“Windfarms kill 10-20 times more birds” sounds really scary – until you discover it is less than 1/1000th the number of bird kills caused by cats, crashing into buildings, vehicles and power lines each year. Seems that this item may be advocating against taking steps to reduce CO2-equivalent outputs, but like much propaganda, uses the method of cherry picking to give the target an incomplete picture.
The claim that “1 in 4 Americans defaulted on their student loans” is a misleading headline from CBS News. The actual number is less than 1 in 20 Americans defaulted – and this was narrowly during the period of The Great Recession, the worst economic collapse since The Great Depression. They have worded the headline to use the method of “anchoring” – when we see this, we immediately think “1 in 4 Americans” have defaulted, which is not true. This appears to be propaganda in support of wiping out student debts.
We all have “frames” of reference that describe various life scenarios. When we walk into a restaurant we have a “frame” that pretty much explains how we expect the restaurant experience to go. We each carry around a lot of subconscious “frames” about how we think the world works. Effective propaganda messaging links to the frames we expect the target to already have. This is not all that surprising but what is old is now new again 🙂
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman after the November 2016 election: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” Today, all three major stock indices reached record levels.
Healthy able-bodied activists climate shaming asthmatics for their use of life saving medication is not a successful propaganda strategy. From a survey of social media, this story has produced a high level of outrage.
Social media has become a vector for epidemics of mass hysteria.
Woman makes a dumb remark about a teen girl’s t-shirt. This in turn is blown up on social media and quickly devolves into a community of outrage in the real world and takes on a life of its own.
Zohnerism is the “the use of a true fact to lead a scientifically and mathematically ignorant public to a false conclusion”.
This is a good example of why we must practice “factfulness” and verify what we are told daily by media and activist propaganda urging us to adopt someone else’s agenda.
The Guardian announces that it requires their staff to use pejorative propaganda terminology rather than the facts of atmospheric CO2 levels rising, sea level ice and temperature changes, ice mass changes and so on. Anyone who does not 100% adopt The Guardian’s perspective is to be labeled a “denier” (name calling, transference from “Holocaust denier”, get on the bandwagon). The word “climate” should be associated with “crisis”, “emergency” or “heating” (transference, fear). Shrill terminology designed to inflame and create emotional outrage is a turn off and causes readers to tune out from the issues.
This is how fake news service Newsweek reported on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize today. Seriously. They did not write a single headline report on the actual winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps this is because Thunberg is white and Prime Minister Ahmed is black and Newsweek is racist?