Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. In this episode, we are rounding out our section in our propaganda season, our section related to media propaganda. In the last episode, or in the last section, I talked about how corporate propaganda kind of surprised me in the ubiquity of propaganda and kind of the power of it. I didn't expect, you know, I expected it to be everywhere but I didn't expect for corporate propaganda to have quite the power that it does because it seems so cheesy and obvious, right? Well, on the other hand, I expected media propaganda to be a whole lot more influential than it ended up being.

Derek: 01:18

And it's not that it isn't influential at all. It's just that I didn't find nearly as much in regard to media propaganda as as I thought I would. And I think it kinda makes sense that it works that way because in corporate propaganda, we don't expect to be influenced by cheesy commercials, right? We don't expect that there's anything more behind that product than that cheesiness. And so, okay, we're not gonna be impacted by that.

Derek: 01:47

Yet there's so much that goes on behind it, so we underestimate it. But media propaganda, we kind of know that there's propaganda in the media and that it's subversive and it it there's this undercurrent. And so, I think a lot of times we are we are really looking for this media propaganda and we self select our media for that reason. You know, you might be an only watch Fox person or an only watch CNN or MSNBC person, but you know that there's media propaganda and so you choose to only get propagandized by your source. And so even though that's that is influential in the way that you can kind of create these echo chambers, at the same time we we know that there's gonna be propaganda in the media.

Derek: 02:34

And that's why I think maybe one of the most important episodes in this section is in regard to the the one on zombies. So the point of that was and the power of media propaganda isn't in these big huge things that you you'd expect, right? I mean it is there, don't get me wrong. There are big huge events that the media, the propaganda of the media is able to kind of gloss over or influence, 100% for sure. But a lot of the power of media comes in its ability to sedate on the normal things, the smaller scale.

Derek: 03:15

And so if you go back to our zombie episode, we talk a lot about how how the media is kind of on those fringes and we expect them to be on those fringes but it's really in the middle where where everything kind of gets through, gets lost. And so they're not really identifying some of the deeper rooted true problems that exist. And in that sense, I mean, the media is powerful but whereas in corporate propaganda, there's power in that it forms you more so. Right? It creates a type of person which is extremely powerful to to change you and shape you into something else.

Derek: 03:55

Media propaganda focuses a lot more on or or its power comes in its silence. What it doesn't talk about, that it doesn't get you to think about. And certainly, that is power. Again, don't get me wrong, that is power, but it's just different than I thought it would be. If you would have asked me beforehand, I would have thought that media propaganda is what really really forms you and corporate propaganda is just kind of childish.

Derek: 04:22

But, you know, it kind of tends to be inverted. And of course it all works together. So media propaganda in tandem with corporate propaganda and all that kind of stuff, very powerful. So I don't mean to say at all that media propaganda isn't powerful. It's just it's different than what I expected.

Derek: 04:39

So let's go ahead and talk about some of the resource recommendations that I might have for you throughout this season or this section here. If you wanna go back in time, there was a lot of what they called muckraking back in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. Muckrakers were just these journalists who would go and try to expose different things. So, I don't remember what the book was called but I read one about some lady who infiltrated an asylum so that she could see what the conditions were like and how the patients were treated. It was interesting.

Derek: 05:19

But the one that I'd recommend here is famous, I think it's Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check. He also wrote The Jungle which is his famous one. But The Brass Check is particularly related to the media. And so that's insightful because I think a lot of times people think, Oh well, you know, it's so much worse today than it used to be. And you go and read the brass check and you're like, Oh, I recognize those strategies or Oh yeah, that happens today.

Derek: 05:47

And so you see that there's nothing new under the sun and the brass check helps you to kind of see Upton Sinclair's experience with media smearing and all that kind of stuff, even back in the day. Of course, Dark Alliance by Gary Webb. I I found the book kind of tedious. I actually liked the movie about him, Killed the Messenger, which was really good and I thought pretty accurate to portraying what Gary Webb's thoughts were and not overstating his case. But Dark Alliance, I mean it would be worth it if this is an area that you're interested in, then that would be worth it.

Derek: 06:27

He gets to explain himself pretty well. And I'm also gonna link a few there's at least one YouTube interview that he has or speech or something, and he explained things really well, and I'd recommend that. There's if you listened to the episode with my interview of Robert Mirapol, whose parents were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. His book, An Execution in the Family, and then there's another book about him, I forget what it's called but it's more of a biography that somebody else wrote. But his book, An Execution in the Family, I thought it was really good.

Derek: 07:12

There were a number of reviewers who didn't like it too much but I thought it was really good. It was a really interesting insight into his life and he was a good writer. And when you look at that book, he doesn't talk a ton about the media propaganda but he definitely talks a bit about it and how he experienced propaganda of, you know, being smeared and kind of people's views of him and his experience giving interviews which is interesting, know, the way that the media is able to kind of shape discussions and cut out what they wanna cut out. So I recommend his book, Robert Mirpol's An Execution in the Family. Then you've got a bunch from Neil Postman, I think media controls by him, but I don't I'm not sure.

Derek: 08:01

But then he definitely has Amusing Ourselves to Death, How to Watch TV New News. Those are our two good ones by Neil Postman. And I think Postman, he's dated at this point, I guess, years, old. I guess his books would be about 30 years old. But really good, really insightful, I think.

Derek: 08:22

Then there's one that I read which I was able to get like a 100 pages in and then it just, oof, it it dried up. And it was a very good book and talking with Doctor. Wellman in our Race series about homeschool curriculum was helpful because she said that she was like, Look, if it's really boring, you know that it's probably good or you're on the right track because good history or more objective history is probably going to be boring. There's not going to be an infusion of all kinds of subjective feelings and and conclusions. So this book, Manipulating the Masses, is really fantastic.

Derek: 09:12

It's just really boring because there's so many facts and details and things. But this manipulating the masses also goes back to kind of the brass check era and it looks specifically in The United States and the formation of things like the OSS. So a while ago I read a biography on Bill Donovan who was a big part of the OSS and so that leads you into then the CIA and other sorts of organizations. But this manipulating mass is about World War I and propaganda kind of arising and the different organizations that Woodrow Wilson created and all the different players. You get lots of different lots of famous players that you see if you're gonna study propaganda, you see tons of these names like Creel and Bernays and and that kind of stuff.

Derek: 10:04

So manipulating masses, if you want a a thick, good account but dry and just factual, git manipulating the masses and what's fascinating about this time in history is that in The United States we have this mythology that we're this land of liberty, right? We fought back against like a, I don't know, a really tiny tax and we showed them. Then a few years later, we go and we suppress a rebellion because we're charging super high taxes in The United States and yeah, it's just, it's so not true and in manipulating the masses you get a vision of that. There's a ton, a ton, absolute ton of suppression of the media and the media went right along with it. They're like, Yep, for the war, know, need to not say anything about this battle or say anything about, you know, our troops not having enough of this.

Derek: 11:03

So there's a ton of silencing in that. And we see that even into today, right? So if you see it one hundred years ago, 100% it's going be around today. Just the other day I was reading an article about, I think it was the Second Iraq War and how their I forget the exact name but they were called like media force or force multipliers and you basically, there would be all these guys who would go onto news stations as experts, right? You know, they were former Marine, former General or whatever and they'd say all these things but they were basically unpaid by the Bush administration to talk up the war and sell it, right?

Derek: 11:49

So we do this kind of stuff today, that the media is in league with the government officials in selling you the stories that they want to sell you. And you can see that very clearly in manipulating the masses. We have tons of documents, Freedom of Information Act applies to tons of stuff back then, know, that stuff, a lot of that stuff isn't as top secret as it as it used to be and so we we can learn a lot about a hundred years ago that we wouldn't have access to today. And what you see a hundred years ago, you know that government reach just extends and extends and extends and you're certainly going to see it today. Manipulating the masses once again, would highly recommend it, just prepare to dig in.

Derek: 12:32

Also, it's not I didn't find it in manipulating the masses, but there's some other good things going on around this time. I forget which book I read about the American Revolution, but in that book, the author mentioned this interesting case that was going on right around the time that manipulating the masses is writing about, and it's called the case of I guess The United States versus the spirit of 'seventy six. And you've got this this filmmaker who is creating a a film about the Revolutionary War, and as as he creates this film, there's like a three second clip where it's just like flashes of the British soldiers committing atrocities. And of course, you you're talking like 1917 or something and they're not like showing gore and crazy, it's just these quick flashes that imply, you know, a British person is banning a woman or child or something. And so you've got three seconds of that.

Derek: 13:42

Revolutionary war, right? Well, this guy, this filmmaker, he ends up getting like ten years in prison and they they end up like lowering the sentence later. But he gets ten years in prison because that's considered seditious, because Great Britain was our ally and so to paint them in a negative light could create a lot of, you know, disorder and and rebellion in The United States or could cause our allies to lose faith in us. Whatever the reasons, we're locking up people for making movies that depict something historically because it paints a friend in a bad light. I mean, insane stuff going on at this time.

Derek: 14:27

So it's super interesting and then you can follow the history from there of different organizations as they develop through time and become what we have today. Alright, so beyond books and such, what are some other recommendations that we might have? Behind the Bastards has done like a short series on Gary Webb or the crack epidemic, so that might be interesting for you to check out. Manufacturing Consent, I believe that's from Chomsky, that's a fantastic book but they also have lots of YouTube videos on it. He gives some speeches and also made a good quality kind of summary of that book.

Derek: 15:12

There's a video called War on Whistleblowers you can get on YouTube, which is really good, really fantastic. And it doesn't always relate exactly to the media, but a lot of times it does. Another interesting thing is Crack in the System. It's a documentary about the crack epidemic. More specifically related to the media, you could take a look at the documentary on YouTube called Spin.

Derek: 15:47

It is, I think if you're gonna look at one resource here for your time and for the quality of this thing, check this out. The Spin documentary on YouTube. It's kinda old. I mean, I think he the guy who did this made it, I don't know, like nineties maybe? Early nineties because they had the satellite technology and he basically learned how to, to tap into that because these news stations, they were constantly recording but they weren't always broadcasting to the channel that you picked up on your TV.

Derek: 16:21

But if you knew what you were doing, you could tap into the the frequency or the airwaves somehow whatever technical stuff and you could actually capture what was going on when they went to commercial break and stuff. And so this guy just spent like a year looking at the good stuff, right? The stuff that happened when people didn't think the cameras were rolling. Politicians, important people, fascinating, like really fascinating to see how things were framed and this is even well before, you know, social media and and all that kind of stuff where it seems like framing an image has gotten even more pronounced in our society. So check out the spin documentary.

Derek: 17:02

It's like an hour, hour and a half. So easy easy to consume and great quality. You could also take a look into Michael Hastings. Michael Hastings is a journalist who was uncovering some crazy things and then he died mysteriously. And so there's a lot of interesting stuff if you want to take a look into his work as well as into the case of his death.

Derek: 17:32

Another one would be GameStop, the GameStop stocks that came out, the short sale that happened in regard to Robinhood and all those other stock apps. So I haven't really found a ton written on this, but I can tell you anecdotally that it was one of the weirdest things that I've experienced firsthand where I was like, man, I'm in the matrix. So when to kinda summarize, for those who don't know what the GameStop short sale was, so basically, you had a bunch of people who decided that, you know, GameStop stock was was I don't know the proper terms. It was like leveraged. You had a bunch of rich people as brokerage firms who were like, oh, GameStop is is gonna do terrible.

Derek: 18:25

And so they all like put a bet that GameStop is gonna do terribly. Well, these people figured out that, man, they were they were over leveraged, they had like too much on it and so if they just bought GameStop stock and held on to it, the price would just rise and rise and rise and rise until these people would have to sell for a loss or hang on and hope that it eventually went down. And so, these guys hung on to the stock and made tons and tons of money. And more and more people started to buy into it because you have these these newer apps that allow the hoi polloi, you know, the the plebs to all the individuals to actually participate in the stock market. Well, all of a sudden as I'm following this thing, I see like all of these news outlets.

Derek: 19:15

I mean, every news outlet you can think of, from Fox to NBC to GameSpot to Gokatu or whatever that that one's called, like all kinds of all kinds of different news outlets and they're saying, hey, know, WallStreetBets, this this Reddit, this sub Reddit group that that is telling everybody to buy GameStop stock and hold on to it, they're like, hey everybody, you know, they're telling everybody to sell their GameStop stock and and now go buy Nokia, Right? And then I was following, I was on the the WallStreetBets subreddit, and everybody on there, all the like main players are like, no, don't sell, don't sell, don't buy this other stock. And I'm I'm sitting here and I'm just looking in one tab, I've got Reddit, like the people tell telling, don't sell and don't buy this other stuff and all the news outlets saying, oh, this is what they're saying on the subreddit. And I was like, oh my goodness, this is like, I am experiencing this in real time. I'm experiencing conspiracy in real time.

Derek: 20:29

It was it was surreal. And so that was that was just fascinating to see all the news outlets, you know. I could have expected, okay, there'd be there'd be some that are kind of in league, but it was just so crazy that it was like everybody. And and I could compare it to the real thing, like, side by side. So that's not something that I've I've really seen shared around.

Derek: 20:56

I haven't seen lots of articles or anything written on it, but that was just one of my own personal experiences that I thought was interesting. I would love for other people to validate that or or maybe you have some some resources you could share. Alright, a few other resources here that I didn't get to read but I would like to read them at some point. So Hearts and Minds looked like a really good book. I actually started to read it like a chapter in but I moved on to some other things but I want to come back to it.

Derek: 21:28

Hearts and Minds, not mind but minds as in like landmines. There's How We Advertised America, Manufacturing the Enemy, Spin Dictators, Century of Spin, AJ Leibling's The Press which is an older one, I don't know that I'd I'd prioritize that but it looked interesting. And then, Inventing Reality. All that stuff looked like it was it was pretty interesting. So I think that's that's pretty much what I have for the media aspect.

Derek: 21:58

Again, there's so much more. Check out, you know, do your own research. Also check out my my Goodreads list. I'm sure I've probably missed some. But anyway, I'll I'll add resources if I think of any before this releases.

Derek: 22:14

That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.