Deliberately Limiting Information, limiting Thought

When I was a teenager, the radio station I listened to, changed.   It went from an omnibus, where it had talk shows and music shows, and sports to become All News All The Time.

The Owners of the Station felt that the Public had a Right To Know what was going on. Having sound bytes every hour and half hour then rushing back to play the latest tune was not enough to insure an educated population.

Events were happening all over the world and to ‘cut and paste’ , leaving out what wouldn’t fit in a 5 minute spurt was not serving the public.

The station went from, (using a current example)  stating; “The Senegalese leader will not step down…”   into giving the listener enough background on the country and leaders so one knew as much about Senegal as if it were studied it at school.

The British Broadcasting Corporation was always practised this kind of in depth news reporting.  The Station strove to speak to the public as if on a mission to impart as much information as possible.

But those were the old days, long before the dumbing down process was implemented.

The dumbing down process was not abrupt.  It if had been then the ‘proles’ would know they were being dumbed down.

It was a slow, global process in which less real news was  dispensed, more ‘blah blah’.

To explain what I mean by blah blah;  imagine you have written a very sharp item on a topic.  You have been concise, clear, but it is only 264 words long.  You need 300 words.  So you go back over a sentence and add words and unnecessary concepts.   You decide to go for 500 words fill each sentence with adverbs and adjectives and metaphors, and by the time you are complete you have 553 words.

That is Blah Blah

On Radio, there will be virtual empty interviews which dispense no real information.   The person being interviewed, allegedly some ‘expert’ or ‘eye witness’ will ramble and  fill a minute or two, thus cutting down on the broadcast of hard news.

Eventually, one can have a so called ‘News Hour’ in which the presenter does most of the talking; repeating himself, savouring each word that comes out of his mouth, so the person being interviewed  may speak two minutes while the Presenter pontificates for four minutes.

This is compounded when the person being interviewed is a few arms length from the facts, so that there are two voices, as well versed in the topic as any passer-bye.   They can give no more information then they have, which isn’t much.

The listener is hearing nothing but blah blah, so learns very little.

With the Internet being available, originally, one could go to sites and get a ton of information.   This meant that anyone who wanted to know, could know.

This has been thwarted by the limitation/removal of hard news, the plethora of   Biased and Fake News sites, where the political or social purpose of the site is paramount, and information is tertiary.

Over time, when one doesn’t know what it is they don’t know, there is no reason to ‘search’.

For example, if you didn’t know about a particular event, i.e. a Mosque being burnt to the ground in Washington State, you wouldn’t look it up.   You wouldn’t know, for example, there have been 257 attacks in the United States since 2015.   Why would you?  It isn’t ‘Front Page’.

The reason I know is because, to write this item I sat back, and wondered if there had been an increase in ‘hate crime’ and just entered a search; “How many Mosques have been attacked since Trump’s campaign” and found myself in the International Business Times, which gave me the facts I mentioned in the above paragraph.

You will NOT hear about these attacks on the CNN or the BBC or in any ‘Acceptable’ news service.  Because it is not news.  At least not the kind of news one would display in Trump Land.

The handful of persons alive today, who have avoided being dumbed down, knew that when Trump won, every racist, every person who hates Muslims, would be empowered.    This was not a ‘bye-product’, this was the product.

America, it’s friends, Big Business are racist, and want to enforce their views.   The way to do it is to not report events.   People will not know, not search, and stay unknowing.   “Respectable” News Sites will focus on the same stories over and again, repeating the empty sound bytes.

And as most people have been ‘dumbed down’, they won’t know.