How-To Guide: Hoodwinking Voters - Part I - The Disinformation Age

"The League of Women Voters is withdrawing sponsorship of the presidential debates...because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public." - October 2, 1988, LWV trustees statement, issued by unanimous vote.

The Disinformation Age - Part I

By Carlton Meyer

Sep/12/2008

A common computer adage is “garbage-in, garbage-out”; i.e. putting bad data in a computer produces bad information. This same rule applies to humans. It doesn’t matter if people are educated, intelligent, and logical. They will make bad choices if fed bad information. This happens frequently in American elections because voters are misled by a continual flow of disinformation. Ask any American which country provides the world’s best health care. Very few can provide an informed guess, yet most will exclaim that the United States has the best health care system. This is far from the truth, yet years of corporate advertising, corporate sponsored news programs, and speeches from corporate sponsored politicians have spread this disinformation. Even educated elderly people will parrot the line that socialized medicine doesn’t work, although they eagerly use the government’s Medicare program.

A frequent example occurs when seemingly intelligent Americans state that the media is "left-wing," as though CBS and CNN are run by hippies living in a flophouse.

The American media is owned and controlled by billionaires, who have many other corporate interests. They have little concern for working Americans. This should be obvious, yet these billionaires hire television and radio commentators to complain the media is "left-wing." It is in their interest to keep viewers ignorant and distracted by threats, like terrorists and liberals. American writer H. L. Mencken recognized this decades ago when he wrote: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."[1]

This problem worsened as the American news media no longer attempts to report facts that disturb viewers in order to boost their ratings. Fox News leads the way by hiring young models to deliver happy news or titillating stories about missing children. Walter Cronkite often notes that there are no anchormen anymore, just news readers.

Those attractive faces on television do not write or even edit news stories like he did. They read teleprompter news written by people who are part of network entertainment divisions.News is designed to entertain Americans, not to inform them...


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