Richard Lloyd Jones: The trend is alarming. The media is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands every day, it seems. And the owners are the same big guys who chum around on boards and in secret clubs with the big dollar industries that get all the favorable press coverage. The influence on our information consumption is ghastly, and we have to wake up to that. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Media Literacy.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Well, maybe for you this report will be old news. I have the distinct impression that you who listen to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head are not totally unconscious consumers of media. You look around. You seek out the alternative views. You pay attention to dissident points of view. You don't buy into the bill of goods they're trying to sell us in what passes for most news coverage these days.
But still, maybe there'll be some statistics here to surprise you. I hope so, anyway, because I believe that this issue of media influence, like political influence, being driven by the most powerful lobby groups and the dominant profit makers in our savagely capitalistic world is one of the fundamental issues of our time. However, media criticism is as thick as the black flies at Lake Manitou in northern Ontario, and anyone with any capacity for independent thought knows enough to be somewhat wary.
But I still don't think most people know the entirety or the enormity of it yet. And here again, Dr. Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy can provide an insightful and in-depth analysis. I was explaining in a recent teleclass how North America is a perfect breeding ground for the vast expansion of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex, which has taken root so strongly in no small part because of substantial spreading of its message by a mercenary and controlled media.
The entrenchment of this destructive joint cartel has been possible in North America, and subsequently around the world in varying degrees, because of a psychological condition called exteriorization, which means the tendency to see our problems outside. I mean, hey, if our disease comes from germs, we need the drug companies who prey on that fear to make outrageous profits and sell vaccines and pharmaceuticals by the ton.
If the problem is the terrorists, we need huge military spending to protect ourselves from those fanatics lurking behind every closed door. So, we North Americans are a perfect market for selling things to protect us from the outside. Keppe's work is truly psychological in returning the human being to the true source of our difficulties and solutions inside the psychological life of the human being.
And by doing that, our society begins to change, too, to reflect this more mature, interiorized wisdom. This, I can assure you, is being understood here in Brazil better than in any philosophical or spiritual or psychological orientation in the world. As always, more information or comments is available to you at my email, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Always good to hear from you. Today, media professional Susan Berkley joins me from New York to improve our media literacy.
Well, Susan, maybe the first question is the old standard that I always heard when I was studying radio and television. I've heard consistently since I've been working in professional media, maybe you've heard this too, never trust what you read and hear. And maybe that's never more true than it is today. The media is being dominated by very few companies.
I'm not sure we're hearing the true story. In fact, I'm quite certain we're not. In your research, you've discovered that there's a lot of censorship that's going on in the media, right? We're not hearing the whole story.
Susan Berkley: Yes. The problem of conglomeration of media ownership has never been more strong than how it is now. In fact, we owe a lot of thanks to our friends at Project Censored at Sonoma State University, who really closely monitors this.
And I have an article here written by Peter Phillips, who I believe heads up the project. And he has a list of, they recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the 10 big media organizations in the United States. And this isn't even national. Let's just start with the United States here. And they determined that only 118 people, Rich, comprised the membership of the boards of directors of the 10 big media giants.
And when you think about this, 118 people, I mean, that's enough to fit in a moderate-sized university classroom. And these 118 people sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. And eight out of the 10 big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other.
Richard: That's incredible. What are the implications, Susan? Because if we've got 118 people controlling the major media and sitting on, what did you say, 228?
Susan: 288 national and international corporation boards.
Richard: This has an enormous impact in how the economic world is controlled, right? And
Susan: so let's take the financial meltdown, for example. Both NBC, which is a major media network in the United States, something like Globo in Brazil, you know, everybody knows what NBC is. And the Washington Post, which is a major paper of record, both share common memberships on the boards of directors with each other.
They have board members who sit on Coca-Cola and J.P. Morgan, the financial services company, J.P. Morgan. Yeah, we
Richard: all know that name. Yeah,
Susan: we know that name. Chase Bank. While the Tribune Company, the New York Times, and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. And Pepsi, of course, doesn't just do the drink. Right. So it's like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests.
Now lately the big story has been swine flu, which is starting to abate. But when you look at and this is really shocking, I mean there's always the disease of the month and so much news in of course the big health care debate in the United States. But taking that off the table for a minute, uh the New York Times has interlocking directorates with Eli Lilly, the major pharmaceutical company, which I believe, I don't have the major drugs that they, I don't even want to say it because I don't know what drugs they, I think it's diabetes drugs.
Richard: That's a pretty big company, though we know
Susan: that. Also the Carlyle Group.
Richard: Yes. That's the, George Bush's father was one of the consultants with that group. One of their clients was the Bin Laden family, Carlyle Group.
Susan: Ford Motor Company. Johnson & Johnson, Hallmark, Lehman Brothers, financial services company, Staples, and Pepsi. And if you look at the Washington Post, there are interlocks with Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette, GE Investments, JP Morgan again, and Moody's.
The Knight Ritter newspaper chain has interlocks with H&R Block, Adobe Systems, Echelon. Let me just scan this for a second. The Tribune, which is in Chicago and the LA Times, with 3M, Allstate, ConocoPhillips, Kraft, McDonald's, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Sharing Plow, Pharmaceuticals, Wells Fargo. News Corp has interlocks with Rothschild Investments.
News Corp, of course, is
Richard: fine. But Susan, we could really go on and on about the connections, and this like really tells us something, but I just want to bring it back to something that Dr. Keppe said in Liberation of the People. I was studying this with my students this week, actually, that the acquisition of money has become the ultimate goal of this material life in our capitalistic system.
And so this idea is put into the minds of everybody, Keppe says in his book, Liberation of the People. The idea of money being the ultimate goal is put into our minds so that we have this admiration for those with economic power. And we forget the wonder that we can find in science, the arts, true technology, and civilization. And Dr. Kepley's idea in Liberation of the People, the Pathology of Power, is that this is a very sick idea, that the organization of our society has, it's not really defaulted to, it's become like a default setting now, but it's become dominated by totally the powerful system, the powerful people who want power to get money for themselves.
And you're showing that very clearly in what you're talking about, that there's a direct link between the media control, who sits on the board of directors of media, and what other boards they're sitting on. These big drug companies, these arms contractors, Halliburton's, these kind of companies that are making money from all of this destruction that we're seeing of nature.
Susan: Right. So, you know, the work of Analytical Trilogy and Dr.
Keppe's work and our work because we're part of this program has been to conscientize people, to make people aware of this because really the media is supposed to serve the people. And in fact, the people have now taken control of the media with the internet and their own, what they call the long tail. So there are niches for all kinds of, you know, smaller media, people's media.
But yet the influence. And I think this point that you made is really well taken. We really, deep down inside, respect this power. We think it's a great thing and might even unconsciously want some of that for ourselves. This is the interesting thing to address. And why we are so lazy, I think, about gathering information, the truth. And really, we're not to be blamed for that because it is difficult to really determine.
There is so much spin out there, Rich. I mean, what shocked me when I started to do this research is that any major company, and listen, I own a company, I'm a business owner, so I'm not against companies per se, but the really big ones that make and sell things that might have some sort of environmental or health impact, say Clorox is one, the bleach company.
Like, say, one of their trains derailed and the chlorine gases were released, causing an environmental impact, you know.
All of these companies have PR departments that know exactly what to say and do they have a plan, like a battle plan, in the event that their company screws up. I mean, we remember the Bhopal disaster, you know, so many years ago in India where there was just a terrible spill of toxic chemicals caused by a company that many were sickened and died.
So, these companies, they are planning for this and they have an actual emergency plan that in the event that they cause some sort of harm, environmental harm or people start dying from their products, that they've already planned exactly how they're going to spin this in their favor. This was really chilling to me.
Richard: Yeah. We both read this book, Spin, The Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewan.
Stuart Ewan. And in this book, you can see very clearly that these PR companies now are being hired to create illusions.
In fact, the whole public relations business is based on this idea of trying to control the thinking of society because of the fear of the rise of democracy at the end of the 19th century. And so all of this spin industry is about keeping control. It's about keeping control for the people who have the money to hire these big public relations firms.
Yes.
Susan: So, you know, I think that the populace, people in general, especially younger people now, have become cynical. And this is like not news to people that this exists, but the point is why are people not then taking more responsibility to get the information that they want to regain control of our democracy so that we can start to build the kind of society that we deserve and that we must build if we're going to save our planet.
And this of course you've done endless podcasts about this and we have that wonderful organization STOP the Destruction of the World Association that Dr.
Cláudia Pacheco founded now almost 20 years ago. So there are pockets of people, but the point I want to get across is that it's incumbent upon us citizens, anybody who cares about this planet and about our democracy and our society, we have got to take responsibility for being better informed. Because you cannot – you can no longer consume the media casually because there are – there's so much pressure being put on us to believe things a certain way to support this – these socioeconomic powers that are behind the media.
And it's just going to slide into your brain and it's going to help affect the way that you think and the way that you act and lead to more apathy. And next thing we know, a lot of our freedoms and certainly our beautiful planet will be compromised and maybe even taken away from us.
Richard: Yeah, you know, Susan, Dr.
Keppe talks a lot about this, that I think one of the things that happens with us, we become kind of numbed by this. One, we're drugged out and we're stupidized because of the level of the television and these kinds of things that we're watching. The level of entertainment is dropping so fast that we kind of become stupid. And I think that we have this idea that that's just the way society is.
What can we do? And this is what we have to fight against, Susan, you know, not to just accept that because every once in a while, you know, there's this like this social uprising, maybe even a revolution and, you know, little things get corrected, but the actual power structure never really gets changed that much. And so this is what we really want to conscientize people about is not just about waking up ourselves, it's about seeing that there's a real sickness in the way that we've structured our society.
Susan: Yes, and that there are people that are, this is the point I was trying to make about the PR thing, that there are people that are really planning how to spin things when when something evil happens, you know, when when a, because the society is sick and people are producing things that are not in the best interest of people and of the environment, and when this comes out and something goes horribly terribly wrong with a chemical spill or a drug, a drug problem, you know, and a vaccine goes bad or some some kind of prescription medication is proven to cause harm, believe me the second at the time these things were created and launched there are already people planning what to do when things go wrong.
So that is that shows this kind of sickness and you know we as consumers really need to take much more responsibility to become media literate and to discern what is truth and what is a lie.
This is,
Richard: I think, the key issue. We need to see that we've really had the wool pulled over our eyes and we need to really wake up to that. That's very important that what you're talking now, Susan, is that this is organized, right? This is not just something that just happened. This is like really planned, organized. The founders of public relations were studying all the theories of Freud.
So they understand the psychological principles behind this of how to manipulate, how to get people following the crowd. They understand this very, very well. And if we don't realize that they have this understanding, we're totally vulnerable to being manipulated because we don't perceive that.
And
Susan: they've had about 100 years now to practice it and get really, really good
Richard: at it. Yeah,
Susan: exactly.
And, you know, with wars and all kinds of things.
I mean, just to give you an example for those who haven't, and everybody should read that book, PR by Stuart Ewan. In there, he talks about Freud's nephew, who was one of the first people that got women to start smoking cigarettes, you know, at the time that he was hired by the tobacco companies. And this was early in the 20th century, in like the 1920s, around the time of the suffragette movement.
One of the things that he did, this is when women were marching for the vote down Fifth Avenue, for example, a major street in New York City, dressed like the Statue of Liberty. And his brilliant quote-unquote PR idea was to have them smoking cigarettes as they marched wearing Statue of Liberty hats. I mean, this is the kind of diabolical thing that these people are doing.
And now, of course, it's become a lot more subtle and behind the scenes, but it's still there.
Richard: In this book, he also talks about the building of the support for the first Iraq invasion. And they talk about how there were all of these reports that were appearing on American media particularly, but I think around the world too, of sort of eyewitnesses, so-called eyewitnesses to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And one 15-year-old girl was testifying before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1990, before the invasion, the first invasion of Iraq.
And she was talking about seeing, being in the hospital in Kuwait City when the Iraqis invaded and watching the Iraqi soldiers spear babies with bayonets and throw them to the floor. She was talking about these things as an eyewitness account, all to build the anger, of particular to the Americans to in order to stimulate the desire to get revenge and go and protect the Kuwaiti people with the American army of course.
Later it was discovered that this woman, this little girl, 15 year old girl, was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, had not been in Iraq and not been in Kuwait at all at the time. And so this is the kind of thing that's done, it's like a manipulation that's so overt but we don't we don't get it because so many of these stories are censored, we don't hear about this in the in the traditional media.
Susan: That's right. And of course what she said she was lying, you know, and this same story was one that was used during World War One about the Huns bayonetting Belgian babies or something, I don't know what what it was, but um it makes you wonder, you know, it really it's it's so creepy because now they're arresting uh supposed terrorists, alleged terrorists, I mean there's a lot of bad people out there, we're not saying that there aren't, but you it's like you get this feeling like what's truth and what's reality, what's a lie, because we see how there has been so many, we've been lied to so much in the past and now there's so many critical issues.
So one of these key points that will help people become more literate, Rich, is and I've determined that there are like nine of them, the first of course is you want to be aware that there is a lot of censorship going on, but another one is to follow the money, you always have to ask yourself from this news piece who would stand to gain economically from this, um and I think if you ask yourself that question it really does give you pause.
And might spur you into doing some additional research than taking things at face value. We
Richard: certainly cannot take things at face value because this question that Dr. Keppe has raised rather brilliantly over the last 50 years is that we have a human pathology. We human beings are much more pathological than we think. And so if we take things at face value, we are not seeing what the great psychologists have showed us for the last 100 years, which is that behind the mask, the appearances, there's a whole other area of bad intentions, of dark sides, of instincts that are very inverted.
And this we don't understand very well in ourselves. And because we don't understand it in ourselves, we're very tempted to take the politicians at face value. And if they do something bad, we say, oh, well, it was a mistake. It wasn't what he meant to do, you know. So we really have got to be much more conscious, not just of what's going on in the media, Susan, but what's happening inside the human being, this psychopathological part that we don't like to see very much.
Susan: Yes. So follow the money is one way that you can do that to start to open your eyes to what might be going on. And another technique that's used is called false balancing. So the media know, journalists know, that you always have to present in your stories an alternative view. And if you read a story carefully there always be that one voice that has the alternative view and it's somewhere like three quarters of the way down in the story, in most pieces that we'll read in the daily paper, in law in longer essays, you know, you might have more, or in a book you might have more of the alternative view, but it's always that one voice somewhere halfway, three quarters of the way down, kind of hidden in there, you know, well some guy in China thinks that this is not a great idea, you know, but 95% of the coverage is pro that idea.
So it's what's called false balancing. And another technique that's used is saturation. So with the swine flu thing, all we saw was swine flu, swine flu, amazing. I mean, I've never seen anything like it, Rich. But when I went back and I looked at the research, I saw that the World Health Organization had a program where they were they're wanting to vaccinate you know half the world's population against swine flu and and I know you've done stories before about what really causes viruses and and what really causes these um illnesses, uh all about viruses and all about vaccines, but there is so much money that was spent on creating these vaccine, billions and billions and billions of dollars would stood to be gained from these vaccination programs, not to mention the sales of Tamiflu, which is the only apparently antiviral medication on the marketplace.
So anybody that follows the money and is aware that these techniques of saturation coverage, it's sort of like the shock and awe campaign that happened during the Iraq war, is done to us, the people, in his PR campaigns. Yeah, this is
Richard: incredible. And if you look at drug company profits, there's a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine's written a book about the medical profession, showing how the whole medical industry is totally taking over and destroying the debate on health, what's going on in health, just by gearing it towards their needs.
She talks about the Fortune 500 companies. In 2002, there were 10 drug companies on that list of Fortune 500 companies. And those 10 drug companies combined had more profit than the 490 other companies on that Fortune 500 list. So they make a lot of money, Susan.
So following the money is a really good piece of advice for us.
Susan: The other thing that we need to be aware of is vague sources. So you'll see this all the time in the media. For example, a spokesman for Citibank, an industry source, a Western diplomat, a top agency official, senior administration officials, court spokesman, former radical, many analysts, other economists, sophisticated investment advisors, those in the industry who believe, dot, dot, dot, et cetera.
So these are other red flags that we need to be aware of. They're vague sources, but yet people take them at face value. The
Richard: way you're speaking now leads me to suspect that what you're suggesting is that the media has an agenda and they're furthering an agenda. And what is that agenda? What is it that they're behind? What are they developing
Susan: here?
Well, to increase the value to the shareholders, It's an economic agenda. Now, listen, I must step aside and say that the journalists themselves are often – they're kind of like they want to keep their job. They've got a mortgage to meet. They need to put food on the table. So many of them are always complaining about – their hands are tied. You know, it's rare to find a journalist these days that really has the courage and, you know, maybe some sort of private financial backing where they can go out and really say what they know.
And what I find is that actually the journalists themselves, their own minds become dulled because of this work, having to work within these corporate structures.
Richard: We have become dulled, Susan. We've become very complacent about what's going on. And I remember very recently I did another radio program with Cláudia Pacheco.
We were talking about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. And she was making the comment in this program that at that time in the 60s, late 60s, there was an enormous reaction against war for new values, new ways of doing things. There was a lot of crazy stuff, of course, that was going on, but there was a real spirit of reaction. And what she was saying in this radio program is that today we're not reacting anymore.
Things are happening. We're being sold this bill of goods. We're being vaccinated to death. We're being drugged to death. We're being sent off to wars that we don't even know why we're there. And we're not reacting. We're not, like, having this response anymore. This must be very worrying. You live there. You're right in the heart of the economic center there in New York.
And this must be very worrying to you.
And how can we wake people up? What can we say to get people reacting again?
Susan: It is worrisome, and it's sort of like a body whose immune system is no longer functioning. Right. So things, what we're seeing, you know, with AIDS and other, if you take a group of, say, 20 women together at some sort of conference, almost everybody has had some sort of autoimmune disease where our own bodies are either overreacting or underreacting to something in the environment and in our personal lives.
This is the great value of Dr. Keppe's work because he teaches us that he links, you know, body, mind, and spirit and sociopathology, psychopathology. It's all one thing, Rich. It's not like we're not reacting anymore. It's all one giant problem that has to be addressed at the source with, you know, inversion, human psychopathology.
You can't just keep hiding from the truth for centuries and centuries and not expect to have some sort of adverse reaction. We see it, you know, this terrible rise of autism in the children. I mean, the death of bees, you know, you address this over and over in your podcast. And of course, the dulling of our brain. Because if we're not feeding it with truth, if we're consuming so much garbage and loving it, by the way.
That's what's so weird. You can't do that year in and year out and not expect to become a shell of what you should be as a person. So you asked me for the solution. I wish that I had it. I think there's a number of wonderful initiatives. I heard the great Pete Seeger the other day, Rich, talk about this. Now, you know Pete Seeger.
Everybody should know him as the father of folk music. He did so much.
Not only was he a great, wonderful folk Singer, but he was a social activist in the mid 20 and earlier 20th century, still alive. He's like 91 years old. And he is still an activist, an ecological activist doing so much to bring awareness of the pollution of the Great Hudson River outside of New York. And what he said the other day when asked the same question, he said this, he said, "during the time of the Second World war he was a big anti-bomb anti-war protester.
When when we dropped that atomic bomb he thought that that the end was near. That the planet would have like you know just years left. But now but we did survive so far. And now he sees so many alternate voices coming up. Little groups here and there. He says initially he thought it was like just people putting teaspoons of water into the ocean.
But now he sees there are so many small groups acting for the same purpose that you and I are, that the people listening to this podcast are, that he has faith and hope that we will manage."
Look, it's very close to the 11th hour. It's close to midnight. But shows like this, I think more and more people are waking up to this fact. This is our goal. And let's hope that it has some effect.
Richard: No, for sure, Susan. This is the only way we can continue because otherwise we just get depressed, you know, so we have to have this sense and my students ask me all the time.
Time. This question, but how do we look at all this without getting depressed? And I think this is what you're saying is really beautiful. It's a question of resonance, you know, that if we have enough people who are really alternatively minded, who really have the desire to do, to bring goodness, to do something good, that this has an enormous vibrational effect in the world.
Susan: It sure does. You know, Pete Seeger doesn't understand resonance, I don't think.
It's not just a bunch of little teaspoons coming together. It's much much more than that. When when enough human beings come together with this consciousness and we're getting pretty close to that right now, it's amazing what can happen in the world. The change the positive change that can occur. So we have to stop being so materialistic and think it's like you know little teaspoons.
It's not. We are aligning ourselves with a power that is so much more stronger and more powerful than us. It's the power of truth. It's the power of consciousness. And it starts with us taking responsibility as citizens for our own knowledge. You can't be lazy about this because your own future and your health is at
Richard: stake. Great, Susan. I read a great story in the New York Times on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yes. And the reporter was saying there that it was like there was some strange change in the law that were going to make it easier for people to get visas. And suddenly these people started showing up at the border and the military didn't do anything because there was all this confusion. And so people started crossing over and the military didn't shoot them.
And it just took over like a wave. And suddenly the wall was not there, you know, it's like incredibly, yeah. It's like things happen like that when suddenly, if the powerful suddenly start doing something good, everything changes because that's the power of God. God is the power to do good. So if suddenly somebody curbs their pathology just for a little bit, goodness just erupts all over the place.
It's extraordinary. If we start demanding goodness, the media is going to follow us because they want to make money.
We
Susan: forget how much control we have as consumers. We really do. Because without us, and it's already happening, Rich, the great newspapers are losing money like crazy. The media is desperate. They're not getting the readership in the newspapers and certainly not on big radio anymore. Almost nobody listens to the radio. Everybody's got their own iPods and their own internet sources of entertainment.
So a lot has happened and fast.
Richard: And I want to stress that analyzing what's going on, really understanding the fast-paced world we live in, is possible through this science of Analytical Trilogy. This is a big and well-developed field of study. Rich at richjonesvoice.com if you'd like more. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time.
