Television is a powerful magical instrument. It has convinced humankind that absurd lies are sacrosanct truths.
Propaganda in the age of television can be used to topple governments, shape mass movements, erase facts, create enemies to mobilize public support for wars, turn heroes into villains, prosecute the innocent without evidence, and destroy the reputation of anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
The competition between state television and independent broadcasting may have been a reality once, but today there is only state television. And that's true for every nation on the planet. The mass hysteria surrounding the covid pandemic wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
If the state is God then television is its bible. When we wake up in the morning most of us turn to our phones or the remote control, whereas in a previous era we would've reached for the holy book or any book.
And for most people what the T.V. says is gospel. If it says we went to the moon then we went to the moon. If it says it's sunny outside then it's sunny outside. If it says a deadly virus is raging across the world then it is so.
Those who control what gets to air on television can shape minds from a young age and create history on the fly. It is the greatest tool of mind control ever invented.
II.
John Logie Baird (13 August 1888 – 14 June 1946) was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926.
An excerpt from, "A history of television, the technology that seduced the world – and me" By Andrew Anthony, The Guardian, September 7, 2013:
Logie Baird may have been a visionary but even he would have struggled to comprehend just how much the world would be changed by his vision – television, the 20th century's defining technology.
Every major happening is now captured by television, or it's not a major happening. Politics and politicians are determined by how they play on television. Public knowledge, charity, humour, fashion trends, celebrity and consumer demand are all subject to its critical influence. More than the aeroplane or the nuclear bomb, the computer or the telephone, TV has determined what we know and how we think, the way we believe and how we perceive ourselves and the world around us (only the motor car is a possible rival and that, strictly speaking, was a 19th-century invention).
Not not only did television re-envision our sense of the world, it remains, even in the age of the internet, Facebook and YouTube, the most powerful generator of our collective memories, the most seductive and shocking mirror of society, and the most virulent incubator of social trends. It's also stubbornly unavoidable.
An excerpt from, "How TV paved America’s road to Trump" By Sean Illing, Vox, November 21, 2020:
According to Poniewozik, Trump is fundamentally a creature of TV. His whole public persona was shaped by TV and he cleverly used the medium, with shows like The Apprentice, to propel his political career. He also knew exactly what TV media craves — spectacle, drama, and outrage — and capitalized on it throughout his presidential campaign.
An excerpt from, "See How JFK Created a Presidency for the Television Age" By Ron Simon, Time, May 29, 2017:
The 1960 Presidential Campaign was a watershed moment in American politics, unleashing the “revolutionary impact of television” that Kennedy envisioned the year before in his TV Guide essay. Eschewing the physical demands of whistle-stop politicking, Kennedy went before the cameras to confront such major issues as his religion and relative inexperience. With television sets in over 90% of American homes, Kennedy preferred to press the electronic flesh.
Videos about Mr. Baird:
