Date: 05 May 97 12:43:46 EDT
From: John Greenley <73324.2472@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Patterns - Media Brainwashing

Hi all

This was originally posted  24 Oct 1996 to the UK Cybershooter list.  While it
was specifically written to help members of the British shooting community
understand what was happening to them, I think it has broader relevance for us
all.   My comments below...

________________________Begin Message________________________
Dear All.
I am not a shooter, but I live with one...No doubt my partner, Stuart, has
been helping out as much as he can.
 However, I would like to give you a few pointers which may help in your pursuit
of personal choice and freedom which is currently under attack.  I am
researching for my PhD, and part of that study involves culture, social and
communication studies.  There are a few key concepts that you may find helpfull
which are in constant use within society and have been documented and
researched.  Once you know how the patterns of social communication work, then
perhaps you may all be able to find some way of breaking the classic cycle (trap)
that society has currently placed you in...especially when it comes to the
'morality' issue.

1.  Amplification of deviance.
The process whereby initial activity, labelled as deviant, is increased or
'amplified' as a result of social reaction which is largely co-ordinated and
articulated by the mass media. The concept has been developed particularily by
Wilkins (1964) who argued that under certain conditions when a society recieves a
simplified, stereotypical and often misleading information about groups and
activities labelled as deviant, it reacts in such a way as to produce more
deviance.  Initial information generates a response, which in turn uncovers and
may promote even greater deviant activity.  This underscores the role of the mass
media in providing information, particularly their provision of labels and
definitions of deviancy.  Young (1981) suggests they are 'guardians of the
consensus'. a) An apparent 'crime wave' appears, orchestrated by mass media which
generates increased public concern. b) Public concern, expressed and represented
by mass media, pressure groups and political demands focuses the attention of the
police and control agencies on the deviant activity. c) This increase of
attention boosts arrest rates apparently uncovering greater or increasing
deviance. e) This accelerates the crime wave and further public sentiments and
concern (go back to (a))

This concept (cycle) offers a useful way both to think through and to analyse the
shootings sports within this concept, and break the pattern. You should
consider:	Agenda setting.
   Labelling.
   Moral Panic.
   The stereotypic shooting image.

2 Moral Panic:
An important concept which highlights the processes of interplay between forces
of social reaction and control, the mass media and certain forms of deviant
activity.  The term has been introduced into the analysis of mass media and
their capacity to generate social concern by Cohen (1972) who describes the
process as one where 'A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerge to
become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.

a)  The occurence and signification of an initial event, which attracts often
dramatic media coverage, and sets in motion often intensive media surveillance
and research routines.  These are organised and aligned to identify any
subsequent events which may be coded as similar.

b)  In the wake of intitial impact, media coverage starts to work from the event
in particular, to the wider social implications and issues that such an event is
defined as raising.  Drawing particularly upon primary definers and 'accredited
witnesses'. who represent 'expert' and professional opinion, and possibly 'moral
intrepreneurs' who contend in defining the event as symptomatic of wider
breakdowns in moral and social fibre and fabfric, the media fuel public debate,
concern, outrage, and sensitivity.  This may be further inflated and intensified
by media indentification of other events and occurences that have subsequently
taken place.  These may under certain conditions, become defined and interpreted
as the progressive discovery that the problem or event in particular is in fact a
part of a widespread and correspondingly more menacing social problem.  In this
way the intitial event becomes constructed as 'the tip of the iceberg', the first
'wave' or 'flood', an early 'blow' in a developing 'battle', and so on. This
spiralling public attention, and its replay through the media, notably in the
form of news, in itself may lend increased urgency and severity to:

c) Social control, excercised especially though not always exclusively in the
form of state responses to the 'problem' drastically and dramatically revealed.
the judicial, legislative and administrative responses and penalities will often
be articulated within the definitions and frameworks provided in preceeding
stages.

It would appear that shooters have been caught in both of these traps. The best
way to get out of these cycles is to either break the cycle or play  your own
orchestrated cycle out to the media. I suggest that some-one spends a day in the
reference library looking up 'communication and media' studies in order to try
and find an experience in the past that was able to break the cycle.  There is a
lot of very nasty social engineering going on here, and you are all the
scape-goats of a repressive and frightened government.  The definitions I have
typed above are from a good source book called Key Concepts in Communication and
Cultural studies.  (Routledge Tim O Sullivan ISBN 0-415-06173-3.) Unfortunately
you are also struck with another social engineering pattern within the new
'morality' issues currently raised...recognise the pattern???

I hope this hasn't been to ardouous to read, but what is happening here is a
classic case.. You must be clever, play them at their own game, and orchestrate a
positive, intelligent and well thought plan of flooding the mass media with an
'alternative cycle'.

_______________END FORWARDED MESSAGE_____________

I've had this note since it was written. We must understand the dynamics and
influences between our society and the media.  I hope this note will make us each
aware that this is both a high art and a science.  And that there are superb
practioners among us orchestrating campaigns against freedom and liberty.

 "It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of
public opinion."
  - Josef Goebbels, 1923

 "What good fortune for governments that the people do not think."
  - Adolf Hitler

 "I'm going to cut my Political Attackers out of American Politics; They
are a Cancer!"
  - William J. Clinton

 "If you thought massive government propaganda was the special preserve
 of communist countries, think again."
  - William E. Simon, fmr Secretary of the Treasury

It's an old story.  It has happened before.  It will happen again.  It can and
will happen to you, to me, to our families if we allow it to through our inaction
and ignorance.   The state does not have to kill its enemies to silence them, it
needs only to make them irrelavent.   They are first marginalized, then painted
as extremists and finally vilified and destroyed.   We are all vulnerable.   In
todays world, each of us is subject to being singled out for our views and
associations and then being attacked.   Who ever we are, shooters, Libertarians,
Republicans, patriots, veterans, seniors, conservatives, self-employers, blacks,
WASPs, Mormons, Jews, or CPAs,  we can be attacked and made irrelavent through
the methods touched on in this note.   The methods are defined, the cycle
illustrated above is predictable and hauntingly familiar to us.  Learn the
pattern. Learn how to counter with truth and reason.  We see the pattern
everywhere we look.  We see it used against those who support the right to keep
and bear arms, painted first as nuts, now as terrorists.  If we do not all reply,
we will all be disarmed.  We see it happening to the Internet. painted as a haven
for child molestors and perverts.  If we do not reply, we will not be able to
post any truth there either.   We see it against those who exercise their free
speech on the radio, painted as liars and freaks.  If we do not reply, we will
return to the bland conformity of the evening news.  We see it happening all
around us, do we take the time to understand, to reply, to fight back?   We must
UNDERSTAND what is happening.  Most people do not react. Too many that do react
do so with rhetoric and emotion, exactly the way that makes them even more
vulnerable.   Valor and truth are insufficient unless allied with intellegence
and knowledge.

 "All people, Jews or gentiles, who dare not defend themselves when they know
 they are right, who submit to punishment not because of what they have done, but
 because of who they are, are already dead by their own decision"
  - Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, Psychologist & former prisoner at Dachau and Buchenwald.


ttfn
John