Smoke signals, messenger birds and human couriers – remember Philippides who is said to have run from Marathon to Athens to deliver news of a war victory, dying soon after his arrival? – are no longer viable ways through which news is passed on.
Newspapers, radio, television and more recently the internet have made sure that people get to know what is happening, many times only minutes after an event has taken place. Today, we can even get flash news on our mobile phones if we wish. We want to be connected with the rest of the world even if we are away from home or the office. Whether it’s good or bad, or whether or not it is adding more stress to our already stressful lives, is another matter.
What is sure is that the media has become a dominant force in our everyday lives. And, the more time passes, the more it is evident that it has become a major influence on the way we think, behave and speak.
Naturally, people who want to pass on a message to the public often, if not always, use the media. Sometimes they have a target audience; sometimes they want everyone to know. And the message is wrapped in such a way so as to make it more attractive and appealing.
Over the years, politicians have realised that if they want to make any headway with the electorate, if they want to win elections, they need the media more than anything else. Likewise, companies know that if they want to sell a product or a service, they must also be present in the media.
The way news is relayed to the public has led to the development of a new role in public relations – that of spin-doctors. They are people who give twists and turns to events and speeches for their own benefit, or for the benefit of the people for whom they work. A news item can be broadcast in one way, but it can also be seen from another angle. The half-full, half-empty glass story describes this perfectly. All you need to do is follow Net TV and One TV to understand what I mean.
A more recent phenomenon is certainly more devious and deceitful – it does not simply twist facts or arrange them in such a way for them to be better or worse than they really are, depending on the agenda one has.
This “new” trend is to “create” facts and repeat them over and over again until the public accepts them as real facts. It is not tweaking or interpreting events or words to suit a purpose; it is the outright invention of a “fact” that will manipulate people into believing that this “fact” really existed when it did not. Conversely, it also entails the denial of facts as if they never happened, when in fact they did.
In other words, it is the creation of “truth” when it does not exist, or the denial of truth when this exists.
This is known as perception management, a term which originated in the United States Military. A quick browse on the internet indicates several websites that define it as follows: “Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in behaviours and official actions favourable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”
Perception management has filtered into civilian use as a synonym for “persuasion”. Public relations firms now offer “perception management” as one of their services. If you want someone to believe that the product you are selling is the best, “truth” can be invented to make the public believe that it is.
Apart from having spin-doctors, political parties and groups which have an agenda make full use of “perception management” to influence the way people think and behave. After all, perception does play an important part in our lives.
Just to give an example, pro-government media will film supermarkets full of people buying all sorts of products just to show that the economy is on track, even though people are struggling to make ends meet. Pro-Opposition media will, on the other hand, show empty supermarkets, although people are not dying of hunger.
It is happening in Malta too, much more than we would like to think. Political parties and groups are also “inventing truth” when it suits them to do so, knowing that there is a large group of people who are either gullible enough to believe anything that is thrown at them without as much as asking a question, or are too busy to check whether what they are being told is true or not and therefore accept it at face value.
So it would be ideal if people start sifting through the information they are fed, learn to read between the lines, and see as many sides of a story as possible before forming an opinion.
But this is like telling a donkey not to bray.
[email protected]