Sylvain Timsits Ten Strategies For Media Manipulation

Media can be used to manipulate the public. But what kind of psychological strategies for media manipulation do they use to do this? Find out here!

Media can help shape public opinion. News media can help create or destroy social movements, hide financial crises and ignite the fervor of ideological trends.

There are many different studies and theories about media influence. One of them, known as strategies for media manipulation, comes from the Frenchman Sylvain Timsit.

People often mistakenly give Noam Chomsky credit for this thought, but Timsit is the original man of the idea. His intention was to show how media use psychological tools to distract the public from what it is really about.

The media manipulates public opinion by dampening the real problems. The goal of this is to make society more submissive and less critical.

Ten strategies for media manipulation

1. Strategy for distraction

This is one of the most elementary cornerstones of media manipulation. Distraction is what happens when the media tries to direct people’s attention away from the important topics.

The media bombards the public with constant distraction and information about superficial things, so that we do not become too interested in crucial issues of politics, culture, economics or social issues.

The idea is to keep people’s curiosity away from the important topics and pull them over to things that do not really matter. That way, the public will stay focused on trivialities and not have time to think about it.

2. Create problems and then offer solutions

This strategy consists of creating problems that will make people react in a certain way and then accept or even ask for a “solution,” which the government has actually wanted to come up with from the beginning.

For example, it could be creating an economic crisis so that the public will accept restrictions on their rights as workers or reduced job security as a “necessary evil”. Other examples could be letting the violence in the cities happen or intensifying them so that people will demand more retaliation against it.

The gradual strategy

The aim here is to get the public to accept measures that may seem unacceptable as a whole, but they are introduced little by little. They can take place over extended periods of time as well.

Some people believe that this is how radical socio-economic strategies such as neoliberalism were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s. Slowly but surely, more and more industries were privatized and job security disappeared.

4. Postponement is an example of strategies for media manipulation

Another way to get people to accept an unpopular idea is to present it as something painful but necessary that will come in the future.

It is much easier for people to accept future sacrifices in the future than here and now. Because then they will not be held accountable for it right now. It gives people more time to get used to the idea and basically accept it when it comes.

5. Talking down to people is one of the widely used strategies for media manipulation

Many media use childish language, arguments, characters and intonation. As if the viewers are not mature enough or do not have the abilities to understand certain ideas. When the media thus tries to deceive the public, viewers may find themselves reacting in an even more childish way.

6. Appeal to people’s emotions

Triggering people’s emotions is a classic strategy to get them to stop rationally analyzing situations. Moreover, by appealing to people’s emotions, one will manipulate their instinctive behavior, which is usually based on lust or fear.

7. Keep people away from the light

Another strategy for media manipulation is to make sure that the audience is unable to understand the technology used to control them. To fulfill this, those in power can cut budgets for education, scholarships, expensive university educations, narrow career paths, etc.

8. Get the public to accept mediocrity

The idea here is to promote the notion that it is fine to be an uneducated non-intellectual person. You can find lots of examples of this in TV shows.

9. Reinforce guilt by applying media manipulation strategies

This strategy consists in making people believe that they are the only ones who can be blamed for their misfortune. Things are going badly for them because they are not intelligent, do not possess so many abilities or they are not working hard enough. That way, people will blame themselves instead of being critical of the system.

10. Know the individuals better than they know themselves

The latter strategy is based on developing a system that allows authorities to know individuals better than they know themselves. This can be achieved by using biology, neuroscience and psychology. This strategy is very effective in controlling the masses.

We can conclude that by knowing these strategies for media manipulation, we can decide how much we want the media to influence us, or how we will react when we become aware of them.