“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (born: 26 April 121; died: 17 March 180).
There is no difference between advertising products and peddling opinions in the press because they are paid to do whatever they do on television.
Actors attract fans, and anchors fascinate followers on the news hour on television, and, depending on how well they make a show, influence viewers and their minds. The actors’ contract amount depends on how many tickets the show sells. Likewise, public speaking fees paid to “celebrities” influencers vary with the position they hold and the hype they can create around the new hypothesis being propagated, be it in social affairs, politics, the environment, economics, or foreign policy. An ex-President and an ex-General are rated and paid royally.
The more they appear on television, the more popular they become according to manufactured TRPs, and with increased popularity, they get higher speaking fees.
Actors advertise products, whether good or bad for people’s health, while “celebrity” speakers propagate views this way or that for money, though both, in their private lives, may not even consume the products publicized or subscribe to the views and opinions peddled to the public at large. Nonetheless, they do it impressively and very intelligently, for most people love money more than morals. Anyway, who cares about morals? To look attractive and to advance one’s career or mating prospects, people these days work on their physique as well as their teeth and spend a fortune on undergarments, but hardly on morals.
If a physicist can convincingly say that neither the earth revolves nor the sun rotates, but that it’s the crooked clock machine that makes our time move from minutes to hours and days, he will get a sack of dead presidents’ bills as an honorarium. The columnists, mostly drunk and delusional, love such characters and are always too eager, rather ordered by the media owners, to lavishly plop them on newsprint and across television shows to make them famous. Advertisers often have “private treaties” with news publishers and barter influence over editorial matters.
There is essentially no difference between advertising products for money and peddling opinions on various subjects for public-speaking fees. Don’t believe actors and anchors because they are paid to do whatever they do on television.
In the present world of information deluge and intensely increasing delusions, preaching has become more important than practice in public life. Somehow, we have come to believe that what we say in public is more important than what we do in private because it’s none of the business of “others” to meddle in the private lives of the celebrities, and also because of our assumption that no one watches despite all religious teachings maintaining that nothing remains hidden from the watchful eyes of the omnipresent God. When a President dangles with a young lady intern, the nation doesn’t bother as long as the newspapers keep saying that the economy is growing and the buck is rising.
We have too much information, sponsored by vested interests. Further, due to our own prejudices and biases, fueled by half-truths and outright lies broadcast day and night, we perceive information selectively and subjectively, with little self-regard for the distortions this causes.
Newspapers do not carry the news as it happens when it happens. They carry what the editors decide people should know. News is no longer the news; it is the “mental impression” that your editor decides you should have.
Times change, and the rate of change accelerates with time. In just about 225 years since Edmund Burke hailed the press as the Fourth Estate of democracy after the French Revolution, it has earned the label “presstitute”. This word has entered the common vocabulary over the past few years and signifies deep-rooted disappointment that people perceive in the selective role the manipulative media play, and that leaves them feeling completely disillusioned. They can’t be trusted any longer, the way they were two centuries ago.
Propitiating money-bags with selling lies in order to fleece people of their intellectual freedom and swindle their votes and notes must stop.
