(250)S11E5/1: Propaganda and the Media
Welcome back to the fourth wave podcast. In this episode, we are starting a new subsection in our season on propaganda and conspiracy. In regard to propaganda, what we're gonna start talking about today is probably the angle that most people usually expect when we talk about propaganda. Because when we think of propaganda, we think of the media and specifically the news media. And this, criticism and cynicism that we seem to have about the news media isn't really all that new.
Derek:I mean, it's something that's been going on for a long time. You know, Thomas Jefferson, two hundred years ago, railed against the news media quite often. Listen to just a a few of his quotes. Quote, the most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers. A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of news writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers.
Derek:This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. End quote. I think this observation of Jefferson's is great because he highlights the problem with being consumers, as most of us are today, most of the time. Newspapers bring us information, but we must still chew on that information and digest it and evacuate the excess. If we don't do that and we just accept information, then we end up being pacified as Jefferson says.
Derek:Here's another quote from Jefferson about the the news media. The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in as much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. And I really like that one because it highlights how it's sometimes better to actually be less informed than to be more informed. Now this is in part because news and other propaganda outlets are trying to shape your thoughts, and they often succeed in ways that we don't realize. To be more informed then simply means to be more propagandized.
Derek:And that, of course, goes back to Elul's work on propaganda where he identifies that it's often the educated who are the most propagandized because they've been through the most institutions and have consumed the most information from sources of propaganda. And many of them have consumed it without critically thinking about or digesting it. Of course, news media isn't the only type of media that is propagandistic. Many recognize that film and television get thrown in here too. And that's especially true when people start to see a pet issue of theirs popping up more and more in shows.
Derek:As I'm recording this episode, we're about four episodes into Amazon's Rings of Power series, and the new aerial trailer has recently been released. There is a sad number of people who are upset with black representation in in both of these cases. Now sometimes people might have some list of excuses, about, you know, being true to lore or something like that. And, you know, every once in a while, those arguments might make some sense. But by and large, the fury over the representation of black people runs much deeper for most complainers, I think.
Derek:Now consciously, you are probably more so in the deeply ingrained and trained and discipled subconscious of of these people. They recognize the power of representation, even in depictions of fictitious characters from a fantasy world. There is a power that comes in being represented. We don't just see this negatively in the reactions of whites to fantasy flicks, but also in the reactions of minorities to seeing a superhero or a protagonist who represents them. You can find blend plenty of heartwarming YouTube videos with young black boys who exude pure joy about, Black Panther when it came out.
Derek:They can see themselves as the hero for once in their lives, and they can see their worth is reinforced in the recognition that someone like them can be a hero. So the media and especially the news media, they tend to be areas of extreme focus when most people talk about propaganda because it's often easy for us to identify the propaganda of the other side. From my assessment so far, I personally think that corporate propaganda is probably the most potent form of propaganda that I've studied. Now the fact that it doesn't just hide or skew information, but it shapes desires, and I I just think that makes it extremely potent. Now you become like the prince in Lewis's the silver chair, who is constantly deluded and is only rarely awakened to his pitiful state.
Derek:Corporate propaganda, more than other forms of propaganda, creates a narrative for us. And so long as we continue to consume the propaganda, we fail to wake from our stupor. The propagandist narrative becomes who we are, and we become unable to realize who we truly are or were or who we truly ought to be. We are bewitched. And certainly, media plays into this corporate propaganda as well.
Derek:There's plenty of overlap, you know, product placements and and all kinds of narratives that are going on there. For instance, if you look at a lot of the sitcoms or regular Joe movies that have been recorded over the past twenty years, you know, the household income of the families on these shows and in these movies is absolutely insane. Now I have a link to, some estimated sitcoms from back in the day, but I think it's I think it's gotten a lot worse. You know, if you watched Roseanne or All in the Family or Sanford and Son, you definitely see some families back in the day that are represented as living pretty simply. But those shows are usually more rare and becoming even rarer.
Derek:My wife and I watched the first two seasons of This Is Us, and we were constantly asking, where are these people getting all this money and all this free time? The one couple was never shown working. They dropped everything and flew all over the country multiple times. They lived in a beautiful place in a nice area of the country, and they paid for extremely expensive fertility treatments. Their lives in no way mimic the reality of most Americans.
Derek:Of course, the woman in the show, Kate, her siblings were pretty rich from their endeavors. So maybe they gave her family some money. I don't know. But however, she came by her money. This definitely is not us.
Derek:The majority of the human race, let alone Americans. It represents the life of only a small fraction of Americans. And that, I think, is par for the course when it comes to how life is portrayed in film and TV. Anyway, I don't wanna talk too much about Hollywood and corporate propaganda here because I'll get to that a little bit later in in one of the episodes in another section of the season. Or maybe I think I'm gonna actually have a whole episode about it down the line, in regard to Hollywood and the military.
Derek:So we'll get back to this. Suffice it to say that I don't want you to forget the power of corporate propaganda here and its shaping influence. And I want you to keep that at the forefront of your mind since there's plenty of overlap with media propaganda and its ability to shape us, which is, in my opinion, propaganda's most powerful effect. But since I've already covered corporate propaganda and the aspect of shaping us, I don't want to focus on that here in media propaganda because, what I really want to focus on in this episode is a a different aspect of propaganda that I think is, accentuated by the media. So this weapon, that media propaganda is is particularly proficient at using, it's not a weapon that no other forms of propaganda use.
Derek:It's just a weapon that the media is particularly astute at wielding. And this weapon is what I'll call selectivity. Now whereas in corporate propaganda, there was a lot of infusion of concepts and desires, you know, what you might consider inception of desires and beliefs into the consumer, the media's unique power often comes from their ability to selectively choose which information is silenced and when that information is silenced. It's unfortunate that this is too often a tactic that is overlooked and actually overlooked in order for us to focus on the opposite. You know, most people often focus on the propaganda that's centered around ideas that they don't like.
Derek:And like, as I mentioned earlier, the inclusion of black characters in a film. They say, why are they trying to push some sort of agenda and are now making all kinds of characters black? That's propaganda. But what these people fail to realize or conveniently overlook is that silence is often just as powerful a weapon of propaganda. Yet this group would never look back over the last hundred years of film and see the lack of representation as propaganda as pushing forward some idea or agenda.
Derek:Yet that's exactly what the last hundred years of silence was. Propaganda through silence. Maybe that's a little hard for you to grasp without providing some real world examples. So that's exactly what we're gonna do. Let's get some glimpses of the power of silence in action elsewhere before we apply that then to, the news media.
Derek:I love my dad, but we definitely grew up in different times. My dad is not a malicious racist. He doesn't hate black people or advocate that they shouldn't have their rights. He had a black coworker who was one of his better friends at work, and, he helped this friend out with carpooling and stuff when he had issues with his diabetes. But at the same time, I've had plenty of conversations with my dad, which uncovered what was really going on in his head in regard to race.
Derek:Plenty of times, he told me about conversations that he had with his dad about why interracial marriage isn't good. Of course, it wasn't necessarily wrong, my dad would say, but, you know, rather he couched his aversion to it as thinking of the kids and how mixed kids wouldn't be accepted by either whites or blacks. Yet my dad even recognized that this wasn't right and often said, well, at least that's how I was raised. But, you know, God made us all, and a mixed couple should be able to marry, and their kids shouldn't be treated any differently. It's like there were these two programs running in my dad's head.
Derek:One program was trained into him from when he was young, by his his parents, his community, whoever, And he couldn't get rid of it. You know, program one was running racist program. But there's another program that overlapped with that program, and and contradicted it, program number two. So I saw this struggle in my dad throughout his life, and I saw it elsewhere besides in the interracial marriage discussion. And sometimes my dad would be recounting a story from his day and say something like, you know, I met a really nice black man today.
Derek:He helped me with such and such. Now why did my dad include the fact that this guy was black? He would never have said, I met a really nice white man today who helped me out. Or sometimes my dad would bemoan a story from the news about someone on welfare or some guy from work who was lazy. And he'd talk about how sad it is that this lazy black milked the system.
Derek:But then he'd run program two, and he'd caveat that and say, I know there are some lazy white people too. You know, it's like he he ran program one, that that brought in these racist ideas. And then he tried to cancel it out by running what he knew was true from program two. He couldn't just say, you know, I met a nice guy today because on program one, it was significant that he actually met a nice man who happened to be black. Black was an important adjective to add because meeting a nice guy isn't all that noteworthy.
Derek:But meeting a nice guy who's black, now that adds to the significance because how often does that happen? You know? The implication is that black people aren't generally nice, so you have to add in that adjective. So even though my dad was trying to compliment a black man by running program two, program one, the racist program, was running under the surface and causing him to make racial distinctions. The same thing happens with his story about the lazy black man.
Derek:Now my dad's mind on program one, lazy and black tended to go together. But program two told my dad that this wasn't true, so he tried to correct himself by telling himself that there were plenty of lazy white people too. Now while I understand that a lot of people would view my dad as a racist from hearing these stories, and that's definitely true depending on how you define racism, I think his life is a beautiful depiction of someone who's fighting the propaganda that he was raised with. There's a whole discussion that we can have on racism expectations for people to change, whether it's even relevant to talk about having compassion on people with racist ideas, etcetera. But I don't I don't really wanna have that discussion here in this episode.
Derek:That's for another time. But I do want you to note that fighting propaganda is a lifelong process which requires community and continued training to overcome. My dad and I had a lot of conversations where we pushed back. My wife and I pushed back on on racial issues. And it it really is a lifelong process, and he's never going to get rid of that program one.
Derek:It's ingrained into him. And, of course, I was raised by my father. So it makes me wonder, you know, do I have program one running too somewhere inside me, where I don't even realize? But in regards to our topic at hand, I want you to think about the last two examples that I gave. The lazy black man and the nice black man versus just saying a nice man or lazy man.
Derek:Now all of the statements here would have been true statements. My dad didn't make untrue statements about the lazy man being black or the nice man being black. So what's what's with the addition and exclusion of adjectives here? So the nice man that my dad met was black, and the lazy man my dad met was black. But when my dad encountered a man who was white that did something really nice, he excluded the adjective white.
Derek:Now think about how this plays out for anyone who hears the story. If my dad recounts a story of a nice man, immediately, images pop into the heads of listeners because that's what humans do when we're told stories. We visualize them. Without my dad including an adjective, the nice white man or the nice black man, my mind has to formulate its own image of what this man looked like. The nice man, devoid of any adjectives of color, is automatically depicted in my mind as a white man.
Derek:And maybe that's partly because I'm white and my community is largely white, but it's also because, in my community, if the nice man was black, people would probably note that. The word nice then becomes synonymous with white because nice by itself is always depicted as a white person in my mind and in my community. Whereas nice and black are anomalous and have to be noted because they're exceptions. A similar but slightly different thing happened with the story about lazy blacks in my dad's story. He would talk about a lazy black, but acknowledge that there are some lazy white people too.
Derek:When he talked about black people, he attached the adjective to their group, lazy blacks. When he tried to correct himself, he would say, I know there are some whites who are lazy too. He's essentially saying the same thing in terms of what the words mean, but the change in phrasing is significant. By putting lazy and blacks together side by side, my dad was attaching the two concepts in his mind and it's in his hearer's mind as being closely related. But when he talks about white people, he said that there are some who are, which brings individuality into the mix rather than corporately attaching lazy to the population at large.
Derek:And he says that these some whites who are lazy are lazy too. So rather than lazy whites going together, he implies that blacks as a group tend to have laziness attached to them. But, you know, there are some whites who we can also add to this group that's lazy. The implication here is that white lazy people are more of an exception to the rule. And the rule is that lazy equates to blacks.
Derek:Now that's a personal everyday sort of example from my life that I would bet a lot of people out there can relate to. Either white people like me who've grown up with parents raised during the tumultuous civil rights area, or, if you're a black person who has experienced this sort of thing, and you know that it's racist, but you just can't speak up or put your finger on how to describe what's going on because the nuances are so subtle and and hard to explain. The point is that the absence of information here can be just as powerful of an indicator as the addition of information. While saying the lazy black may cause you to form racist thoughts about black people, saying the nice man without adding any adjectives at all can ingrain in your mind the equating of nice and white, which is just as powerful a concept in paving the road to ideas of racial superiority. Okay.
Derek:So that's a down to earth example. That's that's a pretty simple, example. Let's move on past that personal example and give you something a little bit bigger that ties in more directly with propaganda in the media. Just know that we are applying the same concept here. This idea that the absence of information is often just as important an aspect of propaganda as is the addition of information.
Derek:I want you to think back to the George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin case. To lay all my cards out on the table here, I think George Zimmerman was as guilty as can be of at least manslaughter, if not some form of homicide. He profiled Trayvon. He followed him despite a professional telling him to back off. He confronted Trayvon without evidence of a felony.
Derek:He pursued him, and his actions resulted in Trayvon's death. When you color in Zimmerman's post trial exploits and his arrogant disregard of his actions, as well as his past with a, charge of assault, I think it's even more clear that Zimmerman had complete disregard for Trayvon's life. Now in light of my thoughts on the guilt of Zimmerman and the victim status of Trayvon, I want to delve into the propaganda that I think was present in this case, particularly the information that that kind of deals with this idea of exclusion. Now I know a lot of people tend to focus on images in cases of race. In the Zimmerman case, a lot of people balked at how the photo for Zimmerman was often of a previous mugshot while the picture for Trayvon was a nice smiling young man.
Derek:One image implied the guilt of Zimmerman, while the other implied the innocence of Trayvon. Now the same thing is often reversed in other cases where a black suspect or victim is often portrayed with a picture that makes them look threatening or, as the media on the right would say, like a thug. Those are definitely issues that we could address in regard to bias and propaganda, but I actually wanna hone in on a different aspect of propaganda in this case. While the Trayvon Martin case was still resonating in the culture, I began to teach at a public school. In my first year in a public school, they, they threw me under the bus along with the kids that I was teaching.
Derek:We all got thrown under the bus. Three quarters of the eighth grade students that year were taking what they called advanced science classes, and that meant that the bottom quarter of students were all condensed into one group. And I had pretty much all of them. Most of these kids had a poorly structured home life. They had IEPs and learning disabilities, or they might not have had any family at all.
Derek:I had a lot of ESL, English as second language learners, transient kids. So kids were coming in and out of my classroom all the time. And I even had students from the local homeless shelter. Now one eighth grader that I had was a 16 year old kid and had fathered two children more than I had fathered at that time at the age of 28 or so. And all of these issues aren't even scratching the surface on the behavior problems that existed and the behavior records of some of these kids.
Derek:There was at least one fight that happened that year during my class, like, in the middle of class. And one of the students who had migrated down to Georgia, migrated from a tough city in Pennsylvania near where I had grown up. And, I'm pretty sure he was in a gang, at least up north. And he, one day acted like he was going to punch my pregnant wife in the stomach in a threatening way. Needless to say, for a first year public school teacher to walk into that was extremely challenging and stressful.
Derek:And for those kids who are all lumped together, it was not a good learning environment at all. It was an absolute travesty of education. But as this whole Trayvon Martin case was circulating through the media, I remember many of the commentators talking about Trayvon being just a kid. They used words like kid, young, teenager, and they used those words a lot. In the discussion, the implication was that Trayvon was a harmless child who the big bad man, George Zimmerman, shot in cold blood.
Derek:Now do I believe that George Zimmerman had a thirst for blood and was guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin? Absolutely. But the angle of Trayvon being a poor, helpless child just didn't sit well with me. I knew that that was potentially BS. I had a 13 year old boy, one of the ones who got into a fight in my class, who towered over me and was definitely stronger than I was.
Derek:He had more weight than I did, more muscle than I did, and more height than I did. I had another kid in my class with EBD who I'm pretty sure I mean, he he didn't double my weight, but he came close. He was, you know, above two fifty. And the kid who pretended, pretended to assault my wife, while he wasn't huge, he had a fire and a ferocity to him that had been fostered in him by the tough upbringing that he had on the streets. And, these kids that I'm talking about, they were 13 to 14 years old, most of them.
Derek:Trayvon was three to four years older than these kids. Now I also saw some of the football players at the local high school who were way more jacked than any of the kids in my class, and many of them younger than Trayvon, if not, you know, around the same age maybe. Now Trayvon Martin was a somewhat tall kid, and his height outclassed George Zimmerman. Zimmerman had Martin by 20 or so pounds though, and probably mostly fat, but still, he was heavier. Nevertheless, I had some level of fear every day that I walked into a classroom of 13 year old kids.
Derek:I wasn't necessarily fearful for my life or well-being, but I knew that they could do a lot of damage to each other and to me if they really wanted to. So to go around emphasizing that Trayvon Martin was a kid completely manipulated the narrative in a particular direction. And while I agree with the conclusion that the media was trying to draw with that propaganda, the conclusion that George Zimmerman was guilty and Trayvon Martin a victim, the route that they took to influence thoughts seemed disingenuous and dangerous to me. Because while their manipulation in this case might lead to a just popular opinion, it could just as easily lead to a travesty of justice in the future in other cases. On top of that, using this type of propaganda is dangerous because if it's uncovered, it can undermine one's own case.
Derek:It can make you lose trust for, this issue, but as well as future issues. If you're trying to manipulate my opinion through propaganda, then I may come to believe that you're manipulating me because your case is weak and your conclusion's wrong. Now rather than convince me in dialogue, you've lost me through an attempt to manipulate me. I know that after saying all this, I probably pissed off 90% of my audience. If you're conservatives, you're mad at me because I didn't defend George Zimmerman against the woke agenda that always views black lives as victims, and I'm refusing to defend a man who used his second amendment rights.
Derek:On the other hand, those on the liberal side are probably mad at me because I'm undermining part of the narrative that elevates the truth of Trayvon Martin's victim status and George Zimmerman's guilt. But it's in pissing off everyone that I gain assurance that my position is more likely than not correct. Because as we've explored this season, propaganda polarizes, and it polarizes hard. Truth tends to be more complex than pure black and white, and the way truths are presented and framed is infinitely more complex than the truth itself. If you can't see and acknowledge the propaganda on your side and your narratives have no complexity, then you're probably living in propaganda land.
Derek:Let me just give you one more talking point here, and then I will try to bring everything together. So US foreign policy and intervention is a really complicated topic. Well, I mean, I guess it's not really usually that complicated. We have an economic interest, and we go to war to overthrow some dictator, and we disguise it through propaganda as benevolence. Let me give you what I think is the most clear recent example that I can think of.
Derek:So a few years ago, The US killed Iranian general Soleimani while he was in Iraq. Now general Soleimani was consistently described as a terrorist in the news media. Now why was he considered a terrorist? Because he had been supplying Iraq with weapons, which we know had led to the deaths of hundreds or perhaps even a thousand US soldiers. So general Soleimani, who was giving weapons to the Iraqi people and those fighting for Iraq, or at least one group in Iraq, was a terrorist because he supplied weapons to the people who were fighting against us, the ones who had invaded Iraq.
Derek:I mean, the the liberators. How dare general Soleimani give weapons to the rebels, the terrorists, or the guerrillas? But rewind a few decades, and The US is supplying the Afghan people with weapons to fight the Soviet invaders. Invaders, mind you, not liberators because it was the Soviets doing the war making, so they were invaders, not liberators like we are. And fast forward a few years from the Soleimani, assassination and the The US is supplying Ukraine with weapons against the Russians, who are once again considered invaders, not liberators, even though they see themselves as liberators.
Derek:And their Russian propaganda of liberation, we think is so ridiculous. You know, we can see straight through it. Russia is there for their own self interest, and they're harming a whole lot of people in in trying to bring about their self interest. Yet we don't see the double standard. We don't see how terrorists or guerrillas become freedom fighters depending on who's at war and who's doing the propaganda.
Derek:When we're at war, we are benevolent and altruistic with adequate justification for invading another country. But when another country invades somewhere that we have a relationship with or economic interest with or a place that we desire to be a buffer state for our interests, there can be zero justification whatsoever. Our rhetoric and conclusions are more polarized than the East is from the West, which is perhaps even too far an expanse for Jesus to save us from. He can't free us from the unpardonable sin of being propagandized, of blaspheming the true spirit for the false, as evidenced by a supposedly Christian nation falling hook, line, and sinker for pretty much every war that we fought as a country. Christians have supposedly historically run the government and the military and founded the businesses, all the while being a little too absent from the churches.
Derek:Our piety for the state and the market, the beast and the merchant has caused us to all too often, as we have seen this season, be the spirit of the false prophet. We Christians who proclaim that we see so clearly and say that we have the truth and that we've largely run the show as a Christian nation, we are absolutely blinded. Having seen we are yet blind, we've been discipled by the spirit of the world rather than by the spirit of the Christ. But, again, I digress. This is for another episode when we get to talk about the false prophet.
Derek:So let's, now take a look back at what all these examples have in common and how they relate to the concept of selectivity, particularly in the news media? In all three of the examples, certain information or terms were either put forward or withheld. Obviously, every story that we tell has to choose what information is important to declare and what information is valueless and ought to be held. But that means that every piece of information that we're given, we should be asking why that particular information or that term was given and simultaneously why other pieces of information or terms were held back. In relation to my father's recounting of various experiences, why was the skin tone of an individual pertinent when talking about black people, but not when talking about white people?
Derek:What did the inclusion or exclusion of that information convey? When we get to the Zimmerman and Martin case or cases like them, how is information conveyed and how are terms included or excluded? Why might information about Martin's age and status as a child be relevant to a story while the physical features like height and weight not included? Why might some news show an image of George Zimmerman in prison, you know, in prison garb and reference his prior record of assault while other news sites completely ignore that and throw him in a nice business suit. The exclusion often says as much about an agenda as the inclusion of information.
Derek:Finally, when we look at US intervention and overseas affairs, why might it be useful for news agencies to avoid The US history of coup involvement and the overthrow of democratically elected officials for their replacement with western backed dictators? Why might we avoid the connotation that those we are fighting are fighting for their freedom, and therefore, freedom fighters? Why might we call someone a terrorist while failing to mention that we participate in actions which qualify as terrorism by our definition? Of course, the answer to all this is something that we know deeply. The selective exclusion of information is just as powerful as the inclusion of information.
Derek:In fact, it may often be that the exclusion of information is more potent than the inclusion. Think of a street act where a performer is demonstrating their ability to pick pocket. What you find is that while there may be a lot of action or information being conveyed in their face or their movements, and their less dexterous hand, you know, moving all around. Their true feet is being accomplished and hidden in the relative inaction of the dominant hand. While you're focused on all the movement and the influx of information the street performer is giving you, it's actually at the place where the least action and information are given that the magic is happening.
Derek:The same thing's true in the news media. While we are inundated and distracted by the information offered to us, it is often in the silence that the true news is happening and where the true threat is. We have to recognize that finding truth in media doesn't prove that it's unbiased. False information wasn't given in any of my examples, only true statements. So the question must not be, is this truthful?
Derek:But rather, did all the truth receive the attention and context that it deserved? Here might be somewhat of a a good example of this in action. Unfortunately, from a way that I've, used deceit and, manipulation in my life. So when I was in eighth grade, our, our class took a field trip to Philadelphia. My mom gave me $20 to, you know, eat or but yeah.
Derek:I mean, pretty much to to buy lunch because we didn't pack lunches. Well, I'm an eighth grade boy, and we go into Chinatown. And they've got, like, really cool things, like weapons, knives. For the life of me, I can't understand how I, as an eighth grade, minor, was able to purchase a butterfly knife. Like, I feel like you're supposed to be at least 16 or 18 or something.
Derek:But somehow, I did. I purchased a knife with this $20. It was, like, right around $20. And, I know. Oh, man.
Derek:K. It's great. I got this knife, but, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to hide it. And so I get home, and my mom says, oh, how's the trip? I was like, oh, it was great.
Derek:You know, it was a lot of fun. She said, do you have any money left over? I say, man, the cheese steaks were expensive. Now that, of course, implied that all of the money was spent on cheesesteaks, but I never talked about the money. I never mentioned the specific price of the cheesesteaks.
Derek:I never said that I spent my money on cheesesteaks. I just kind of diverted the attention, by waving my one hand and keeping my other hands motionless. My mom looked at at the information that I gave her and drew her conclusions based on that information. But in reality, the real action was happening elsewhere. Maybe one of the biggest examples of media silence that I've encountered recently that I can give to you is the absolute silence about the war in Yemen.
Derek:Now Yemen's war with Saudi Arabia, which is really more like Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, has been going on for over half a decade. About one and a half percent of Yemen's Twenty Nine Million people have died, with close to half a million children under the age of five expected to suffer from the effects of severe acute malnutrition. And I'm sure those numbers are just rising. I'll put a few links in the show notes, and and you really should make yourself go and watch what is being done there. It's absolutely horrific, and you should know about it.
Derek:But how is it that I hadn't heard of the humanitarian crisis until only about two years ago, and I heard about it through nonmedia channels? Why hadn't I heard about it through the news media? Why isn't such a huge crisis front and center on the world stage? An event that happened about two years ago, right after I found out about Yemen, became extremely explanatory in my mind for why I'd never heard of Yemen before. A few years ago, there was an a journalist, who's an American resident named Jamal Khashoggi.
Derek:Now Khashoggi was very critical of the leader of Saudi Arabia. And being the type of violent state that they are, Saudi Arabia didn't like that too much. They figured out a way to lure Khashoggi into a consulate that they held in Turkey, seemingly neutral ground. However, they ended up assassinating Khashoggi while he was in the embassy. Now assassinating a journalist, a journalist who is an American resident at that, is something that the press isn't going to let go.
Derek:So that story was flashed in the news for for a little bit. But what the, what was president Trump's reaction and what ended up happening to Saudi Arabia after the anger quickly ebbed away onto other distractions? Nothing. It was just crickets. Less than a year after Khashoggi's murder, presumably at the behest of the crown prince, president Trump called the prince, quote, a friend of mine.
Derek:At one of his rallies, only six months after Khashoggi's murder, Trump said, quote, they have nothing but cash. Right? They buy a lot from us. $450,000,000,000, they bought. You had people wanting to cut off Saudi Arabia.
Derek:I don't wanna lose them, end quote. Well, two and a half years after the fact, after president Trump did absolutely nothing about, Khashoggi's murder, president Biden finally brought action against Saudi Arabia. Well, not Saudi Arabia. Just a a few individuals. The US government ended up sanctioning 17 individuals who they hold responsible for killing Khashoggi.
Derek:The individuals who carried out their leader, the crown prince's plan, are sanctioned while the country and the crown prince himself aren't. So president Trump did nothing, and Biden essentially did nothing. All he did was some token slap on the hand. Right? Nothing nothing at all.
Derek:Just a pure propaganda, pure pure token symbol. But now with these things in mind, we have a few touch points with Saudi Arabia, And just a few, mind you. There is a whole, and I mean a whole lot deeper and longer history with Saudi Arabia that we could discuss here. But let's just take a look at at some of the things we know, and and I'll fill in maybe one or two other pieces that I think are pretty common knowledge, as we color in this picture. Saudi Arabia is very important in regard to oil, sitting centrally in The Middle East.
Derek:Saudi Arabia buys a lot of weapons from us, as president Trump said, and they give us a lot of money. We don't wanna stop making money by selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. We don't want to make enemies with those who control our oil and give us money. We aren't willing to divvy out real consequences when an international journalist and resident of The US is murdered by a violent regime. In that light, the silence about Yemen screams out to us.
Derek:There's silence because we don't have to pay it attention. They're unimportant foreigners, not US residents or journalists. Saudi Arabia buys weapons from us. And if we highlighted that, that they're using US weapons to conduct atrocities, not to mention, US actually assisting them by refueling their planes and stuff, there may be pressure to stop selling them things. Making Saudi Arabia look bad might compromise our oil prices as well.
Derek:Now it doesn't matter which motivation route you choose. Indifference at foreigners being killed or a conspiracy to prevent weakening our economy. It doesn't really matter. The war in Yemen is directly connected to significant policy and human rights issues that The United States is, at least in part, responsible for in our alliance with Saudi Arabia and providing them the weapons and the leeway to commit atrocities on both a large and a small scale. Interestingly, as I'm recording this episode, the media is shouting at the top of their lungs about Ukraine while being absolutely silent about Yemen.
Derek:And whenever we see silence or hear silence, I guess, we have to ask why. When we ask why, the media silence on Yemen becomes deafening. To close out this section on media silence, I wanna point you to an article by Marvin Olaski that I'll link in the show notes. Just for context, Olaski has been the editor at World Magazine for decades. While World identifies as a Christian magazine, they've historically avoided selecting topics or positions based on party lines.
Derek:They've done some strong journalism that has cost them a lot of financial support. However, in this article, Alasky bemoans a conservative takeover of how World Magazine runs and what that means for truth and journalistic integrity. I think you'll find his account fascinating. And if you view it in the context of media silence, it should be even more meaningful. Alaska will help you to see how silence or inconvenient topics creep into the news as topics of party interest or convenience are embraced and topics of inconvenience kind of get bypassed over.
Derek:We want our group to look good and the other group to look bad. And if the news doesn't fit that narrative, then we have silence on it. And once again, this just highlights what Elul has been screaming to us since episode two, and we come back to over and over and over again. The polarization of society. Polarization is a key indicator, a key consequence, a key goal of propaganda.
Derek:When you can isolate a group that is monolithic in some way, then you can create propaganda outlets which continue to feed them what they want to hear, both positively about themselves and their group, as well as negatively about the dangers to them and and their enemies. And simultaneously, when you isolate a group, you can prevent them from receiving dissonant information, which might wake them up to reality. This polarization leads to the silence that we've talked about. Whenever you're in a particular group or consuming and hopefully digesting certain media, listen for the silence. If there's silence, especially where that silence is in regard to self critique and accountability, then you know something is woefully wrong.
Derek:And in my opinion, that's a big part of what is happening in the, the church, especially the evangelical church today in regard to abuse. We've been propagandizing our people and isolating them so that disagreement and critique have become synonymous with heresy rather than with a living, loving, and thriving community. We, you know, we throw these threats around. If you don't fall in line, then you must be the problem. But that's a discussion for another time.
Derek:And you'll you'll get part of that discussion, in Olaski's article as he talks about some of the critiques that are are levied at him and World Magazine. So go check it out. Since silence as a tool of media propaganda was what I wanted to really hit home today, and since we're already at a pretty lengthy episode, I want to briefly highlight a few other aspects of the media and media propaganda that I think are important to recognize. Noam Chomsky has done a lot of work on propaganda with his best known work, dealing with it called the the manufacturing of consent. I highly recommend listening to or reading some of Chomsky's stuff, and you can find a lot of it on YouTube for free.
Derek:But Chomsky highlights that while propaganda in a place like North Korea might be directed by a top down approach, We have to often avoid these types of conspiracy theories in the West. It's not that this sort of thing never happens. I mean, I'm reading a book right now called Manipulating the Masses, which is about how propaganda arose during World War one. At the beginning of chapter nine, the author talks about how the government actually approached newspapers to censor things or to infuse propaganda into them. As just one example, the, the CPI, the government's propaganda division at the time, went to newspapers and told them to stop running stories with pictures of a good looking Kaiser.
Derek:They would replace their pictures with one, that painted him in a weaker or worse light. And then there was, of course, the Supreme Court case entitled The United States versus the spirit of '76, in which The US sent a filmmaker, the filmmaker of the movie, the spirit of '76. They they, sentenced him to prison for ten years. It ended up getting commuted to three years, but still, this this guy spent three years in prison for making a film, based on the the espionage or the sedition act or something. Well, how bad was this film?
Derek:The filmmaker had included, like, three seconds in his film where the British were briefly depicted as committing violence and atrocities during the revolutionary war. You know, they, like, I don't know, come in and it's implied that they ban at somebody or ravaged a woman. You know, of course, they don't show anything. This is, like, 1917. It's just implied sorts of stuff, mostly.
Derek:So, yeah, that was a problem. It was seditious because, what it does is we were allies with Britain at the time, and creating a film like that was giving the enemy, Germany, fodder for propaganda. So, yeah, we're we are foolish to think that there's no top down propaganda. But I think what Chomsky wants us to avoid is delving into these weeds of conspiracies too much because we don't need to. And and more often than not, we're gonna come out in crazy land.
Derek:We can just pick the low hanging fruit and deal with that here because that tends to be more broadly explanatory. Generally, you don't look for big, huge conspiracies of of people trying to manipulate, minds and create zombies. Generally, you just follow the money. Especially in a free market model, propaganda arises out of self interest rather than some top down conspiracy. With cable news advertisements, and, you know, sponsorships of a lot of media outlets, the media is going to report on what viewers want because advertisers are going to pay based on viewership.
Derek:So people are going to select the news that tells them what they want to hear and news that doesn't ruffle their feathers. We self select propaganda that suits us. We lock ourselves into our echo chambers and the news media is incentivized to keep feeding us what we want to hear. And it certainly doesn't help that something like six corporations own and control over 90% of media outlets. To how many places do we really have to run?
Derek:There's a link in the notes if you want to read more about that. But point is that there's, yes, there's top down propaganda that happens. Conspiracies happen for sure. And we talk about them this season. But a lot of our propagandization just comes down to human desires playing out uncritically.
Derek:Just like we feed ourselves the junk food that we want to eat at the expense of our health, so we're going to choose to consume the propaganda that tickles our ears rather than, you know, do the work or suffer the discomfort of experiencing truth, which is often arrayed in the garb of dissonance. To close out this episode, I wanna highlight one resource that you need to check out. Right after you're done with this, go check this out. I know I'm gonna have a resource episode at the end of this, this section of the season, but I still feel the need to plug this, this particular resource here. There's a documentary called Spin, which aired in the nineties.
Derek:This tech guy figured out that he could actually pick up the cameras of news stations via satellite as they were always running. That means that when a show like Larry King Live cut to commercials on your TV, you could still actually pick up what was going on on the cameras at the studio if you knew how to receive those signals. I don't completely understand how it worked, but the result is amazing. This guy puts together all these behind the scenes recordings that he took of political figures who are talking when they don't realize that they're being recorded. And seeing the image that we get on TV and then seeing what's going on behind the scenes was absolutely eye opening.
Derek:It's like you're watching a secret camera. It's far more real than reality TV because it's just raw footage of unguarded politicians laying out their thoughts and plans. What the film shows you is how the news media can deliver us images and coordinate images to deliver to us images in in the packages that they want us to have or that that we will most accept. Definitely go check it out. There's actually quite a bit more that I wanted to talk about in this episode, but it feels like adding more would not only make this episode really long, but it would be delivered in a more haphazard fashion.
Derek:So we discussed the huge core of what I think we need to focus on when it comes to the media, and you are free to dig further into resources if you'd like. Just remember, when you think of news media or media in general, you should be thinking of this idea of selectivity, along with all the other propaganda things that we've talked about, especially this selectivity. That's all for now. So peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
Derek:This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and kingdom living.
