HOW THE U.S. MEDIA PROMOTES WAR AS ENTERTAINMENT

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ~ Richard Salent, Former President CBS News. 

“It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.” ~ Jacques Ellul

 

``I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television.... You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV set images....'' ~ Hal Becker, media ``expert'' and management consultant, the Futures Group, in an interview in 1981

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." ~  Michael Parenti, political scientist. 

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As depicted in the graph above, the number of corporations owning the majority of US media outlets went from 50 to 5 in less than 20 years. 

ED: Over the years every form of media has been gobbled up so that now it is controlled by only five or six men all of them Jewish. All of them owned by companies who own the ammunition and military facilities as well. We know this.  

To see who owns what, and therefore slants the news in their profit making favour, please go to this site, OWNERSHIP CHART: THE BIG SIX to have your eyes opened. Almost EVERY outlet for media is owned by a major supplier of armaments or items involved in the “art of war”.
 

This author below does mention some good things but he or she (I could not find a name) completely ignores the Zionist influence of the media. What we see today is not news but staged, controlled, scripted material to mold the minds of the audience whilst also controlling their every thoughts. To that end, I will throw in a few quotes to bear in mind.

Finally, at the end, from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the chapter on media control and how the perceptions of the people are handled. I highly recommend reading this. The depth of thought and complexities contained therein are completely applicable to the world of information we deal with today.  Then, if you have time, reread the original post from this entirely different viewpoint. 

InfoRefuge

December 18, 2011

‘They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.’ ~ Ernest Hemmingway 1

The technological advances of the post-war era in the machinery of warfare have made human suffering and death in conflict-zones acutely brutal. Innocuous sounding weapons used in the public lexicon such as ‘daisy-cutter’ and ‘rocket propelled grenade’ are weapons used in modern conflict to inflict heinous death and casualty.

However, public perceptions of the reality of war have been consistently censured by the press ~ in this case the American media establishment ~ since as early as the American Civil War. While the obvious reason for this is to maintain public morale and support for life-threatening conflict, American military intervention since that civil war has been projected internationally.

During the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the explosion of media communications technology has mirrored military R&D in that it has allowed instantaneous access to global conflict.

In three case studies that chart American intervention ~ the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, and the Second Gulf War ~ I will argue that the development of communications technology combined with traditional economic pressures in the Network News medium have reduced public perceptions of American intervention to a form of ‘entertainment.’

I will contrast the pressures and prejudices of journalists and producers on the ground with the economic pressures facing competing media networks to enlarge this debate. Specifically, this will address the ‘rolling news’ format that the Central News Network (CNN) established during the first Gulf War. Finally, the relationship between the media conglomerates and their target audience will be considered in reaction to the ‘entertainment’ label.

The emergence of the CNN Effect can be categorized as ‘the negative effect on the economy caused by people staying home to watch CNN or some other news source during a crisis such as a war.’ 2

It would be a misconception to place the ‘CNN effect’ as one simply referring to ‘rolling news’, a concept adopted by many international media outlets but pioneered by CNN in the first Gulf War.

If one takes the CNN effect as an amalgamation of these two definitions, then the overall CNN effect has been to transplant Hollywood mentality onto a daily level, where producers denigrate genuine human suffering in favour of securing a wider audience from competing economic media giants such as CNBC; MSNBC; Fox; ABC; and Bloomberg.

In one example, it is widely held that the presence and reportage of CNN in Somalia prior to the October 3rd battle ~ where 29 U.S. soldiers were killed and up to 80 injured ~ pressured President Clinton significantly to intervene militarily and deploy Special Forces to that region.

CNN knew what images would appeal to the American public’s conscience and how public pressure could convince an incumbent leader into intervening in humanitarian crises. So, while the economic benefit to CNN was an overriding concern, so too was the power to manipulate what in the Somali example was a highly complex international response to a highly complex national emergency.

Then Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s policy of ‘assertive multilateralism’ involved actors and considerations reaching far beyond the humanitarian dimension of a Somali famine.

Yet, CNN producers and executives chose only to present human suffering vis-à-vis the humanitarian dimension when presenting that particular conflict to the American public. In one assessment, the use of human suffering to influence foreign policy imbued in the Somali context had tragic consequences:

Even when the Mogadishu tragedy was followed a few days later by the outbreak of massive genocide in Rwanda ~ one that saw from 600,000 to one million men, women and children murdered ~ American public opinion did not criticize or challenge the contortions engaged in by the Clinton Administration to avoid intervening. 3

The U.S. media establishment, in the above, aided U.S. policymakers to secure public support for non-intervention in Rwanda, a decision which is universally recognized as irresponsible and an intervention which, unlike Somalia, could actually have benefited the country in question and stalled an unprecedented genocide.

The concept of this distinction ~ between journalists as presenters and journalists as moralists ~ was discussed most ardently after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. During the Nixon Presidency, the television and print media acted moralistically in its presentation of the Vietnam conflict and questioned the national interest by mobilizing the public:

‘The president couldn’t sleep. Long afflicted by insomnia, Nixon had special reason for distress on the night of May 8, 1970. He was being pilloried in the press and by the anti-war movement, first for ordering the invasion of Cambodia, then for reacting coldly to the killing of four Kent State students by National Guardsmen. Now protesters had descended on Washington and the capital was in a state of siege.’ 4

Nixon’s paranoia and megalomania saw the media establishment purely in political terms, with a grand liberal conspiracy engaged in machinations to destroy his Presidency. The Watergate scandal which ultimately broke Nixon’s Presidency was a watershed in American media history as the media saw themselves as the purveyors of that society’s morality.

Established journalistic rules regarding political character attacks which had prevented Clintonian scandals in John F. Kennedy’s era had now been deemed redundant. The media, in short, had free license to report anything and everything.

In Vietnam, this became evident in how the media reported the War. The depiction of violence was no longer censored by the media establishment; it was sensationalized to mirror the mood of a radical American public, morally appalled at the legitimacy of the Vietnam War:

Any viewer in the United States who watched regularly the television reporting from Vietnam – and it was from television that 60 percent of Americans got most of their war news – would agree that he saw scenes of real-life violence, death, and horror on his screen that would have been unthinkable before Vietnam. 5

The effect of this on the American public was obviously an integral tool to the anti-war movement.

Correspondents did not question themselves when taking footage of self-immolating monks, as in response to President Diem’s pro-Catholic policies during the Kennedy Presidency.

Appalling images such as those, designed to shock the American public and enhance the career of a correspondent, would re-emerge during the height of the war. 

De-sensitized to the everyday realities and horrors of a soldier in Vietnam, Americans such as Norman Morrison effectively questioned not only the legitimacy of the war, but the media’s representation of it. Morrison infamously set fire to himself outside Secretary of Defense McNamara’s Pentagon office in 1965, thereby inviting the American public to compare domestic, as opposed to foreign, representations of human suffering in conflict zones.

Samuel Huntington, when describing the new world order as The Clash of Civilizations, also alluded to a domestic media’s perspective when describing foreign intervention:

A world of clashing civilizations…is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard to others 6

It must also be considered that Nixon’s view of the media as conspiring against Republicans alone was misguided. The previous Democratic Presidents involved in Vietnam ~ Johnson and Kennedy ~ both endured a hostile press.

In Johnson’s case, even Cabinet members defected to the press in an effort to discredit what they perceived as an unsteady Presidential leadership descending into chaos.

In Vietnam, the television media establishment recognized the power of shock tactics to induce the government to relinquish control of ambiguous foreign policies not clearly in the national interest. However, the power of the media in Vietnam to influence public opinion has often been exaggerated, as James Hoge notes:

[As in Vietnam,] public attitudes ultimately hinge on questions about the rightness, purpose and costs of policy ~ not television images. 7

In the Iraq conflict of 1991, CNN established itself as the dominant American media network.

This was due to the efforts of producer Robert Weiner, who urged that CNN should stay in Iraq to report the war Live From Baghdad, as the title of the book chronicling his experience suggests. Due in part to Weiner’s ability to secure a relationship with then Deputy Minister of Information Naji Sabri Ahmad al-Hadithi, CNN procured a ‘floor wire’, a device similar to that of a two-way radio.

The advantage for CNN when air strikes on Baghdad became a certainty was that the ‘floor wire’ communicated directly to the Atlanta head office using underground communications cables. Thus, even in the event of U.S. air attacks striking traditional communications centres, the network would be able to broadcast live and uninterrupted.

Once direct warnings emerged from U.S. embassy officials warning of an imminent bombing, the remaining international media networks pulled their journalists out of Baghdad, a move designed to protect journalists’ lives and the credibility of President Bush’s bombing campaign.

CNN engineered a historic moment in international broadcasting when veteran journalists Bernard Shaw; John Holliman; and Peter Arnett were flown in to report the first wave of U.S. attacks.

‘Rolling news’ had found both a niche and an audience, as few of us can forget the live images of U.S. air strikes combined with up to the minute reporting. In addition, the U.S. and global audience were simultaneously transported to live events and extensions of the Iraqi conflict by journalists as far as Tel Aviv and Jordan.

Weiner and his team were hailed as journalistic ‘heroes’ and the envy of the U.S. media establishment. During the first wave of U.S strikes, competing media networks could only feed directly into CNN’s broadcasting to retain a minor portion of the market.

Americans tuned in live round the clock to watch the U.S. air strikes on Baghdad, yet the immediacy of the devastating effects on Iraqis went unnoticed by the American public.

Additionally, the Executive Branch now had to contend with a competing information source, as the government was unable to counter military losses or Hussein’s aggression with pacifying statements to the public: the media now controlled the distribution and content of information.

Underlying this paradox is the concept that the CNN audience was becoming de-sensitized to the realities of a Patriot missile strike or Iraqi Scud launch to the extent that the choice of watching the war on television was not an exercise in information procurement, but a perverse and horrifying form of entertainment.

Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Powell laments:

These days, it seems that an administration can develop a sound foreign policy strategy, but it can’t get people to acknowledge or understand it. 8

Secretary Powell refers here to reinvigorated U.S. government public diplomacy efforts to counter anti-Americanism. In the aftermath of 9-11, the Executive Branch established an Office of Global Communications (OGC) with the mandate: ‘the Office assists in the development of communications that disseminate truthful, accurate, and effective messages about the American people and their government.’ 9

In essence, OGC’s job is to monitor foreign media broadcasts and cultivate effective counter-attacks to perceived propaganda. However, OGC is also competing within a larger paradigm that sees CNN and Al-Jazeera as the principal methods of disseminating ‘truthful, accurate, and effective messages’ related to the demands of their audience.

Al-Jazeera has a pro-Arab and anti-American stance, a position which invited their broadcasting (in mid 2003) of bloodied Iraqi carcasses killed by American armed forces.

ED: as this blog has shown in previous posts, the modern Al-Jazeera serves the Zionist entity and always has. Perhaps in the beginning those who ran it were sincere in truth, but as seen in the past few years, it has deteriorated to a tool to alter perceptions in the Muslim world, serving the agenda of the powerful. Libya and the uprisings in Egypt exposed their agendas completely.

This was not necessarily a ‘shock’ tactic. Al-Jazeera’s defence of its inflammatory journalism is that it is a network, like CNN, cultivating its content to the requirements and beliefs of its audience. It is the content of the message, however, which also reiterates the concept of mass media as entertainment.

Al-Jazeera tailors its coverage of the current Iraqi reconstruction to favor its audience, often at the expense of its international credibility. However, Al-Jazeera also provides a balanced portrayal of events important to the Middle East region with the aim of countering purely Western portrayals of Arab conflagrations which include the Arab-Israeli conflict. 9-11 and the ‘globalization’ of mass media also contributed to an enhanced and increasingly complex relationship between a network and its audience.

When assessing U.S. media presentations of 9-11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, one has to take into account that:

[Thus,] the difference between news coverage of terrorism inside and outside a target country is striking: when terrorists hit their enemies at home, they can inflict greater damage but they lose in the battle over media access and predominant perspectives. 10

In the U.S. media’s haste to assuage the nation’s thirst for justification and retribution in response to the 9-11 attacks, the legitimacy of intervention in Iraq ~ and the methods employed to gain that legitimacy ~ were not called into question by the media until too late.

If the media does not exercise control on its moral obligations ~ as it did in Vietnam and Watergate, but only reacts to the government’s supply of information and their audiences need for military action to counter unlimited domestic terrorism, the public can only be expected to treat the media as another form of entertainment in their lives.

Consider CNN’s article of May 8, 2003, reporting President Bush’s dramatic arrival on the USS Abraham Lincoln:

WASHINGTON (CNN) ~ Several administration officials Wednesday defended President Bush’s flight on a Navy jet to an aircraft carrier last week, saying there was a minimal difference between the cost of the president flying to the ship in a jet versus flying in a helicopter. 11

This extract, and the subsequent article in its entirety, fails to acknowledge that the true cost of that political maneuver. The event was ‘staged’, much like a theatrical trailer, to enhance President Bush’s image as a war-time leader with previous combat experience in Vietnam.

International media executives and producers could not simply exercise a moral high ground and refuse to cover the event: that would be tantamount to economic suicide. However, CNN et al. are inconsistent in their coverage of the Iraq war and reconstruction efforts by not pressuring Administration officials to reveal accurate casualty and death rates, or to cover with as much zeal and attention items such as President Bush’s visit to the relatives of deceased combat soldiers.

The latter are not stories of success and triumph, yet for an audience to comprehend the nature of an all encompassing ‘war on terror’, the audience must be allowed a balanced portrayal of the realities of American intervention. In addition, the cost of American national security can only be understood in a wider context of universal injustices precipitated worldwide in the name of ‘terrorism.’

Appalling images of suffering in the world are interrupted by advertisements for car insurance: barbarism and banality, cheek by jowl. 12

If the American public becomes increasingly de-sensitized to violence, policy makers may well become less emotionally attached to human suffering.

In terms of future American military intervention, this could prove beneficial when having to make decisive action in delicate operations, as the recent Haitian example suggests.

However, sensitivity to human suffering ~ epitomized in how governments react to global conflict and international intervention of any description ~ is not only a fundamental aspect of participating in international affairs, but what legitimizes the foreign policies of mature western democracies.

If continually editorialized media representations of war are promoted with the same guidelines as those used by producers to market programs such as ER or Friends, this moral conviction erodes.

The increasingly belligerent undertone taken by the U.S. media television establishment in its efforts to secure economic stability should throw a caution to the prevailing wind that American intervention is always justified when the national interest is at stake.

War and violent conflicts, however marketed, are not enjoyable enterprises for any potential actor involved. CNN and the larger U.S. media establishment may well benefit from this reminder.

CITED

Bunting, Madeleine. ‘Reasons to be Cheerless’, The Guardian

‘The CNN Effect‘

Goshko, John M. ‘Bush, Clinton, and Somalia’, in Abshire, David, ed., Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency: Seventy-Six Case Studies in Presidential Leadership (Praeger: Westport, CT), pp. 226-232

Greenberg, David. Nixon’s Shadow: the History of an Image (Norton: New York)

Hemmingway, Ernest. ‘Top Ten War Quotes‘

Hoge, James F. ‘Media Pervasiveness’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 1994, pp. 136-144

Huntington, Samuel P. ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72. No. 3, pp. 22-49

John King, ‘Administration Defends Bush Flight to Carrier‘, CNN

Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (Andre Deutsch: London)

Nacos, Brigitte L., Terrorism and the Media: From the Iran Hostage Crisis to the World Trade Center Bombing (Columbia University Press: New York)

‘Office of Global Communications‘

Powell, Colin, ‘A Strategy of Partnerships‘, Foreign Affairs

1 ‘Top Ten War Quotes‘

2 ‘The CNN Effect‘

3 Goshko, p. 231

4 Greenberg, p. 232

5 Knightley, p. 410

6 Huntington, p. 36

7 Hoge, p. 141

8 Colin Powell, ‘A Strategy of Partnerships‘ Foreign Affairs

9 ‘Office of Global Communications‘

10 Nacos, p. 47

11 John King, ‘Administration Defends Bush Flight to Carrier‘, CNN

12 Madeleine Bunting, ‘Reasons to be Cheerless’, The Guardian

PROTOCOLS OF ZION
PROTOCOL #12 ~ CONTROL OF THE MEDIA

1.  The word "freedom" which can be interpreted in various ways, is defined by us as follows:

2.  Freedom is the right to do what the law allows.  This interpretation of the word will, at the proper time, be of service to us because all freedom will then be in our hands; since the laws will abolish or create only what is desirable for us according to the above-mentioned program.

3.  We shall deal with the media in the following way:  What is the role played by the media today?   

It sometimes serves to excite and inflame those passions which are needed for our purpose, and at other times it serves the selfish desires of other parties.

It is often bland, unjust, dishonest, and the majority of the public haven’t the slightest idea what purpose the media really serves.  We shall saddle and bridle it with a tight chain.  We shall also do the same with all other productions of the printing press; for what would be the sense of getting rid of attacks from newspapers if we remain targets via pamphlets and books?

The output of the media is nowadays a source of heavy expense owing to the necessity of censoring it.  We will turn it into a very lucrative source of income to our State by laying a special stamp tax on it and requiring deposits of caution-money before permitting any new media companies from being established.  They will then be required to guarantee our government against any kind of attack from their media.

For any attempt to attack us (if that’s still possible) we shall inflict fines without mercy.  Such measures as stamp tax, deposit of caution-money and fines secured by these deposits, will bring in a huge income to the government.

It is true that political groups which have money to spare might still attack us for the sake of publicity regardless of these fines.  But these we shall shut up at the second attack upon us.  No one shall lay a finger on the aura of our government infallibility without being punished.

The pretext for stopping any publication will be the alleged plea that it is agitating the public mind without good reason or at an inappropriate time.  

I beg you to note that among those making attacks upon us will also be entities established by us; but they will only attack points of our plan which we have already decided to alter.

WE CONTROL THE MEDIA

4.  Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control.

Even now this is being achieved by us due to the fact that all news items are received by only a few agencies, and their offices are a focal point for news coming in from all parts of the world.

These agencies will already be entirely owned by us and will only publish what we dictate to them.

5.  We have effectively taken possession of the minds of the Goy communities to such an extent that they have all come to look upon the events of the world through the colored glasses which we have placed on their noses.

Already now there is not a single State which has barriers preventing us from gaining access to what Goyim stupidity call “State secrets”.  What will our positions be when we are acknowledged as supreme lords of the world, and have one of our persons as the king of all the world...

6.  Let’s turn again to the future of the printing press.

Every one desirous of being a publisher, librarian, or printer, will be obliged to first acquire a special license for that purpose, which in case of any fault, will be immediately suspended.

With such measures 

the thoughts of the people will be under the control of our government, who will educate them appropriately, and won’t allow the masses to be led along different paths and by fantasies about the blessings of progress.

All of us here know that these delusional blessings give rise to fanciful dreaming which leads to anarchy among the people and towards authority.  This is a bad thing because progress, or rather the idea of progress, has brought forth all sorts of ideas about gaining freedom, but has failed to establish its limits...

All the so-called libertarians are anarchists, either in thought or in reality.  Every one of them, in hunting for the phantoms of freedom, ends up involved in anarchy, and protests for the sake of protesting...

FREE PRESS DESTROYED

7.  We turn now to the periodical press.  We shall impose on it, and on all printed matter, stamp taxes per sheet and deposits of caution-money.

Books of less than 30 sheets will pay double.  We shall classify them as pamphlets for two reasons: firstly to reduce the number of magazines, because these are the worst form of printed poison, and secondly, to force writers to make such lengthy productions that they will be little read, especially seeing that they will also be costly.

At the same time what we shall publish pamphlets ourselves to influence mental development in the desired direction.  Our publications will be cheap and eagerly read.  This will also bring us some profits.

The tax will bring uninteresting literary ambitions within reach and the risk of possible penalties will make literary men dependent upon us.

And if anyone is desirous of writing against us ~ they will not find any person eager to put their productions in print because the publisher or printer will first have to apply to the authorities for permission to do so.

Thus we shall have advanced knowledge of all tricks being preparing against us and shall nullify them by getting in ahead with our explanations on the subject being discussed.

8.  Literature and journalism are two of the most important educative forces, and therefore our government will become proprietor of the majority of the journals.

This will neutralize the injurious influence of the privately-owned press and will put us in possession of a tremendous influence upon the public mind...  If we give permits for ten privately-owned journals, we shall establish thirty journals of our own, and so forth in the same proportion.

This, however, must in no way be suspected by the public.  For this reason 

all journals published by us will be very opposite, in appearance, tendencies and opinions to our official stance.  This will create confidence in our journals, bringing over to us quite unsuspicious opponents, who will thus fall into our trap and be rendered harmless.

We will divide our media components into three layers or ranks…

9.  In the front rank will be publications of an official character.  They will always stand guard over our interests, and therefore their influence will be comparatively insignificant.

10.  In the second rank will be the semi-official publications, whose part it will be to normally support us and sometimes criticize us, but only over issues of lukewarm importance.

11.  In the third rank we shall set up what looks like our own opposing camp, which, in at least one of its publications, will present what looks like the very enemy of us.  Our real opponents at heart will accept this simulated opposition as their own and will reveal their identities and plans to us.

12.  Our newspapers will be of all possible complexions ~ aristocratic, republican, revolutionary, even anarchical ~ for only as long, of course, as the constitution exists...  Like the Indian idol "Vishnu" they will have a hundred hands, and every one of them will have a finger on any one of the public opinions as required.

When an emotive issue arises, these hands will lead opinion in the direction of our aims; for an excited person loses all power of judgment and easily yields to suggestion. 

Those fools who will think they are repeating the opinion of a newspaper of their own camp will actually be repeating our opinion or any opinion that seems desirable for us.

In the vain belief that they are following the ideology of their party they will, in fact, be following the flag that we have hang out for them.

13.  In order to direct our newspaper militia in this way we must take special and minute care in organizing this matter.  Under the title of Central Department of the Media we shall arrange literary gatherings at which our agents will, without attracting attention, issue the orders and specify the ‘important issues’ of the day which journalists need to cover.

By superficially discussing and opposing, but without touching the essence of the matter, our appointed people will carry on sham fights and arguments with the official newspapers solely for the purpose of giving us a reason to express ourselves more fully than we could have done from the outset in official announcements, whenever of course that is to our advantage.

14.  These attacks upon us will also serve another purpose, namely, that our subjects will be convinced of the existence of full freedom of speech and this gives our agents an occasion to claim that all publications which oppose us are empty babblers, since they are incapable of finding any substantial objections to our orders.

ONLY LIES PRINTED

15.  Methods of organization like these, which are imperceptible to the public eye but are sure to work, are calculated as being the best way to succeed in bringing the attention and the confidence of the public to the side of our government.

Thanks to such methods we shall be in a position, as may be required from time to time, to excite or calm the public mind on political questions, to persuade or to confuse, sometimes printing truth, sometimes lies, facts or their contradictions.  We will do this according to how well these messages are received, and always very cautiously feeling the ground before stepping upon it...

We shall have an assured victory over our opponents since they will not have the appropriate access to the media in which they can give full and final expression to their views owing to the above-mentioned methods of dealing with the media.

We shall not even need to refute them except very superficially.

16.  Trial shots like these, fired by us in the third rank of our press, will, when necessary, be energetically refuted by us in our semi-official publications.

17.  Even nowadays, already, to take only the French press as an example, there are groups which reveal Masonic-like solidarity in acting together on the ‘important issues’: all people of the media are bound together by professional secrecy; and like the priests of ancient Rome, not one of them will give away the secret of his sources of information unless the group agrees upon it.

Not one journalist will venture to betray this secret, for not one of them is ever admitted to practice journalism unless his whole past has some dark and disgraceful secret in it... For if he did, these secrets would be immediately revealed.

So long as they remain the secret of a few, the prestige of the journalist allows him to attack the majority of the country ~ and the mob will follow after him with enthusiasm.

18.  Our mischievous plans are also designed to apply to the rural areas.  It is essential for us to stir up there, those hopes and impulses which, at any moment, we could also stir up in the major cities.  We shall tell the people of those cities that these expressions are the independent hopes and impulses of the rural people.

Naturally, the source of them will be always one and the same ~ ours.  What we need is that, until such time as we have the majority of power, the cities should find themselves stifled by the provincial opinion of the nations, i.e., of a majority arranged by our agents.

What we need at that psychological moment is that the city-capitals should not discuss our position of majority power for no other reason than it has already been accepted by the public opinion of a majority in the rural-provinces.

19.  When we are in the period of the new regime, but prior to the assumption of our full sovereignty, we must not allow any revelation by the media to admit to any form of public dishonesty.  It is necessary that the new regime should be thought to have so perfectly contended everybody that even criminality has disappeared...

Occurrences of criminality should remain known only to the victims and to chance witnesses ~ no one else.