April 1st 1957: the day Western mainstream media officially became masters of propaganda through a seemingly innocent April Fools' Day joke

globinfo freexchange 

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.

It is worth to add that the technology of real-time video manipulation is already available for at least twenty years now. So, imagine the corporate media power in building efficient propaganda, using modern technology.