How Media, Business & Government Lie and Spread Psychological Warfare

What we believe to be real is the result of our information environment. Outside of what our own senses tell us, we depend greatly on the media, which answers to business, as does the government. Do business and government also have to answer to the consumers and the electorate? Ultimately they do, which is why systematic disinformation plays such a large role in what we see, how we react, how we spend our money, and who we end up voting for. Therefore, the control, manipulation, distortion and outright fabrication of information are crucial to the smooth operation of the machinery of war and power. A war such as the Iraq war is as much a business venture as is it anything else, and as such, it needs to be marketed to those who must ultimately pay for it, the American taxpayers.

"The key to understanding information dominance is to be clear that it is not dissent in itself that the US planners object to. Rather it is dissent that hampers their ability to do whatever they want that matters." (Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control Miller 2004:16)

Other objectives of disinformation campaigns have included, and continue to include; anti-drug hysteria, racism and anti-Semitism, capitalizing on fear through "tough on crime" political initiatives, and the depiction of various youth-culture, pop-culture and countercultural trends as harmful to the mental health of teenagers and young adults. In the case of youth culture, this negative publicity actually assists in the marketing of these cultural commodities, while simultaneously creating demand for authoritarian solutions among those who fear a changing world.