The Problem With Mainstream Media's Mindset

Here is another gem from marketing guru Seth Godin on The problem with cable news thinking

(all bold emphasis mine)

``Cable news thinking has nothing to do with fires or with politics. Instead, it amplifies the worst elements of emotional reaction:

1. Focus on the urgent instead of the important.
2. Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what's important.
3. Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis.
4. Unwillingness to reverse course and change one's mind.
5. Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders).
6. Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.
7. Things become important merely because others have decided they are important.
8. Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).
9. Ill-informed about history and this particular issue.
10. Confusing opinion with the truth.
11. Revising facts to fit a point of view.
12. Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time."

Additional comments:

The above don't just apply only to cable news but also to traditional media: TV, radio or even mainstream broadsheets.

Emotions capture best the attention of the public than the rational. This leads us to our next concern...

The manipulation of public opinion

A chilling reminder from Joseph Paul Goebbels' (1897-1945), Nazi's Propaganda Minister, speech in 1933, ``It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion."

Manipulating public opinion to advance the interests of the state and of those interest groups who depend on the state can easily be done by brandishing emotions to a gullible public.