort to remain focused in the face of distraction. This ability of the brain to change is called neuroplasticity, and it has a big effect on your attention and cognitive function.

Music:
"Sappheiros - Embrace" is under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0)
https://www.youtube.com/c/Sappheiros
Music promoted by BreakingCopyright: https://bit.ly/embrace-song

The replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially of substantial parts of scientific knowledge.

The replication crisis most severely affects the social and medical sciences, where considerable efforts have been undertaken to re-investigate classic results, to determine both their reliability and, if found unreliable, the reasons for the failure.Survey data strongly indicates that all natural sciences are affected as well.

The phrase "replication crisis" was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem. Considerations around causes and remedies have given rise to a new scientific discipline called metascience, that uses methods of empirical research to examine empirical research practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion.

Public Opinion is perhaps Lippmann’s most well-known work. Lippmann begins this book by describing a situation in 1914, where a number of Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen were trapped on an island. They have no access to media of any kind, except for once every sixty days when the mail comes, alerting them to situations in the real world. Lippmann explains that these people lived in peace on the island, treating each other as friends, when in actuality the war had broken out and they were enemies.

The purpose of the above anecdote is to develop the idea of "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads". Throughout Public Opinion, Lippmann explains the way that our individual opinions can differ from those that are expressed in the outside world. He develops the idea of propaganda, claiming that "In order to conduct propaganda, there must be some barrier between the public and the event". With this separation, there is the ability of the media to manipulate events or present limited information to the public. This information may not match the public’s perception of the event. In this way, Lippmann was essentially presenting some of the first views on the mass communication concepts of gatekeeping and agenda-setting, by showing the media’s power to limit public access to information.

Guided democracy & The Illusion of Choice -- Based on the ideas of Noam Chomsky, I will explore the concept of guided democracy where the bewildered herd vote correctly. We look at some examples from Walter Lipmann and Edward Bernays.

A Guided democracy functions as a de facto autocracy. Such governments are legitimized by elections that are free and fair but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals. In other words, the government controls elections so that the people can exercise all their rights without truly changing public policy. Under guided democracy, the state's continuous use of propaganda techniques prevents the electorate from having a significant impact on policy.

Media, Persuasion and Propaganda

#politics #chomsky #mediabias