propaganda: subliminal messages and bad photoshopping

there are a lot of people who still refuse to believe that the media is to blame for how society acts. i’m not saying that people aren’t responsible for their own actions or anything, and i’m not saying that it’s entirely the media who shape the comfortable majority of the world. however… you can’t dismiss the media as a harmless entity, and you can never take it at face value. there is a core audience and propaganda directed towards that audience in everything you can see or hear. and there is always a motive.

i ran across two great examples today that i thought i’d share:

 

1.) JOHN MCCAIN IS HIDING IN YOUR FOX NEWS!

It now appears that mere exposure to an object is especially likely to increase liking for that object when people are unaware of this exposure (Bornstein 1989; Bornstein and D’Agostino 1992).

(intelstrike has a good excerpt about subliminal messages from a social cognition book.)

2.) IRAN EMPLOYS DANGEROUS PHOTOSHOPPERS

i guess it’s undetermined whether this photo was actually tampered with by iran or if another country did it, but regardless of the source, it’s hillarious.

a ny times blog has more info on this.

 

scott

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