Stop Press - We Wish They Would!

One of the features of the Lib Dems campaign which looks frankly rather ‘old school ‘compared to their coalition buddies, the Conservative Party, has been the use of print media - spam publications dressed up to look like free local newspapers and delivered via the letterbox.

Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) has sent out his Colchester Courier and today we have received the Colchester View.

We wondered in the Essex Chronical, a real newspaper had complained, that the use of 'Chronical' might cause confusion?

We had certainly brought our concerns about advertising dressed up as news to our local newspaper group Newsquest, that incidentally Sir Bob had worked for. Lib-Dem MP Sir Bob Russell career history in the newspaper industry seems to have gone missing from his Wikipedia entry. In his early twenties Sir Bob became the country's youngest newspaper Editor when he took over the Maldon and Burnham Standard before heading for Fleet Street.

An article in the Colchester View at least supports a previous article of ours.

PROPAGANDER v REAL NEWS

1. Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (perhaps lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information. 

Edward Louis James Bernays November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995, a nephew of Freud, was an expert in propaganda. He coined the phrase ‘Public Relations’ and used his experience selling WW1 to people such as the Americans and to market products after the war. Prior to WW1 products had been sold on the basis of ‘Need’, but Companies were worried that the war having accelerated mass production, would soon mean that everyone had everything, a new idea had to be found: ‘’Wants’ in marketing terms. We know this today as consumerism.

Soon words like ‘better’ or ‘new and improved’ would pepper the language of the new high priests of product worship - Marketers.

The Jews in Germany and London saw an opportunity to break the stalemate of the First World War, where neither side could break the deadlock on the Western Front nor at home Great Britain was close to starvation due to submarine warfare. The Jews approached the UK government and from that came the Balfour Declaration that would eventually lead to a Jewish homeland Israel in 1948. The French and British had secretly planned to carve up the Middle East in 1916, so no country for example, could field a navy as powerful as the Turkish Navy (on the side of Germany) and threated the Suez Canal. The canal was the route to India.  

The US Jewish dominated film and banking industry just had to use propaganda to persuade the Americans including their many former German citizens, getting involved in European War was a noble undertaking. Many US citizens were uniterested in the conflict, some were against it and others even supported Germany. Enter the 'spin doctors' and the propagander machine. War is business.

Bernays persuaded debutants in the 1920’s to be photographed smoking, as a symbol of female emancipation. A newspaper helpfully described cigarette smoking as lighting: ‘torches for freedom’.

Bernays later marketed the idea of a war in Guatemala, after persuading the American people these impoverished peasants could invade the USA after electing a socialist leader, who wanted to use the counties cash crops to help raise up the poor. An idea not part of the business plan of the United Fruit Company, a US multi-national. 

Bernays invented the ‘press release’ and his pioneering work using the 'news' as more credible medium than pure advertising in forming opinions. His work gave birth to the sinister UK Tavistock Group and their ideas on mass mind control. Bernays, killed millions in pursuit of company profits, with words not bombs. His ideas are right at the heart of our modern media industry.