I Saw it on the TV News...

Seeing and Believing

Back in the 1990s, an independent journalist by the name of Michael Born wanted to see just how easy it was to create what we now know today as Fake News. Born created over twenty TV segments and then pitched them to several TV stations in Germany and Switzerland. The problem was, that the news stories which he had created—and which were eagerly broadcasted as serious content—were all made up nonsense. The reason Michael Born had gotten away with this prank, was due to the stereotypical-plausibility of the footage and images he created with his friends. Details and facts were irrelevant to the TV editorial departments and evening news readers. As far as they were concerned; seeing was believing.

Following a real-life incident in which a letter bomb was sent to TV announcer Arabella Kiesbauer, Martin Born got a group of his friends together and dressed them up in the most cliched Neo-Nazi outfits he could find. This fictional ‘ultra right wing hate group’, was then claimed to have been responsible for sending the letter bomb to Arabella Kiesbauer. The images were so convincing—within the context of their near stereotypical ridiculousness—that the bait was taken by the mainstream media to the point that even the German police used the footage to look for the ‘ultra-right bombers’ who were actually a group of larping pranksters.

In his other scams to fool the mainstream media, Michael Born created Kurdish freedom fighters, the Klu Klux Klan burning a cross (of course) and swarthy Arab drug smugglers who were all the same group of friends dressed up and playing an almost deliberate stage-version role of these groups. In every case, serious news agencies, TV networks and newspapers editors ran with these overtly sensationalist ‘scoops’ because they fitted certain stereotypes and popular assumptions. Thanks entirely to the images and videos supplied by Born. In the minds of these news professionals; they had to have been the real thing, as this is what they expected to see.

In one story, Michael Born even bought an IKEA rug and took it to India. Then he recruited some Indian children to pretend that they were making the rug inside a sweat shop. The German media again ran with the story based entirely on the images. The bogus story of the IKEA child-labour, sweat shop was naturally presented with all the fake angst and virtue signally which the TV news readers and newspaper journalists could muster. Clearly demonstrating that the delivery of your evening news, or an Op-Ed piece in your daily broadsheet are the product of actors playing a role to fool/emotionally manipulate the public.

All it would have taken for these news editors and broadcasters to have discovered they were—in actuality—being pranked, would have been to call IKEA’s head office for confirmation or denial of the story and footage. The editorial staff did not bother follow-up in search of the truth, because the bogus sweat shop images—complete with their moralistic platitudes of phony compassion and outrage—were enough for them to present it as legitimate news. Ostensibly, Michael Born had mind controlled the mind controllers.

Back in the 1990s when Michael Born fooled the German and Swiss news media, it had resulted in great embarrassment at both the gullibility, as well as the total lack of professionalism, within mainstream media. Fast forward to the early 2020s, and news agencies all over the world used images of parked Italian military trucks—lined up at night on a street in central Milan—in order to create a notion of some impending doom straight out of an ‘end of the world science’ fiction movie. Nothing of any depth needed to be said to the viewing and increasingly traumatised public. As continuous use of psychological terrorism by the media surrounding COVID-19 was enough for people to assume these trucks were there to remove the thousands of bodies from Milan who were about to die in this “plague of the century”.

What Michael Born did to the media in the 1990s—in order to demonstrate just how fake the TV news and all mainstream media can be—has today, had been turned around by the mainstream media themselves so as to terrorise endless millions of people into believing they would be all dead soon using images of empty military trucks parked on a darken Milanese street. The fact remains, that the groups and organisations claiming to be protecting us all from Fake News, are themselves nothing more than pranksters and tricksters. However, with a far more insidious agenda than what Michael Born was delivering back in the 1990s.

While everything we are told by mainstream sources is not always a lie, far too much of it is wild and misleading distortions for any independently-minded individual to unconditionally trust what the TV presenters and scientists announce these days.

Yet sadly, to the point of tragic, we now live in an age wereby much of society considers automatic unquestioned loyalty to what they have heard on their radio, seen on the TVs or read in the print media has—incredibly it must be said—become a sign of their intellectualism. We have come a long way from the days of the Symposiums of ancient Athens, and very much in the wrong direction.