The means to communicate 1 idea powerfully is critical to conveying ideas and influencing others. If someone isn’t certain about their ideas, they’ll speak vaguely. Adding more ideas complicates others’ understanding.
News coverage and history are never exempt from political manipulation, since the ability to craft convincing stories is a tremendous form of power.
While we can gain a tiny bit of power via publicly protesting, boycotting, and writing letters, it’s rarely as much power as communicating to the public with a form of large-scale media (e.g., social media).
Since the news of information isn’t the information itself, a story and its implications can change very rapidly, and without notice. In retrospect, it’s clearly evident what caused it (typically through what people felt strongly about but didn’t have words to say), but it’s impossible to predict it.
The second-best way to discover the historical and journalistic facts are to read both sides of the story and conclude for yourself. However, it’s difficult to share those conclusions (or not share) without your own political manipulation. The best way is to read the facts themselves, but that’s typically more boring than most people can withstand.
The most reliable way to convey a message is through embellishing the truth. By converting the story into a mythological tale, it travels farther because it hits the emotions more. Plus, if the reality of the story is also absurd, the “fact-checkers” who oppose the story will give more weight to that story’s credibility.
We must be critical of what we hear, but also why people are saying things. Observe closely what you’re not hearing.
Most of the tales and creative works of the distant past that have survived were propaganda, parody, and designed for unsophisticated people. We lose that in translation (especially with the people who teach it), so we assume there was something more dignified about the past than there really was.
Since stories are a relatively straightforward mechanism, they’re easy to duplicate when you make a popular one. Barring the artist devoted to creating meaning, most storytellers will simply reproduce the same tired framework over and over.
If someone gains enough power telling the news, they will actually make future news events. By claiming things about public opinion or informing people about details, a news outlet has the power to bend the opinions of sometimes millions with a few choice words.
The untold stories are, often, the more important ones.
If you want to know what will be popular 5 years from now, it’ll probably incorporate whatever was overwhelmingly popular about 15 years ago from today.
The internet has broken the media/listener wall. Now, everyone can become a media personality with enough people interested in following it. This trend has transformed news and education forever.
People with the power to censor have tremendous control. Unless those people are held fully accountable for each censorship activity they perform, a benevolent situation will rapidly become oppressive.
Advertising mascots are an attempt to create a human face on an otherwise emotionless legal organization. People fall for the false image because it appeals to whatever sentiment a demographic prefers to associate with.
One of the advantages of exploring the cultures of the past (i.e., history) is that you have an easy viewpoint to see how they behaved and what happened from it. Though you can’t speak with them directly, you can still use your imagination to connect how they likely lived and thought. It’s easy to believe yourself superior or removed from them in some way, but never forget they were as human as you, and others will see you the same way.
It’s safe to say that every single storyteller is the propaganda arm of some other large group. As the writer of this essay, I’m aiming for brevity that maximizes meaning, driven by my personal spirituality.
Given human universals, if you’re angry about a news story you have no influence to change, the very fact you’ve heard the story means someone is publishing it, and that other people who can do something about it may also be angry about it.
Eventually, if the product of a storyteller is good enough, their amassing of power will mean that they will become a bad system.