Media Manipulation

Overview

"Media manipulation" is an umbrella term used to define the wide variety of psychological tactics and advertising techniques that use mass media as a way to directly influence and even shape public opinion. The techniques include the use of carefully selected images, carefully worded texts, ambient music, and even disarming sound effects that create an arresting presentation sufficient to secure audience consumption and coax action or encourage a particular opinion.

Although the rise of digital media since the late 1980s has considerably broadened the concept of media manipulation and has made the psychology of it far more complex, the template for using the authority and reach of mass media to manipulate the emotions of an audience has its foundations in the rise of radio and television in the early twentieth century. Contemporary culture is saturated by television. As J. Koblin (2016) reports, although such data is notoriously difficult to measure with any accuracy (in many homes, for example, the television is left on although no one is watching and people sleep and eat in front of the television without actually watching television), the average person in the United States consumes between 25 to 30 hours of television per week. With the advent of the online video downloading and streaming, the hours per week the average person spends in front of a screen has dramatically expanded. That reach, that accessibility, is at the core of the theory of media manipulation.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the concept of media manipulation was centered primarily on the rising influence of advertising and how advertising executives could craft a television commercial to make a maximum impact on viewers. Remote controls were a boon to viewers in large part because they made skipping commercials easier. It then became important to advertisers to craft commercials that worked to engage viewers quickly, before they changed the channel, and the commercials themselves became an important element of watching television. Advertising campaigns created continuing characters to sell a product or used celebrity spokespeople or introduced an irresistible jingle or an unforgettable slogan as a way to manipulate the public to agree that they did not merely need deodorant or a car or toilet paper but rather that they needed a particular deodorant, car, and toilet paper.

Advertisers took advantage of the notion that media was seen as reliable. Selling then was at the heart of media manipulation. Cultural psychologists and sociologists pointed out that commercial advertising drew on some of the darkest theoretical underpinnings and actual techniques of the massive propaganda machine that generated widespread popular support for the pernicious agenda of the Nazi regime in wartime Germany. Further, before government watchdog agencies came to investigate the claims made by advertisers, commercials were largely free to assert any level of quality for the product without the expectation of accountability. Hyperbole became the norm. Every product was the best, new and improved, the easiest to use, the safest, the most reliable. Routinely using exaggerations and even outright distortions; providing enhanced and carefully staged images that maximized the product appeal; offering engaging storylines that really had nothing to do directly with the quality or performance of the product; piling on sensational adjectives; relying on paid endorsements by celebrities who seldom had any real expertise in the product field; and simplifying problems by offering the product as an easy solution—all these strategies created the first-generation of widespread media manipulation. Awareness, clearly, could be coerced, assent could be gained without authentic quantitative data, people could be moved subtly and indirectly to act in a way that benefited those who created the very campaigns to generate that action.

Although to a contemporary audience the use of media manipulation to "sell" a political candidate or to push a political, social, economic, or even religious agenda is widely accepted, the idea of applying media manipulation techniques to politics and public activism was, in the early 1960s, a radical (and for some troublesome) concept. After all, to use the same marketing manipulation techniques deployed to spike sales of a brand of laundry soap in order to elect a politician was seen as unsavory, unseemly, and profoundly insulting to the electorate; relying on slick commercials with pithy catchphrases, clever jingles, and riveting images cheapened the complex process of selecting political leaders to direct the affairs of a country. Undoubtedly the turn toward embracing rather than dismissing the concept of media manipulation in politics occurred during the heated 1964 presidential election between liberal Democrat incumbent Lyndon Johnson and conservative Republican maverick Barry Goldwater, the junior senator from Arizona. At the time, there were few more complex issues facing Cold War America than the fear of either Russia or the United States igniting a world war using the rapidly growing stockpile of nuclear weapons. Goldwater was known to have hawkish views on American military power. The Johnson campaign enlisted a prominent New York City advertising agency to craft what has since become the known as "The Daisy" ad. In it, a young girl innocently plucks the petals off a daisy. Her counting off the plucked petals is gradually superseded by a stern military voiceover who engages the familiar count down sequence preceding a missile launch. At zero, the screen exploded into the terrifyingly familiar blast of a nuclear bomb. The girl's face is lost in the roiling glare as a snippet from one of Johnson's stump speeches plays, warning of the dire consequence of nuclear annihilation. The ad was not a lie, but neither did it rely on information and discourse. It was subtle and emotionally manipulative—and it worked.

The commercial, barely forty seconds, aired only once because of the outcry against its disturbing impact. Nevertheless, the point had been made—without any reasoned debate, without any supporting data, the ad simplified the Johnson campaign's characterization of the Goldwater candidacy: Elect him and he will annihilate the planet and kill children. Johnson was elected in one of the greatest landslide victories of the twentieth century. Over the next four decades, before the rise of digital technologies would considerably broaden the reach and the techniques of mass media coercion, media manipulation would come to center virtually every political campaign at all levels as well as provide strategies for crucial public platforms that addressed a variety of thorny social activist causes (most notably civil rights, abortion rights, and environmental protection).

In a 2001 article that covered the sweeping rise of the media in politics around the world, Esser, Reinemann, and Fan concluded that by the mid-1990s and the Clinton White House, political reporters and the media generally were recognized as a "political tool" baldly used by all parties to create popular support or to manipulate public outcry. It was a simple premise: Begin with a complex issue and carefully select a loaded image that would relay a simple message about the issue and in turn generate an uncomplicated and immediate reaction. Mass communication theorists suggested that this manipulation simply recognized the reality of television as a medium. Television, it was argued, was not suitable for lengthy discussions because of its frenetic, animated nature; television could not really teach or inform because viewers did not turn on the television to think but rather to relax and be entertained. A Keep America Beautiful public service announcement (PSA) from 1970s illustrates this idea: To persuade Americans to abandon the universal habit of discarding their litter anywhere instead of putting it in a trashcan, the PSA portrayed a Native American along the side of a highway who gets pelted by litter tossed from a car and turns to the camera with a single tear rolling down his cheek. Dispensing with complex arguments weighing the convenience of throwing trash around against keeping the landscape and waterways clean, the short scene relied on loaded messaging—the man (Iron Eyes Cody, a non-Native actor who during his career passed as Native American) invoked America's pristine past; the litter at his feet was emblematic of boorish behavior by America's conquerors; the tear evoked feelings of regret and shame, prompting resolutions of personal responsibility to pick up one's litter and keep America beautiful.

Applications

Media manipulation seeks to not only create a reality that is simple and accessible to understand but also to create a reaction as well, usually to buy something. However, as Douglas Kellner, a Distinguished Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, argued in 2004, in the post-9/11 culture, media manipulation has morphed into a far more complicated practice. Initially used to sell particular makes of automobiles or toothpaste and then developed to manipulate public opinion in behalf of a political candidate or party or activist cause, media manipulation techniques have become an element of government itself and the conduct of public policy. It is one thing to sell toothpaste or to encourage people not to litter, but media manipulation has emerged as a strategy for directing government actions by "manufacturing consent." U.S administrations—liberal and conservative—have invoked the new conditions of the post-9/11 world to maintain unchecked surveillance and to classify information deemed sensitive as secret, unpopular policies that governments sought to justify using the widespread fear of terrorism to manipulate public opinion, that is, to trade some degree of civil liberty in return for national security. Using mass media, governments create and in some cases entirely re-create events as a way to direct and control public opinion, to sustain short-term confidence, and to support divisive and often unpopular policies, such as healthcare reform or military campaigns or immigration rights, that, without the distortions and manipulations, might not garner such approval (Hart, 2013).

Although cataloging all the applications and techniques governments use in media manipulation would be difficult, mass media theorists center on four basic strategies that have become standard procedures in the new millennium: 1) When confronted with a difficult issue or a controversial proposed course of action, government agents and their operatives orchestrate a kind of diversion, promote an event or series of events tangential to the crisis into a happy diversion that manages to distract public anxiety from the troublesome issue and allows for government action without attention or consequence; 2) to help the public accept sacrifice as an element of addressing a major crisis, operatives push back the timeline of sacrifice sometimes for years in return for the public agreeing to speedy action, thus playing on the belief that, given more time, a government with its enormous resources will come up with a solution that will make that sacrifice ultimately unnecessary; 3) to help motivate a population quickly, operatives scapegoat a vulnerable group (usually a particular ethnicity or income level) by remaking that minority into an easy-to-understand caricature and then generate significant and long-term animosity toward the marginalized group as a way to distract from the real (and far more complicated) reasons for the crisis; and 4) to help create a convincing case, operatives carefully select critical data points that appear to be reliable and even useful but have in fact been misappropriated, slanted, or distorted to create the appearance of making a convincing case.

Viewpoints

Donald Trump made media manipulation a key component of his campaign leading up to the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections, charging the "mainstream media" with dishonesty and turning criticism of his proposals, background, and public statements into evidence for endemic corruption of the establishment. Whether this assertion was seen to be a condemnation of media manipulation or an exercise in it depended on voters' point of view. Nevertheless, the success of this strategy introduced a serious disruption in the area of civil discourse, assuring its continued use as a means of deflecting a range of challenges during Trump's presidency and beyond. The administration argued that the left-leaning media was selective in its details and chose to report the president's statements and actions in a negative light calculated to appeal to liberals and create hostility, thereby distorting real-time events into "fake news." Trump continued to use media manipulation throughout this presidency and in his following campaigns. Many of his right-wing conservative supporters helped proliferate misleading or untrue information. On September 25, 2020, a conservative tweeted that 1,000 mail-in ballots had been discovered in a dumpster in Sonoma County, California, which was not true. Like gossip, the story was embellished on social media until it became an exclusive, suggesting that thousands of mail-in ballots had been trashed and workers had tried to cover it up. As he campaigned to return to the White House, his claims continued to reverberate around the country. Even as states held their primaries and caucused in 2024, Trump's followers insisted public officials had helped President Joe Biden "steal" the 2020 election and were working to remove them from office.

The strategy of fake news did not originate with Trump; it was preceded and accompanied by a proliferation of right-leaning media outlets, the largest of which, Fox News, began broadcasting in 1996 to counter prevailing narratives regarding civil rights, international relations, and science-based policies that held sway over U.S. policy and majority public opinion. Social media fostered a raft of outlets that built nationwide communities around conservative politics, the most prominent of these being Breitbart News, founded in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart and later managed by Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Some of these social media outlets (including Breitbart) became forums for ostracized hate groups, particularly white supremacists, whom Trump's presidential opponent Hillary Clinton, famously termed "deplorables." The popularity of these sites was amplified by Russian intelligence operations (Elizabeth, 2017) that sought to "meddle" in the election process and exacerbate divisions in American society. The combination of these and other factors resulted in the reporting and/or consuming as real news items that were demonstrably either misrepresented or entirely fabricated—for example, that Clinton was running a child sex slave ring out of a pizza parlor, a hoax that few believed but that inspired one man to go to the restaurant armed and ready to end the nefarious operation. The episode was held up as epitomizing how far the right-leaning media was willing to lie to manipulate support for Trump.

Congress, in particular right-wing Trump supporters, repeatedly called social media executives to Capitol Hill to testify and accused them of bias against conservative voices. Though these claims were disproven, in December 2023, advocacy group Free Press said some social media companies including Meta and X (formerly Twitter) had rolled back many of their policies for controlling hate speech and misinformation.

Older "legacy" media outlets, which tended to uphold the very narratives Trump supporters sought to overthrow, charged the new Trump administration with deploying a campaign of simplifications, distortions, fabrications, and coverups in order to dupe a credulous constituency. Some outlets, including The Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC, responded to Trump's positioning of media as essentially dishonest by embracing the role of opposition press and doubling down on negative coverage of the administration, setting aside a degree of objectivity and scrutinizing every aspect of the administration, from the cost of pens at the EPA to the president and first lady's private life.

Most scholarly opinion holds that media manipulation succeeds only with a public inclined to accept a narrative as given; it is generally not useful for changing minds, though it has considerable appeal for those not willing to engage complexity or be challenged by difficult and often contradictory data. Media manipulation is, however, effective at validating, stimulating, and consolidating audience members' existing inclinations and opinions. Governments, however, if supported rather than challenged by media can issue propagandistic distortions that can begin to appear as reality (Saran, 2016). The use of social media to advance disproved conspiracies, disprove documented events, and discredit expert opinion and good faith discourse tests the dictum attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

Bibliography

Dezenhall, E. (2018, March 6). Are Russian bots controlling your thoughts?. Wall Street Journal—Online Edition. p. 1. Retrieved May 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=128309986&site=ehost-live

Elizabeth, W. (2017, October 31). Russian trolls had huge presence on social media. USA Today. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=J0E373584445017&site=ehost-live

Esser, F., Reinemann, C., & Fan, D. (2001). Spin doctors in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany: Metacommunication about media manipulation. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 6(1), 16. Retrieved May 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=5811900&site=ehost-live

Harbath, K. (2024, February 10). Can social media companies safeguard the 2024 election against misinformation? Interview by John Yang and Harry Zahn. Public Broadcasting Service. www.pbs.org/newshour/show/can-social-media-companies-safeguard-the-2024-election-against-misinformation

Hart, C. (2013). Argumentation meets adapted cognition: Manipulation in media discourse on immigration. Journal of Pragmatics, 59(Part B), 200–209. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.06.005

Jang, S. M., Geng, T. T., Queenie Li, J. J., Xia, R. S., Huang, C. H., Kim, H. K., & Tang, J. J. (2018). A computational approach for examining the roots and spreading patterns of fake news: Evolution tree analysis. Computers in Human Behavior, 84, 103–113. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2018.02.032

Kellner, D. (2004). 9/11, spectacles of terror, and media manipulation: A critique of Jihadist and Bush media politics. Conference Papers—American Sociological Association. Retrieved May 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=15931279&site=ehost-live

Koblin, J. (2016, July 4). How much do we love television? Let us count the ways. New York Times. p. B6. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=116588975&site=ehost-live

Miller, Greg. (2020, Oct. 26). As US election nears, researchers are following the trail of fake news. Science. www.science.org/content/article/us-election-nears-researchers-are-following-trail-fake-news

Saran, V. (2016). Media manipulation and psychological war in Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova. Centre for European Studies (CES) Working Papers, 8(4), 738–752. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=120984183&site=ehost-live

The dangers of manipulated media in the midst of a crisis. (2020 Feb. 12). Council on Foreign Relations, www.cfr.org/blog/dangers-manipulated-media-midst-crisis