Telexx wrote:I can imagine no news media source to be completely free of government agency pressure.
However - what you are postulating with your comment "Uh, the way any other editor does in other CIA-influenced/controlled media" is not pressure, it is control. Micro-managed control. Unless you mean that the embedding of these keywords was not micro-managed?
In which case state how they were embedded without micro-managing? (and, no, this is not a straw-man - you said "CIA-influenced/controlled media") I would love you to explain how the embedding of subliminal messages could happen in a non-micro managed way.
I can answer that one!
In reality, the production process whereby words and images end up in print or on a screen for the edification of the reader/viewer is, in fact, not only a process of serial micromanagement to begin with, but one in which there are multiple points of ingress through which putative agents of subliminal-messaging can enter and derail whatever project they don't care for under cover of any number of guises.
Let's postulate a top editor, whom, for the sake of convenience, we will call.....I don't know. How about "Meredith"? The needs, preferences and desires of Meredith are known to all staff members, through memos, weekly meetings, casual conversation, and various other communiques, as is the extent to which Meredith is in a position to buck the wishes of the person whose masthead title would usually be "publisher," though occasionally the top power on the business side is either called something else, or the power is functionally in the hands of someone with a different job title. But let's not quibble about it.
Everyone on the edit side must please Meredith in order to retain his or her job. And Meredith must please the publisher for the same reason. Meredith has personal favorites, at least one or two of whom are known to everyone on staff to act as double-dealing, self-serving rats and trouble-makers. As in any office, many of the parties to the process can't be relied upon to do what they're supposed to do, but owing to institutional apathy are not generally regarded by their colleagues with any real hostility, unless they're powerful. (Let's say, hypothetically, the deputy photo editor, a twenty-year employee of the parent company, is likable enough, and not spectacularly incompetent, but also happens to have numerous personal issues that make dealing with him or her so hellish that no one who could avoid it would dream of challenging him/her, rather than silently attempting to compensate for his or her well-known erratic availability or job functioning. You know what I mean. It doesn't have to be that template, but every office is full of people, and most people are quirky and neither very good or very bad at their jobs. That's just how people are.)
So. Let's now say that a story our putative agent of subliminal messaging wishes to influence one way or the other is pitched at a story meeting, or pops up on the Tuesday morning production schedule, or becomes publicly known by whatever means such things become publicly known at the operation in question. Putative Agent is as familiar with the office environment as everybody is, and, as all staff members do, gets regular updates on the status of the story as it is assigned, revised, formally enters the line-up, and so forth. At every stage subsequent to copy being filed, it makes at least one pass through every department, in any one of which it might be modified, or if necessary, eliminated, owing to a wide variety of both integral and extraneous pre-existing factors, including but not limited to: inter-office power-plays; manipulation of the known fears and desires of Meredith; the artificial introduction of some contingent element which, by frequent repetition, comes to be unthinkinglyl accepted by the group mind as the criterion by which it will or will not qualify for cover or front page exposure; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
If Putative Agent is focused, alert, and trained in group dynamics, he or she would easily be able to insert a high-priority subliminal message at some point in the process at close to a 100 percent success rate, along with any number of lower-priority subliminal messages that would have about a fifty percent chance of ending up in the finished product just because the field was so heavily seeded with them. No one would ever notice, and it would not be something that was detectably or provably attributable to a single agent.
I'm not asserting that this does or does not happen. And I have no idea if it does. I am just explaining how the embedding of subliminal messages could happen in a non-micro-managed way. I hope coherently, but if not, please let me know, and I will try to clarify.
