10 Strategies For Media Control According To Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is one of the most respected intellectuals in the world. The New York Times said he is the most important thinker of our time. One of the great things he has done is to bring to light and analyze various media control strategies used in the world today.

Noam Chomsky first gained attention for his work as a linguist, but he is also a philosopher and politician. He has also become a major voice in the world of political activism. People share what he writes all over the world, and every day he gets new readers.

Chomsky wrote an educational piece summarizing the strategies for media control. While his thoughts on the subject are deep and complex, he summarized it in simple, accessible terms for the purpose of educating and enlightening people.

Distraction – The first form of media control

According to Chomsky, the most common of all media control strategies is distraction. It basically involves shifting public attention to meaningless or irrelevant things. This is how they keep our minds occupied.

They also overload people with information or emphasize sporting events, celebrities and trivial things. The goal is to make people lose focus on the real issues.

2. Problem-Reaction-Solution

Sometimes we can see that those in power deliberately neglect, or at least do not really address, certain realities. They make their citizens believe that there is a problem that needs an external solution. Then present the solution yourself.

This is a media control strategy used in unpopular decisions. For example, they may deliberately portray a public industry as being worse than it really is because they want to privatize it. The idea is to justify selling it.

3. The gradual strategy

The goal here is to get the public to allow things that they would not normally accept. How? By introducing them very gradually, so that the people will not even notice it until it is too late.

This is, for example, what has happened with the reduction in employee rights. In some societies, they have implemented rules or forms of work that make people ultimately think it is normal for an employee to have no guarantee of social security.

4. Postponement

This strategy makes citizens believe that they are taking steps that may be bad in the short term, but may pay off for society as a whole in the future. “The purpose justifies the means.”

The goal is for people to get used to the “bad” things and not reject them. How? To make them think about how good it will be later. When the time comes, the “normalization effect” has already done its job. The people do not protest when they do not get what they were promised.

5. To treat people like children

Many television messages, especially commercials or advertisements, speak to people as if they were children. They use very strategic expressions, words and attitudes topped with a halo of innocence.

The point is to break through people’s defenses. It is a form of media control that tries to kill people’s capacity for critical thinking. Politicians also use these tactics, pretending to be paternal figures.

6. Choosing the emotional path

The puppet masters will not activate people’s logical and thinking sides. They want to stir up emotions and reach people’s subconscious. That’s why so many of these messages are full of emotional content.

The point is to cause a kind of “short circuit” in rational thought processes. They use emotions to capture the general meaning of the message, but not the details. This is another way they kill people’s ability to think critically.

7. To keep the public ignorant

Keeping people ignorant is one of the main goals of those in power. Ignorance means not giving people the tools they need to analyze things for themselves. It means telling them the interesting parts, but never revealing what is going on behind the scenes.

Keeping the public ignorant also means taking focus away from education. This results in a large gap between the quality of private and public education. They quench the people’s thirst for knowledge and make intelligence insignificant.

8. To make the public complacent

Most trends and fashions do not just come out of nowhere. There is almost always someone who sets them in motion and promotes them. They do it to create homogenized tastes, interests and opinions.

The media constantly promotes certain fashions and trends. Most of these trends have to do with a frivolous, unnecessary, even ridiculous lifestyle. They convince people that behaving this way is just a matter of style.

9. Reinforcement of self-blame

Another strategy for media control is to make people believe that it is them, and only them, they are to blame for their problems. Every bad thing that happens is entirely because of them. This is how they make people believe that their environment is perfect, and if something is wrong, it is their own fault.

Because of this, people try to fit into their environment and then feel guilty when they fail to fit in perfectly. They misplace everything the mind causes the system, and indefinitely blame themselves instead.

10. To know people better than you know yourself

Over the last few decades, science has given us access to abundant knowledge of human biology and psychology. But this information is, unfortunately, still not available to most of us.

Only a small piece of that information reaches the public. In the meantime, the elite have all this information and use it as they please. Again, we can see how ignorance makes it easier for those in power to steer society in the direction that is best for themselves.

The goal of all these media control strategies is to make the world what the most powerful people want it to be. They block everyone’s abilities for critical thinking and freedom. But it is our responsibility to stop this passive control they will exercise over us. We must fight against this control, these strategies to curb ourselves and stay compliant, with all the means we can muster.