Drishyam: The Alternate Reality Media Creates And Presents As Reality
Above photo is the screen shot of the Indian Express headline on the results of Rajasthan civic polls of the last week, which BJP won; trouncing Congress. But in the minds of the readers who read the headline, the words "BJP loses face" would have made the mark that details that followed the headline could not have erased.
So, even a news that was very positive for BJP was reduced to a negative for it by the time it reached the readers.
In the recent movie "Drishyam," the hero creates a story as an alibi to keep his family from getting arrested for a crime they had committed unintentionally. But each story has characters, and the hero knows that the characters appearing in his story would be questioned by the police. So he creates an alternate reality, and carefully inserts all characters appearing into his story in that reality, or simply writes in their mind the story as he wants, the way a computer writes data on memory devices. He does it so skilfully that indeed all the characters appearing in his story narrate the story as if it were real, the way hero wanted them to narrate. He succeeds because the characters are too busy and occupied in their own lives, and they do receive data, but are too disinterested to process it, and simply store it in memory. Once the skeletal data is placed in their minds, the hero fills in crucial false details, and reinforces the memory by repeating the whole story to the characters, but this time with some crucial but false details inserted. And that is what media does daily to its readers and viewers, on a mass scale. It creates an alternate reality, and presents it as the reality. And succeeds because of the same reasons: the readers and viewers are too busy in their lives to process the data. Media then reinforces this alternate reality through comments and discussions, by carefully choosing columnists and commentators, and members of the panels it assembles for discussions.
So the readers and viewers never realise that they are being made to live into a make believe world that conforms to the ideology and agenda of those who control the media. Media knows that few persons have the time, inclination, and access to resources to verify what they are claiming to be the facts, and even fewer capable to spot omissions, mutilations, and obfuscations of facts that may puncture the alternate reality. This is done by suppressing news, by manufacturing news, by inventing news (and publishing a regret two days later if challenged), by formulating headlines different from the actual thrust of the news, knowing that few readers go beyond headlines, and even in the minds of those who go, the headline stays.
In India, a Left elite controls the narrative. And it makes sure that only the narrative it approves controls the way media reports on the daily events. Broadly speaking, its "guidelines" can be discerned as under:
1. Nothing against The Nehru Gandhi Dynasty is to make it to the headlines, if does, it has to be in most innocuous words, and must be taken off headlines within few hours. So the charges by Jayanthi Natarajan against The Dynasty disappeared down the memory hole the same day. The book Durbar by Tavleen Singh, that contains explosive revelations against The Dynasty, has been disappeared by media by ignoring it to the extent as if it was never written.
2. If a Congress government has done anything good, it is the express and direct doing of The Dynasty. If it has done something bad, it never happened, or was the failure of some minion, or of the system. So it is never mentioned that Sonia Gandhi and her Super Cabinet called NAC was the real government at the Centre for last ten years, and it systematically destroyed Indian economy.
3. The consequences of the socialism, which has been the governing philosophy of the Indian ruling elite, are never to be connected to the socialism itself. So if the education and health services in India have collapsed, that is not the inescapable consequence of the socialism, but only means that we need to throw more money on these sectors.
4. Any negative news from the states ruled by the "secular socialist" parties is not a news, and must be discarded. So, Indians would never know that in UP, Bihar, and West Bengal; roads have disappeared, education has disappeared, health services have disappeared, electricity has disappeared, businesses have disappeared, and jobs have disappeared. That in these states Law and Order has ceased to exist, and they are more like wild uncivilised world.
5. Anything bad done by the groups which have been classified by the Left ruling elite of India as "victim groups," i.e. its favoured religious minority groups, is not a news and must not be broadcast, but anything negative happening to them must be played up as breaking news for many days. So a riot is not a riot if the favoured "victim group" has upper hand, but as soon as it loses dominance, it becomes a breaking news.
6. Once a political personality has been accepted by the Left as its own, nothing negative from his/her life is a news. Only her positive acts and attributes are to be played up, his/her lies are not to be exposed, his/her acts of dismeanour are never to be mentioned. So it is never mentioned that Lalu Yadav is a convicted and sentenced criminal out on bail.
7. If something horrible has been done by a Leftist or by a "victim" group, and can't be suppressed into a no-news, its impact is to be diluted by reminding the readers/viewers that other people have also done the same in the past. So when ISIS atrocities could no longer be suppressed, Praveen Swami of Indian Express wrote that the Mexican drug mafia also similarly tortures people.
8. The Leftist ideas are kept safe by attributing their consequences to persons. So 120 million human beings murdered by the Leftists in USSR, China, Cambodia, and host of other countries are claimed to be killed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other leaders, not by the Leftists.
9. Confusion is compounded by divorcing the words from their meanings. So the programmes and schemes of Leftists are called Welfare measures, and pro-poor schemes. The armed wing of the Left in India is not called armed wing of the Left, they are called Naxalites. Most of the newspapers claim that the papers run by the hard Left parties are the only Left mouthpieces, even as they themselves have almost all columnists from the Left. Occasionally an article from a neutral or "Rightwinger" columnist is given space, but the reader is always made to believe that the views expressed by regular columnists and editors are objective commentaries on events and ideas, not the subtle propaganda by the Leftists.
The methods, and instances of use of the methods, which the media uses to create an alternate reality: suppressing news, playing up news; establishing connection, denying connection; claiming equivalence; calling "isolated incident," calling it a "pattern;" having only the columnists who subscribe to the Leftist worldview but not calling them Leftists, having only the panelists who subscribe to the Leftist worldview but also having someone from the openly communist parties so that the remaining panelists look neutral to the average viewer; are too numerous to list them here. But in conclusion it can be said that the Indian media is a Left controlled contraption that has created an alternate reality and keeps the readers and viewers there by daily reinforcing the narrative.
Most of the Indian media outlets are owned by Indian nationals. Almost all the newspersons and columnists are Indians. So how is it possible that they are part of this "grand conspiracy" that has the potential to bring down India as a country? After all, reality has the nasty habit of intruding into the most carefully constructed make-believe world, and destroying it. So the world of media, in which the only problem is the problem of "delivery" of Left's programmes and policies to the intended beneficiaries, and problem is not those programmes and policies themselves, in which majority is oppressing minorities, even though it is continuously losing both land and followers to those minorities; in which problems in the Middle East have been created by America, and not by the idea that the people there subscribe to; will also someday collapse, and these mediapersons themselves and their children will also suffer the same fate as all the citizens of media. So how is it possible that these disparate people from diverse background, the mediapersons, are collectively perpetuating this fraud on Indian people who actually trust them?
Answer is not simple. Individually, each mediaperson may actually believe the Leftist ideas, that is why he has been allowed to enter media in the first place and stay there. He also needs to hold the job to keep his family above water. Being on the right side of those who control media brings riches and glamour. Few human beings have the courage and honesty to bite the hand that feeds.
But still it is really intriguing how so many newspapers and news channels propagate the same lies, promote the same agenda, play up the same news, suppress the same news, claim the same equivalence, deny any equivalence in the same instances, claim the same connection, deny the same connection, claim the same pattern, deny the same pattern. Is there some invisible single hand that guides them all, feeds them all?
May be we would never know. Maybe we know, and it is the Leftist ruling elite of India.
(To read similar past articles, click on the titles below.-Ed)
1. Surjit S Bhalla Takes Apart Leftist, Dhimmi, Crony Indian Media
2. “The End Of Truth,” Or How The Mainstream Media Controls The Narrative
3. Bamiyan Buddhas And Dhimmitude Of Indian Media
4. Land Acquisition Bill, Narendra Modi, And India’s Ruling (Mafia) Elite