Corporate Media's oily tricks

[Meat Target]

Over the years, I've become more aware of how the media deceives and misleads people. And it never ceases to make my piss boil, knowing what they're doing and why they're doing it.

I'm not talking about Meat Target's Law (which it shouldn't be called anymore, because I am not the first person to notice it). I'm talking about what is in the text of the articles themselves, and how they editorialize and carefully craft narratives. Their word choice is very deliberate.

1. Snarky quotation marks

When they want to dismiss an idea as silly, frivolous, or an imaginary problem, or at least cast aspersions on those making it without explaining what is wrong with it, they put the term in quotation marks.

Exhibit A:


They refuse to acknowledge that there is well-documented evidence of the government breaking the law and abusing its authority to go after its political adversaries.

Rather than recognize the plain fact that people are unhappy, they gaslight you into thinking "you're just imagining all the rotten shenanigans we are doing in plain sight!"

Have you seen them use the term "bothsidesism"? That's because they'd rather invent new words than allow their credibility to be called into question.

2. Sensationalism for Thee, Kid-gloves for me

Yellow Journalism is alive and well. They love making their own side look like poor, put-upon victims and their opponents as scary and dangerous. This recent Vice article is a great example: all the conservative figures are vilified as "conspiracy theorists", "extremists", "trolls", "far-right", etc.

Meanwhile, the glowies doxxing a random guy with a Twitter are a "nonpartisan group that tracks extremism online", while the guys who tried to kill Kyle Rittenhouse were "unarmed protesters" (never mind the fact that Huber tried to brain him with a skateboard and Grosskreutz pulled a gun on him, but I digress).

3. "X did not respond to requests for comment"

As documented in the threads on Taylor Lorenz and Ali Breland's hitpiece on KF, journalists love to email their targets full of loaded questions late at night, and then writing that the target "did not respond". They make it so that it's technically true, but set it up so that their target has no opportunity to respond.

Of course, that's assuming they don't just disregard responses altogether, like Mother Jones did to Null.

What other ones have you noticed?

 

[m1ddl3m4rch]

I don't know what to call this in your list of examples but what I know it as is 'forced teaming,' where different groups with different and often conflicting interests are lumped together as if they have anything in common.

An example is purposefully keeping to the label LGBTQ and using it everywhere. Gay men were attacked for their homosexuality in Edinburgh and the article kept talking about anti-LGBT+ and quoted a spokesman from an LGBTQ non-profit in the article. I doubt they'd take a quote from LGB Alliance.

Florida had the "Dont Say Gay" bill, which didn't have the word gay in it, and was a move to counter TQ ideology infiltrating the education system. TQ usually shelters behind LGBTQ, but what made it worse is they specifically sheltered behind gay when they called it Dont Say Gay. Lo and behold, the article says the bill marginalizes LGBTQ people.

This deliberate usage overlaps with another problem the press has, language prescriptivism. The AP style guide is used in colleges everywhere, and thus infects non-journo minds. It dictates we should lowercase white and capitalize Black. It demands we refer to homosexuals collectively under LGBTQ+ to be 'inclusive.' Heterosexuals do not need to be inclusive of heterosexuals, and words which exclusively apply to me are not offensive or disparaging.

Spoiler: MW is now prescriptivist

 

[Wesley Willis]

"Bothsidesism" is the new "truthiness". They make up new buzzwords to stay relevant and interesting. Jon Stewart, who is not a journalist, described this very thing when he skewered Tucker Carlson when he worked for CNN on Crossfire almost 20 years ago. South Park also did this in one of their most famous episodes.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=312630419216922

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Dubbing events with terms that are made to create bias, like anti grooming bills with "Don't say gay".

 

[ZazietheBeast]

Here' a few from what I've noticed.

1. "Memory holing". A classic trick that just involves the media doing everything they can that you don't remember. All they do is not report on it. This was used to great effect in the early days of the Wu-Flu when they outright refused to report on the situation. But once the elites figured out that they can capitalize on it and move on with their fucked up plans... it went onto overdrive.

The revelation that South Korea is run by a fucking cult of feminist hags known as the Megalians? Forgotten.
Hunter Biden being a sexual deviant and has political ties to the administration? Forgotten. Somewhat.
Fires suddenly ruin a ton of food processing plants? Don't think about it goy! Just appreciate that the price of food is now rising.

2. "Fireworks" Another one along with memory holes is something the administration also likes to do Something inconvenient gets declassified? Politico found having sordid affairs with barnyard animals? Journos are tasked with finding something absurd to help hide it! Even making it up if they have to. The whole UFO balloons are definitely this.

3. "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" Named after the episode in Avatar when the administration is doing everything they can to hide the truth, It's right up there with memoryholing, this one is the trick most cathedral/big tech platforms love to employ. Hate unwanted facts? Does it make your current administration and leadership look like clowns? It's not allowed to be talked about! This 1984 esque measure is implemented in nearly every mainstream platform. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit. Comes in two forms. Outright banning as observed in Reddit. And Shadowbanning. Where you are still able to use it, but your post isn't as visible to everyone as you like. As noted in Youtube and Twitter. (Metokur did a great video about that.)

This one is a fairly odd duck as all three sections, business, media and government are all implicit in this. Government does something. Journo publishes news about that obviously government-sided. Once publications are out, Business does what they can to make what the journo say is 'true' by cementing that opinion into online encyclopedias and making sure anyone who disagrees on it is called a conspiracy theorist or banned in one way shape or form.

4. "Send in the shills!" This is a trick to make their argument seem legitimate. Humans in general are a social animal. Thus, most people are prone to this. Its all about forming a crowd, have that crowd repeat whatever company line you want and any onlookers might just buy into it too. Corporate media is guilty of this as well as everyone else in the cathedral. Used to great effect in cults, marketing and salesmen.

How this is applied online is variable. In sites like Reddit, thanks to the admin, people just parrot the line eventually. No need for shills there. Scammer who wants to make easy bucks in crypto or any weird product and/or service? Just hire some bots and pajeets and make it sound like there is interest in the product. Want to change minds to make most dissenters crow the praises to your masters? Shills and bots. Sometimes that works, other times it fails spectacularly. Notable example below:

Spoiler: The tale of /mlpol/'s war on shills

Since 2016, /pol/ was consistently flooded with shills and bots doing everything they can to steer that happy hive of brown Nazis into establishment supporters. But that has failed spectacularly simply because nothing interests the autists as part of the reason why they are there in the first place is because they are dissatisfied with how things work. So to that end, shills and bots would make divisive threads, try their best to hide threads that would spell disaster for the establishment (which they failed by the way) and would do everything they can to continue their mission. Even though this is clearly their Vietnam campaign and the autists are the Viet Cong in this regard. With the shills taking visible losses as articles of shills and censors needing therapy were being churned out along with a few defecting to the autists. Then one day, during April fools at 2017, the bought out admins at 4chan staged a prank to put two boards together. /mlp/ the brony board was stuck onto /pol/ as a prank. They figured, a bunch of horsefuckers and brown Nazis would tear through each other's necks. They did for the first two hours. But afterwards, grown to like each other's company as for all the shit the horse show has done, the first two seasons actually did teach some wholesome and valuable lessons. More importantly, the shills had no idea how to deal with the deluge of horsepussies. So right on top of dealing with glorifications of a peculiar defeated German state, they also had to deal with furry porn. So for the entire day, the union actually created a version of /pol/ that had no shills. No bot bumped boards. No divisive shit. it was /pol/ before the election.

These are some of the tricks I have noticed personally. The anon who wrote "Trolling isn't just an art but a way of life." was definitely way ahead of his time.

 

[Tren Shapiro]

If the media doesn't like a person or a group, whenever they are mentioned they will include a link back to a previous hit piece they wrote.

Example: Right-wing extremist bodybuilder Tren Shapiro, who recently sparked controversy for asking if Australian aborigines are an elaborate prank, has come out in support of [thing the media is against].

 

[melty]

-Saying "It is unclear what was meant by that statement" when it's perfectly clear what was meant by the statement and they are just trying to make the person look dumb
-Asking the opinion of someone in another country that just so happens to agree with whatever the narrative is, so it looks like the entire country agrees with the narrative
-Cherrypicking the most sympathetic cases when they want some cause to look good/least sympathetic when they want a cause to look bad
-Circular referencing (eg sites linking each other with the claim that Kiwi Farms killed a billion troons, no primary source for the claim)
-Interviewing a lolcow that pushes the narrative and taking their claims at face value without additional research (Keffals, Brianna Wu)

 

[Lemmingwiser]

Whenever the media uses the term "self-described" I know I'm going to be reading some mean girls book shit about someone being too gay to function.

 

[FudgeFish]

The deliberate and literal misinterpretation of what words and phrases mean.

Example - when it was originally reported that Malmo, Sweden had large areas of the city, populated entirely by Muslims, which had become de-facto "no-go zones" by the local populace and even emergency services. Articles started to pour out stating that this was a falsehood - burying in the article, that their objection was based on the fact that no government body had officially declared them as no-go zones, therefore they weren't.

It ignored that the term wasn't describing some official declaration, but a local understanding that unless you were also a Muslim, it was best to stay away. It was also based on numerous accounts of fire crews and ambulances being attacked, their vehicles often set on fire while attending incidents.

The media's argument against the existence of "no-go zones" was entirely based around the fact that no official map existed detailing such a zone.

 

[The Ugly One]

One of the latest cool tricks is that for articles about some nigger committing a heinous crime, they us a stock photo with a white person.