Television

Television  (Corporate media,  Communications technology,  social control)
A tool of 20th century commercially-controlled media, now used as a tool of mass surveillance.

Television was the first technology to allow images to be transmitted for remote viewing. It was quickly adopted by governments worldwide as an effective means of broadcasting.

“Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.”
Bill Hicks

Concerns

Truthstream Media opines that TV consumption has over decades enforced an attitude in society where most of the people believe whatever the mainstream media tells them without critical analysis. Technical research from the 60s onward, into how different flickering frequencies, among other things, lead to different brain wave patterns that make people absorb information in an uncritical way, may have played a role in this if it has been applied on a wider scale.

“Fast image sequences and information overload make you passive and mentally lazy. Viewing fast image sequences puts the viewer in a kind of trance. The brain is thereby very unfavorably, since that is very one-sided, stressed. The same brain cells are activated over and over again and the remaining cells (e.g. active, creative thinking) lie idle and atrophy over time. Additional problem: In addition to the fast cuts, the diversity of the TV offering also reduces our attention span.”
Wolfgang Eggert (1 September 2019) 

Worldview

Full article: Propaganda

Television, through repetition of the same notion over and over again, enforces a worldview that on the political side assumes certain things and questions very little. The enforcing of this worldview starts at a young age through TV program for children and goes from there to cover all sections of society and all entertainment aspects (shows, movies, video games, etc). While critical content is produced, it is outweighed by those productions that enforce this worldview - which in general follows the line that America is fighting for what is right, not so much for it's own gain and empire. Domestic television productions around the world, especially in Europe, are generally concerned with other topics, but the outreach of Hollywood and the productions geared towards children, which are produced by the American entertainment complex, are factoring in as explained above. News reporting in Europe again, is very much in line to US foreign policy and overwhelmingly uncritical.

“I once said to the chair, the heads of the CIA, when I was prime minister, that if you want to advance regime change in Iran you don't have to go through the CIA cloak and dagger stuff. What you want to do is, is take very large, very strong transponders and just beam Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 2050 and all that, into, into Tehran and into Iran because that is subversive stuff. They watch with, the young kids watch it, the young people. They want to have the same nice clothes and the same houses and swimming pools and so on.”
Benjamin Netanyahu (12 September 2002) 

Example

Full article: Hollywood

The Delta Force (1986)

The movie 'The Delta Force' depicts a successful rescue attempt of American hostages from Iran. It is based on what the real operation 'Eagle Claw' would have been, if it had been successful. Unlike the movie however, it ended before any firefight. The operation is described and remembered as a debacle, but the movie does not give a clue as to what really happened and the viewer is left with the impression of good American soldiers fighting Islamic "terrorism".

Talk shows

Talk shows are an effective way to shape public perception in general and communicate changes and developments in society that have been decided elsewhere.

Spying

CIA and MI5 have developed software to use televisions as surveillance tools.

BBC

Full article: BBC

In the UK, television development was organised by the BBC , which was founded in 1922 under John Reith.

Brainwashing

On average, US citizens spend about 5 hours/day watching television. John Whitehead suggests that they "are being programmed to accept the brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things happening to other people."

Weblinks

Hendricus G. Loos - Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors

 

Examples

Page name	Description
A Very British Coup	TV series describing how the British Deep State tries to topple an elected left-wing Labour government.
ARTE
BBC coverage of the Calais Jungle	Coverage of the European migrant crisis from the BBC.
Glenn Beck
CNN	"Deep State TV network and master of fake news", experienced a precipitous decline in popularity since about 2019
Conspiracy Files	A series of programmes, each of which focuses on a particular "Conspiracy theories".
Germany/Public broadcasting
Alasdair Milne
Nieuwsuur	A state-funded TV program that replaced several award-winning current affairs programs that were "too biased"...meaning not following the official narrative.
Saving Syria's Children	An emotive episode of Panorama that may have been used to try to increase public support for a program of bombing Syria.
Secret Society	Bought by the BBC, but at least one episode was never broadcast. This TV series lead to the Zircon Affair.
The Cook Report
The Met	A BBC programme about the Metropolitan Police.
World in Action

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Hollywood	“The great ideology of which we are only dimly aware of being subjected to in the West is Hollywoodism, a real complete system of values, models of behavior and thought, of how we should dress and what we should eat, etc. In short, an entire model of reality, to which we in varying degrees end up believing. And it is precisely those who are not aware of the purely faith-based nature of this who in no time at all finds himself a fundamentalist, that is, someone who blindly believes in his own models of reference without at all realizing their relativity. Like it or not, we are all Hollywood fundamentalists - we've watched too much American cinema and television in our lives not to be. Some will be more so than others, but no one escapes.”	Roberto Quaglia
Hollywood	“Today, very little of our make-believe is drawn from children's games, storytelling, folktales, and fables, very little from dramas and dreams of our own making. Instead we have the multibillion-dollar industries of Hollywood and television to fill our minds with prefabricated images and themes.”	Michael Parenti
Hollywood	“The hierarchs of Hollywoodism want to possess and control your mind, as well as that of everyone else, and this possession manifests itself whenever you think in the terms they set. And they already possess your mind, at least partly, even if you believe they don't. Every time you like to quote the Matrix in your oppositional speeches, or movies like V for Vendetta... but in this case I have bad news for you, my friend. Even the Matrix, even V for Vendetta were injected into your head by the sorcerers of Hollywoodism, they are allegories that they put into circulation, it is not your own work. And they did it for you. To help you express your dissent better. And by expressing your dissent in the exact terms they have laid out for you, you demonstrate that you are wholly part of their immaterial realm, and by doing so you make it more stable. You don't believe it? Think about it closer.”	Roberto Quaglia
Hollywood	“For a hundred years, Hollywood has represented the Western imagination in its cinematographic products, and in doing so it builds it, homogenizes it, sets its standards. But from what moment can we begin to call this activity of structuring our tastes and customs, a real effort at manipulation? That is difficult to establish. However, there is evidence that in recent decades US cinema is increasingly overflowing with clearly intentional elements of mass manipulation, we can identify, recognize and describe them, and these manipulation techniques are the result of extraordinary knowledge of the exact methods for how the masses of people can be conditioned. The framework is therefore of a very polished science of sociological engineering, new things, things that is not taught even in the best universities - apart from possibly some military universities of which we know little or nothing.”	Roberto Quaglia
Peace	“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.”	John Lennon
Police	“If you think about it, this is a really ingenious trick. Because when most of us think about police, we do not think of them as enforcing regulations. We think of them as fighting crime, and when think of “crime,” the kind of crime have in our minds is violent crime. Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it... most violent crime does not end up involving the police... Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it’s not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences.”	David Graeber
Jacob Rees-Mogg	“Masks are worn more by socialists when there are television cameras around than when they are not going to be seen.”	Jacob Rees-Mogg	21 October 2021
Malcolm X	“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”	Malcolm X	1963

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:TV8 Moldova list of activities	funding requirements for NGO TV Channel	26 December 2018	Integrity Initiative	upgrade requirements and price for Moldovan NGO channel
Document:TV8 Storage equipment	funding requirements for NGO TV Channel	26 December 2018	Integrity Initiative	costs for upgrading NGO TV channel in Moldova
Document:To influence/shape entertainment outputs	'Memorandum' document on how to influence/shape entertainment outputs	26 December 2018	Integrity Initiative Victor Madeira

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Commentary from Howard Beale, a character in the 1976 film Network:

"Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was the Chairman of the Board of the Union Broadcasting Systems and he died at eleven o'clock this morning of a heart condition, and woe is us, we're in a lot of trouble! So, a rich little man with white hair died. What does that got to do with the price of rice, right? And why is that woe to us? Because you people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube! Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers! This tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world! And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died! Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the 20th floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?! So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth, go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth! But man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch, at the end of the hour he's gonna win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know! You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here! You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal! You do whatever the tube tells you, you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets! Turn them off now! Turn them off right now! Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now! Turn them off!"