The Cult of Ugliness

MediaTricks | December 31, 2022

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.
Roger Scruton

The Hollywood Mind Wipe

MediaTricks | October 25, 2022

Quote: "They mould your minds and have you see the world not as it is, but as they want you to see it. Through their cinema, they are the educators of our youth and with just one film in two hours, can wipe out of a child's brain what he has learned in six months in the home, the church or the school."

The truth is still putting its shoes on

MediaTricks | March 3, 2022

“A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes. By the time the truth catches up, it’s too late.”
Mark Twain

Fake Quote, Real Quote.

“Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”
Jonathan Swift

George Orwell on Newspaper Manipulation

MediaTricks | February 12, 2022

"Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines."
- George Orwell

Fact from Fiction

MediaTricks | February 3, 2022

Quote image: Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. - C.S. Lewis

Political Correctness: The Ready-Made Lies

MediaTricks | January 21, 2022

Quote image: "The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence….Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie. There exists a collection of ready-made phrases, of labels, a selection of ready-made lies."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

Entire fields of study are off-limits because of the regime of ready-made lies. The regime enforced by the media machine.

The Purpose of Political Correctness

MediaTricks | January 18, 2022

Quote image: “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” – Theodore Dalrymple

The Madness of Crowds

MediaTricks | January 16, 2022

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Charles Mackay

Source: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), by Charles Mackay

Soviets livin’ the lie

MediaTricks | January 1, 2022

"l was a loyal Soviet citizen until the age of 20. What it meant to be a loyal citizen was to say what you were supposed to say, to read what you were permitted to read, to vote the way you were told to vote and, at the same time, to know it was all a lie." -Natan Sharansky

Divide and Conquer

MediaTricks | December 29, 2021

"The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority." Will Durant

A New Kind of Totalitarianism

MediaTricks | December 8, 2021

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind totalitarianism.

All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit. - Aldous Huxley

The illusion of newspaper credibility

MediaTricks | December 2, 2021

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. - Michael Crichton

MSNBC anchor admits live on air the media’s job is to “control exactly what people think”

MediaTricks | December 2, 2021

“control exactly what people think” … “that is our job”

Fake Realities

MediaTricks | November 29, 2021

“Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.”

Thomas Jefferson: Fake News

MediaTricks | November 29, 2021

The Invisible Government

MediaTricks | November 29, 2021

The Unseen Power of the Mind Manipulators

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

Manipulating Crowd Size for Media-Approved Events

MediaTricks | November 28, 2021