Subject:   Turn Off Your TV: part 7

Turn Off Your TV--Part VII

Here Now the News....

by L. Wolfe

I'm not even going to ask if the television set is turned off.
I know that it is: I'd be very surprised if it were not, after
what you have learned from the preceding sections of this report.
  But I suppose that I should remind people who may not have
followed all that we have said or who are coming into this
dialogue at this point, of the ground rules. Since watching
television limits your powers of comprehension, we require
that the set be turned off while you concentrate on what we
are saying. So, if there are any sets on out there, now is
your chance to turn them off.
  Okay, we're ready to begin. In this section of our report,
we are going to explain how you are brainwashed and controlled
by the {news} you watch on television.

  It's All the Same

  ``More Americans get their news from ABC News than any other
source.'' So says the trailer to the nightly news broadcast
on that network. Let's modify the statement a bit: More Americans
``get their news'' from television news broadcasts than any
other source. That is the result of recent surveys, but it
has been true for almost three decades.
  Of the {six to eight hours a day} Americans spend
in front of their television sets, one to two hours is spent
watching news or news-related programming. On average, most
people watch at least one news broadcast in the evening, either
the national network news or local news, and then watch a wrap-up
news show in the later evening. A housewife will generally
watch an additional ``early evening'' news broadcast, occasionally
leaving the news on in the house continuously between 5 p.m.
and 7 p.m.
  Viewership studies, as recent as spring 1991, show that
if the television set is on during dinner hours between 5 and
7 p.m., it is more than 80 percent likely to be tuned into
news programming.
  Content analysis of the news broadcast during these hours,
both national network programs and local news, shows that,
from channel to channel, the principal stories covered--the
so-called ``lead'' and secondary ``lead'' items are {identical}
in all major aspects.  Flipping the channel from one news program
to another, also shows that beyond these ``lead'' items, most
other news items reported are identical in major content, varying
only in the order of presentation. The text read by news anchors
is also strikingly similar, as are the picture images that
accompany the text.
  To the extent that there is any variation, it is in what
are called news features or human interest stories, and even
there the difference in coverage tends to be slight.
  Even the breakdown of the time spent for each major category
of story on the network news is {identical} across
the networks. A 30-minute nightly news broadcast consists of
22 minutes of ``news.'' Each network spends between six and
eight minutes on national news, four and seven minutes on international
news, seven to ten minutes on so-called special reports and
one to two minutes on so-called soft news about entertainment
or media, etc. The remaining eight minutes are commercials.
  The compositional breakdown of all local news telecasts
is similar.
  No wonder few viewers could tell the difference between
the {content} of the different networks' and local
stations' broadcasts. When asked in a recent survey to cite
a difference, most could only name the different ``anchor''
people or sportscasters.
  Focus on this for a moment: Every night, at approximately
the same time, nearly every American between the ages of 10
and 80, watches the {same} representation of what has
taken place in the world that day.
  Think back to what we described in an earlier section of
this report about Nazi Germany, about their propaganda machine.
Now you can understand why former CBS chairman, the late Bill
Paley, once said that television created the capability to
``out-Goebbels, Goebbels.''

  The News, In Brief

  And what is it that all of you see and hear, as you ``get
your news'' each evening? A {New York Times} piece
on local television news begins with this description:
  ``Another night, another nightmare. The teenage killer gives
way to the subway slasher. The face of the weeping mother dissolves
into a closeup of a bloodstained shirt. House fires become
`raging infernos.' Traffic snarls. Kids fall out of windows.
Babies die in random shootings.  Manhunts are commonplace.
  ``She killed for love. Details at Six.''
  All ``stories'' are told in brief, most running no longer
than 30 seconds.  A {long} story runs a minute.  Voice
over pictures. Short interviews, usually only a few sentences.
The average 30-minute segment may report as many as 40 items
in this manner, in a seamless style, broken only by slightly
longer features, followed by a sports report and weather. Is
that the world?  Are the images and pictures being presented
{reality,} or only a distorted and edited version of
something that the news show {tells} you is reality?
How would you know?
  Let's ask the question another way: Given the way the news
is presented, in these short items, does your mind ever engage
in deliberative thought about any single item? Or, isn't it
the case that you watch a news show, never thinking about any
item at all, merely taking in the ``information.''
  This would explain the startling results of some studies
done by brainwashers to profile TV newscast audiences. They
have found that the average viewer cannot remember {facts}
from any story presented, even only a few hours after the broadcast.
Instead, viewers remember only vague generalities about what
they saw, an impression about the way the world looks, according
to the news broadcast: ``There were a lot of killings. The
economy is doing badly and the President isn't doing anything
about it. Donald Trump has a new girlfriend. And, oh yes, the
Mets lost.''
  The items remembered relate to the {emotional connection}
made by the individual to the totality of what is being reported.
For example, the {fear} associated with the increase
in crime, causes such stories to ``pop out.'' As the stories
move from ``hard'' news to human interest, the tension lessens
and infantile emotional connections take over. Although, as
we stated, most people remember little about what they saw
in general, they remember relatively more about these human
interest stories.
  The brainwashers call this type of memory {selective
retention}. They say that television causes people to {suspend}
their critical judgment capabilities. Whether a person is watching
news or regular programming, the combination of sound and images
places the individual in a dream-like state, which limits cognitive
powers.  In that condition, a person can merely {react}
to whether what he sees and hears coheres with his opinion
of what the world is like.
  These opinions created by television news have such power
that they will overwhelm a contrary reality.  Think about that
news broadcast cited.  Most likely the ``crime'' stories were
about blacks killing blacks, or blacks killing whites. In a
controlled test, people were shown a story about a white man
threatening a black man with a razor. When asked to recall
what they had seen, a significant minority of the audience,
both blacks and whites, of varying ages, responded by saying
that the {black man had the razor} and was threatening
the white person!
  The ordering of stories on a news program helps {program}
this process of {selective perception}. The most tension-causing
or fearful story of the day is usually put first, followed
by stories of decreasing tension. The brainwashers say that
this {encodes} those stories with an order of importance.
This is not to say that the programming is trying to make you
{think} about what you are viewing:  They are merely
stimulating you enough to {receive} the message being
transmitted. In fact, by watching the news for all these years,
you have been conditioned to {expect} this type of
ordering. You don't have to judge what is important, it's the
first few items they report, isn't it? The rest is merely filler.
  Now, let's go back to that report of what one viewer saw,
in watching one to two hours of news. Only four items are recalled,
or more precisely {played back}. The first item is
about killings, a collage of reports about violence in international
affairs, with some national and local murder stories. That
is the principal image: a violent and degraded society.
  Then we have the next item about the state of the national
economy and the President: This is the lead national news item,
reduced to its simplest, fear-ridden image. This is the secondary
image coveyed in the overall reporting, one that resonates
with the fear of daily life.
  Then ``a big fire,'' which was probably a story with pictures,
that was near the lead of the local news.
  Then a ``human interest'' or entertainment story about ``the
Donald,'' the soap opera saga of Trump's affairs, which has
been effectively serialized over a period of months and years.
The mere mention of such stories is usually enough to cause
most of the audience to remember something about them.
  Finally, we have a sports score, indicating the viewer's
obsession with a local team.
   What is the ordering principle? {Primary image}:
degraded view of man as an animal, killing, murdering, raping.
Violence as a primary mode of existence. {Secondary image}:
economic collapse, fear and hopelessness, leading to a sense
of bewilderment. The other stories remembered deal with infantile
obsessions.
  This, then is the {picture of man and his society}
planted in the minds of Americans watching the news on that
given day. That is how the brainwashers use the news: not to
inform, but to paint {a picture in the minds} of viewers
of reality, one that is neither questioned nor thought about,
but is simply there.

  The Cult of Public Opinion

  The brainwashers understand this concept of {painting
pictures} in your minds. They call it the making of {public
opinion}.
  In a previous section of our report, we referred to a quote
from a book by Walter Lippmann, the famous commentator. We
explained that Lippmann had been part of the World War I British
psychological warfare unit at Wellington House that studied
the manipulation of ``mass opinion.'' Lippmann was also an
admirer and student of Freud, and was especially struck by
Freud's book, {Mass Psychology}. For our present discussion,
we draw renewed attention to the following quote:
  ``Public opinion deals with indirect unseen, puzzling facts
and there is nothing obvious about them....  The pictures inside
their heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves,
of their needs, purposes, relationships are their public opinions.
These pictures are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals,
acting in the name of groups are Public Opinion, with capital
letters....''
  Lippmannn says many of these pictures are what he calls
{stereotypes}, shared, common {perceptions}
of the categories of things: ``All blacks are like ...; all
Italians are like ...; etc.'' Such ``stereotyping'' is possible,
he says, because people seek simple explanations for complex
problems, because they prefer to see every individual as part
of some social group or mass.  ``Everyone knows that all Germans
are like ...'' Stereotyping, which plays upon individual racial
and other prejudices and is reinforced by the media, becomes
the principal way that the {image of man} is socially
communicated between groups of men within society.
  Lippmann wrote this before the advent of television. His
later work discusses the potential for radio to place such
{images inside people's minds}. But television, with
its ability to provide simultaneous audio and visual messages,
creates even more powerful and overwhelming {pictures}
than radio. And television, as we stated, has the capability
to cause one to suspend {critical judgment of reported
information}.
  Remember Hal Becker, the brainwasher from the Futures Group,
who calls man ``homo the sap''? Becker contends that through
the control of television news programming, he can create {popular
opinion} on a nightly basis; and through the control of
{popular opinion}, he can manipulate the way you think
and act about the world you live in. Listen to what he has
to say about how easy it is to {shape your opinions}:
  ``Americans think they are governed by some bureaucrats
in Washington who make laws and hand out money. How wrong they
are. Americans are ruled by their prejudices and their prejudices
are organized by public opinion.... We think that we make up
our minds about everything. We are so conceited. {Public
opinion makes up our minds}. We do, generally, what we
perceive public opinion says we should do. It works on our
herd instinct, like we are frightened animals.''
  Before we discuss more about how this is done, we must examine
what lies behind Becker's arrogant assertion of how easy it
is to manipulate you. To do that, we must show you how closely
you actually do act like the animals he asserts you are.

  Aborting the Search for Truth

  All human progress is based on the search for eternal Truth.
Man, as distinct from the animal species, has been made in
the image of his Creator, the living God. He has been endowed
by his Creator with the Divine Spark of reason, which gives
him the capacity to perfect his knowledge of the universe.
Man seeks Truth, and in his search to discover Truth, learns
what is eternal in the universe.
  As man perfects his knowledge, he comes to understand some
things that he once believed to be true as no longer so. More
importantly, he comes to understand {the assumptions which
underlie how he understands things to be true} as no longer
correct. Man, using his power of reasoned moral judgment, willfully
changes the assumptions which underlie the way in which he
thinks. In so doing, {man becomes increasingly more human},
more distinct from the animal, which cannot reason.
  Man, his judgment morally informed by the moral teachings
of Judeo-Christian religion, is compelled to seek Truth as
his highest goal. By so doing, religion gives man an identity
that is beyond the sway of the {cult of public opinion}.
Man must act to do Good, as he understands Good in relation
to God's Word. He must answer only to his God and he must never
bow to {public opinion}.
  The brainwashers and mind destroyers of the Tavistock Institute
and the Frankfurt School have concentrated so much of their
firepower on destroying man's relationship to his God, because
by so doing, they destroy man's capacity for morally informed
judgment.
  People like Hal Becker, Fred Emery, and Eric Trist, as well
as the evil Sigmund Freud, and all those who believe that men
are no different than animals, must deny the existence and
relevance of a {higher Being}, to render all men morally
insane.
  Freud despised organized religion, and especially the Catholic
Church, precisely because it gave man a {higher moral purpose},
because it reinforced man's moral conscience by defining a
relationship between man and his Creator that was based on
{universal truth}. Freud saw the Christian apostles,
people who refused to be swayed from God's work by the {popular
opinion} of their times, as {neurotics}; they were
maladjusted people, who made up stories to deceive others,
he raved.
  Freud and the others who have followed him, reduced religion
to {ideology}, to one of many conflicting {opinions}
about how the world works.  Freud claimed that it would ultimately
pose no threat to his view of man, since, robbed of his {higher
moral purpose}, man would, as society became more perverse
and complex, see his religion as an ineffectual guide for his
existence: it would become a {minority view, a minority
opinion}.
  Freud's successors, like Trist and Emery, also denied the
existence of universal Truth, and profanely asserted that they
have the power to create reality, or, more precisely, to impose
{images of reality} on the sovereign minds of individuals.
To them, all man's thought is reduced to individual {opinion}.
The majority of those individual opinions become the {popular
opinion} which governs the way the ``masses'' are to act.
  In this system, the most man can aspire to do is to know
{true opinion}. This is what he gets, for one to two
hours each night, from television news. Becker et al. see television,
and especially the television news, as a god, a creator of
mass opinion. Emery and Trist have compared television viewing
to a religous experience, by which man gets the ``logos,''
the news.
  Using the parameters of the same {Freudian mass psychology}
that defined the Nazi experiment in brainwashing, they understood
the television viewing experience as an externally organized
{mass process}. People in such circumstances, according
to Freud, tend to identify their own thoughts and desires with
what they perceive to be the thoughts and desires of those
involved in the same process. In other words, their {identity}
becomes something shaped by what others think about them and
what they think about others. This is what the brainwashers
call being {other-directed}--a constant and unending
desire to act as you perceive others would want you to act.
  Television, with its overwhelming presence in your life,
both {creates} popular opinion and {simultaneously
validates it.} It can do so because you have become so
{other-directed} that you have given up the search
for Truth.
  ``If it's a fact, I'll believe it,'' says the man in a commercial
for a popular beer. He has been told that this beer is more
popular than another leading brand. ``Hey, I saw it on television,''
he says. ``It must be so.''
  {It must be so}. Why?  Because I saw it on television.
How could the images and sounds of the television news lie?
They are right there, right in your living room. As Becker
says, ``the world is in that box. And it's there every night.''
Well, it is really there a lot more than that--six to eight
hours a day.
  This is a power that the Nazi propaganda minister Josef
Goebbels could only dream of, could only imagine. Now, it is
in the hands of your brainwashers. And still most of you watch,
and more importantly, in the case of the news, accept what
is represented as {reality, your reality}.

  What Do You Know, Really?

  Let's have you pull your head out of the tube and the pictures
placed there by it. Now, let's think about the news programming
from a different perspective, to show you how totally you are
brainwashed.
  On June 9, 1992 Lyndon LaRouche won the Democratic presidential
primary in North Dakota. Did you hear that reported on network
news or the national sections of your local news?  Not a word,
right? Surely, it's a ``newsworthy story,'' when a man running
for the White House from a federal prison cell where he is
a political prisoner, wins a primary of a major party, even
if it is in a small state and it is at the end of the primary
season, with the nominations supposedly locked up.
  But LaRouche wasn't supposed to win that primary. Therefore,
television news, across the nation, was not to report it, let
alone feature it. It fell outside what they had been telling
you was the {public opinion} of the way the campaign
was going. So, unless you are a reader of this newspaper, or
caught the chance item in a newspaper wire story, you probably
never heard about this. {The television news smothered
reality}.
  The next day, with the television news still not {validating}
the LaRouche win by reporting it, there was some frantic scrambling
to actually {erase} the results. By moving some votes
here and there, new results were announced that had LaRouche
finishing second, to Ross Perot; still an impressive showing
for LaRouche, but with Perot winning, something that more fit
the then-current television images of the election campaign.
  The point being made here is that the news program doesn't
simply brainwash you by what it {chooses} to report,
albeit distorted in content and with an implied ``message,''
as we have discussed. As your chosen {most important source
of news}, it limits your understanding of the world by
what it chooses {not to report and to ignore.}
  We'll try another image: Imagine putting your head in a
bag and then having the world described to you by someone telling
you what {he or she }sees.  That's how the news operates,
and you tolerate it and think it tells you the ``truth.'' So
do your neighbors, because they think that you do.
  So, if you didn't see it on the television news it didn't
happen. And if it {did} happen and it wasn't on the
television news, then it really {wasn't} important
anyway. Sounds pretty infantile and stupid, doesn't it?
  Let's go back for a moment to the coverage of the state
of the economy.  There's a point to be made about the {limits}
of the power of television to annul reality. Television news
coverage may alter your perception of {reality} but
it cannot, as the arrogant Hal Becker of the Futures Group
asserts, {change reality}. If something happened in
this world, simply because television didn't report it doesn't
mean that it {didn't happen}.
  If television news failed to report that an avalanche was
descending on your town, it wouldn't stop you from being buried
by that avalanche. You might get pretty angry if something
happened to you that you could have done something about, had
you only known about it. Similarly, you'd get pretty angry
if you actually caught the television news lying to you, telling
you something that you had first-hand knowledge was false.
  That is precisely what was happening with the economy. The
television news, for a period of several years, told you that
the American economy was in good shape.  That seemed to cohere
with what most people were experiencing: That was the majority
{opinion} of what was happening in the economy.
  But the collapse of the economy is not a matter of perception.
It can be calculated by examining the collapse of physical
output of our factories, farms, and mines, the collapse of
the infrastructure, services and technology required to support
them. The American economy, according to these standards of
measurement, has been in a state of collapse since approximately
1972.
  Wait a minute, you say, that's impossible, no one ever told
me that.  Well, that's true--{the television news never
reported the facts to you in that way}. Instead, they presented
reports of distorted and ``massaged'' government economic indicators
that purported to show the exact opposite.
  About three years ago, reality started to assert itself,
hitting with the force of an avalanche of bad news:  Banks
were collapsing, layoffs started to mount, and the real estate
market started to collapse. The television news was still not
reporting the true extent of the economic collapse.
  As the economic downslide picked up steam, as more of you
were buried under your own economic bad news, the people who
control the television news had a choice. Either the coverage
had to shift to be more in line with current popular perceptions
of reality, or they would face a loss of their credibility.
It was only at this point that coverage started to change.
Those reports have picked up in intensity of image in the last
several months, but they still do not say that the economy
is in a depression.
  Recall what the man who watched the news remembered: ``The
economy is doing badly and George Bush isn't doing anything
about it.'' The television news created that {thought image},
which is a more or less accurate, if limited, perception of
reality.  Starting about 18 months ago, the nightly news started
aggressively {linking} the images of economic collapse--layoffs,
bank closings, real estate collapse, municipal crisis--with
the policies of the Bush administration and with George Bush
directly.
  Think back, to about a month or two after the end of the
war with Iraq.  From that point on, the image of Bush, the
new Herbert Hoover, was linked with the economic collapse.
If you remember what we said earlier, television news reporting
relies not on making you {think} about what is happening,
but on giving you an emotion-laden image of reality that serves
to{ prevent} you from thinking.  Bush now serves as
the {hate object} to some people, the cause of their
problems, the {hapless fool} to others; in either case,
he becomes a {cause} for the economic collapse.
  All of this is necessary to continue to keep you under {control},
to prevent you from actually thinking about what is happening
to you.
  How did your brainwashers know when to shift gears? They
followed the {poll} results. You told them that the
economy was making you feel uneasy.

  For Whom the Polls Toll

  Your brainwashers have been profiling the American population
for nearly 70 years. {Public opinion polls} have been
probing every aspect of your life, all your tastes and desires,
to get {a picture of the pictures inside your mind.}
  The origins of public opinion polling lie in the mass manipulation
of public opinion studied during World War I at Wellington
House by the group that included Walter Lippmann and Eduard
Bernays, Freud's nephew. The polls had two purposes. First,
they provided a detailed profile of the prejudices of a target
population; those prejudices, as Lippmann and Bernays both
explained, become the basis for mass brainwashing campaigns.
Second, the results of the carefully constructed polls, fed
back to the population through the mass media, provide the
basis for shaping {opinion}.
  {Creative thinking} defies
measurement in quantifiable terms. It is impossible to come
up with a statistical correlation that would tell somebody whether
one creative idea is better or more appropriate than another,
whether it should be accepted by others as useful, important,
or true.
  {Opinions}, however, can be easily counted. You
can ask a group of people how they {feel} about something,
or whether they think that such and such a statement is {true}.
You tabulate the numbers, and come up with a count. So many
{agree}, another number {disagrees}. The larger
number becomes the {consensus}, which represents the
{majority opinion}.
  But no matter how many people agree with something, {it
doesn't make it true}.
  A poll taken in the first millennium would have certainly
found the majority opinion, the {consensus}, to be
that the Earth was the center of the universe. A poll taken
today, under the influence of perverse Freudian and other outlooks,
might find that man is no different than the beast or even
that he is the most destructive of all beasts. Neither result
has anything to do with Truth, in the sense that we have discussed
Truth.
  People like Lippmann and Bernays, the pollsters such as
George Gallup and Lou Harris, and others who have followed
them, have abandoned Truth as a criterion for judgment. If
one denies Universal Truth, as we have explained they do, the
concept of truth itself becomes meaningless. If there is nothing
that is eternal, nothing that is universal, then there is only
what is perceived to be true today. There is only {true
opinion}.
  Emery and Trist, reflecting the thinking behind the polls
that governs their design, claim that over the last 50 years,
American society has been bound together by the concept that
``we all behave according to the consensus.'' Americans, they
claim, are so {other directed} that they wouldn't dare
break this {social contract}. They must do what others
perceive that they should do; to do otherwise would cause psychological
pain. We seek the comfort of the consensus, they say, ``because
it gives meaning to our lives.'' We can only measure how we
are doing against what we are told are {norms}, and
those {norms} are derived, they say, primarily from
{poll results}.

  Rigging Results

  ``If you want the American people to believe something,
then all you have to do is get a poll taken that says that
it is so and get it publicized, preferably on television.''
The speaker is Hal Becker of the Futures Group.
  Becker went on to say that he and any other brainwashers
could design a poll so that it would show any result that he
wanted. It is all in how the questions are asked, he said.
  Is he correct or does he exaggerate? Is it really that simple
to create opinion? Let's try a test. We'll take our own little
poll among you readers. I say that the majority of your fellow
Americans are brainwashed by television. Do you agree? Well,
after reading this series, I should hope that I have presented
sufficient argument to convince you of this point.  But what
if you hadn't been reading these articles? What if someone
on the street or on the subway were to have come up to you
and asked that question, without your ever having seen my articles?
What would your response have been then? You would probably
have answered that you didn't agree. Why?  Because it is {your
perception}, validated by the opinions of others, that
Americans are not brainwashed by television.
  Now, let's change the polling question slightly. You are
{told}:  {According to a recent poll, 85 percent
of all Americans think that television is their most valuable
source of accurate news. Do you agree?} Remember--you haven't
read my articles. What would you answer? You'd probably say
that you agree, without too much hesitation.
  Why did you answer that way?  First, the way the question
was posed:  You were given {poll results} that {guided}
your answer. You were told that 85 percent of your neighbors
held the opinion that ``television was their most accurate
source of news.'' The poll question, the poll itself, was merely
asking you to step in line behind an existing consensus. This
is called the {bandwagon effect} and is one of the
most common of pollsters' tricks. With the question posed that
way, it is hardly likely that you even thought at all about
the {content} of the proposition: whether television
news is accurate or even the most accurate source of news.
  And, I am certain that you would never question whether
the poll results were {rigged.} That would happen only
if the content of the question were at very sharp odds with
your perception of {popular opinion}. The presentation
of the poll results defining that consensus would tend to prevent
that from occurring.
  So, I think that you can see how easily pollsters can {trick}
you into validating what might be completely spurious propositions.
Becker wasn't really being overly boastful, was he?
  Over the years, since Bernays and Lippmann, there have been
changes in the {techologies}, both in polling and in
the transmission of results. However, the {basic method},
as defined by {Freudian mass psychology}, remains the
same: to appeal to the most infantile and therefore most animal-like
in man, to therefore bypass or abort creative reasoning powers,
informed by moral judgment.
  Polling questions, starting back in the 1920s, were designed
to seek not what a person thought about something, but what
were his {feelings}; such questions in fact bypass
thought and are designed to spur an unreasoned, unthoughtful
response: True opinion is thus a {feeling state}.
  This fits directly the profile of the American: ``Keep it
simple,'' he says, ``my time is short.'' Complicated issues
are reduced to simple sets of choices, often ``critical choices,''
in which neither choice is really acceptable. By rigging the
choices, the results are easily predetermined.
  Let's look at an example of how polls were used in concert
with the television news, to alter the way Americans thought
about the space program. First, I'll give you a little background
that has not been reported on television.
  In the mid-1960s, Tavistock, under a grant from NASA, undertook
a study of the effect of the space program on the American
population. To their dismay, the survey showed the space program
had produced an extraordinary number of scientists and engineers,
who were in turn reproducing their positive outlook, their
{cultural optimism}, among wider sections of the population.
The surveys, among a wide cross-section of the population,
discovered that the success of the space program had produced
a renewed faith in the power of science to solve problems,
a view of society that saw no limits to either growth or prospects
for expanding human dominion over nature.
  Such views were {contrary} to those of the oligarchical
elite that dominates our society and which employs the brainwashers
like those taking this survey. They would not tolerate an American
society whose {moral outlook} was bound up in the idea
of scientific progress, with this idea of progress and hope
reaching all layers of society, from the skilled workforce,
to the clerks, to the housewives, to young school children.
{It threatened to undo 20 years of television brainwashing,
because any society whose values are shaped by moral human
progress cannot be easily manipulated}.
  There is evidence to show that this report, called the Rappoport
Report, after its Tavistock author, provided the basis for
the decision to dismantle the space program by the early 1970s.
This decision was followed by a step-up in polling activity
directed toward that end.
  It was necessary to provide you with this information to
help you rethink what you know happened in the period under
discussion. It is important that you understand that there
is an ``invisible government,'' as Bernays called it in a previously
cited quote, that operates to shape your {opinions}
through television and other media, and through the control
and shaping of {popular opinion} is destroying our
nation and more than 2,000 years of western Christian civilization.
  Now, I want you to think back to 1969, to the days immediately
after Americans walked on the Moon, as millions watched them
do it on Earth.  Your immediate response to that event was
a great burst of pride in your nation, but even more importantly
a joy in the accomplishment of man in taking a bold step into
the universe. It reinforced your belief in the power of human
creativity to solve fundamental problems of science, and gave
you confidence that the future for men, all men, was indeed
a bright one. You were {optimistic}.
  But all that was to be changed.  Shortly, that Moon landing
was to be eclipsed in the media by a highly publicized satanic
orgy of the counterculture known as Woodstock; still later,
there were the violent protests against the war in Vietnam.
But try to focus on the weeks immediately following the lunar
landing. The first Harris and Gallup polls started telling
people that in the opinion of {their neighbors}, the
space program had now served its purpose. It was branded as
{non-essential}, with a very large budget, while {more
useful} and {less esoteric} programs on Earth required
funding; these poll results, widely reported at the time on
television, were backed up by news stories of poverty and chaos
at home and the images of the counterculture, whose spokesmen
at Woodstock demanded an ``end to wasting money'' on the space
program, even as the dust of the Moon walk was settling.
  The pollsters phrased their question in the following manner:
Landing on the Moon was a tremendous scientific achievement.
But many scientists say that everything that man did on the
Moon could be better done by machines. Given the huge budget
deficits and the need to spend money on programs here on Earth
to help needy people, do you feel that the space program is
essential or non-essential in its present form?
  A strange way to put the question, but the {only}
way they could put it to get the results they desired. Had
the American population been asked, back in 1969, whether {they
supported the American space program}, they would have
answered, in overwhelming numbers, ``Yes!''
  Instead, a majority of confused Americans, agreeing with
the first statement about the glorious scientific achievment,
not sure about the second, since ``some scientists'' appeared
to question the value of manned space flight, and {feeling
guilty} about the third, saw reason to {agree}
that the space program {might} be non-essential.
  Other polls questioned whether Americans were giving scientists
too much control over their lives. Such polls attempted to
play off the well-known, irrational, profiled fear Americans
have of ``eggheads''; scientists who ran the space program
were being lumped with the rightfully hated liberal intellectuals.
  As the results were {played back} over a period
of years on television newscasts, Americans were conditioned
to accept deep cuts in the space program, first administered
in 1970-71--even though the majority of Americans did not believe
such cuts desirable when the process started!

  Instant Opinion

  By now, each network news organization has its own polling
operation, or one linked to a newspaper, such as the {New
York Times} or {Washington Post}, or to one of
the national polling operations, such as Gallup or Harris.
They are able to provide almost instant responses to breaking
news developments, letting each of you know what the {majority
opinion} is about what they are reporting. In that way,
you are being told what {your appropriate opinion}
should be about an event or statement.
  Think about any recent news event.  Take the Democratic
or Republican conventions, for example. As you watched, you
were given the results of a network news poll that told you
how Americans thought about what was happening.
  Now, remember what your response was to all of this. You
listened to Clinton's speech at the Democratic Convention and
weren't impressed. Yet, the news commentators, armed with poll
results, told you that Americans thought differently. You started
to rethink what you had just heard: You're not different than
you neighbors; your {opinion} must be wrong. By the
end of the evening, you started to think that maybe the speech
was much better than you thought. Nothing had changed--except
that you were being moved into line behind {popular opinion}.
The next morning, when someone asked you what you thought about
Clinton's speech, you {reported back} what the poll
results had told you the night before.
  And who determined this so-called {popular opinion}?
The poll results, in general, are based on {very small
numbers of people} who are supposed to reflect a cross-section
of a target population. The total number of respondents to
the polls on the Clinton speech, for example, numbered less
than 1,000.
  Think about your response to the speech again. Clinton didn't
say anything: That was your first impression. But the pollsters
didn't ask people whether he said anything of importance or
even anything at all. They asked whether the people {felt}
that it would help his campaign, a question that had nothing
to do specifically with what he said.
  These results were in turn reported on television as {meaning}
that in the {opinion} of the majority of Americans,
Clinton gave a ``good speech.''
  These same polls show that Americans have a fascination
with the numerical presentation of facts in polls. The polls
results, as reported on the nightly news, are said to be among
the most popular segments of the show, and the ones that people
are most able to repeat in detail approximating what is reported.
  This brings us to the final point we want to make about
polling. In some of the first major national polling work done
by the Tavistock crowd in the 1930s and early 1940s, they discovered
that our {other-directed} citizens, who determined
their opinions about something based upon {counting}
the opinions of the friends, were more susceptible to believing
something as true if it were presented as a {statistical}
fact.
  The poll results are presented like ball game scores: There
are winners and losers, with the scores telling who won and
who lost. More recent studies of the response of people to
polls confirm this: To the extent that questions are asked
and posed in a way that shows somebody or something ``winning''
or ``losing,'' viewers tend to pay more attention to the results
and to have a higher retention of the reported outcomes.
  A poll was taken near Columbus Circle in New York City recently.
The pollster, clipboard in hand, was seen approaching something
on roller blades, with a Sony Discman plugged into his ears.
The pollster tried to ask his questions, but it was obvious
that he was not being heard. Finally, the pollster stuck his
clipboard in front of the strange thing's face, and it nodded,
and thrusting out its hand, finger extended, pointed to his
choices on the clipboard. The pollster smiled, as the person
skated off, his head bobbing to the beat of the music echoing
through his head cavity. The pollster went on to his next respondent,
someone lying on a park bench.
  A recent CBS News-{New York Times} poll shows that
most Americans will accept the reduction of the world's population
by one billion people, reports Dan Rather on the Evening News.
And ``that's the way it is.'' Or is it?
  {To be continued.
--
        John Covici
         [email protected]

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