Introduction
A lot of people say, I dont follow politics, but the reality is that pop culture is politics. Its woven into the fabric of movies, television shows, musicand now even professional sports. Just as art imitates life, life imitates art, and what is often seen as mere entertainment actually functions as a container to deliver carefully crafted pieces of propaganda intended to influence the audience as much as it is to entertain them.
Millions of people practically worship celebrities and blindly follow their lead, imitating characters hair styles, the way they dress, and even their attitudes and behaviors. People subconsciously absorb ideas and actions they see in the media and regurgitate them as part of their own personalities.
While many celebrities engage in political activism as a hobby during their off time, the more subtle power of Hollywood is using entertainment itself to influence. The ability to influence is a tool, and tools can do great things for humanity, but in the wrong hands easily turn into weapons.
In the 1980s, The Cosby Show brought a nice upper middle class Black family into the homes of millions of Americans, depicting the husband as a doctor and the wife as a lawyer, changing the way many looked at the possibility of Black people achieving higher education and making a better life for themselves.
For Generation X kids who grew up during this time period we watched He-Man and GI Joe cartoons which always taught a valuable lesson, either through the plotline, or a brief PSA at the end. So now you know, and knowing is half the battle! Shows like Family Ties and Growing Pains often tackled serious issues kids and families sometimes faced, and as cheesy as those shows may seem today, by the end of the episode there was an obvious moral to the story that undoubtedly, however subtle, affected millions of people in a positive way.
And while there are still plenty of nice family shows on television today, they are surrounded by landmines consisting of the most degenerate characters and perverted plots one could imagineshows so vile just a generation ago it would have been unthinkable that major networks would air such content.
A strategic and relentless campaign by LGBT activists has saturated television shows, movies, and even commercials with gay, lesbian, and transgender characters which is the sole reason they have become normalized in the minds of the masses. Despite denying there was a gay agenda, youll see that well-funded and highly organized groups have been lobbying Hollywood studios to promote and celebrate such characters.
America went from having one television per household in the 1950sprominently placed in the family roomto children as young as seven or eight years old carrying their own TV around in their pocket and being able to watch practically anything they want with virtually no adult supervision. So not only has there been a stunning drop in the moral quality of content in recent years, the safeguards to prevent children from consuming it have all but vanished as well.
Joshua Meyrowitz, professor of Media Studies at the University of New Hampshire, points out, Television dilutes the innocence of childhood and the authority of adults by undermining the system of information control that supported them. Television bypasses the year-by-year slices of knowledge given to children. It presents the same general experiences to adults and to children of all ages. Children may not understand everything that they see on television, but they are exposed to many aspects of adult life from which their parents (and traditional childrens books) would have once shielded them.
He continues, Television and its visitors take children across the globe before parents even give them permission to cross the street. How true is that?! And he said this in a book Ive had since collegea book published back in 1995 when the Internet was just in its infancy, and a decade before social media would begin to wrap its tentacles around an entire generation of children.
Today, kids have access to unlimited adult content in the palm of their hand thanks to YouTube, Netflix, Snapchat and the rest. Parents dont know what to do, and trying to shield children from inappropriate content in todays online age would require living like the Amish. Pandoras Box has been opened.
Meanwhile, celebrities continue to speak out of both sides of their mouthssaying entertainment inspires, encourages, and teaches viewers about life, while at the same time denying that it can influence anyone in a negative way. About 100 years ago a British film industry paper called Bioscope once wrote that movies were the Christian churchs legitimate competitor in moulding the character of the nation. Since then, the Church has lost out, and its no longer a question of which institution has more influence.
The majority of people dont even realize what has happened. Professional hypnotherapist Dr. Rachel Copelan warned, Most people drift into a common, everyday trance when they gaze into the light of the TV tube. Indirect hypnosis manipulates the minds of millions of unsuspecting viewers every day. Surreptitiously, subliminal persuasion leaves its mark upon the collective subconscious. Ideas implanted by commercials affect the health and behavior of all of us. We eat, drink, dress, and make love based on what we see and hear. Television has the power to lull the mind into a state of exaggerated suggestibility, opening it up to behavior control from the outside.
Singer Miley Cyrus popularized twerking in 2013, a form of dance (if you can call it that) where girls rapidly shake their buttan act that was instantly mimicked by millions of teens who now regularly post twerking videos on TikTok and Snapchat, etc. In the early 2000s we saw the Jackass Effectwhere kids got hurt imitating the stunts they saw Johnny Knoxville and his friends doing on the popular MTV series.
A college football-themed film in 1993 called The Program had a scene edited out when it was later released on DVD because at one point several of the players decided to lay down in the middle of a busy highway at night to show how brave they were. Of course, several groups of teenagers imitated the scene which resulted in at least one death and numerous others getting seriously injured when they were struck by a car.
Edward Bernays, the man who is credited with being the father of public relations, was a 20th century genius who knew how to manipulate the media in order to shape public opinion around virtually any issue. He was hired by advertising agencies and even the U.S. government to deploy his methods for a variety of aims.
The De Beers diamond monopoly and the tobacco industry paid him well for his ingenuity, and because of his knowledge of psychology and mass media he was able to play the public like a fiddle through a series of cleverly crafted press releases and ad campaigns.
In his 1928 book Propaganda , he admitted, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of...in almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
He even went so far as to say that those in control of the media constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
Entertainment rules America. Charlie Sheen made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the person to reach 1 million Twitter followers the fastest once joining. Music videos get more views than political speeches, and celebrities make more money while they sleep than police officers or fire fighters do risking their lives to keep their communities safe.
