Staging the news and staging reality are the same thing
by Jon Rappoport
October 12, 2013
“Hi! We’re the news…manufacturing witnesses, creating dupes, and using true believers. Just like an intelligence agency. Come join us!”
Focus on the network evening news. This is where the staging is done well.
First, we have the image itself, the colors in foreground and background, the blend of restful and charged hues. The anchor and his/her smooth style.
Then we have the shifting of venue from the studio to reporters in the field, demonstrating the reach of coverage: the planet. As if this equals authenticity.
The managing editor, usually the elite anchor, chooses the stories to cover and their sequence.
The anchor goes on the air: “Our top story tonight, more signs of gridlock today on Capitol Hill, as legislators walked out of a session on federal budget negotiations…”
The viewer fills in the context for the story: “Oh yes, the government. We want the government to get something done, but they’re not. We want to government to avoid a shutdown. These people are always arguing with each other. They don’t agree. They’re in conflict. Yes, conflict, just like on the cop shows.”
The anchor: “The Chinese government reports the new flu epidemic has spread to three provinces. Forty-two people have already died, and nearly a thousand are hospitalized…”
The viewer again supplies context, such as it is: “Flu. Dangerous. Epidemic. Could it arrive here? Get my flu shot. Do the Chinese doctors know what they’re doing? Crowded cities. Maybe more cases all of a sudden. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand.”
The anchor: “A new university study states that gun owners often stock up on weapons and ammunition, and this trend has jumped quickly since the Newtown, Connecticut, school-shooting tragedy…”
The viewer: “People with guns. Why do they need a dozen weapons? People in small towns. I don’t need a gun. The police have guns. Could I kill somebody if he broke into the house?”
The anchor: “Doctors at Yale University have made a discovery that could lead to new treatments in the battle against Autism…”
Viewer: “That would be good. More research. Laboratory. Germs. The brain.”
If, at the end of the newscast, the viewer bothered to review the stories and his own reactions to them, he would realize he’d learned almost nothing. But reflection is not the game.
In fact, the flow of the news stories has washed over him and created very little except a sense of continuity.
It would never occur to him to wonder: are the squabbling political legislators really two branches of the same Party? Does government have the Constitutional right to incur this much debt? Where is all that money coming from? Taxes? Other sources? Who invents money?
Is the flu dangerous for most people? If not, why not? Do governments overstate case numbers? How do they actually test patients for the flu? Are the tests accurate? Are they just trying to convince us to get vaccines?
What happens when the government has overwhelming force and citizens have no guns?
When the researchers keep saying “may” and “could,” does that mean they’ve actually discovered something useful about Autism, or are they just hyping their own work and trying to get funding for their next project?
These are only a few of the many questions the typical viewer never considers.
Therefore, every story on the news broadcast achieves the goal of keeping the context small and narrow—night after night, year after year. The overall effect of this, yes, staging, is small viewer, small viewer’s mind, small viewer’s understanding.
Billions of dollars are spent by the networks to build a reality the size of a room in a cheap motel.
Next we come to words over pictures. More and more, news broadcasts are using the rudimentary film technique of a voice narrating what the viewer is seeing on the screen.
People are shouting and running and falling in a street. The anchor or a field reporter says: “The country is in turmoil. Parliament has suspended sessions for the third day in a row, as the government decides what to do about uprisings aimed at forcing democratic elections…”
Well, the voice must be right, because we’re seeing the pictures. If the voice said the riots were due to garbage-pickup cancellations, the viewer would believe that, too.
How about this: two-day-old footage of runners approaching the finish line of the Boston Marathon. A puff of smoke rises at the right of the screen. A runner falls down in the street. The anchor is saying: “The FBI has announced a bomb made in a pressure cooker caused the injuries and deaths.”
Must be so. We saw the pictures and heard the voice explain.
We see Building #7 of the WTC collapse. Must have been the result of a fire. The anchor tells us so. Words over pictures.
We see footage of Lee Harvey Oswald inside the Dallas police station. The anchor tells he’s about to be transferred, under heavy guard, to another location. Oswald must be guilty, because we’re seeing him in a police station, and the anchor just said “under heavy guard.”
Staged news.
It works.
Why?
Because it mirrors what the human mind, in an infantile state, is always doing: looking at the world and seeking a brief summary to explain what the world is, at any given moment.
Since the dawn of time, untold billions of people have been urging a “television anchor” to “explain the pictures.”
The news gives them that precise thing, that precise solution, every night.
“Well, Mr. Jones,” the doctor says, as he pins X-rays to a screen in his office. “See this? Right here? We’ll need to start chemo immediately, and then we may have to remove most of your brain, and as a followup, take out one eye.”
Sure, why not? The patient saw the pictures and the anchor explained them.
After watching and listening to the last year of news, the population is ready to see the president or one of his minions step up to a microphone and say, “Quantitative easing…sequester…”
Reaction? “Don’t know what it is, but it must be okay.”
Eventually, people get the idea and do it for themselves. They see things, they invent one-liners to explain them. They’re their own anchors. They short-cut and undermine their own experience with vapid summaries of what it all means.
“Here are the photos. Just look at these photos. Don’t look at any other photos. These are the killers. Here’s what it means: we’re going to send in SWAT teams and rout you out of your homes at gunpoint, we’ll search your homes, no warrants, and you’re going to comply, and when it’s over and we’ve caught them, you’ll cheer.”
“Sure. Okay. We will.”
Pictures, explanation, obedience.
The staging of reality, the staging of news; they’re the same thing.
At some point in time, the television audience begins to experience an itch. “If reality is the news, then maybe I could become a visible piece of reality. Maybe I could get on the news. What would I have to do? How can I stand out? What outlandish thing could I cook up?”
Anyone’s face could appear on the screen and flicker there and be driven into the minds of millions of people as something hypnotic.
If not fortune, then at least fame.
Whereas an honest television news anchor, if one existed, would say:
“The battle over the government shutdown and its funding continue as a piece of planned chaos. Events like this are shaped well in advance by men who manipulate the One Political Party With Two Heads, and you, the viewer, are reacting predictably. You’re choosing sides. You’re angry. And I’m sitting here on most nights adding fuel to the fire. The fix is in, and I’m going along with it. Here in the studio, I’m staging the news about staged reality.”
The news is a movie of a movie.
And then, of course, when the news cuts to commercial, the fake reality of products takes over:
“Well, every night they’re showing the same brand names, so those brands must be better than the unnamed alternatives.”
Which devolves into: “I like this commercial better than that commercial. This is a great commercial.”
Which devolves into: reality is an advertisement for itself.
Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com
While the major stories are all staged or propaganda productions, I’m convinced the minor “news stories” are 100% fiction. The networks long ago stopped looking for stories they would like to air, and they started inventing them: The happy recovered disabled veteran, the remorseful drunk driver, the successful inner city school, etc…
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Staging the news and staging reality are the same thing
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Some questions of biology and ecology (not religion) based on a paraphrase of Jon’s “Staging Reality”: “The news is a staged movie of a movie of reality advertising to convince everyone that it alone is real.”
I ask: To what end? What’s the game? Who made it? Why am I watching? Where is the “off switch”?
With so many zombie demons marketing themselves, what else could this be but hell (an insane asylum run by the inmates)? No doubt, but why am I here?
Since any hell of mine can’t be about punishment (not profitable and I don’t need any), it must be some kind of teaching or school for learning, but what is the subject? And, if I’ve come to realize this much, haven’t I already left the mindless, meaningless round of unconscious hell and upgraded to purgatory?
What am I purging then? What would I purge but waste or what is too impure to use as food for growth and well being? In the realm of mind and soul that would be impurities of consciousness such as failures of discernment and distinction, ignorance and denial, deceit and betrayal.
What’s to deny? And what’s wrong with the ignorant bliss of denial anyway, especially in hell? Well… Each of these impurities would enable a zombie demon parasite of hell to attach and feed on me as well as steer me as its unwitting slave. How could I defend myself from a parasite or predator that I failed to discern and recognize? Might that be what I came here to learn?
What happens if I learn to recognize and purge the impurities that mind-blind me? I then become able to sense the parasites before they can attach, and knowing how to deflect them I gain immunity to their bite and suck. That means my energy, consciousness, and creativity are no longer unguarded food for zombies and I am no longer a free ride host and vehicle for “demons” (in biological terms: sentient, metabolizing, reproducing, adaptive, evolving chunks of viral parasitic consciousness).
When I stop feeding all of my energy and creativity to demons, I notice that I can use them to expand my consciousness and my reality into a much larger space. In that free space I can imagine myself in a world where parasites and predators are relatively rare (as reminders) and co-creative artists of consciousness are everywhere engaged in producing serious play.
Different stage, different game, different moves. I’m no longer a passive observer of someone else’s media-ted bad dream. Now I’m the lead character, stage manager, director, cinematographer, and producer, but this is no movie. This is the real raw direct experience of my own co-creative life.
Hey, William, that’s really good. I could have written much of what you point out, as I arrived at all those same places. When and where I awoke, at age 28 (in 1968, on/in what we call “earth”), was definitely hell and it troubled me for a long time. Don’t expect anybody to agree that earth is anywhere close to hell, though, as it scares the hell out of people even to imagine it and they aver, “Hell is nowhere close to me! I’m on earth on my way to heaven!” But I am certain there are only two places in existence, Absolute Bliss (heaven) and Total Degradation (hell.) Imagine it, if there is a heaven and if there is a hell, then these are the only two possibilities. There is not anything in between, such as purgatory, because if one is not in heaven, then one has to be in hell. If one is in hell, then one cannot be in heaven. Thus, one must ask oneself, “Where am I, in heaven or hell?” The averment, “I am on earth,” or “I am in purgatory,” is only the whistling noise of the juvenile while walking past a graveyard alone at night.
Imagine heaven, where everything has to be Bliss. If one has a tiny sore spot even the size of a molecule, then one cannot be in heaven, because one could not be sore in heaven, right? A tiny sore spot would thrust one right out of heaven, wouldn’t it? Thus, I have determined that either one is in heaven or one is in hell, because if one is not in heaven, then anything “not-heaven” would have to be hell. Wouldn’t it be hell not to be in heaven? This sort of negates the lie: “I exist on earth,” doesn’t it? Surely there is some possibility of transport ‘twixt the two, otherwise all would be heaven or all would be hell. Maybe this is where “salvation” comes in.
I enjoyed that! reads like the script of my favorite film Network
The “anchor” has no say-so and is nothing but a pretty face and a sock puppet. Scumbags behind the scenes filter the news and set up that day’s lies to be told long before the lying, grinning “anchor” shows his/her BS mug onscreen.
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Brilliant work as always Jon.
In the same thrombotic vein, “And in today’s Sigh-Prop-News, Diane Sawyer, she’s the one who saw yer, the looking glass just for yer, her left eye altered, MK Ultra’d, as she reads the script that her handlers slipped into her pliant hands, look-e-here, at the sheeple screen, Generals one and all it seems, misbehaving, their gambling cravings and other bliss, now fired and shipped, their bombs adrift, upon a sleeping populace. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIqbFBmOZ2c
Excellent blog, Jon. Reminds me of the brilliant short story, “Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut in his short story collection, WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE.
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Yes, much of the news is staged. Here in Europe we have seen these days lots of items about the shipwreck with all the succumbed refugees from North Africa. There was this Italian Marine Colonel – or whatever he was -, a real authority with stars and stripes all over his uniform. This man had been underwater to the ship. Many drowned people were still in it. ‘I saw mothers with their babies still in their arms as to protect them. I saw mothers with their arms stretched out like begging for help.’ !!!!
Imagine, after some ten to twelve hours in the water and still ‘arms stretched out’? Is that possible? This was where I started questioning the whole disaster. I remember Sarkozy mentioning some years ago that Europe had to welcome some 200 million more Africans. ‘Europe needs more immigrants’. Isn’t such a disaster a wonderfull excuse to open up the European borders to let in all those poor refugees? People who flee their homeland now in pieces thanks to the NATO and CIA orchestrated Arab Spring?
I am not sure, but my guts tell me this disaster has been staged to weaken Europeans. Who wants people perish in shipwrecks?
Loved the post Jon, surprised you didn’t ask the question, ” Who are you going to believe, me or your lying’ eyes?”. .At the end of the day it is information and dis information and proving what is what, for a guy sitting at his computer and in the front of TV, is not all that easy of a thing to do. For me it is a little easier. I have not had cable for over 10 years and read my news on the inter net. Rense. com has been my homepage since before 9/11. But even still it is hard to shake a 60 year lifetime of indoctrination. But I have come to the point where I am concerned with the greatest truth.
18:37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
Empires come and go but the words of the Lord last forever.
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[…] time, for all people. The voice that replaces what is going on in the heads of his audience—all those doubts and confusions and objections in the heads of the great unwashed…the anchor will replace those and substitute his own plot […]
[…] his time, for all people. The voice that replaces what is going on in the heads of his audience—all those doubts and confusions and objections in the heads of the great unwashed…the anchor will replace those and substitute his own plot […]
My solution, which I whish everyone else did was too completely get rid of television all together.
Also I don’t waste even on second of my time reading pulp so called “news pappers”.
Although I occasionally get sucked into reading “news” web sites when I want to get a good laugh or to remind me of just how fake the fakery is still.
I instead will watch streaming movies and TV shows.
But then again a lot of these are heavily propgandised too.
The main thing, is if you are one of these people that make it a habit of reading a newspaper or watching the nightly news, etc., then you really should stop.
Not only like he says it’s about creating realities for highest bidder, it’s also just not what life is about.
Life is not about how many people got murdered, and finding something to worry about, etc.
It’s about the living, love, people, the many more wins people have that exclips the fails and deaths by millions to one that are going on!
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Amazing article, one of the best I’ve read from you.