You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [59]
It turns out the reports, though impossible to deny, were remarkably easy for TV news outlets to ignore, despite the fact that they were published on the front page of the New York goddamned Times. When Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2009, most television pundits were busy hyping swine flu. Brian Williams had the balls to report that the paper had won five Pulitzers, and even mentioned the subject of three of the stories they’d won for. He just chose not to mention the one they got for pointing out that he’s a government stooge.
What it taught us about the media
Hey, those celebrity vaginas aren’t going to expose themselves. OK, they are, but that’s beside the point. The system’s not perfect, but it’s not Stalinist Russia either. As long as the New York Times is around, we have nothing to worry abou—Oh, hey, look. There’s one more entry on this list.
1. THE DENIAL OF THE HOLODOMOR
When It Happened: 1932-33
News Agencies Involved: New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and the Nation
When the harvest of 1932 was poorer than expected in most regions of the Soviet Union, it became pretty clear that there wasn’t enough food for the Russian people. Unfortunately, Stalin’s government was busy convincing the world that Communism was rad, and alerting the world to an impending disaster wasn’t part of the PR plan.
Luckily, America had its best Russian reporter on the ground at the time: Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner who had interviewed Stalin himself. As millions of Russians began starving to death and Stalin continued itching his balls indifferently, the New York Times’ Duranty stepped up to the plate, informing the world:
“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” The people, you see, weren’t starving to death; they were just dying of malnutrition. Wait, what the hell?
It turns out that most writers who got approval to enter the Soviet Union were too terrified of Stalin to talk about what was really happening. They pretty much just reported whatever the Soviet government told them to. In Duranty’s case, scoring an interview with the year’s hottest dictator came with a price. Namely, not alerting the world that 10 million people were about to starve to death.
What it taught us about the media
Everything you’ve ever read is a lie. Trust no one.
FOUR BRAINWASHING TECHNIQUES THEY’RE USING ON YOU RIGHT NOW
BRAINWASHING doesn’t take a lot of sci-fi gadgetry. There are all sorts of tried-and-true techniques that anyone can use to bypass the thinking part of your brain and flip a switch deep inside that says “OBEY.”
In fact, there’s an entire arsenal of manipulation techniques being used on you every day to do just that. Techniques like:
4. CHANTING SLOGANS
Every cult leader, drill sergeant, and politician knows that if you want to quiet all of those pesky doubting thoughts in a crowd, get them to scream a repetitive phrase or slogan. You know it as chanting, but at New York City’s Cult Hotline and Clinic, the practice is known as a thought-stopping technique. Guess why.
Why it works
The analytical parts of your brain and those that handle repetitive tasks just can’t seem to function at the same time.
In a 2000 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell argued that this is why athletes choke in big moments. The heightened pressure turns on the analytical part of their brain while they’re trying to complete a repetitive task. Athletes refer to this as “overthinking a shot,” or “pooping the wedding bed.”
Chanting just reverses the dynamic. It forces your brain into repetitive-task mode so you can’t think rationally.