Have you ever seen the headline on a newspaper front page or on your TV screen that says, “Wow we were really wrong about something we wrote thousands of articles about until you started to believe it. Now that you believe it we are sorry that we misinformed you.” Maybe there is a shorter headline: “Sorry we sucked you into our intellectual scam” Guess I am not very good at headlines for newspapers. How about “We fooled you. you Idiot”–The New York Times. Remember Peak Oil? A lot of people thought it was fashionable to talk about that a lot and some still believe it from years of exposure to the concept. The mass media went on a biz to let us all know the world would be running of gasoline and oil because somebody wrote a book called peak oil. Yes a real oil analyst who ran figures on the subject came up with the theory and created a theory of peak oil. The problem is that all the numbers and assumptions in the theory have now , just a few years later proved to be completely false. New technology and new exploration for oil has created brand new “Saudi Arabia’s of Oil ” that include the US and Canada, Brazil and parts of Africa. Fracking technology and Oil sand processing were only lightly considered as a source of future supplies of oil in the original theory. The peak oil theory became a giant re-education platform in newspapers and on television . People in the energy business were considering the theory as if it were some real concern. Faint voices from the likes of Exxon corporation were saying “nonsense” but that never stopped the peak oil media blitz. It sure wasted my time reading a couple of articles on the subject and it wasted space in my head as it did in millions of heads around the world. The concept is now patently worthless and proven false but that does not mean that it is not still popular.
Peak oil was not the first time nor the last time that the mass media wasted time and space in the human brain on nonsense. Remember Nuclear Winter? How about The 2012 end of the world thesis? That one is still an active scam. There was Y2K which was nothing like something real like 911. The mass media journalism of intellectual fraud is in the process of finding the next great thing to trash people’s minds with. Global Warming hysteria is still very active. The entire occupy wall street movement seems to be more media generated than real.
Here is a partial list of great media news scams: peak oil, negative US balance of payments, All out nuclear war , Y2k, Nuclear winter, 2012, DDT, Silicon Breast implants, environmentalism, Camelot, peak oil, population bomb, greening of America, every one is a victim, natural food, supplement and vitamin cures, global warming, global cooling, climate change, change, Obama the messiah, the occupy movement, Obama, GMO danger, hole in the ozone, acid rain and it goes on and on with much of it discredited and some of it still journalist gospel. When journalism promotes fraudulent reality it is usually for some good cause because someone says they are more concerned about perceived problems than the rest of us.
Journalists can present ideas without having to go overboard with them as causes to enlist everyone in the population into? Is it really a great success that they fool the maximum number of people most of the time? It is only a matter of time that most of the hysterical myths will be proven false one after the next but that still leaves a vast population of misinformed people who can never be re-educated. That is probably the idea behind the mass media monolithic fraud story telling. What will be their next great fraud? Immortality? Immorality? The need to visualize orange? You are what you read? You believe the magic words that are written? Creating false knowledge is power? Journalist are professional story tellers. Stories can be fictional . Why not make fiction useful by saying it is fact? Easy to do and lucrative. That is why you had better consider this: Water is a threat. There is too much water on earth. Didn’t you know that. Well you should and you should also know we are running out of water fast. You must be thirsty.