Cause and effect. It’s a law of nature.
The DMC (Dead Media Complex), also known as the Billionaire Blogs, lied through its teeth. A quick perusal of today’s versions indicates that They are still lying. We assume that the lies will continue. After all, it’s fairly easy to convince an honest man to lie if the price is right; a liar cannot be persuaded to tell the truth at any price (viz. Mrs. Clinton).
That should cause us to pause, and more: to deliberate, and to act.
They lie, so we act. The effect? We don’t patronize the liars, we don’t read them (they lie, remember?), we don’t click on them, we don’t bother to refer to them in polite conversation.
But now there’s more.
On Facebook and other social media, we go to the pages of the companies that advertise on or in the lying “news” media and tell the advertisers what we are doing and why. Politely but firmly, we explain that the media on which they advertise are liars; that those advertisers are paying those liars to keep on lying; and we’d be glad to buy your products, if you’d just stop subsidizing the lies – and we’re telling our friends about it too.
Social media are powerful: high-end colleges have placement offices full of interview opportunities for social media communications specialists with countless businesses, large and small. The execs are terrified of what they don’t understand – they will listen to the “experts” and act accordingly.
Cause and effect. Cause and effect.
All of this is voluntary, of course. The ads can continue, and so can our choice of other products. Of course, the lies will continue, but the liars will only be talking to each other (it is quite easy, I’m told, to bamboozle a liar, and quite difficult to do so to a truth teller).
This exercise can easily be combined with our usual visits to the sites where our kids, extended families, and classmates share their news and pictures. We can even “share” the fun news of how we are pulling the plug on liars!
Give it a try. Country’ll grow.
UPDATE: My suggestion is hardly original, but now I’ll go on Facebook more often. And here’s the site of a movement that gives you an up-to-date list of advertisers on the news networks (CBS news, in this link).
5:13 pm on November 9, 2016 Email Christopher Manion
