By Rahasya Poe
~ Being the publisher of this magazine, I think it’s important to touch on the subject of misinformation and disinformation, especially in today’s world, where 85 percent of the mass media is controlled by five corporations. According to recent polls (www.poynter.org), in 2012 less than 34 percent of young people ages 18-29 watch traditional news shows on TV and this percentage grows less every year. Research published by Farleigh Dickinson University in May found that NPR listeners were the most informed while “all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly—a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all.” So what the study results are saying is that you would be better informed about domestic matters if you never watched FOX News … the “fair and balanced news channel.” It’s no great surprise that FOX News gets a higher network rating as an entertainment channel than as a news channel.
So here comes the “good news” and the “bad news.” The good news is that the younger crowds, more than 60 percent, are getting their news from digital devices, social networks such as Facebook, and independent media. The older the demographic gets, the more it seems to be locked into the mainstream traditional outlets for news and consequently is less informed, or misinformed. So what is the bad news? When you take a hard look at where traditional news gets its information, which is the Associated Press and Routers, you will find that the reporters are little more than repeaters sitting there reading the news with little or no investigative journalism. Then you have the blogs, YouTube channels, Facebook, Twitter, and many other social networks where anyone can hear a story and post it in such a way that others “assume” it has been investigated and repost until it goes viral.
I recently read in two local newspapers who published two separate stories that were specifically meant to be disinformation pieces, meaning that they were deliberately published to mislead their readers.
The first one was on vaccinations, giving them approval in a way that was meant to persuade parents to vaccinate their children but that left out pertinent information most parents should have to make an “informed” decision. But more important, the story missed the deeper concerns of most people, which is our freedom to choose for our children. Then, of course, there is that pesky little thing called statistics. Do your own research, but briefly, according to the National Vaccine Information Center, there have been, as of December 2014, more than 6,960 serious adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in connection with the measles vaccine since 1990, with more than half of those occurring in children 3 years old and under. Of these adverse events, 329 were deaths, with more than half of the deaths occurring in children under 3. From 2004 to 2015 there were zero deaths due to measles (source: CDC) and 108 deaths due to the measles vaccine (source: VAERS). The CDC recommends 49 doses of 14 vaccines between the day of birth and age 6. All I’m saying here is that the news industry should be more responsible and make sure you have all the facts so “you” can make up “your” mind, not them. So should you vaccinate your child? That is not my decision; it should be yours based on all the facts. I know three doctors in the area where I live who are strictly against vaccinating children to the extent that we are doing it, and all of them told me, off the record, that they would not write an article because of the repercussions of telling the truth.
Then there was another story from another local newspaper saying, “Chemtrails Are Just Another Conspiracy Story.” It was almost embarrassing to read it, online I might add, and to see the comments from people in the community who have spent at least 30 seconds outside and looked up. Even the government admits it is spraying, except it calls the process “aerosol disbursement,” to name one of the terms it uses. Don’t get me started on this, just visit http://www.GeoEngineeringWatch.org or http://www.ChicoSkyWatch.org.
Then we have misinformation pieces that are essentially bad news reporting and bad investigative journalism. This is rampant on the Internet social networking sites. Few people realize that a program called Prism allows the NSA to collect all of the social-networking data from Facebook, Google, Apple, and a long list of other corporations and that much of this data is incorporated into larger databases for statistical analysis … but if a lot of the data is misinformation, how accurate is the database? Then, if you factor in the disinformation that is pumped out daily from think tanks, it’s no wonder that most people are so confused about what’s really going on … which is the goal, by the way.
So why am I writing this article? A war is going on for your mind, all in the pretense that it’s for the commercial aspects of targeted advertising, which is partially true. In Michael A. Hoffman’s book, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, he points out the hypocrisy of the mixed messages that the media send out, especially when it comes to sex and violence. I remember reading a piece in our local newspaper a few years ago about the rise of sexually connected violence and turned the page to see a half-page ad with an amazingly beautiful woman in a bikini holding a machine gun. Hoffman calls this our “Double-Mind”—a part of us buys into it and another part rejects it, which can make us highly unstable mentally and emotionally.
Then there’s one more aspect of ingesting the news that we really need to consider. For a while now I have noticed something inside myself that I find unsettling. There’s some part of me that is strangely attracted to negative and violent news. In 2009 I wrote a book, To Believe Or Not To Believe: The Social & Neurological Consequences of Belief Systems, and I asked Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist, about this. He said that scientists have known for a while now that through time we have developed neural networks that are in place to be attracted to news about danger in our environment. The reason for them is that to survive in a world where danger was around every corner, we needed to be tuned into that kind of information and it actually exhilarates us when we are exposed to it. I asked him how I could break down this tendency in myself and he said that the first step is to be aware when it happens and to put the light of consciousness on it. Misinformation, disinformation—it all happens under the cloak of secrecy and unconsciousness. This is why we at Lotus Guide strive to be a conscious, independent source of information and we need your involvement to keep us that way so pick up an extra copy for a friend.
Contact Rahasya at Rahasya@usa.com or visit http://www.RahasyaPoe.com