Mainstream media corporations opening labs to study how TV programming can manipulate human thinking

Friday, November 27, 2015 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: mainstream media, TV programming, brainwashing

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(NaturalNews) America's legacy media companies – which have been hemorrhaging viewers and readers for years, not to mention revenue – have decided that, since they can't compete with the new alternative media with a superior product or win the ideological debates, they will resort to brainwashing the public into loyal compliance.

As reported by Reuters, TV networks are employing technology that essentially reads viewers' minds, in order to understand what programs and commercials they like to watch.

As Reuters further noted:

Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal and Viacom Inc are each opening labs where they will study TV viewers in mock living rooms filled with infrared cameras tracking their biometrics – such things as eye movements and facial reactions made while hooked up to skin sensors and heart monitors.

Viacom's lab, which is being built in New York, will include electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor peoples' brain waves while watching television. And ratings firm Nielsen Holdings, which just bought neuroscience firm Innerscope Research earlier this year, is adding facial coding and biometrics to its labs, which currently conduct eye tracking and perform EEGs.

This is just the latest attempt by mass mainstream media to manipulate and exploit the public for profit and gain, rather than offer a better product that consumers just naturally want. This new effort is a step up in technology; before, data were primarily based on surveys and asking viewers to turn dials in response to what they like and don't like. With Viacom's new lab, the media giant will literally be able to see how it's TV programming affects viewers' brain functions, allowing media corporations to fine-tune their programming to elicit specific emotional responses or thought processes in consumers.

They're blinding you with science

"The problem is that when you ask someone how they respond to things, they sometimes think about it or they overthink it," Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development at NBCU, told Reuters. "This is the closest to what's going on inside your brain."

The latest TV viewing technology includes streaming and the ability to record programming so that, later, viewers can fast-forward through advertising. Therefore, marketers are increasingly shifting ad dollars away from TV in favor of digital platforms. The result: Networks are now attempting to utilize neuroscience and biometrics as a way to target ads to better improve relations with advertisers while generating better responses from viewers.

"The experience of The Ad Council, a New York-based organization that creates ad campaigns for non-profits and government agencies, shows how using biometrics could help boost response from viewers. It has worked with Nielsen Neuroscience to test some of its ads," Reuters reported.

Most mainstream media owned by just a few corporations

In one ad test for the Shelter Pet Project, a program that promotes the adoption of pets from local animal shelter, viewers were engaged by looking at a mixed-breed dog playing with the screen and appearing to reach out to viewers. However, the part of viewers' brains that triggered memory were not firing when the advert asked them to contact ShelterPetProject.org as it appeared on screen, according to Patty Goldman, Ad Council research director.

So, the Ad Council tweaked the ad a bit by adding audio that encouraged viewers to visit the project's website. Though it isn't known just how much that tweak changed results, the Ad Council reported overall success over its entire campaign, seeing visitors to the website increase by 100,000 within the first three months.

In January 2013, The Daily Kos reported that a very well-sourced Gonzaga University master's degree thesis filed a year earlier found that "the American corporate media conglomerate in collusion with the government, has formed an oligopolistic entity whose sole purpose is to manipulate the population into accepting undemocratic corporate control over their lives."

And in Oct. 2014, Michael Snyder, writing at DC Clothesline, noted that just a half-dozen companies controlled nearly 90 percent of all mainstream media in the U.S.

"Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations," he wrote.

They include GE, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, CBS and Time Warner.

Sources:

News.Yahoo.com

DailyKos.com

DCClothesline.com