10 strategies of manipulation by the media: do you think they are also using them in Italy?

Exaggerated newspaper headlines, fake information, wrong numbers, images taken from video games or other contexts. It has always happened, but in the last two years the classic media manipulations have become much more evident, pressing, and even more identifiable. It is no coincidence that users who followed TV and newspapers have drastically decreased. What the manipulators of collective thought may not have calculated is that people can be fooled for a long, long time. But not forever. Upon the awakening of so many people we are witnessing, to their newfound ability to think with their heads and look with their eyes, we dedicate this article, which we would like to call "Old Manipulation Techniques".

Historically, the media have proven highly effective in shaping public opinion. Thanks to the manipulation and propaganda of the media, social movements have been created or destroyed, wars justified, financial crises have been minimized, preferential ideological currents spurred. The media have shaped reality at will within the collective psyche.

But how to identify the most common strategies to understand these psychosocial tools in which we certainly participate? Encouraging stupidity, promoting guilt, promoting distraction or building artificial problems and then magically solving them, are just some of these tactics, which we are going to illustrate. Try to recognize them also applied in Italy.

3. The gradual strategy: it allows the acceptance of unacceptable measures, just apply it gradually, with the dropper, for consecutive years. Thus it was that radically new socio-economic conditions (neoliberalism) were imposed in the 1980s and 1990s: the minimum state, privatizations, precariousness, flexibility, massive unemployment, wages that do not guarantee a decent income, many changes that would have produced a revolution if they had been applied once. The well-known story of the boiled frog.

4. The deferral strategy. Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as "painful and necessary", gaining "momentary" public acceptance, to create the way for future application. It is easier to accept a future sacrifice than an immediate massacre (from a pandemic virus, for example). First, because the effort is not used immediately. Therefore, because the public, the masses, always have a tendency to naively expect that "everything will be better tomorrow" ( everything will be fine, we will come out better ) and that the sacrifice required today can be avoided in the future. This gives the audience more time to get used to the idea of ​​change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.

5. Address the audience as you would address a child. Most advertising in general uses speeches, arguments, people and especially the intonation of children, with protective tones, as if the viewer were a child or a mentally deficient child. The more you try to deceive the viewer's gaze, the more it tends to adopt an infantilizing tone. Why? "If you go to a person as if he were 12 years of age or younger, then, due to suggestion, he tends with some probability to an even non-critical response or reaction like that of a person of 12 or less. (For example: " I am proud of you, the Italians have been vaccinated en masse, they have been good and reasonable and deserving of praise. As a reward they will be taken off the mask outdoors. If they continue to be good, one day they will be able to also remove indoors ").