The spaghetti-tree hoax: an 'innocent' experiment showed the overwhelming power of the mainstream media over the masses
When
you have the monopoly of information you can literally transform
people's minds. You can make them believe whatever you want. You can
even reverse reality toward the narrative you have built to promote
the desirable agenda for your bosses.
In
1957, BBC conducted a very interesting experiment. The spaghetti-tree
hoax
was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by
the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama, purportedly showing a
family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family
"spaghetti tree". At the time spaghetti was relatively
little known in the UK, so that many Britons were unaware that it is
made from wheat flour and water; a number of viewers afterwards
contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees.
Decades later, CNN called this broadcast "the
biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled".
This
'innocent' farce showed dramatically the unimaginable power of TV and
the mainstream media to shape massively the minds of millions.
Earlier, Freud's young nephew, Edward Bernays had set
the foundations
of modern propaganda.
During
the post-WWII era, inside the Cold War, the mainstream media in the
West had built a strong propaganda veil from which Western societies
would be impossible to escape. Entire generations have grown with the
perception of 'evil Communism' as a threat to the Western values and
way of life. Dirty wars conducted mainly by the US as the emerged big
power in the global scene, based on lies and deception manufactured
by the mainstream media, in order to secure the consent of the
majority, even after the collapse of Soviet Communism.
For
decades, before the invention of the Internet and the rise of the
alternative media, people had to rely solely on the mainstream media
for their information about what's going on around the world. During
previous decades, what was being broadcast by the big TV channels and
printed by the biggest newspapers, was taken for granted by the vast
majority of the people in Western societies.
The
spaghetti-tree hoax showed that, in order to manipulate the public,
all you needed was a good scenario, a persuasive narrative, and a few
good film shots. Just think how easily you could be tricked with
today's digital technology.
Yet,
less than two decades ago, the beginning of the rapid expansion of
the Internet brought eventually the first serious cracks on the
mainstream media propaganda monopoly.
Still,
there is a lot of hoax and propaganda on the Internet too, but there
is also alternative information as counter-propaganda, which is not
filtered by any certain hierarchy, as in the currently obsolete
function of the mainstream media.
Internet,
counter-propaganda networks, WikiLeaks, Whistleblowers, are some key
factors due to which the mainstream media propaganda rapidly
collapses. As we are currently inside that process, we don't know
exactly the rate and degree of the collapse, but we can guess that
the Western media have already lost much of their credibility.
However,
it seems that, in many cases, governments or other systemic decision
centers, exploit the Internet, guiding public opinion and independent
judgement towards the "official interpretation" of the
facts, and this is done not only through misinformation flow in the
web, but also through other methods like, for example, trolling.
In
that case, such an "official channel" may inject
information inside the web, the information goes viral, and finally,
people will start to get used to the idea of even the most terrifying
scenarios, like those of a nuclear conflict, or, radical population
control. Then, the system may benefit from the sincere willing of
independent bloggers to whisper the truth.
But
it is true that independent information has escaped from the control
of the mainstream media and that's the reason for which the
establishment proceeds in more drastic measures, especially in the
United States, like, for example, the killing of Net Neutrality.
It
is expected that the battle of information will become wilder in the
following decades as the mainstream media will be losing more and
more of their credibility, and people will turn massively to
independent sources.
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