Only Clicks Matter

Orange Man Bad
Times Square, New York, USA. © Reuters / EDUARDO MUNOZ

Another story on RT by Professor Glenn Diesen. He's obviously a communist stooge.

For most people, propaganda has simply come to mean deception and lies. However, throughout history, the dark arts of media manipulation have long been known to be a far more powerful tool than falsehoods and dishonesty alone.

The concept of propaganda was seen by its pioneers, New York-born Walter Lippmann and Austro-Hungarian press agent Edward Bernays, as something of an exact science. Lippman cautioned that democracies have an inclination to use it to manufacture the consent of the public, while Bernays dubbed the growing discipline ‘public relations,’ in order to avoid the negative connotations.

As the world has become more complex, people have relied more and more on stereotypes and simplifications to help them interpret and filter events around them. Propaganda manipulates this desire for simplicity – handing people easy answers rather than winning them over with rational arguments. Society then rallies around these stereotypes and squashes dissents with ‘herd mentality’, an irrational set of psychological behaviors where individuals are swept along with a group, overriding their own rational assessments.

Propaganda builds stereotypes that present a predictable, familiar and comfortable view of our place in the world. And, as Lippman himself noted, for those who buy into them, “any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe.”

He goes on to sight several examples of bullshit being peddled by the media, which reminded me that I have something to say about this.

People have been complaining about the major media outlets spewing lies for quite a while now, but nothing seems to change. I think I finally figured it out. The media doesn't care about the truth or exposing corruption, all they are interested in are eyeballs, eyeballs that they can convince to click on the next item and keep on clicking until they get so bored they finally click on an advertisement and buy something. The media is paid for by advertising and companies only pay for advertising if they believe someone is seeing it. Clicks tell them that people are at least looking at it. So more clicks mean more money. And what gets the clicks? Scandal, sex and murder. And that's why everything you see on mainstream media is a lie. Nobody cares if it's a lie and as long as it's lurid.

The professor has been quoted here before.

P.S. I have to admit the poster in the picture is kind of clever. Bruce, Donald and The Beatles, all rolled up into one.