CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

INTRODUCTION

UNIT 1. INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC RELATIONS

UNIT 2. HISTORY

UNIT 3. CRISIS COMMUNICATION

REVIEW units 1-3

UNIT 4. TACTICS

UNIT 5. ETHICS

UNIT 6. PR SPIN

REVIEW units4-6

UNIT 7. «BLACK PR»

UNIT 8.PROPAGANDA

UNIT 9. BRAND MANAGEMENT

REVIEW units 7-9

UNIT 10. PROMOTION

UNIT 11. MEDIA MANIPULATION

UNIT 12. AUDIENCE TARGETING

REVIEW units 10-12

UNIT 13. HOW TO WIN OVER AND WOW A CROWD

UNIT 14. A PUBLIC RELATIONS SPECIALIST

REVIEW units13-14

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES & RESOURCES

UNIT 11. MEDIA MANIPULATION

Part A

TRUTH, WAR PROPAGANDA, CIA AND MEDIA MANIPULATION

Never before has it been so important to have independent, honest voices and sources of information. We are – as a society – inundated and overwhelmed with a flood of information from a wide array of sources, but these sources of information, by and large, serve the powerful interests and individuals that own them. The main sources of information, for both public and official consumption, include the mainstream media, alternative media, academia and think tanks.

The mainstream media is the most obvious in its inherent bias and manipulation. The mainstream media is owned directly by large multinational corporations, and through their boards of directors are connected with a plethora of other major global corporations and elite interests. An example of these connections can be seen through the board of Time Warner.

Time Warner owns Time Magazine, HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN, among many others. The board of directors includes individuals past or presently affiliated with: the Council on Foreign Relations, the IMF, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Warburg Pincus, Phillip Morris, and AMR Corporation, among many others.

Two of the most «esteemed» sources of news in the U.S. are the New York Times (referred to as «the paper of record») and the Washington Post. The New York Times has on its board people who are past or presently affiliated with: Schering-Plough International (pharmaceuticals), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chevron Corporation, Wesco Financial Corporation, Kohlberg & Company, The Charles Schwab Corporation, eBay Inc., Xerox, IBM, Ford Motor Company, Eli Lilly & Company, among others. Hardly a bastion of impartiality.

And the same could be said for the Washington Post, which has on its board: Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and individuals associated with (past or presently): the Coca-Cola Company, New York University, Conservation International, the Council on Foreign Relations, Xerox, Catalyst, Johnson & Johnson, Target Corporation, RAND Corporation, General Motors, and the Business Council, among others.

It is also important to address how the mainstream media is intertwined, often covertly and secretly, with the government. Carl Bernstein, one of the two Washington Post reporters who covered the Watergate scandal, revealed that there were over 400 American journalists who had «secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency». Interestingly, «the use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA». Among organizations which cooperated with the CIA were the «American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune».

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. The CIA even ran a training program «to teach its agents to be journalists», who were «then placed in major news organizations with help from management».

These types of relationships have continued in the decades since, although perhaps more covertly and quietly than before. For example, it was revealed in 2000 that during the NATO bombing of Kosovo, «several officers from the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters». This same Army Psyop outfit had «planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration’s Central America policies», which was described by the Miami Herald as a «vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory». These Army PSYOP officers also worked at National Public Radio (NPR) at the same time. The US military has, in fact, had a strong relationship with CNN.

In 2008, it was reported that the Pentagon ran a major propaganda campaign by using retired Generals and former Pentagon officials to present a good picture of the administration’s war-time policies. The program started in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and continued into 2009. These officials, presented as «military analysts», regurgitate government talking points and often sit on the boards of military contractors, thus having a vested interest in the subjects they are brought on to «analyze».

During the public debate around the question of whether to attack Syria, Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to George W. Bush, made a series of high-profile media appearances. Hadley argued strenuously for military intervention in appearances on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg TV, and authored a Washington Post op-ed headlined «To stop Iran, Obama must enforce red lines with Assad».

In each case, Hadley’s audience was not informed that he serves as a director of Raytheon, the weapons manufacturer that makes the Tomahawk cruise missiles that were widely cited as a weapon of choice in a potential strike against Syria. Hadley earns $128,500 in annual cash compensation from the company and chairs its public affairs committee. He also owns 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate ($77.65 on August 23, making Hadley’s share’s worth $891,189). Despite this financial stake, Hadley was presented to his audience as an experienced, independent national security expert.

The major philanthropic foundations in the United States have often used their enormous wealth to co-opt voices of dissent and movements of resistance into channels that are safe for the powers that be. As McGeorge Bundy, former President of the Ford Foundation once said, «Everything the Foundation does is to make the world safe for Capitalism».

Examples of this include philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation providing immense financial and organizational support to Non-Governmental Organizations. Furthermore, the alternative media are often funded by these same foundations, which has the effect of influencing the direction of coverage as well as the stifling of critical analysis.

This now brings us to the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research.

As an institution which acts as a research centre as well as a source of alternative news through the website www.globalresearch.ca, the CRG has become a much needed voice of independence seeking to break through all the propaganda and misinformation.

To maintain our independence, Global Research does not accept assistance from public and private foundations. Nor do we seek support from universities and/or government.

While the objective is to expand and help spread important and much-needed information to more people than ever before, Global Research needs to rely upon its readers to support the organization.

Thank you, dear readers, for your tireless support.

EXERCISES

1.     Sum up the main ides of the text and retell it in Russian.

2. Fill in the missing words from the box into the text below.

The world of 1)________ and modern media has become a tool of de-evolution, propaganda and social control. Since the reign of Edward Bernays and the rise of the Tavistock Institute in the early 20th century, nearly 2)________ resources have been applied to understanding how to manipulate the human psyche through television and other forms of mass media.

What we have 3)________ is an increasingly sophisticated full-spectrum assault on free will and psychological well-being, and we have come to a point where it is no longer even necessary for media institutions to attempt to hide their blatant work of manipulating public opinion, manufacturing 4)________, and creating winners and losers in the minds of the already brain-washed public. The practice of digitally «touching up» 5)________ and models in images and videos is an overt industry standard. Yet most people, whether they’re aware of image 6)________ or not, still process television and print images on the sub-conscious level as if they were, primarily because everyone is doing it, and our 7)________ for «normal» has been socially reconstructed to adopt advertising lies as normal.

This process is demonstrated in the following video where an ordinary looking woman is transformed into a 8)________ beauty queen for the purposes of selling more products to consumers.

The comedian and talk show host Conan O’Brien has done a 9)________ for America by compiling overtly ridiculous cases of local «news» broadcasts that were simultaneously repeated 10)________ in dozens of markets nationwide. This is proof that you simply cannot trust the authenticity of what you are 11)________ on news broadcasts.

3. Read the following article and make a rendering of it in English.

МАНИПУЛЯТОРЫ СОЗНАНИЕМ

Герберт Шиллер

Для достижения наибольшего успеха манипуляция должна оставаться незаметной. Успех манипуляции гарантирован, когда манипулируемый верит, что все происходящее естественно и неизбежно. Короче говоря, для манипуляции требуется фальшивая действительность, в которой ее присутствие не будет ощущаться. Таким образом, важно, чтобы люди верили в нейтральность их основных социальных институтов. Они должны верить, что правительство, средства массовой информации, система образования и наука находятся за рамками конфликтующих социальных интересов. Правительство, в особенности федеральное, занимает главное место в мифе о нейтралитете. Миф предполагает честность и беспристрастность правительства в общем и его составных частей: парламента, системы судебных органов и президентской власти. А такие проявляющиеся время от времени явления, как коррупция, обман и мошенничество, принято относить за счет человеческих слабостей, сами по себе институты выше подозрений. Фундаментальная прочность всей системы обеспечивается тщательно продуманной работой ее составных частей.

Так, например, в соответствии с этой мифологией президентская власть находится вне сферы частных интересов. В целях манипуляции прежде всего создается иллюзия беспристрастности президентской власти, ее непричастности к скандальным конфликтам. Глава исполнительной власти всего лишь один из многих (хотя и самый важный) представителей власти, пытающихся представить себя нейтральными, не преследующими никаких целой, кроме всеобщего благоденствия, который служит всем беспристрастно и бескорыстно. В Америке более полувека все средства массовой информации дружно создавали миф о ФБР как о далеком от политики высокоэффективном, контролирующем соблюдение законов органе. На практике же бюро постоянно использовалось для запугивания и обуздания, тех, кто недоволен социальным устройством страны.

Считается, что средства массовой информации также должны быть нейтральны. Некоторые отклонения от беспристрастности в подаче новостей признаются, но пресса уверяет нас, что это не более чем ошибки, допущенные отдельными людьми, которые нельзя считать недостатками в целом надежных институтов распространения информации. Тот факт, что средства массовой информации (печать, периодические издания, радио и телевидение) почти без исключения являются деловыми предприятиями, получающими доходы от торговли своим временем или полосами, похоже, нисколько не смущает апологетов объективности и неподкупности информационных служб. Во времена Никсона роль средств массовой информации часто подвергалась сомнению, но лишь потому, что они были недостаточно правыми.

Наука, которая сегодня, более чем любой другой вид умственной деятельности, стала неотъемлемой частью корпоративной экономики, также претендует на ценностный нейтралитет. Игнорируя недвусмысленный характер источников ее финансирования, направления ее исследований, применение ее теорий и характер создаваемых ею парадигм, наука поддерживает представление о своей изолированности от социальных сил, влияющих на все другие виды деятельности государства.

Система образования от начальной школы до университетского уровня, согласно утверждениям манипуляторов, также свободна от направленного идеологического влияния. Однако результат налицо: удивительно, какой внушительный процент выпускников на каждой ступени образования продолжает, несмотря на всю шумиху по поводу контркультуры, верить в этику конкурирующего делового предпринимательства и следовать ей.

Повсюду в социальной сфере к понятиям нейтральности и объективности прибегают всякий раз, когда речь идет о характеристике ценностно-ориентированных, направленных видах деятельности, оказывающих поддержку превалирующей установленной системе. Существенным элементом постоянного функционирования системы управления служит тщательно культивируемый миф о том, что никакие частные группы или взгляды не оказывают доминирующего влияния на важные процессы принятия решений в стране. Традиционная экономическая наука утверждает, что все – покупатели и продавцы, рабочие и работодатели – находятся в условиях рынка примерно в равном положении и сами решают свою судьбу в не поддающейся контролю сфере независимого принятия решений в пользу того или иного выбора. Манипуляция в рыночной экономике – это подобие того оптического обмана, которого все опасаются и от которого все пытаются избавиться, но вместо того, чтобы бороться с ним, стараются просто его не замечать. То же самое происходит и на рынке идей. Манипуляторы утверждают, что не существует никакой идеологии, выступающей в качестве механизма управления. Есть лишь, утверждают они, информационно-научный спектр, из которого нейтральный ученый, учитель, правительственный чиновник или любой человек выбирает информацию, более всего подходящую к той модели истины, которую он пытается построить. В самом начале периода наиболее острых за всю историю Соединенных Штатов социальных конфликтов и усиления манипулятивного управления Дэниел Белл опубликовал книгу, возвестившую «конец идеологии».

Part B

WHAT IS MEDIA MANIPULATION?

Ryan Holiday

If you don’t know, you should. Because media manipulation currently shapes everything you read, hear and watch online. Everything.

In the old days, we only had a few threats to fear when it came to media manipulation: the government propagandist and the hustling publicist. They were serious threats, but vigilance worked as a clear and simple defense. They were the exceptions rather than the rule–they exploited the fact that the media was trusted and reliable. Today, with our blog and web driven media cycle, nothing can escape exaggeration, distortion, fabrication and simplification. I know this because I am a media manipulator. My job was to use the media to make people do or think things they otherwise would not. People like me are there, behind the curtain, pulling the puppet strings. But that is about to get harder: I’m spilling my secrets to you and turned my talents from exploiting media vulnerabilities to exposing them–for your benefit.

When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals scuttle election bids or knock billions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about «how the story unfolded» – media manipulation is the status quo. It becomes, as Daniel Boorstin, author The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, once put it, a «thicket …which stands between us and the facts of life.

Today the media–driven by blogs–is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online –and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning.

Everyone is in on the game, from bloggers to non-profits to marketers to the New York Times itself. The lure of gaming you for clicks is too appealing for anyone to resist. And when everyone is running the same racket, the the line between the real and the fake becomes indistinguishable.

The Rise of the Manipulator

At top of the pantheon of the media manipulators, of course, sits the late Andrew Brietbart. «Feeding the media is like training a dog», he once said, «You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns». And learned it did: they followed his lead exactly in the Shirley Sherrod story, and continue to fall for the manipulations of his student, James O’Keefe, who has ravaged NPR, ACORN, and many other liberal organizations.

But in this rising class, I also place some unlikely figures. Michael Arrington, former editor and founder of the popular blog TechCrunch. Manipulator is the only word for Arrington, a man who once said «Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap» and made $25 million from around that fact. Nick Denton and his cabal of Gawker writers–partially paid by how many visitors their posts get–use the same tricks to get your attention and sell it to advertisers. You can see it in how Brian Moylan, one of Denton’s minions, once explained the art of online headlines: «[the key is to] get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click».

And the old threat of government abuse of the media? We know that the Bush administration was a pro at it. Think of Dick Cheney leaking bogus information to Judith Miller at the New York Times as an anonymous source and then citing himself (without disclosing the conflict) to justify the build up to the war in Iraq. He planted the information which he then alluded to as support. That happened in 2002. Today, this loop is even easier, because as political strategists like Christian Grantham admit, «Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs».

So it goes: manipulators on both sides of the equation–the writers and the marketers and press agents–all influencing the news to their own benefit. I know because I used to be one of them. I plied the trade for bestselling authors and billion dollar brands. I can recognize manipulation when I see it…because I invented many of the plays myself.

EXERCISES

1.     Sum up the main ides of the text and retell it in Russian.

2. Fill in the missing words from the box into the text below.

Media 1)_________ exploits the difference between perception and reality. The media was long a trusted source of information for the public. Today, all the barriers that made it reliable have broken down. Yet the old 2)_________ remain. If a random blog is half as reliable as a New York Times article that was fact checked, edited and reviewed by multiple editors, it is twice as easy to get coverage on. So 3)_________ (myself included) play the volume game. We know that if we can generate enough online buzz people will 4)_________ that where there is smoke there is fire…and the unreal becomes real.

This all happens because of the 5)_________ incentives. When readers don’t PAY for news, the creators of the news don’t have any loyalty to the readers either. Everything is read one off, passed around on Facebook and Twitter instead of by subscription. As a result, there is no consequence for burning anyone. Manipulators can deceive journalists because journalists are not held responsible for deceiving 6)_________. To combat these manipulations, we must change the incentives. If we want loyalty to the truth, we 7)_________ be loyal to the people who )_________ us with it–whoever they are. This probably means paying for information in one form or another. It means we have to be more patient. Good information takes time to 8)_________ after all. The idea that news can be given to us iteratively and reliably is )_________. Screw Michael Arrington. I’d rather have my news right than first.

This is the age of the fake. We live in an era where the gap between how the world is and how 9)_________ interests try to portray it has grown dramatically wider. Virtually nothing in public debate these days is free of the virus of fakery....

Today distortions [such as the famous Stalinist 10)_________ of Trotsky from photographs of the Russian revolutionary period] are much more easily contrived. The advent of the digital 11)_________ has made it easier, cheaper and quicker to take and distribute photographs – and to manipulate them. In the last couple of years there have been several examples of photos produced to artificially inflate the size of crowds listening to a speech by George Bush for example. An LA Times 12)_________ was sacked in 2003 for manipulating a photograph of a British soldier in Basra.

The problem with fakes is that the 13)_________ do not need to be false to mislead. The photos showed by Colin Powell in his presentation to the UN on Iraq were genuine. They just did not show the things that he said they did....

But it is not only photographs which are susceptible to fake 14)_________. While governments have a long and invidious record, the cutting edge of innovation is in the corporate 15)_________, particularly in the PR )_________. Monsanto and other GM interests have been to the forefront of creating fake demonstrations, fake scientific institutes, fake pressure groups with all the 16)_________ of fake leaflets, tee shirts, websites and the rest.…

In recent 17)_________ the fakes have become more sophisticated, so that the distinction between fake and real is less easy to discern.

3. Read the following article and make a rendering of it in English.

МАНИПУЛЯЦИЯ СОЗНАНИЕМ В СМИ И НЕ ТОЛЬКО

Воздействие в ходе информационной войны сенсорно (органами чувств) не различается от нейтрального либо позитивного информационного воздействия подобно тому, как негативное физическое воздействие моментально ощущается его объектом и отличается от нейтрального или позитивного, т. е. объект воздействия может и не догадываться о том, что против него ведется информационная война. Вследствие вышеуказанной особенности информационная война мало поддается какому-либо правовому регулированию (подобному гаагскому праву войны), этапы ее проведения, затишья и т. п. не обязательно известны объекту воздействия, она может проводиться в любой информационной ситуации – как при информационном шуме, так и в условиях информационного вакуума.

Другим проявлением сенсорной нейтральности информационной войны является то, что к ее методам не относятся угрозы, шантаж и т. п. В противном случае, воздействующая сторона раскрывается как агрессор, и было бы нарушено главное условие победы в информационной войне. У объекта воздействия репродуцируется иллюзия относительно самостоятельности принятия решений, навязываемых ему, в действительности, воздействующей стороной.

Понятию «информационные войны» очень близко понятие «манипуляция общественным мнением»/»манипуляция массовым сознанием», т. е. подавление воли людей и программирование их поведения. Манипуляция всегда осуществляется скрытно, манипулируемый не догадывается о своей объектности.

Признаками скрытой манипуляции среди прочих являются эмоциональность, сенсационность и срочность, повторение, дробление целостной фактологической картины, изъятие из контекста, «тоталитаризм» («достоверный источник») источника сообщений, смешение информации и мнения, прикрытие авторитетом, активизация стереотипов и т. д.

К методам манипуляции массовым сознанием относят, в частности, следующие:

•        использование внушения;

•        перенос частного факта в сферу общего, в систему;

•        использование слухов, домыслов, толкований в неясной политической или социальной ситуации;

•        метод под названием «нужны трупы»;

•        метод «страшилок»;

•        замалчивание одних фактов и выпячивание других;

•        метод фрагментации;

•        «метод Геббельса» (многократные повторы);

•        метод чередования на конвейере «правда, правда, правда, неправда, правда»;

•        создание лжесобытий, мистификация.

Все эти методы используются в информационных войнах, поскольку в них среди прочего активно осуществляется манипуляция массовым сознанием. Однако манипуляцию массовым сознанием нельзя свести к частному случаю информационной войны.

Part C

MEDIA MANIPULATION

Anup Shah

The impacts of public relations cannot be underestimated. In the commercial world, marketing and advertising are typically needed to make people aware of products. There are many issues in that area alone (which is looked at in this site’s section on corporate media.) When it comes to propaganda for purposes of war, for example, professional public relations firms can often be involved to help sell a war. In cases where a war is questionable, the PR firms are indirectly contributing to the eventual and therefore unavoidable casualties. Media management may also be used to promote certain political policies and ideologies. Where this is problematic for the citizenry is when media reports on various issues do not attribute their sources properly.

Some techniques used by governments and parties/people with hidden agendas include:

•Paying journalists to promote certain issues without the journalist acknowledging this, or without the media mentioning the sources;

•Governments and individuals contracting PR firms to sell a war, or other important issues

•Disinformation or partial information reported as news or fact without attributing sources that might be questionable

•PR firms feeding stories to the press without revealing the nature of the information with the intention of creating a public opinion (for example, to support a war, as the previous link highlights where even human rights groups fell for some of the disinformation, thus creating an even more effective propaganda campaign) Such technical phrases like «truth projection» hide their true meanings and intent: propaganda. One can understand how these have been tactics of war. Churchill used such a technique to fool the Nazis regarding the Normandy landings, for example. Yet, in the Iraq example, PR is turned onto one’s own citizens to convince them to support a war or make it look more glorious and right, than could otherwise have been.

The 2003 war on Iraq saw similar amounts of public relations and media manipulation at work. A detailed account was given by Ahmed Chalabi who seemed to boast how he helped influence major politicians and countries into drumming the beats of war against Iraq. This is discussed in further detail on this site’s Iraq section. Smear tactics are often used to discredit, stain or destroy the reputation of someone. It is unfortunatley common-place and is an age-old technique. It can either involve outright lies, or a distortion of the truth.

With the increasing popularity of the Internet, and search engines such as Google, smearing is taking on additional forms and techniques. Juan Cole, a professor of history has described what he has coined a «GoogleSmear» as a political tactic to discredit him. March 2005 has seen some revelations in the mainstream about fake news whereby organizations and journalists working for public relations firms or a government department have produced news reports. The problem arises where these reports are either presented as factual news by journalists, or have been rebroadcast by news stations without revealing that the segment is from an organization or the government, thus giving it the appearance of genuine news.

EXERCISES

1. Sum up the main ides of the text and retell it in Russian.

2. Fill in the missing words from the box into the text below.

I ate cold 1)_________ for breakfast this morning. At least, that’s what my Instagram post implied; I actually had cereal. Do you see how easily lies can spread online? In media? In life? It has recently come to my 2)_________ that media manipulation is a big deal. Never before have I questioned so many news articles until learning just 3)_________ distorted and edited they could be. Media manipulation is a serious problem in today’s 4)_________.

As for the history, it’s been around for quite a while, and is still happening today. Even around 500 BC in Athens it was used – by ethical teachers no less. Aristotle, Plato, and Isocrates used 5)_________ writing and speaking skills to win over the favor of people, and taught their students these strategies as well. I myself have learned such persuasive strategies in writing and 6)_________ in school. While some 7)_________ may be harmless or simply persuasive, let us not forget about the true manipulation in the past. For instance, in World War II, media manipulation was used: a 8)_________ was released in America in September of 1940, called London Can Take It! showing the bombings and destruction of the city by German troops in London. Americans thought the film to be an unbiased account; however, the director, Harry Watt, and 9)_________, Humphrey Jennings, were from the Crown Film Unit of the British Ministry of Information. Their job was to gain America’s help in the 10)_________ through propaganda. As it says in Selling War by Nicholas John, the British effort to influence the people of America was «one of the most 11)_________, extensive, and yet subtle propaganda campaigns ever directed by one sovereign state at another». And history isn’t the end of it – on the contrary, it’s just the beginning.

One of the 12)_________ recent examples of media manipulation occurred when BBC News released an article to inform people of fake videos circulating around the world. One video, supposedly of the earthquake in Nepal, 13)_________ an 14)_________ creating huge waves in a swimming pool. However, this video was actually taken of an earthquake in Mexico in 2010. The video was turned horizontally and the time stamp was scrubbed to seem like it was from Nepal. BBC News had this 15)_________ on their site, and it became international media. While the earthquake was a tragedy, it can be hard to see what damage was really done without the right information. Also, In the Middle East, many groups of people have 16)_________ feelings toward the United States – some 17)_________ have hatred for the country. When questioned as to why they feel this way, they responded with incorrect information about the U.S. When questioned as to 18)_________ they thought such things, they responded that it was what they read in newspapers and online. Perspectives on things as big as countries can be altered so easily. Intelligent people check are tricked into believing things every day by media manipulation.

Thankfully, there are small changes being made or suggested to 19)_________ this problem. Last year, there were massive street protests and riots in Ukraine. A report from senior United Nations officials (in the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights) was 20)_________ about the situation. The report had a list of suggestions to the Ukraine government, one of them being the prevention of media manipulation, which has caused tension in the country. There are also websites people can go to 21)_________ facts, such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.

I have some ideas of my own, as well. My idea has to do with laws concerning photography. While there are laws stating you have to have a permit to take 22)_________ in certain situations, and there are laws to protect children and public morality, there are no current laws set to restrict photo editing. As of now, the editor can decide to add a tagline (telling the viewer if the photo has been edited). I 23)_________ it would be a good idea to require a tagline informing the viewer if the photo has been edited to a certain extent. It may be a good step to 24)_________ media manipulation, and then people could tell if a photo has been majorly messed with. Truly, though, there will be no end to exaggerations or persuasive strategies. The best thing to do is to learn recognizing false statements and the use of rhetoric, as Aristotle, Plato, and Isocrates taught their students so many years ago. I believe the truth can be 25)_________ by reading between the lines and gathering multiple accounts or ideas of any events, facts, or news. It also helps if we spread the truth ourselves.

In the final 26)_________, media manipulation has been around for a while, is still happening today, and requires prevention. My perspective on this 27)_________ is that no good can come of being manipulated by the media. No one wants to be kept in the dark, which is why we need to read between the lines to find the truth and not always 28)_________ the first thing we hear. There are, without a doubt, bad things happening in the world (or so one can assume from the news – who now knows if it’s completely true or not), and media manipulation is one of the 29)_________.

3. Read the following article and make a rendering of it in English.

Выявление и анализ на конкретных примерах современного внутрироссийского криптолиберального (полускрытого и скрытого, наряду с открытым) и, в целом, антигосударственного (антирусского) дискурса в средствах массовой информации (телевидение, радио, печатные СМИ, Интернет-издания) позволяет идентифицировать целую систему. Речь идет о новых технологиях и методологии скрытой информационной войны, проводимой против Российского государства и общества, и манипуляции сознанием.

Важны аналитическая реконструкция причин, по которым противники суверенитета России выбирают те или иные конкретные методы информационного воздействия воздействия, генерация способов пропагандистского противодействия со стороны России обозначенным вызовам.

Под информационной войной принято понимать комплекс мероприятий по информационному воздействию на сознание большого числа людей для изменения их поведения, мировосприятия и навязывания им выгодных противнику ментальных моделей, в оборонительном аспекте – борьбу с осуществлением противником информационного воздействия в его целях, а также защиту от такого воздействия. Информационная война проходит в самых разных сферах жизни общества и государства – политике, экономике, культуре, религии, науке и т. д. Причем, для постиндустриальной эпохи характерна интеграция различных областей ведения информационной войны в единую смысловую и целеположенную сеть. Таким образом, информационная война становится составной частью относительно нового понятия сетевых войн.

Информационное воздействие на противника имеет ряд особенностей, отличающих его как от других форм борьбы, так и от коммуникаций в сфере обмена информацией. Рассмотрим основные из этих особенностей. В отличие от межличностных манипуляций сознанием, объектом воздействия в информационной войне является массовое сознание противника, учитываются коллективные особенности больших групп людей, являющихся объектами воздействия, а также видовые особенности человеческого сознания. Узкое целевое негативное информационное воздействие на отдельную личность или незначительный круг лиц информационной войной не является. В отличие от обычного информационного воздействия, в ходе информационной войны объекту воздействия навязываются чуждые ему цели, стремление к достижению которых в результате наносит ущерб ему самому.