To better understand the use of the mass media to influence the public, I recommend two books. Public Opinion (1922) by Walter Lippmann and Propaganda by Edward Bernays.

Both were highly highly influential writers. Lippmann and Bernays worked for President Wilson’s US Committee on Public Information, which was responsible for generating the anti-German propaganda that helped sway a neutral US to go to war on the side of the allies.

Borrowing from Wiki…

Walter Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times’ coverage of the Bolshevik revolution was biased and inaccurate…. It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. He argued that people–including journalists–are more apt to believe “the pictures in their heads” than come to judgment by critical thinking. Humans condense ideas into symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed “the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation…To his mind, democratic ideals had deteriorated, voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies, they lacked the competence to participate in public life and cared little for participating in the political process. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann noted that the stability the government achieved during the patronage era of the 1800s was threatened by modern realities. He wrote that a “governing class” must rise to face the new challenges. He saw the public as Plato did, a great beast or a bewildered herd — floundering in the “chaos of local opinions.”

Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and was a pioneer of modern public relations.
Again, from Wiki,

the father of public relations and an American pioneer in the field of public relations along with Ivy Lee. Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious.

He felt this manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the ‘herd instinct’ that Trotter had described. Adam Curtis’s award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC, The Century of the Self, pinpoints Bernays as the originator of modern public relations, and Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine…As a Jew who had witnessed the critical role that propaganda and mass media had played during and after the Nazi’s pseudo-democratic rise to power in Europe, Bernays felt that the same unleashing of irrational animosity could happen in any democratic society. According to the BBC interview with Bernays’ daughter Ann, Bernays felt that the public’s democratic judgment was “not to be relied upon” and he feared that “they [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above”. This “guidance” was interpreted by Ann to mean that her father believed in a sort of “enlightened despotism” ideology.

Both men shared the same dim view of democracy and the common man. “This elitist thinking ( By Bernays) was heavily shared and influenced by Walter Lippmann, one of the most prominent US political columnists at the time. Bernays and Lippmann sat together on the US Committee on Public Information during World War I and Bernays quotes Lippmann extensively in his seminal work Propaganda.”

Now let’s fast forward to 2009 and to Thomas Friedman, noted NYT columnist. Earlier this year Friedman wrote a controversial column in which he argued, “… Communist China’s system is preferable to ours because it “can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century…” Friedman further gushes about authoritarianism, “Because once the directions are given from above, we would be overcoming the worst part of our democracy (the inability to make big decisions in peacetime), and the very next day we would be able to enjoy the best part of our democracy (the power of our civic society to make government rules stick and the power of our markets to take advantage of them).”

Viewed through the prism of this type of thinking, the MSM actions become easier to understand. I see the issues of today not as liberal/conservative, left/right. Nor do I view, nor have I ever viewed corporations as the friends of freedom loving people. I view the political issues as being fought between three distinct groups. Those who would advocate a state solution. Those who would advocate a state/corporate solution. And the public upon whom any so called solution will be inflicted.

Neither the statist or corporatist group has the interests of people at heart. Neither advocates limited government, unassailable fundamental rights of individuals or the primacy of individual freedom over the greater good of society as a whole. Both the authoritarian state and the corporatist state would sell our freedoms down the river to further their own power, which they perceive as the greatest good.

Our whore political class, both democrat and republican have sold us out to the highest bidder and will gladly be their shills as long as they get a cut. As for our media, they are simply the hawkers of whatever goods their owners are selling. Useful idiots for the most part. The bureaucrats? They will simply do what ever they are told to do as long as they can keep their jobs and security. They will always be able to claim that they ‘were only following orders.’
Note the alarming increase in government jobs, especially under this administration.

The founders of this country, having been through the revolution and having witnessed the failure of the original confederation, very wisely drafted a constitution that specifically prescribed the powers of the branches of government and allowed each of those branches the power to check the others. It is why the Bill of Rights was also added. Fundamental, inalienable rights. If the fundamental rights of individuals are not inalienable, then they are subject to negotiation as any part of a common contract.

In the last 100 years, as this country has emerged as the preeminent in industrial, economic and military we have seen the slow and gradual erosion of our freedoms and individual rights.

One of my grinds with today’s democrats and the Obama administration in particular is that they have more openly than any past administration advocated the statist solution. They work for the increased pace of the gain of state control at the expense of individual freedoms, in the name of the common good.

Say you are measuring the power output of a device. The power output of this device, as you increase the input frequency, declines in a linear fashion. As you continue to increase the input frequency, at a certain point you notice the negative slope of the linear decline of output power decreases sharply and you see the graph’s descent get much steeper at this point. One term for this in electronics is a 3dB down point.

Obama’s administration is such a point. Here is where the erosion of individual rights and freedoms begins to deteriorate much more quickly and openly than they had heretofore. I do not liken Obama and today’s democrats to an event horizon surrounding a black hole because there is no coming back from an event horizon.

However it is up to us, all of us to determine our fate. I don’t think it is going to be easy or comfortable. As for the media, I never trusted them before, nothing has changed.

I’d advice you read the article.

You wrote, “Seems to me she’s blaming the US students, who are the victims of our universally crappy secondary education. ”

Victims with fast thumbs (texting) sit in the back (too cool for the front) and flirting…..

Yep. Those are true signs of victims… I feel really bad for them !

When I was in college – I challenged the instructors. My psychology teacher went on an anti-gun tangent every 6 minutes. Predictably.

My report in that class was on the psychology of guns and how rape dropped 87% in Orlando Florida after 1500 women were armed and trained. I listed a number of other examples.

I got an A.

I may not be correct. But I had pigeons who made a home on my roof. Googling that world and working with professionals for month showed me HOW many diseases and what not birds like the pigeon can pass on to humans.

If your dog is fairly wild and bringing back dead animals I’d be worried.

But if your domesticated, bathed, well fed animal is giving you what pigeons and chickens can give you I’d be HIGHLY surprised.

And… That is what I’m saying. It’s not political. However there are rules for what you can have in a city and you’d have to consult with those rules.

At any rate. Look at the top 10 failing cities. They are all run by liberal Democrats. The funny thing is how silent the legacy MSM is on this topic.

Im not suggesting that on a city lot people can raise all their food. I’m suggesting that they can raise part of it.

How is it political? Ive watched the left push gardening as some sort of “green” saving the planet kind of thing too long. There have been conservatives doing gardening all the way back-its an American thing. I hate it to see leftists pretend this is somehow progressive- like they own it!

Bad times may indeed be coming. Many of us Conservatives see it coming. We need to prepare for it. Store up all the ammo we want- and I have been-but im not planning on eating bullets.

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/wellesley/2009/12/lazy_american_students_after_t.html

Apparently she took flak. Her last paragraph in this article said:

By rejecting criticism, we are doing a disservice to our students. It is not anti-American to point out flaws in our educational system; it is both patriotic and necessary.

The reverse incentive does this to Americans…

Other people can see the opportunity this country offers.

As this opportunity shrinks because of big government policies there is less and less incentive to do well and work hard and learn hard.