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Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 11-13-2007
Link
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Nandigram - Key players</b>
<b>Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee</b>
What began as a farmers' protest against land acquisition in Nandigram has turned out to be one of the biggest challenges for Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.
Though the chief minister has shelved the plan for an Special Economic Zone in the region, the protests are continuing in Nnadigram. The agitations have put Brand Buddha in a unique position where he is advocating industrialisation for the growth of the state.
<b>Mamata Benerjee</b>
The farmers' protests in Nandigram provided a new platform to Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Benerjee to surmise her place in the state's politics.
Mamata has managed to form a solid opposition to Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. She is using the agitation plank to corner the CM and regain her mass base.
<b>Bhumi Ucched Partirodh Committee</b>
The Bhumi Ucched Partirodh Committee (BUPC) is an organization formed to counter the state government's move to acquire farmlands for an Special Economic Zone.
Though the government has aborted the SEZ plan, the Trinamool Congress led BUPC is continuing its protest, pitching itself against the CPIM.Â
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Above is a link from Communist news channel NDTV. No where they had referred CM of West Bengal as Communist leader, according to above description he sound like a reasonable man and Mamta and BUPC as villain.
Had it BJP, they would have used fascist, Hindutava, RSS etc in every sentence.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - dhu - 11-29-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Upcoming movie:
<b>Crusade to the Hindoos</b>
In brief: A celebrated spiritualist becomes entangled in revolutionary politics while her followers battle among themselves for control over her movement.
The story: At 16, Simon Besant is a willful and mischievous student at Eton, forever in the shadow of his famous mother, Annie â Socialist reformer, militant feminist, and recent convert to all things occult.
...<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-02-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>CNN-IBN Provokes Muslims to Kill Modi!-Video</b>
12/1/2007 1:30:50 PMÂ Click here to watch the provoking Video aired by CNN-IBN
In a three part series telecasted by IBN-CNN Titled 'Inside Moditva' , the Channel Telecast the biased reporting by Sagarika Ghosh misuses the Journalistic ethos to induce violence in Gujarath. In the program media airs open threatening to to kill an elected representative / head of State.
In which country other than India a media can telecast such programmes to promote violence and terrorism in the country. We should condemn such journalism by CNN-IBN in the middle of the election. No media has the right to provoke masses to kill an elected CM of an Indian state.
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Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-03-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->December 02, 2007
Insight
<b>The sting and the truth about Gujarat </b>
By B.P. Singhal
"IT was a well planned âgenocideââ, âit was a âpogromââ, âit was state sponsored âterrorismââ, is what they had said in screaming headlines day-after-day in 2002 in Delhi based âsecularâ English dailies and the âsecularâ electronic media. So complete was the Goebbelsian propaganda and so effective was the concealment of truth, that even the Supreme Court lost its judicial balance and without verifying what steps the Government of Gujarat had taken, it went on to write on page 72 of its judgement in the Best Bakery Case that, âThe modern day Neros were looking elsewhere when Best Bakery and innocent children and helpless women were burning ...........â.
It was media power at its worst that caused this unwarranted outburst from the Supreme Court. All the Gujarat language dailies were giving truthful accounts which were at complete variance with the Delhi based media.
The Hindu, the leading-most South India daily reported on March 1, 2002 : âThe Chief Minister Modi frantically asked for the Army units to be called in.â On March 2, 2002 The Hindu reported : âUnlike February 28 when one community was entirely at the receiving end, the minority backlash on 1st March has further worsened the situation .......... and the Army staged a flag march in Ahmedabad on March 1, 2002 at 9.00 A.M.â
It was therefore truly shocking that on 25.8.2007, Aaj Tak harped on the same old refrain that âModi did not call the army until three days had passedâ. Even more outrageous was their insistance on this point. When Aaj Tak contacted me on phone to get my response, I told the anchor that the Godhra carnage took place on February 27, 2002, that the Hindu backlash commenced on February 28th and the Army was doing flag march on the forenoon of March 1st ............ He cut me short by saying that âthis is exactly what we had said, no action was taken by Modi on 29th, 30th and 31st thus giving three clear days to the murderers ........â I had to cut him short by reminding him that the date 28th was 28th of February, 2002 and there was no 29th, 30th or 31st in that month. The phono was of course disconnected. However, it has to be said to the credit of Aaj Tak and Headlines Today that they called me for a full length studio debate from 9.15 P.M. 11.45 P.M. next day. But the details of that debate shall have to wait. For the present, however, it is imperative that certain facts are stated to prevent perpetuation of the lies propagated in 2002.
Fact 1: That âshoot at sight ordersâ had been given by the Government on 28th itself.
Being a former DGP and also a Member of Parliament at that time, I was personally in touch with the office of DGP Gujarat and the Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad. I was keen to tell them, (a) to call in the Army at once and (b) to issue âshoot at sightâ orders, to all officers of the rank of Sub-Inspectors and above. It was very comforting to learn that the Government of Gujarat had already taken both those steps by 2.30 P.M. on 28th February itself. In fact the State Government had also requested for Armed Police reinforcement from neighbouring states, besides calling for the Army.
Fact 2: On the 28th February itself 10 Hindus had been shot dead and 16 had been wounded by police bullets.
Fact 3: On the next day i.e., 1st March an additional 24 Hindus were shot dead and 40 Hindus wounded by police bullets.
Fact 4: In the entire period of riots total Hindu casualties were 80 shot dead and 207 wounded by police bullets alone. (But no Delhi-based media showed any interest in giving coverage to these casualties.)
Fact 5: The Muslim counter attack, which commenced from March 1, 2002 was no less ferocious. In the first three days alone, out of a total 611 deaths, 101 were caused by police firing. Of these, 61 were Hindus and 40 were Muslims.
Fact 6: As on 5th of March, as many as 40,000 Hindus had to be given shelter in Relief Camps. (There was plenty of media coverage given to the plight of Muslims in relief camps but no Delhi-based media covered any Hindu relief camp.)
Fact 7: In answer to the Parliament questions, the present Union Government gave the figures of casualties during Post Godhra riots in 2002. There were Muslims killed 790, Hindus killed 254, wounded 2500, in all missing 223. Thus this shows that based on Godhra riots one Hindu was killed for every three Muslims killed as such it was a riot and not a genocide or any pogrom.
Such heavy casualties in riot control are unprecedented in the entire history of Indian Police. The figures of casualties caused by Police firing in the first three days alone indicate the ferocity of Police action. (And the âsecularâ parties and their media cohorts even to this day proclaim unabashedly that Modi ordered the Police âto look the other wayâ to give a free hand to murderers for three days). If they have any respect for truth, they can cross-check the casualties with the records of the concerned hospitals. The Police is duty bound to carry the dead or the wounded in Police firings to the concerned Government hospitals.
With the Muslim counter attack commencing from 1st March onwards till the riots were quelled altogether, what took place in Gujarat was a full-fledged Hindu-Muslim riot. It was no genocide, or pogrom, or state terrorism against the Muslims of Gujarat. âNo modern day âNeroâ was looking elsewhereâ. The modern day Chief Minister was dealing with the situation as best as was possible with the highly limited forces at his command.
Because of the spontaneous conflagration at scores and scores of locations, it is entirely possible that the Police or Fire brigade may have failed to reach a scene for hours, or, having been spread so thin, the posse of Police that did reach the scene was deterred from intervening by the sheer ferocity of violence at that point in time. But to say that Police was restrained as a measure of Government policy is completely belied by the sheer immensity of casualties caused by Police firings.
The insane ferocity and brutality with which Ram bhaktas including âinnocent children and helpless womenâ were roasted alive at Godhra set the benchmark for the equally insane ferocity of the Hindu backlash and the ferocity of the Hindu backlash was followed by an equally insanely ferocious counter attack by the Muslims.
The Delhi-based media made out as though the whole of Gujarat was in flames. It concealed the fact that out of 18,600 villages, 240 municipal towns and 25 districts, the number of locations that were affected by riots was just 60. Not a single man-day was lost in the 200 odd industrial townships by any industry in Gujarat because of the riots. The examinations in schools, colleges and universities were conducted as per schedule during the period of riots.
Irrefutable confirmation that it was a communal riot and not a genocide or pogrom came from the verdicts of Courts in post-Godhra riots cases.
All the Goebbelsian propaganda had to bite the dust when the BJP was not only returned to serve Gujarat for a second term by an overwhelming majority in the legislature, in the Post-Godhra- Post-Gujarat elections, but also continued to win the Corporation, the Municipal and the village panchayat elections with overwhelming margins.
Tehelka and its sponsors have once again tried to vitiate communal harmony not only of Gujarat but of the entire country. People overwhelmingly believe that the Tehelka âsting operationâ was sponsored by the Congress. If it is so, then, this would be the third major attempt of the âsecularâ Congress to stoke the communal flames in the country. The first major attempt was made through the Sachar Commission who ordered a headcount of Muslims in Indiaâs Defence Forces. Thanks to the Army Chief who firmly put his foot down to prevent the communal virus from infecting the Army. The second attempt was made when the Government of India filed the affidavit in the Supreme Court in the Sethusamudram case wherein it questioned the very existence of Sri Ram. Now by sponsoring Tehelka âsting operationâ it made a despicable third attempt to communalise the Indian polity. What Tehelka âsting operationâ has done, clearly attracts Section 153A of the IPC and if Congress has not sponsored this âsting operationâ then it should not hesitate to prosecute Tehelka u/s 153A IPC. As Tehelka as well as the T.V. channels who aired those tapes are headquartered at Delhi, it is the Delhi Police and consequently the Government of India to take the legal action against them u/s 153A IPC.
Nobody could have had any grouse if Tehelka and the TV channels had passed on those tapes to the Supreme Court, for suitable action, or even telecasted the so-called confessions of VHP activists or the BJP MLA for the information of the people. And, if indeed, those confessions are genuine and have any evidentiary value in them, then the law must take its course against those whose guilt is established. The real mischief that attracts Section 153A IPC is the juxtaposition and interspersion of rising flames and bellowing smoke with the earlier recorded bytes of the Gujarat riots, accompanied with crashing cymbals, beats of drums, screaming voices and the highly provocative comments of the âanchorsâ of the channels that aired those tapes.
There is a clear intention to inflame communal passions through what all was telecast in the name of Gujarat ka Sach and it would be dangerous for the future of the country if such a nefarious act goes unpunished by default of the UPA Government.
<i>(The writer is IPS (Retd.) and former Rajya Sabha MP and can be contacted at C-001, Stellar Kings Court, F-32, Sector-50, NOIDA-201 305.) Being a former DGP and also a Member of Parliament at that time, I was personally in touch with the office of DGP Gujarat and the Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad. </i>
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Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-22-2007
xpost
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>When bias is passé </b>
Pioneer.com
Jaya Jaitly
Issues before the common man were ignored by the national 'liberal' media in Gujarat in shameless pursuit of an agenda that divided the State far more than what a fundamentalist group could achieve
Five years ago, during the last Assembly election, I was in a small town in Gujarat and visited an old socialist, the editor of the local newspaper. The Election Commission of India had tightened spending by candidates. I learned from the saddened editor that to circumvent the old method of paying for published schedules of public meetings of leaders of parties, money was now being accepted 'under the table' so that the expenditure did not have to be disclosed as election expenses.
Money was given to newspaper owners, who, in turn, had meetings 'covered' by their reporter and published as news. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>It is a well-known fact that some regional newspapers in Gujarat enter into deals with major Opposition parties during election, charging Rs 2 crore for not writing against it, and an additional matching amount for writing about it in positive terms.</span> A Chief Minister lost his throne for not going through with one such agreement. During the current <b>Assembly election in Gujarat, local cameramen of some television channels were offering 10-second slots for Rs 30,000. </b>
Apart from localised incidents in Gujarat, there is a marked disconnect between what the observer of the political scene saw first-hand in the recent Assembly election and the matter that readers were offered in national newspapers.
An 'atmosphere of fear' was a phrase bandied about by secular badge-wearers well before the election. <b>The Election Commission rightly responded by offering to put up booths exclusively for Muslims to vote in areas where they were supposed to be terrorised. The Muslim population at large was courageous enough to reject the offer and declared that they would stand in line along with everyone else</b>. However, the media told exactly the opposite story. When Congress president Sonia Gandhi screamed "fear and death stalk the State", the media obliged with large headlines.
<b>A full report appeared about secret voting by Muslims because of "underlying fear", yet while campaigning for a Muslim candidate in Jamnagar on behalf of the Samata Party, I asked a 2,000-strong audience of largely Muslims that had gathered spontaneously whether there was an atmosphere of fear around them. They laughed out loud and unitedly responded "nahin" ("no").</b> I was led to this meeting place in a musical procession with women supporters (both Hindu and Muslim) dancing on the streets as if at a wedding. Fear? Purdah? Hostility? Communalism? Hatred of Mr Narendra Modi or Muslims? I saw nothing of these. However, none of the media present wanted any of it.
The entire drama about the "merchant of death" was not a subject of discourse at hundreds of meetings everywhere. It was Ms Sonia Gandhi's grandstanding for headlines outside Gujarat and to frighten the majority of Muslims who have been leading normal lives and had localised views and allegiances just like everyone else. Neither Mr Modi nor Ms Gandhi loomed on the horizon. The petition by Mr Javed Akhtar before the Supreme Court or Ms Teesta Setalvad's complaints to the Election Commission were complete waste of time for the real voters and only entertained an elite readership.
<b>The election in Gujarat was fought on a completely different plane from what was conjured up for the readership outside Gujarat by the media who had become a dice-thrower at the chequer board of the election, betraying their own professional tenets, not to mention their readers</b>. Whoever wins or loses there, communalism will not have been the issue.
Embedded journalism has come to stay since scores of media are flown in helicopters to selected election meetings or to accompany the feudal-style outings of the crown prince, ludicrously termed "road shows". Full-paged advertisements are placed in most newspapers throughout the year by a host of Congress-ruled States, prominently propagating dynastic images and the UPA chairperson who has no constitutional authority to justify such expense from the public exchequer.
Soon this becomes the norm for every party, and the media is effectively co-opted while editorialising about the freedom of the Press. Honourable exceptions only show the others more starkly. Readers struggle to find some meaningful news between pages of semi-clad starlets, six-pack hunks, and front pages taken up with the current cricket match or BCCI battle, the Bachchan family's latest trip to a temple, or Shilpa Shetty's take on world harmony. Many media watchers, including from within the media, have already admitted to the steady encroachment of froth into what should be a serious and noble domain. But they do not allude to the real causes. Some of it may be understandable in the era of the market and eyeball grabbing commercialism. But it becomes another matter when it enters the political spaces.
A recent Delhi High Court judgement made headlines for attempting to define the parameters of investigative journalism, specifically sting operations. The sad fact is that the state of journalism today is far worse than demonstrated by the black brushes of stings alone. The Editor's Guild and the National Broadcaster's Association have expressed dismay over the judgement.
Self-regulation seems to be taking a long time coming and it is not clear whether the entire Press would agree to commit itself to the commonly laid-down guidelines or whether each would want to push its own envelope to the edges to explore grey areas, as was famously declared by the Kings of Stings at the Commission of Inquiry set up to explore, among other things, the methodology of the sting operation itself after the so-called defence expose of 2001. With injured innocence they squealed that investigating their methodology for accuracy and ethics was like shooting the messenger. No one has yet convinced the public that the all such messengers have indeed done anything other than create sensational entertainment.
We engage with our newspaper like a trusted friend that is expected to be faithful in its reporting, meticulous in its quest for truth and accuracy, and be of unswerving integrity so that its credibility is not compromised. If the Press Council and the Editor's Guild did a thorough self-appraisal (maybe even some internal sting operations), they would be surprised at how corrupted and biased the system has become.
-- The writer is a columnist and former President of Samata Party
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Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-22-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Introspect? Us? </b>
pioneer.com
Lookback: Udayan Namboodiri
Just as the east coast-based media establishment of America rewrote journalism's rules to back the John Kerry ticket in 2004, so too did India's liberal elite seek to ensure the fall of Narendra Modi in Gujarat 2007. Can't say if the American disaster will be repeated here - but no harm hoping for an end to the illiberal tradition
The Gujarat election is over and the result keenly awaited. We don't know who will emerge winner in one of the most bitterly fought elections in recent memory. But we do know already who lost. The liberal media elite. In the eyes of its consumers.
The common man, whether in Porbandar or Nagaland, now has a fair idea of what "media objectivity" is all about. <b>All the biases and hypocrisies of the liberal media elite were exposed in the last quarter of 2004. Rules and ethics were given a pass for the sake of pursuing a singular agenda -- remove Mr Narendra Modi</b>. Whether or not that succeeded will be known on December 23, but Saturday Special is on to something higher this week. Gujarat 2007 will be recalled for years as a disaster for the image of the Indian fourth estate as a whole. The corrective steps that must be taken if the long-reaching effects of the damage are to be avoided should begin with some soul searching.
We must look inwards and address the following questions:
Was it Ms Sonia Gandhi or was it Mr Modi or some other party that originally raked up "emotive issues"? Was not the first shot fired at a "summit" organised by a media house in New Delhi in the second week of October, that is, two months earlier?
Can it be denied that in that "summit", the Gujarat Chief Minister, after he had delivered a speech quite in line with the theme chosen by the organisers, was set upon by a gang of highly motivated people comprising, among others, a minor Congress leader, a former editor of the host newspaper and a <b>TV news presenter, all of who demanded that he "apologise" for the post-Godhra riots of 2002? </b>
<b>Did we see wrong again, on October 20, Mr Modi walking out of an interview when its host (who will go down in the history of Indian television journalism as the founder of the you-ain't-nothing-if-you-ain't-offensive principle) tried to hustle him into making self-destructive remarks despite Mr Modi's request that the riots subject be kept out? </b>
<b>Is it fair to first organise TV talk-shows on themes like "Is Modi a dictator", "Is Moditva dividing Gujarat?", etc. and then complain that the election track was distorted by "emotive issues" instead of "development"? </b>
There are examples of similar disasters from other free societies. In 2004, the media establishment based in the eastern coast of the United States decided to transform the newspapers and channels under its control from mere onlookers to the presidential election of that year into active players. Deciding that Mr George W Bush was bad, and it would be badder still if all Americans did not think likewise, the media moghuls marshalled every form of synergy possible to ensure Mr John Kerry won. Actually, all the tricks that we saw in Gujarat over the past month were only desi versions of those seen in America three years back. The media organised events -- big budget processions in downtown New York, huge demonstrations in stadiums, anti-Iraq involvement plays, documentary films exposing alleged lies of Mr Bush and Mr Dick Cheney - so that doubting Thomases could believe that voting against Bush was the done thing.
Yet, the unthinkable happened. Mr Bush won. By a huge popular margin too.
The good thing about the American media is that while the rest of the country went back to normal life, journalists went into intense soul-searching, which was reflected in their writings. They admitted that they had gotten myopic, missed the issues before the real America and generally blaming themselves for causing the division in American society which Mr Bush and Mr Kerry exploited.
There is no culture of accountability in almost all spheres of life in India. And since we don't know yet which way the ordinary Gujarati voted, it may be premature to hazard a guess on the necessity of introspection in Delhi's aren't-we-grand media. <b>Yet, one gets an eerie feeling that most of the buzz in Delhi's newsrooms this Sunday would be on the subject - why were we wrong? </b> <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo--> Jaya Jaitly (see Main Story), a columnist with hands-on experience in politics, exposes the grissly corruption, both in terms of money changing hands and intellectual dishonesty, that marked Gujarat 2007. She marvels at the utter lack of connection between "fear psychosis" that the media and Congress (in that order) alleged and the real situation where you had Muslim voters in Jamnagar rejecting the Election Commission's offer to put up all-Muslim booths.
M Burhanuddin Quasmi (see The Other Voice) comments at the end of it all that the liberal media got its strategy all wrong. If demonising Mr Modi was the objective, there were better, time-tested ways to do it. Rather, the media chose the least-cost option -- revive the ghosts of 2002. In his opinion, a far more potent weapon would have been distributing information on the marginalisation of the ordinary Gujarati from the "boom story" on the State's economy. He could have a point. In post-1991 India, economic growth and happiness have emerged as two mutually exclusive concepts. <b>If Mr Chandrababu Naidu and Mr Digvijay Singh could fall, why not Mr Modi?</b>
For the Indian Muslim, it was betrayal twice over. For, in the end, we all end up recalling not the words of our enemies ( in this case Mr Modi and his ilk ), but the silence of our secularist-liberal friends.
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Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-22-2007
<b>Media is far removed from reality</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->After the final polling in Gujarat the swing towards Modi seemed apparent to the Delhi media. Every TV channel came out with their exit poll. The Modi factor was still dominant in Gujarat. Till that morning of the final polling, the media was lambasting Modi and how he would find it so difficult to come back to power.
I am not talking about whether Modi will become the Chief Minister or not. I am trying to point out how irrelevant the Delhi media is in State elections. No one at the grassroot level, either watches it or is influenced by it. Sitting in their drawing rooms, gossiping among the so called 'elite' has no effect on the voter or even the candidate. Luckily the real politician rubbish such gossip from the start.
With due respect to the media, time and again their poll have gone wrong. Why they do it, I do not understand. I am always a bit wary of the cocktail circuit politicians and journalists. The ones go from party to party predicting and pretending they know all. Their information comes from a handful of their own class.
<b>Of course to which side they are inclined is of importance. After all a seat in the Rajya Sabha is their goal. The right comments at the right moment too like "How you met the crown prince over tea, or how madam treated you to pasta, or even how Arun Jaitley or a Kapil Sibal let this slip during some dinner." Who are they trying to impress? Not the 'snobs' of Delhi. If any VVIP by chance happens to be at a gathering you should see the way the poor person is not given any space to even breathe.</b>
.....
Irrelevant whether the cause suits him or not. <b>And then there are the babus. They are such an integral part of Delhi syndrome. The one's about to retire or retired always make a beeline for the powerful. You never know when they might make you the head of a Commission.</b> Well! This is Delhi. <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo--> ....................................<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
She is on dot.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - dhu - 12-29-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"I Am Legendâ and the Christian
Every movie has a certain framework to it. You need tension, conflict, and resolution. The resolution comes in the form of a Jesus figure.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This depopulation/apocalypse movie is basically soaking with Christian themes. There is a reference to "God's plan" and its discovery and fulfillment in the actions of the characters. I feel the movie encapsulates the Christian worldview.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-30-2007
<b>Modificationâ of politics</b>
Karan Thapar
December 29, 2007<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> <b>Only the sudden removal of Narendra Modi can stop this.</b>Â For he is the agent forcing this change. And whilst heâs with us, he will do just that. I have no doubt Indian politics after Sunday the 23rd is another country. We have to live with new challenges. Some of us have to accept new leaders.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In main stream Englisg newspaper, Karan Thapar is suggesting, eliminate Modi.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Shambhu - 12-30-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-Mudy+Dec 30 2007, 08:46 AM-->QUOTE(Mudy @ Dec 30 2007, 08:46 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Modificationâ of politics</b>
Karan Thapar
December 29, 2007<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Some of us have to accept new leaders.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
[right][snapback]76615[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
..Karan, the rest of us have had to "to accept" a$$holes like you all the time.
Deal with it.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - shamu - 12-30-2007
Please use this article as a campaign against Karan Thapar.
KT is not a devil's advocate, he is a devil.
Combine the two parts he wrote, he calls for political assassination similar to that of Bhutto.
<b>Only the sudden removal of Narendra Modi can stop this </b> and <b>And whilst heâs with us</b>
Expose the devil as much as you can <!--emo&
kull--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/aaskull.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='aaskull.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-30-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Please use this article as a campaign against Karan Thapar.
KT is not a devil's advocate, he is a devil.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
His father General P.N. Thapar, was chief of army staff during 1962 war. We know what happened. India lost big chunk of north India. Army was ill prepared. Recently Karan Thapar tried to put blame on Gen Manekshawâs name in the context of someone passing on defence secrets to Pakistan based on Gohar book.
He is an idiot without any morality or ethics and is a loser.
tit-bit on his father
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->One is that given by Gen. S.S.P. Thorat who was superseded for the post of Army Chief after retirement of Gen. Thimayya in 1961. As Corps Commander of NEFA, Thorat had prepared a plan to meet the Chinese challenge but was bypassed and retired to favour the mediocre, Gen. P.N. Thapar. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Bharatvarsh - 12-30-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->To describe 2007 as a boring year would not be entirely inaccurate. May 2008 be a Modi-free year for you. Seasonâs greetings!
Vinod Mehta
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodna...e=ZcVinod&sid=1<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-30-2007
<b>Send email to BJP, Gujarat Govt and Delhi police on Thapar comments. Lets see whether they take any action.
bjpco@del3.vsnl.net.in, cm@gujaratindia.com, dcp-newdelhi-dl@nic.in</b>
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-31-2007
Thapar father was a useless person and same is his son, total useless.
His mother's brother Gautam Sahgal was married to Nayantara Sahgal, the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Sahgal, who has been married twice, was latterly married to E.N. Mangat Rai, a Punjabi Christian who was a distinguished Indian Civil Service officer.
During Morarji Desaiâs short premiership, Nayantara Sehgal (Mrs Vijay Lakshmi Panditâs daughter) was offered Ambassadorship to Rome, including the Vatican, provided she married Mangat Rai with whom she was living after both had divorced their spouses. She married Mangat Rai and was ready to leave for Italy when Morarji Desaiâs government fell and Indira Gandhi returned to power. The first thing Mrs Gandhi did was to cancel Nayantaraâs appointment as Ambassador and then she sidelined her husband by refusing to make him full Secretary and forced him to retire. Mrs Gandhi was a very vindictive woman; she loathed her aunt and all her family.
(The affair of Mangatrai, then Punjab Chief Secretary, with novelist Nayantara Sehgal kept tongues wagging for years. Ultimately, it led to divorce and his premature retirement from the civil service. He now lives in Dehradun with Nayantara.)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->link
The troubling fact is that, though no one in India has ever accused Manekshaw of being a traitor, many have been jealous of his rise through the 1960s. The Army Headquarters in the 1960s was virtually divided into two groups, as has been brought out in the various accounts of the 1962 and 1965 operations. Nehru's defence minister Krishna Menon was grooming his own coterie, the most prominent among whom was B.M. Kaul whom he appointed commander of IV corps in the east. Menon also appointed the pliable Gen. P.N. Thapar to succeed K.S. Thimayya (whom Menon hated) as Army chief.
Thimayya's favourites-mainly Lt-Gen. S.P.P. Thorat, J.N. Choudhuri and Manekshaw-were sidelined during the Thapar-Kaul days. Thorat, who was a contender for the chief's post against Thapar, retired as a lieutenant-general. Thapar and Kaul also tried to block Manekshaw's promotion by instituting a frivolous inquiry against him.
The fortunes of Choudhuri and Manekshaw looked up after the Thapar-Kaul duo goofed up the 1962 war. Thapar resigned forthwith, and was succeeded as chief by Choudhuri. Thapar later managed an ambassadorship in Afghanistan. It is said, Thapar's Kabul appointment papers were the last papers signed by Nehru. Kaul had to quit in disgrace; he was succeeded by Manekshaw as IV corps commander.
Thapar largely kept quiet with his ambassadorship, but Kaul could not be quietened. He wrote two books, both of which he used for taking potshots at Choudhuri and Manekshaw.
One charge against Kaul then was that he had never commanded a battalion. Kaul's reply in his book The Untold Story is that so didn't Manekshaw. Kaul's hatred for Manekshaw is clear even in the account where he says Manekshaw was building quarters for soldiers in Jammu, though he had not agreed to the proposal. "He 'acquiesced', instead of refusing to let his troops build, and had taken to it like a duck to water, bidding adieu to his aversions on the subject."
Kaul's second book, Confrontation with Pakistan, was about the 1965 war, now referred to by Gohar. Since Kaul had little to say about Choudhuri and Manekshaw's conduct during the 1965 war, he refers to them in the context of the 1948 Kashmir war, when Sir Roy Bucher was the commander-in-chief; Choudhuri his DMO and Manekshaw the latter's staff officer. Kaul refers to them as Bucher's men and "both served their master well in key appointments at army headquarters, running the Kashmir war between them. Bucher was Manekshaw's guest in the chief of army staff's house in Delhi for quite sometime (with government permission) early in 1970."
Kaul's boss Thapar has not expressed his antipathy towards Manekshaw in public, but he was known to be Menon's favourite for being pliable. (Menon hated Manekshaw who told him that he would not give any opinion about his chief Thimayya whom also Menon hated.) As D.R. Mankekar wrote in The Guilty Men of 1962, "it was apparent that General Thapar's greatest qualification for the post of the chief of army staff was his malleability-unlike Thorat whom Menon considered 'uppity'. Menon hoped that a man with such unspectacular service record would be beholden to him for being made the army chief and eat out of his hands." During his tenure, Thapar is said to have deliberately-or on instructions from Menon-sidelined Manekshaw. But even Menon found Thapar useless. So much so that once Menon remarked to Mankekar that Thapar did not even know the places in NEFA.
Anyway, Thapar has the distinction of being the only Army chief who had to quit in disgrace. And Manekshaw has the distinction of having been the most successful chief ever.
What many Army officers want to know is: <b>Why is General P.N. Thapar's son now interviewing people who are willing to throw dirt on Manekshaw</b>?<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If anything happens to Modi, Vinod Mehta and Karan Thapar should be arrested ASAP. Actually they should be behind bar now.
Think about if same comments somebody write for Gandhi family, all these lowlife so-called moron journalist will be screaming from roof top for international investigation, ban RSS, VHP, BJP.
HT should be closed down for ever.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-31-2007
<b>Numbers on Gujaratâs wall</b><i>Modi proved that if leaders have credibility they can win again and again.</i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->An analysis of the Gujarat result reveals that the BJPâs victory margin over the Congress has increased beyond 2002. In 2002, the BJP led by 9.5 per cent votes. The lead this time is 11 per cent. A larger lead has resulted in fewer seats essentially because of the uneven size of the constituencies and the large BJP vote being concentrated on winning seats. In percentage terms, the victory margin in Saurashtra is 9 per cent; north Gujarat 9 per cent, south Gujarat 14 per cent and, surprisingly, in central Gujarat, the BJP has lead the Congress alliance by 10 per cent. Despite the 10 per cent lead in central Gujarat, the BJP got fewer seats than the Congress because of âwasted votesâ. The margin of victory in BJP seats was very high and the margin of defeat in others, narrow.
<b>Why is it that the national media refused to gauge the public mood and BJPâs 11 per cent lead almost uniformly spread across four regions? This is because of an oppressive environment that a section of the media felt it could create. Fair reporting was considered a journalistic sin since it would report a Modi win and hence the rule was to misreport.</b> This resulted in a bandwagon effect which essentially involved acceptance of every theoretical proposition propounded by BJP rebels, some of whom had become ideological guides for the Congress. A âKâ factor was invented. The BJP would be routed in Saurashtra because of the revolt of the Patels, the Kolis and even the farmers. On the ground, no such factors seriously existed. Even if there was a mild slippage of Patel votes it was more than compensated and in fact enhanced by the OBC vote, Kshatriya vote and Modiâs credibility.
<b>The Soharabuddin speech was deliberately interpolated to include sentences like âThis is what I did â what is wrong with what I didâ and âSoharabuddin got what he deservedâ. </b>
<b>Even the going rate of illegal satta market was misreported on the front page of a newspaper.</b> I seriously believe the credibility of a section of the national media is at stake. Not merely because Gujaratâs people chose not to be guided by it but because of this deliberate perversity. Media organisations which claim to have its own in-house ombudsmen would surely take note of this. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Psephologists also suffered credibility jolt. The admission of some â that the raw data favoured Modi but factoring in improbables like fear and over reporting landed them in error â raises a fundamental question. Are we being guided by participatory psephologists? A participant in a political process may well want Modi to lose. But can the participant sift the data and reach an anti-Modi conclusion on the basis of these improbables? Being dissatisfied with the results on various opinion and exit polls, I decided to conduct an exit-poll through a professional agency, purely for my partyâs understanding. Its conclusions were close to the final results. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-31-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-Mudy+Dec 30 2007, 05:49 PM-->QUOTE(Mudy @ Dec 30 2007, 05:49 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->
If anything happens to Modi, Vinod Mehta and Karan Thapar should be arrested ASAP. Actually they should be behind bar now.
Think about if same comments somebody write for Gandhi family, all these lowlife so-called moron journalist will be screaming from roof top for international investigation, ban RSS, VHP, BJP.
HT should be closed down for ever.
[right][snapback]76638[/snapback][/right]
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At long last we have got a leader who is not a hypocrite and stands by his beliefs, who is also honest and an able admistrator. It is not like there are a thousand of them. Nothing bad should happen to Modi. We should all follow your idea of emailing the bjp and modi and make sure he is not ignoring security concerns.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Guest - 12-31-2007
<b>LSrini</b>,
What we are seeing is, (old)Elite class of India are unable to digest that common man had risen and captured hearts of millions, who is delivering development and showing them future and elevating their dream to another level. They are seeing loss of their power behind throne. This new man Modi and woman Mayawati are from rural India, well educated, neither socialites nor who walked or will go for cat walk. Language used by them(elite) as "ugly Indian" etc...
Thapar is from Nehru family and Vinod Mehta is also linked through Chanderlekha Mehta (yet to confirm). These elites are insecure. Previously, only rich guys and their kids were able to travel outside India for education or vacation, but now middle class or even this generation of rural class is doing same. So now whatâs difference between them (elite) and us. That is killing these elites of India.
Next 10 years will be interesting to watch, when these elites will lose all power, as new generation had already started exerting power and new idea in Indian polity.
Media In India/elsewhere -2 - Bodhi - 01-03-2008
Sandeep is hilarious. follow the article on blog for links etc.
The Devil in the Advocate
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The award for Hate Speech of the Century goes to this piece. The self-styled swamis of secularism have transcended all boundaries of reason. The reason: F-E-A-R.
But this one is dangerousâ¦
This blogger chanced upon a hush-hush Devilâs Advocate with the Devilâs Advocate himself. It unravelled the Devil in the advocate.
Q: Mr. Devilâs Advocate (DA), what do you think of the new term, Moditva floating around after Modiâs third electoral victory?
DA: You need to ask that more clearly.
Q: How do you define Moditva?
DA: What do you mean how do I define Moditva? Thereâs nothing to define. Moditva is Moditva. Moditva is communal, divisive, has a saffron tinge, grows a beard, and inspires hate.
Q: Really? Despite all these horrid qualities, how did it triumph?
DA: Because divisiveness breeds divisiveness and it breeds only in Gujarat because my friend the eminent psychologist, has proved that Gujaratis hate themselves. Therefore, hatred works. Hence Moditva.
Q: Oh yes, Iâve read the psychologistâs article. So you think Moditva..errâ¦Narendra Modi will become the Prime Minister of India?
DA: Well, not really but that deadly hope definitely exists. My analysis proves it. Let me read out the relevant excerpt:
The key question is can Moditva work outside Gujarat? It depends on how you define it. If you believe it combines strong personal leadership and integrity, with an appeal to regional pride or robust nationalism â admittedly with strong communal undertones â and a stress on development, I see no reason why it canât translate throughout the country. Even the fact that it alienates minorities is counterbalanced by the promise of uniting Hindus as never before. And if in Gujarat it could cut across divisions of caste, wealth and location, then it can hope to do so elsewhere as well.
Q: That sounds spine-chilling. But let me try to understand what your analysis says. Personal leadership, integrity, and demonstrated economic development are the evils we need to fight in order to ward off Moditva. Is that right?
DA: You are correct.
Q: With decades of experience in dealing with all hues of politicians, what do you propose?
DA: Exactly one person.
Q (confounded expression): Person? You mean, an anti-Modi, to borrow the psychologistâs (anti-self) terminology.
DA: Absolutely!
Q: So do you have anyone in mind? Or is anti-Modi waitingâ¦
DA (Interrupts): Sonia Gandhi
Q: Mr. Thapar, but I thought you were against all dynastic forms of governmentâ¦.
DA: Please hold your horses. That same analysis I wrote has proved why Sonia is the best choice, dynasty notwithstanding. Let me read out:
Modi and Moditva is, therefore, the challenge facing the Congress, the UPA and the Left. I donât deny it has to be fought ideologically, but that also calls for the projection of a single personality who, in herself, embodies the fight. She has to rival Modiâs appeal â both his magnetism and his myth â and symbolise the alternate vision.
Perhaps there is only one person who can do that. The pronoun âsheâ was used deliberately. Itâs Sonia Gandhi. It may be an irony that an Italian-born woman, a widow who till 1998 detested politics, should transform into one of the twin poles of Indian politics, but it could also be an inescapable fact. No other person from the anti-BJP parties has the appeal or the nation-wide image to rival Modi..Of course, Sonia has a lot to learn.
Q: Hmm..You have a point but the last line got me curious. Ever since her entry into active politics, all observers including you have repeatedly said she has a lot to learnâ¦its almost 10 years nowâ¦
DA: Every electoral defeat is a learning.
Q: In that case, what explains Modiâs hatrick success?
DA: Thatâs not success, itâs Moditva.
Q: Agreed. So Moditva should be defeated by Sonia Gandhiâ¦
DA: Yes, but you see since she has a lot to learn, we will coach her. We have our methods in the media and public space. We will take her side. I have already given the clarion call in the same analysis:
For the rest of us, voters rather than politicians, commentators but not participants, we also have to make a critical choice. We can either accept the idea of Modi and Moditva and adapt and adjust to it, or overcome our concerns with the Gandhi dynasty and Sonia in particular, and join the fight she must lead⦠the emergence of a dominant idea on the saffron front and, in response, the creation of an equal but counterveiling force on the other will squeeze out everything else. The more Moditva grows, the more its opposite has to be strengthened. Increasingly the choice will be one or the other. We will have to take sides.
Q: Itâs a brave fight. Letâs talk about your methodsâ¦
DA: Sure. One, we will use the combined might of the media, which we control and write similar analyses. We will condemn Moditva in the strongest terms. We will create awareness across India that personal integrity, leadership skills, and economic development are communal and divisive. Theyâre the enemies of secularism and progressiveness. At the end of five years, we will ensure that Moditva is voted out.
Q: Interesting and very ambitious. Let me ask you something. In the recently-concluded Gujarat elections, the media did the same thing. They exposed Narendra Modi horribly and dented his image. That didnât seem to matter to the votersâ¦
DA: You have pointâ¦let me thinkâ¦
Q: What if the same phenomenon repeats say a few years laterâ¦
DA: It wonât. My analysis again, has the answer to that:
Only the sudden removal of Narendra Modi can stop this. For he is the agent forcing this change.
Q: We now come to the end of the Devilâs Advocate. Thank you, Mr. Thapar.
DA: It was a pleasure being on this show and sitting on the other side of the fence. You played your Devilâs Advocate role very well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This blogger questions: Mr. Karan Thapar, how exactly do we interpret sudden removal of Modi: Forcible removal by the President? Or is it something more sinister?
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Media In India/elsewhere -2 - acharya - 01-04-2008
http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/warfare.htm
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> ``I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television.... You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outsid e the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV set images....''
  --Hal Becker, media ``expert'' and management consultant, the Futures Group, in an interview in 1981 [1]
In the 15 years since Becker's comment, Americans have become even more ``wired'' into a mass media network that now includes computer and video games, as well as the Internet--an all-surrounding network whose power is so pervasive that it is almost taken for granted. As the standup comic said, ``We are really a media conscious people. I know a guy who was run over by a car in the street. He didn't want to go to the hospital. Instead, he dragged himself over to the nearest bar, to check out whether he made it onto the evening news. When it wasn't on, he said, `What does a guy have to do, get killed, to get on television?'|''
In the highest circles of the British monarchy and its Club of Isles, this great power is not taken for granted. Rather, it is carefully manipulated and directed, as Becker describes from a limited standpoint, to create and mold popular opinion. In a 1991 report published by the Malthusian Club of Rome, entitled ``The First Global Revolution,'' Sir Alexander King, top adviser on science and education policy to the royal family and Prince Philip, wrote that new advances in communications technology will greatly expand the power of the media, both in the advanced and developing sectors. The media, he proclaimed, is the most powerful weapon and ``agent of change'' in the fight to establish a ``one-worldist,'' neo-Malthusian order that will transcend and obliterate the concept of the nation-state.
  ``It is certainly necessary to engage in a broad debate with the journalists and the top media executives involved to study the conditions for them to be able to define this new role,''
King wrote.
In his project, King's Club of Rome can count on cooperation from the media cartel, which is a British asset, as documented in our report. It can also call on the capabilities of a mass psychological warfare machine, also run by the British and their assets, which extends into key phases of media production, and includes writers and psychiatrists who help shape the content, and the pollsters who fine-tune and analyze the impact on targetted populations. Beyond this interacting network, there are millions of participants involved in the production, distribution, and transmission of media messages, whose thinking, in turn, has been shaped by the content of the media product, and who are, effectively, self-brainwashed by the culture within which they live.
The Tavistock "Mother"
The historic center of this mass psywar apparatus is based outside London, in the Tavistock Center. [2] Established in the aftermath of World War I under the patronage of the Duke George of Kent (1902-42), the original Tavistock Clinic, led by John Rawlings Rees, developed as the psychological warfare center for the royal family and British intelligence. Rees and a cadre group of Freudian and neo-Freudian psychiatrists, applied wartime experience of psychological collapse, to create theories about how such conditions of breakdown could be induced, absent the terror of war. The result was a theory of mass brainwashing, involving group experience, that could be used to alter the values of individuals, and through that, induce, over time, changes in the axiomatic assumptions that govern society.
In the 1930s, Tavistock's extended networks developed a symbiotic relationship with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, created by European oligarchical networks, which focussed on the study and criticism of culture from a neo-Freudian standpoint. In the late 1930s, with its operations transferred from Germany to the New York area, the Frankfurt School coordinated the first analysis of the impact of a mass media phenomenon, i.e., radio, on culture--the Princeton-based ``Radio Research Project.'' [3]
With the outbreak of World War II, Tavistock operatives took effective control of the Psychological Warfare Directorate of the British Army, while its allied network in the United States embedded itself in the American psychological warfare apparatus, including the Committee on National Morale and the Strategic Bombing Survey.
By war's end, the combined influence of Tavistock (which became the Tavistock Institute in 1947) and of the former Frankfurt School operatives, had created a cadre of ``psychological shock troops,'' as Rees called them, and ``cultural warriors'' numbering in the several thousands. Today that network numbers in the several millions around the world, and it is the single most important factor in determining the design and content of mass media product.
The "Pictures in Your Head"
In 1922, Walter Lippmann defined the term ``public opinion'' as follows:
  ``The pictures inside the heads of human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs and purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion, with capital letters.''
Lippmann, who was the first to translate Sigmund Freud's works into English, was to become one of the most influential of political commentators. [4] He had spent World War I at the British psychological warfare and propaganda headquarters in Wellington House, outside of London, in a group that included Freud's nephew, Eduard Bernays. [5] Lippmann's book Public Opinion, published one year after Freud's Mass Psychology, which touched on similar themes, was a product of his tutelage by the Rees networks. It is through the media, Lippmann writes, that most people come to develop those ``pictures in their heads,'' giving the media ``an awesome power.''
The Rees networks had spent World War I studying the effects of war psychosis, and its breakdown of individual personality. From their work, an evil thesis emerged: Through the use of terror, man can be reduced to a childlike and submissive state, in which his powers of reason are clouded, and in which his emotional response to various situations and stimuli can become predictable, or in Tavistockian terms, ``profilable.'' By controlling the levels of anxiety, it is possible to induce a similar state in large groups of people, whose behavior can then be controlled and manipulated by the oligarchical forces for whom Tavistock worked. [6]
Mass media were capable of reaching large numbers of people with programmed or controlled messages, which is key to the creation of ``controlled environments'' for brainwashing purposes. As Tavistock's researches showed, it was important that the victims of mass brainwashing not be aware that their environment was being controlled; there should thus be a vast number of sources for information, whose messages could be varied slightly, so as to mask the sense of external control. Where possible, the messages should be offered and reinforced through ``entertainments,'' which could be consumed, without apparent coercion, and with the victim perceiving himself as making a choice between various options and outlets.
Lippmann observes in his book that people are more than willing to reduce complex problems to simplistic formulas, to form their opinion by what they believe others around them believe; truth hardly enters into such considerations. Appearance of reports in the media confer the aura of reality upon those stories: If they weren't factual, then why would they be reported? Lippmann says the average person believes. People whose fame is in turn built up by the media, such as movie stars, can become ``opinion leaders,'' with as much power to sway public opinion as political figures.
Were people to think about this process too much, it might break down; but, he writes,
  ``the mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated individuals is very considerable, much more considerable, there is reason to think, than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbarians, whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion.''
Stating that he saw a progression to ever-less-thought-provoking forms of media, Lippmann marvels at the power of the nascent Hollywood movie industry to shape public opinion. Words, or even a still picture, require an effort for the person to form a ``picture in the mind.'' But, with a movie,
  ``the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining has been accomplished for you. Without more trouble than is needed to stay awake, the result which your imagination is always aiming at is reeled off on the screen.''
Significantly, as an example of the power of movies, he uses the D.W. Griffith propaganda film for the Ku Klux Klan, ``The Birth of a Nation''; no American, he writes, will ever hear the name of the Klan again, ``without seeing those white horsemen.''
Popular opinion, Lippmann observes, is ultimately determined by the desires and wishes of an elite ``social set.'' That set, he states, is a
  ``powerful, socially superior, successful, rich urban social set [which] is fundamentally international throughout the Western Hemisphere and in many ways, London is its center. It counts among its membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it does the diplomatic sets, high finance, the upper circles of the army and navy, some princes of the church, the great newspaper proprietors, their wives, mothers, and daughters who wield the scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social set.''
In a typical elitist fashion, Lippmann concludes that coordination of public opinion is lacking in precision. If the goal of a one-worldist ``Great Society'' is to be realized, then ``public opinion must be organized for the press, not by the press.'' It is not sufficient to rely on the whims of a ``super social set'' to manipulate the ``pictures in people's heads''; that job ``can only be managed by a specialized class'' which operates through ``intelligence bureaus.'' [7]
The "Radio Research Project"
As Lippmann was writing, the radio, the first major mass media technology to invade the home, was coming into prominence. Unlike the movies, which were viewed in theaters by large groups of people, the radio provided an individualized experience within the home, and centered on the family. By 1937, out of 32 million American families, some 27.5 million had a radio set--a larger percentage than had cars, telephones, or even electricity.
That same year, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a project to study the effects of radio on the population. [8] Recruited to what became known as the ``Radio Research Project,'' headquartered at Princeton University, were sections of the Frankfurt School, now transplanted from Germany to America, as well as individuals such as Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, who were to become key components of Tavistock's American operations. Heading the project was the Frankfurt School's Paul Lazerfeld; his assistant directors were Cantril and Allport, along with Frank Stanton, who was to head the CBS News division, and later become its president, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation.
The project was presaged by theoretical work done earlier in the studies of war propaganda and psychosis, and the work of Frankfurt School operatives Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. This earlier work had converged on the thesis that mass media could be used to induce regressive mental states, atomizing individuals and producing increased lability. (These induced mental conditions were later dubbed by Tavistock itself as ``brainwashed'' states, and the process of inducing them called ``brainwashing.'')
In 1938, at the time he was head of the music section of the Radio Research Project, Adorno wrote that listeners to radio music programs:
  ``fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear.... They are not childlike, but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded.''
The Radio Research Project's findings, published in 1939, backed up Adorno's thesis of ``enforced retardation,'' and serve as a brainwashers' handbook.
In studies on the serialized radio dramas, commonly known as ``soap operas'' (so named, because many were sponsored by soap manufacturers), Herta Hertzog found that their popularity could not be attributed to any socio-economic characteristics of listeners, but rather to the serialized format itself, which induced habituated listening. The brainwashing power of serialization was recognized by movie and television programmers; to this day, the afternoon ``soaps'' remain among the most addictive of television fare, with 70% of all American women over 18 watching at least two of these shows each day.
Another Radio Research Project study investigated the effects of the 1938 Orson Welles radio dramatization of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, about an invasion from Mars. Some 25% of the listeners to the show, which was formatted as if it were a news broadcast, believed that an invasion was under way, creating a national panic--this, despite repeated and clear statements that the show was fictional. Radio Project researchers found that most people didn't believe that Martians had invaded, but rather that a German invasion was under way. This, the researchers reported, was because the show had followed the ``news bulletin'' format that had earlier accompanied accounts of the war crisis around the Munich conference. Listeners reacted to the format, not the content of the broadcast.
The project's researchers had proven that radio had already so conditioned the minds of its listeners, making them so fragmented and unthinking, that repetition of format was the key to popularity. [9]
The "One-Eyed Babysitter"
Television was beginning to make its entrance as the next mass media technology at the time the Radio Research Project's findings were published in 1939. First experimented with on a large scale in Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, TV made its splashy public appearance at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where it attracted large crowds. Adorno and others immediately recognized its potential as a mass-brainwashing tool. In 1944, he wrote,
  ``Television aims at the synthesis of radio and film ... but its consequences are enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter, so drastically that by tomorrow, the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out in the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of Gesamtkunstwerk--the fusion of all arts in one work.''
As was obvious from even the earliest clinical studies of television (some of which were conducted in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Tavistock operatives), viewers, over a relatively short period of time, entered into a trance-like state of semi-awareness, characterized by a fixed stare. The longer one watched, the more pronounced the stare. In such a condition of twilight-like semi-awareness, they were susceptible to messages both contained in the programs themselves, and through transference, in the advertising. They were being brainwashed. [10]
Television moved from being a neighborhood oddity, to mass penetration of especially urban areas, during approximately 1947-52. As Lyndon LaRouche has observed, this coincided with a critical period in the nation's psychological life. The dreams of millions of World War II veterans, and their high hopes of building a better world, crashed to earth in the morally corrupt leadership of the Truman administration and ensuing economic depression. These veterans retreated into family life, their jobs, their homes, their living rooms. And, in the center of those living rooms was their new television set, whose banal images provided assurance that the corrupt moral choices they had made were correct.
The earliest programming fell back on the tested models of radio, as described in the Radio Research Project: the situation comedy, or ``sitcom,'' the game shows, the variety shows, sports, and the ``soaps.'' Many were in serial form, with interlocking characters, if not stories. All were banal, deliberately designed so.
The children of these unhappy veterans, the so-called baby boomers, became the first generation to be weaned on what LaRouche calls ``the one-eyed babysitter.'' Television viewing was encouraged by parents, often as a means of controlling the children, who would stare at whatever was on the screen for hours on end. The content of the first children's programs was banal (but no more so than the television programming in general), and mentally destructive; even more destructive was the replacement of real family interaction by television viewing, as the dinner table was replaced by the ``TV dinner'' in front of the tube. Not surprisingly, the children fixated obsessively on the items advertised by the media, demanding that they be given such items, lest they not be like their friends. [11]
In the mid-1970s, Eric Trist, who, until his death in 1993, headed Tavistock's operations in the United States, and Tavistock's main media ``expert,'' Fred Emery, reported on their findings of the impact of 20 years of television on American society. In Emery's 1975 work, Futures We Are In, they reported that the content of programming was no longer as important as the sheer amount of television viewing. Average daily viewing time had risen steadily over the two decades since the introduction of the medium, such that by the mid-1970s, it ranked as a daily activity only behind sleep and work, at almost six hours a day (since then, it has risen still further, to more than seven hours, with the addition of video games, home videos, and so on); among school-age children, the time spent viewing television ranked just behind school attendance. These findings, Tavistock indicated, strongly suggested that television was like an addictive drug. Similarly, Emery reported on neurological studies which, he claimed, showed that repeated television viewing ``shuts down the central nervous system of man.''
Whether this claim holds up under scientific scrutiny, Emery and Trist present persuasive argument that general, extensive television viewing lowers the capacity for conceptual thinking about what is being presented on the screen. The studies show that the mere presence of images on television, especially within appropriate news or documentary format, but also within general viewing, tends to ``validate'' those images, and imbue them with a sense of ``reality.''
Trist and Emery find nothing wrong with such developments, which indicate that television is producing a brain-dead generation. Rather, they show how this development fits into a larger global plan for social control, implemented by Tavistock and its allied networks on behalf of its sponsors. Society, they state in A Choice of Futures, a book published in the same time period, has been plunging through progressively lowered states of mental awareness, to a point where even the Orwellian fascist state is not attainable. At this point, thanks to television and other mass media, mankind is in a state of dissociation, whose political outcome will be manifested in a ``Clockwork Orange'' society, named for the book by the late Anthony Burgess, in which roving youth gangs habitually commit acts of random violence, and then return home to watch the news about what they have done on the ``tube.''
The brainwashers point out that this development, for which they say the violence of Northern Ireland is a model, was not induced by the effects of television alone. Society has been put through ``social turbulence'' in a series of economic and political shocks, which included the war in Vietnam, the oil price shocks, and the assassination of political leaders. The psychological impact of those events, for whose responsibility they neglect to properly ascribe to the Anglo-American establishment, were magnified by their being brought into homes, in gory and terrifying detail, by television news broadcasts. Under the Trist-Emery scenario, one can imagine hearing the tag line for a future late news program: ``The end of the world. Details at 11.''
Consolidating the Paradigm
In a 1991 anthology of the work's of Tavistock which he edited, Trist wrote that all of the international ``nodes'' or centers of the institute's brainwashing apparatus were deployed for the central purpose of consolidating the paradigm-shift to a ``post-industrial world order.'' Their goal, he stated, was to make the shift irreversible. In this work, and in other locations, Trist, like Alexander King, urges a mass ``reeducational'' campaign to break the last vestiges of national resistance, especially within the United States, to this new, one-world order.
Approximately ten1 years earlier, another of Tavistock's minions, Bertram Gross, in a paper delivered to a 1981 World Future Society conference attended by Al Gore, provided a glimpse of what this ``new world order'' might look like. Gross argued that in the period ahead, the world would be offered what Tavistock likes to call a ``critical choice''--a set of options, all of which appear to be bad, but, because of applied terror and pressure of events, a choice is nonetheless forced and the ``less bad'' option taken. Western industrial society will break down into chaos; this chaos can, he said, either lead to a fascism of the authoritarian type that the British helped install in Nazi Germany, or to a more humane and benevolent form of fascism, which Gross called a ``friendly fascism.'' The choice, Gross proclaimed, is to attempt to go back to the old industrial paradigm, under which there will be Nazi fascism; or, to embrace post-industrialism, where there will be a ``friendly fascism.'' The latter, he said, is clearly preferable, since it is merely a transition to a new ``global information world order,'' which will involve more personal choice and freedom, a true open and participatory mass democracy.
For Gross, the choice is clear: In any case, there will be pain and suffering; but only the ``friendly fascism'' of the global information order, of a society wired together by cable television, satellites, and computer lines, offers hope for a better ``future.''
Who shall administer this ``friendly fascist'' world order? Gross explained that there now truly exists a ``Golden International,'' a term that he credited to the late Communist International (Comintern) leader Nikolai Bukharin. It is an enlightened international elite, based within the powerful European-centered oligarchy that controls the global multinational communications industry, as well as other critical resources and global finance. This elite must be instructed and informed by the intelligence of the Tavistock networks; they must be shown that the great masses of television-fixated mental zombies can be won easily to this brave new world, through inducements of entertainments and the endless supply of ``information.'' Once the masses are won over, through ``education,'' then the resistance within national sectors will collapse.
In 1989, under the initiative of Trist, Tavistock convened a seminar at Case Western Reserve University to discuss the means to bring about a ``stateless'' international fascism--a new global information world order. In 1991, Tavistock devoted its journal, Human Relations, to the publication of the papers from that conference. In several of the papers, the call went out for the deployment of the mass media on behalf of this project.
In addition, since 1981, there was now a new technology at the disposal of the brainwashers--the Internet. According to Harold Perlmutter, one of the participants at the Case Western seminar, the Internet represented a subversive means to penetrate national borders with ``information'' about this new world order; it also serves as a glue for a network of non-governmental organizations, all circulating propaganda for the new world order. These NGOs are to be the superstructure upon which the new world order is to be built. Perlmutter, and other conference participants, argued that their movement cannot be beaten, because it doesn't exist, in a formal sense. It resides in the minds of its conspirators, minds informed by Tavistock's mass-media brainwashing machine. As television was the information drug during the last half of this millennium, so the Internet, with its glut of mostly useless chatter and ``information,'' with its subversive, programmed messages, is to be the new ``drug'' of the next millennium, Tavistock boasts. [12]
``Americans don't really think--they have opinions, feelings,'' said the Futures Group's Hal Becker in a 1981 interview. ``Television creates opinion, then validates it. Are they brainwashed by the tube? It is really more than that. I think that people have lost their ability to relate the images of their own lives without television intervening. This really is what we mean when we say we have a wired society. We are headed for an Orwellian society, but Orwell made a mistake in 1984. Big Brother doesn't need to watch you, as long as you watch it. And who can say that this is really so bad?''
The Fly in the Ointment
But, even within the elitist circles of Tavistock's international networks, there is a faint glimmer that something might be seriously awry in their plan. It was expressed by an author quoted by Emery back in 1973, who wondered aloud what might happen when the television-addicted baby-boomer generation fully takes over the reins of leadership. Have we really prepared them to lead? Can they think and solve problems? Emery dismisses the problem, indicating that there is enough time yet to train such leadership cadre.
But the questions linger. In 1981, at the World Future Society event at which Gross delivered his paean to the ``friendly fascist'' ``global information order,'' Tony Lentz, an assistant professor of speech at the Pennsylvania State University, observed that he had witnessed destruction of oral and written skills, by the mass media and television; not only could most students not write coherently, but they could not even speak intelligently. This was not merely a function of miseducation, he stated in his paper, ``The Medium Is Madness,'' but also because they had no desire to think. Arguing that Plato states that our knowledge of the world must be based on knowing the mind of someone who knows something about it, Lentz said that television has left people with the idea that mere images represent knowledge. There is no questioning, no effort to get inside the mind of someone, merely dialogue and image, sound and fury, that certainly signify nothing. [13]
``Allowing ourselves to be influenced by the subtle but powerful illusions presented by television,'' wrote Lentz, ``leads to a kind of mass madness that can have rather frightening implications for the future of the nation ... We will have begun to see things that aren't there, giving someone else the power to make up our illusions for us. The prospect is frightening, and given our cultural heritage we should know better.''
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