“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'” ~George Orwell, “1984”

Every day we are subject to corporate propaganda and we do not even notice it. Our beliefs and core values get influenced and neighbors are pitted against each other. The news we see is increasingly spreading fear creating a darker and darker world around us. We need alternatives. We need independent journalism that is more widespread.

Some Stanford professors coined the term the Dune affect: “The Dune affect, which states that those who control the media control the opinions of the people”

"Modern propaganda uses all the media available to spread its message, including: press, radio, television, film, computers, fax machines, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing, handbills, buttons, billboards, speeches, flags, street names, monuments, coins, stamps, books, plays, comic strips, poetry, music, sporting events, cultural events, company reports, libraries, and awards and prizes. It is most likely that some of these media uses are surprising, but that only serves to show how easy it is to not even recognize propaganda as such. For the purpose of our paper we will focus on mainly the usage of the press in their tactics of shaping people’s opinions. The press (newspapers and magazines) is important because the most current news and issues are spread every day through them.

Indeed, propaganda is so powerful because everyone is susceptible to it. This is true as explained by Robert Cialdini, an expert in influence, because people exist in a rapidly moving and complex world. In order to deal with it, we need shortcuts. We cannot be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We do not have the time, energy, or capacity to process the information; and instead we must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger feature are present (Cialdini 6). While this makes people highly susceptible to a propagandist who understands persuasion, in general it is the most efficient for of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. Additionally, propaganda includes the reinforcement of societal myths and stereotypes that are so deeply embedded within a culture that it is often difficult to recognize the message as propaganda."

Our media has become increasingly centralized and has been taken over by the billionaire oligarchy. Corporate Propaganda media is controlled by 15 billionaires ahem oligarchs

Here are some organizations that look into corruption and do investigative journalism:

International Consortium of Investigative Journalist (the people who broke the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers and just last week Cyprus Papers)

Paper Trail Media

Forbidden Stories

The Signal Network (Whistle blowers)

Anti Corruption Data Collective

Spotlight Corruption

Global Investigative Journalism Network

International Journalist Network

Committee to Journalist

Reporters without Borders

Future Crunch (positive news)

International Federation of Journalist

Documented

I will leave with this video which encompasses how wide spread this problem is: This is extremely Dangerous to Democracy