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Democracies
work only when the voters have reliable,
accurate information upon which to base
their decisions.
In the United
States, reliable, accurate information
is getting harder and harder to come
by. It is not that we aren't
bombarded with information because we
are - it's that the information is being
used to create a false reality - a
virtual reality.
The manufactured
version of reality is presented on
television. Newspapers publish
canned and sanitized stories from a monopoly provider -
American
Pravda.
The truth - if one is interested, must be
ferreted out on the internet by reading
the same stories from different
sources. The cognitive dissonance
that results from the two entirely
different realities is reminiscent
of Rod Sterling's Twilight
Zone.
In an
article titled "Without
A Doubt", Ron Suskind quoted an
senior Bush advisor which confirms the
suspicion of a false reality.
“The aide said that
guys like me were ''in
what we call the reality-based
community,'' which he defined
as people who ''believe
that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible
reality.'' I nodded and
murmured something about
enlightenment principles
and empiricism. He cut me off.
''That's not the way the world
really works anymore,''
he continued. ''We're an
empire now, and when we act,
we create our own
reality. And while you're
studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will
-- we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you
can study too, and that's
how things will sort out.
We're history's actors . . .
and you, all of you, will
be left to just study what we
do.'
The creation of a virtual reality became
government policy during the Reagan
Administration as reported by James
Kelso in an article titled 'Control
of the American News Media'.
The following is an excerpt from that
article:
A covert policy,
formulated by Ronald Reagan in
conjunction with the CIA, was
termed “perception
management” and was
formalized on January 14, 1983
when President Reagan signed
the National Security Decision
Directive No. 77. The Reagan
White House and the CIA felt
that a resurrection of
anti-war activism in the
United States as had occurred
during the prolonged and
futile Vietnamese war could
curtail or halt the Reagan/CIA
policy of “aggressive
containment,” specifically
in Central America.
This
project was also called
‘public diplomacy’ and
while it was ostensibly
created to develop American
public support for Reagan’s
foreign policy, it also was
constructed to effect control
over the opinions of the
American public through
control of the American media,
both TV and press reportage.
Under
the “perception
management/public diplomacy”
program, the CIA was
instructed to take a number of
steps to bring the American
public’s perceptions into
line with an official U.S.
governmental policy.
The
first step in this program was
to fully analyze the cultural,
ethnic, political and
religious backgrounds of the
general population and attempt
to discover what themes
resonate best with the
greatest number of Americans.
When this was been achieved,
the next step was to create
specific themes to address
these cultural weak spots, or
“points of public
concern.”
This
sounds more like a policy of the Soviet
Union or Communist China than it does
the United States but the Iran-Contra
scandal nearly brought down the Reagan
Administration. Leaders in power
are all the same, they want to stay in
power. The media - TV and press
exposed the corruption of our foreign
policy and as such, they represented a
threat to that power and the ability to
abuse it.
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