THE MEDIA is staging a veritable orgy of distortion in response to the terrible massacre in Charleston, S.C. It’s not that the press is lying so much as exaggerating and ignoring anything that conflicts with the sensational, emotional narrative of white supremacy and violence against blacks, creating the distinct impression that violence by white supremacists is a serious national problem and that large numbers of whites hate blacks. It reminds me of an art exhibit I recently saw of African America art at a major museum.

One of the entries in the exhibit consisted of blackened impressions on white paper made by four hot irons. The description accompanying the artwork said the images of hot irons evoked the servitude of black domestic workers and the pain of hot irons pressed against human skin, giving the impression that whites deliberately applied hot irons to the skin of black servants and that it was a common practice. Now if you said to the artist of this work, “But that wasn’t a common practice,” the artist could simply say, “I never said that it was.” But, of course, he implied that it was. Lawrence Auster referred to this phenomenon as “quasi-totalitarian” propaganda, distinct from the more blatant propaganda of totalitarian regimes like that of the Soviets in that much is said indirectly and an entire alternate reality is created.

This “artwork” was only one of numerous inflammatory, historically inaccurate pieces of propaganda art which had no redeeming aesthetic qualities, unless one finds expensive paper, canvas and frames beautiful. It was purely political. I saw young black children at the museum and was saddened to think of how their innocence was deliberately stolen, of how they were being formed in the idea that whites hated them so much and would physically torture them with hot irons if they had power over them. (And, it should be noted, it was whites not blacks who were mainly responsible for this exhibit. It was a stage for their exalted and deformed sense of their own virtue, but also it was an unconscious acknowledgement of their loss of authority.)

One major newspaper had a huge headline the other day that said, “VICTIMS OF HATRED,” accompanied by a photo of weeping black residents of Charleston that took up the entire top half of the page. The entire top half of the front page. It was the sort of large and prominent headline one might reserve for the outbreak of a major war. Speaking of war, the coverage can only exacerbate racial resentment and hatred.

Paul Joseph Watson, whose work I am otherwise completely unfamiliar with, responds to the coverage in this video.

 — Comments —

Bill R. writes:

Laura writes, “It’s not that the press is lying so much as exaggerating and ignoring anything that conflicts with the sensational, emotional narrative of white supremacy and violence against blacks.”

Exactly.  It’s a brilliant propaganda strategy that the major media employ every day.  They don’t lie at all in any specific thing they say.  It’s not necessary, for one thing.  There’s a much better way to lie, and that is in the contrast in their approach to one type of crime as opposed to another.  Similar to what Laura said about the artwork at the African American museum, the media can say, “we never said there wasn’t any black on white crime.”  No, but like the iron on the white background, they just left that impression, and that’s actually much better.  A white on black crime like this will receive saturation coverage for days or weeks, with the emphasis on the racial aspect maintained with utmost intensity throughout the coverage.  In fact, the racial aspect will be the coverage.  A similar black on white crime, on the other hand, will receive little or no coverage at, and as for what little coverage it may receive, the racial aspect will be utterly buried.

At The Occidental Observer, Professor Kevin MacDonald has provided an interesting psychological analysis of the media coverage of Charleston, and how the manner of dishonesty in this kind of propaganda ends up being so effective.  He writes, “Cognitive psychologists study heuristics [problem solving by trial and error] that people use to make judgments about the likelihood of events that are complexly determined — things like airplane crashes or shark attacks. A heuristic relevant to Charleston is the availability heuristic, where people make judgments and form attitudes based on their memories of past events.”

Professor MacDonald goes on to note the very specific goal this kind of skewed saturation coverage is designed to achieve based on that idea.  The more extensive and enduring the media coverage of an event, the more people tend to remember it and the more frequently, therefore, they are likely to believe that event to occur.  So even though black on white crime is vastly greater than white on black, people will tend to think the opposite because, whereas white on black crime is frequently national news for days or weeks (if not an occasion for my personal favorite, a “national discussion on race”), black on white crime is, for all intents and purposes, simply not reported.

Could there possibly be a more perfect way to lie than that — to lie without actually having lied at all?

I noted, without surprise, that in one of Yahoo News’s lead stories about Charleston, you knew the race of the perpetrator literally within the first two words of the article, it having begun, “A white man…”

The Left doubtless knows that many whites are becoming wise to this propaganda tactic and the nature of the skewed media coverage of racially motivated crime.  But they also know that their methods are, unfortunately, still very effective with millions of Americans.

The Paul Joseph Watson video was spot on all the way.  This RamZPaul video on the topic is also excellent.

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