# Manufacturing opinions



## Edward Campbell (1 Feb 2012)

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Globe and Mail_, is not, really, a "new" story as I will explain:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/how-a-us-agency-cleaned-up-rwandas-genocide-stained-image/article2322005/singlepage/#articlecontent


> How a U.S. agency cleaned up Rwanda’s genocide-stained image
> 
> GEOFFREY YORK
> 
> ...




I don't know how many of you remember 1967; the big news was not Canada's centennial celebration, it was the Six Day War.






Pictures like this were on every front page:
celebrating "brave little Israel's" victory
over the big, bad Arabs. 

Israel was not, until after Jun 1967, America's best friend in the region - in fact America was, still, relatively hostile to Israel but the _image_ of the Six Day War - a little democracy preemptively attacking and beating countries with 10 or 20 times it population - struck a chord. 

Just a few years later, in 1970, another catastrophe hit the anti-Israel forces, which now included the USSR, which changed from Israel's ally to an enemy in 1967: Black September when King Hussein of Jordan kicked the PLO out of Jordan.

In the 1970s Israel was on top of the world: our, Western media, were full of jokes about cowardly Arabs and brave Jews and, a bit later, about savage, uncivilized Arab terrorists. But it all changed: Israel was, in the 1980s, 90s and beyond, increasingly branded as a _Nazi_ like oppressor, beating down the brave Palestinian people. What happened? Two words: "Hill" and "Knowlton." As in Hill & Knowlton which took on several Arab states as clients and mounted a covert media campaign with the aim of "changing the narrative." It worked. The folks at Hill & Knowlton were, doubtless still are, very, very good at their business. Hill and Knowlton would, eventually, take on China as a client, just after Tiananmen Square (1898) and, ironically, Isreal when the latter finally understood that it, too, needed the services of a PR agency.

Now it is a HUGE business and journalists, including "reputable" Canadian journalists are the targets of slick, sophisticated, covert _campaigns_ aimed at manufacturing an "image" for leaders and nations. Some, a few journalists, are aware of the campaigns, a few go along with it willingly, most are simply careless and lazy and they are the cannon fodder for the PR firms - the journalists regurgitate the PR firm's releases, "informing" you, their readers/viewers/listeners of the new "truth."





Goebbels would be proud


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## a_majoor (3 Feb 2012)

Manufactured opinions, and propagnda in general, need to be based on a grain of truth otherwise it will eventually fail. This article is about the ongoing Republican primary, but I think it illustrates the point; the relentless negative campaigning will not get the desired results because there isn't anything to build on (kind of the mirror image of not having anything to build the positive message on without the underlying positive idea/fact/metric).

http://canadiancincinnatus.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/02/strategist-bill-mcgurn-on-mitt-romneys-cheap-florida-win.html



> *Strategist Bill McGurn on Mitt Romney’s cheap Florida win*
> 
> Normally I consider Bill McGurn to be the kind of establishment, RINO political strategist who I instinctively distrust, but Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal he hit the nail right on the head:
> 
> ...



The ongoing deamonization of Israel is also running into inconveinient facts, people who have been buying the narrative are stunned when they see the treatment the Arab nations have been dealing their own people in the "Arab Spring", or reading about "honour killings" by these cultures, or just the general levels of poverty being broadcast in the news reports. Israel, as a liberal democracy, is totally the opposite of these images, and some people are rejecting the "Israel as opressor" meme because of this.


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## a_majoor (20 Feb 2012)

The initial article was about "top down" methods of manufacturing opinions, here is the use of an "army of davids" and social media to spread messages and attempt to overwhelm the opposing ideas. Note it is still a "top down" operation, the 50 cent army is posting what they are told to post:

http://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2012/02/fifty-cent-army-when-trolls-outnumber.html



> *The Fifty Cent Army - When trolls outnumber blog readers.*
> 
> China has a "50 cent army", Russia is catching up with its 50 ruble army and the US goes for viral marketing using tame bloggers.   The "army" is paid to make pro-government posts, tweets and comments. What do you do when trolls outnumber the readers?
> 
> ...



An Al Qeda/4 GW warfare version of this meme would be to put some general ideas "out there" and encourage/incentivise people to take up these ideas and run with them on their own. Since the ideas would be changing and evolving in real time as various bloggers/posters/agencies digest and use the ideas, you would end up with a very complex branching structure derived from the initial idea or set of ideas, and have little control over how it would develop or be implimented. As well, free range ideas would also have a tendency to "cross breed" with other ideas that are in circulation, resulting in new branching structures with more unpredictable results.


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## Edward Campbell (21 Jun 2013)

I'm reopening a _necrothread_ because one of the most popular "manufactured opinions" is that Buddhists, especially Tibetan Buddhists who follow the Dali Lama, are all right thinking pacifists. Nothing could be further from the truth.



			
				E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> There are many, many Buddhist _sects_, and Buddhists in Myanmar are not the same as Tibetan Buddhists, but let us put aside the notion that Buddhists are "benign and enlightened." They (Buddhists) are just as capable of sectarian violence as is any other socio-religious/ethnic group. And, as we saw in the Balkans, Muslims can be the victims, too.




More on Buddhist extremism in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the _Straits Times_:

http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/se-asia/story/myanmar-monk-lashes-out-time-magazine-20130621


> Myanmar monk lashes out at Time magazine
> 
> Published on Jun 21, 2013
> 
> ...








The "Time" cover

It's not just Muslims who are extremists or who take their extremism to violent, bloody ends.


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