The power of suggestion

This month’s ‘Scientific American’ journal reports that research done by a team from the University of Western Australia has revealed that people continue to rely on misinformation, even when given clear warnings to ignore it.

The study found that information that was initially thought to be correct, but later retracted or corrected, often continued to influence memory and reasoning, even if the retraction or correction is well remembered.

While explicit warnings that facts are wrong could routinely be given to jurors in court, or could be imparted as errata by newspapers, they do not eliminate the effects of misinformation.

This research merely gives a scientific basis to something that advertisers, lawyers, spin- doctors and even the media have known instinctively for some time - people will tend to believe what they first hear. So if you want to present something as an established fact, you get it in first.

And it is even better if you disguise wrong facts with suggestion or innuendo. For example, The Christian Science Monitor reported in March 2003 that President George W Bush had mentioned 9/11 eight times at a press conference which focused almost solely on Iraq.

Invasion of Iraq

His more numerous references to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein were ‘often in the same breath with Sept. 11.’ While he never blamed the attacks directly on Saddam, the overall effect was to support the notion, which was patently untrue, that the Iraqi leader had a role in the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.

A week after the press conference, a New York Times/CBS poll showed that 45 percent of Americans believed Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six months later, after the invasion of Iraq, a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed this. Such is the power of suggestion.

The problem is not that politicians or spin-doctors use the power of suggestion or of innuendo to influence the public. The problem is that the Western media do the same.

For example, just a few days ago the news broke that Britain’s News of the World newspaper was involved in tapping illegally the telephones not only of politicians, but of the families of kidnap victims, terror victims and dead soldiers in Britain’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - as well as in bribing police officers to do so.

Western media

In the course of reporting the scandal on the BBC World Service News, newsreader James Coomaraswamy said, almost in passing, something on the lines that journalism in the developing world was already in the abyss and that it was being joined there by journalism in the developed countries.

He did not make any statements of fact to back up his assertion of dereliction of duty by the Third World Fourth Estate. He simply averred it as an established truth, even axiomatic.

Mind you, he was speaking of possibly criminal acts by a huge Western media institution; and he was suggesting - with no evidence whatever - that journalists in developing countries regularly resort to this kind of behaviour!

The UWA conclusions appear to confirm that this type of arrogant assertion tends to shape people’s thinking and will continue to do so, even if corrected later. Such is the power of suggestion.

Last month, while announcing the re-election of Ban ki-Moon as Secretary General of the United Nations, another BBC World Service newsreader happened to mention that some people were unhappy over his inaction over the killing of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

White superiority

Please note that he did not say ‘alleged killing’ but just plain adjective-less ‘killing’. To say the least, this treads the line of journalistic propriety. To any unwary listener, the wholesale butchery of Dravidian people in this fair isle was an established fact. Such is the power of suggestion. There is also an additional element of suggestion, an underlying innuendo, in the Western media’s reaction to Channel 4’s accusations, which is that Channel 4 is British, hence European and hence White.

This reinforces notions regarding White superiority which have been established by suggestion and innuendo over many generations.

It is unthinkable that a ‘White’ media organization might be helping to spread the propaganda of a terrorist outfit. After all, it is the Third World media which is in the abyss, not the Western. This is precisely the kind of image that Coomaraswamy’s suggestion tends to buttress.

Also playing on this White Good/Black Bad theme was an assertion made some time ago by revolting Libyans that the Gaddafi regime was using Black African mercenaries to massacre people opposed to its rule (who are certainly not Black).

The Western media played this to the hilt, so that many people believe this to be true - although there is absolutely no evidence. Consequently, when the Libyan rebels carried out massacres of Black African migrant workers, this was not considered so appalling.

The News of the World scandal has at least breached the wall of supposed integrity that the Western media had built to protect itself. It remains to be seen how far the much vaunted free media in the West will be able to identify and eliminate its evident lack of balance and its use of suggestion and innuendo.