Note how crucial Authority figures are in the above.

The famous, and depressing, Milgram Obedience to Authority experiments proved the willingness of test subjects (~60% of test population) to (as they thought) torture people to death given the proper environment and immediate and personal positive feedback by an Authority figure.  The results of these experiments, widely duplicated because of disbelief of the results, showed ~20% of the test subjects (torturers) were willing to continue even in environments where the Authority Figure's presence was minimal or absent.

Group Dynamics and socialization affects the results in regard to (perceived) In-Group members.  However [from Techniqes of Persuasion by J. A. C. Brown, emphasis original]:

... most people want to to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they 'belong' with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations.

Clever propagandists feed these wants and needs.  They construct a Message inside a Narrative so as to provide simple answers, confirm prejudices, provide a sense of belonging, and point at an enemy.  They establish an Authority Figure to 'validate' the Message and Narrative.  They isolate non-conforming Narratives and Messages by physical -- not allowing access to media by those with alternative views -- and psychologically -- 'locating' those with alternative views in the Out Group.

And they are very, very, good at all of this.

By popular request ... Madness takes it's toll. Have exact change ready.

That's why this works. Humans are a collective organism, driven by instincts and tradition, but with no clear collective consciousness or goals - the intellectual equivalent of lichen.

Andrei Codrescu made a few insightful comments about the media in a recent essay. He basically said that study of the psyche and its reception of information could be ignored. We no longer need to think of the unconscious, he said. We are unconscious.

When it comes to the info industry, I think he's right.

Then again, information culture has always been gamed in such a fashion, from embedded reporters in Iraq, to CIA operatives working the top newsrooms. In fact, this was going on ages ago. I saw a presentation yesterday which proved that in the 1930s the Nazis were conducting psychological warfare against England by publishing works by top Irish writers who were critical of colonial policies. These were being published by established presses and magazines in New York and Paris.

That the web has had such an effect is IMHO obvious. Just look at the numbers in the US that opposed the Iraq war even before it started and compare them to some previous US foreign interventions from Vietnam to Panama. The scale of the opposition IMHO would not have been possible in the pre-web era until after many years of violence.

Thus: Au claviers citoyens! :-)

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

No one has really explained the six-month delay, or attempted to deal with the apparent lack of change in opinion or perception at the immediate end of the experiment's time period. Really important, I think. Until this anomaly is dealt with in a better way than just calling it "Letting their guard down", the whole thing has a shaky sort of feel to me.

Second, the McCauhey affair is legion, and not germane. She's just another product, for the same old market.
Throughout my life I have been surrounded with people who edit the available data and adopt the bits that support their prejudices. I've pointed out that major universities have lent themselves and their prestige to the project of massaging reality to produce fig leaves for plunderers and pirates-- take the Chicago school as a fair example. There was ample evidence available to debunk Uncle Milty- but he was a smash hit with those who needed to justify. Different process, a process that exists to offer refuge- comfortable bubbles of self-deception, in which with a gate and a guard, we might live comfortably on swap street...

But there are lots of people in my world who attempt to vet the sources they expose themselves to, who can (and do) disassemble a piece of fallacious rhetoric, a manipulative narrative based on hot air. Is this enough protection? Bruter's work says--no. Read enough crap, and the old brain becomes brown and mushy. But there's still a solution.
When a source seems unbalanced, tendentious, propaganda riddled, at odds with the lessons that the reality of DOING brings --then discard the source. Not an option in this study, --was it?
When an entire media industry becomes opaque as to finances and sources, dubious as to motivation,--dump it. That does it for the tube. (Deeply satisfying sound of crunching display panels in the background).

But what about reading the opposition, the dissenters alien thinkers, those who disagree with you? Is not that a valuable exercise, in fact an obligatory one for any truth seeker?

Nope. If Bruter's right, past a point of understanding the argument and discarding it, they rot the brain. You've gotta exorcise, refuse to feed that nasty little invisible tendency toward group-think that's so tenacious, by reading those heretical bastards,understand them ---and then savagely delete them, and the horses they ride.
So There.
Again, great find, Jerome.

Grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.

  To cite it:

  "His study paints a blunt picture of how cynicism, far from inoculating citizens to resist political persuasion, merely delays the impact."

  For lots of the very same reasons which come into view here, I've tried to argue that it's a mistaken self-delusion to suppose that, as melo put's it here,

  "i believe this... [* see below]

tv is a medium, a vessel, what you put into and take out of it is up to you."

 http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2009/11/2/91157/1637#74

   in response to a comment of mine where I wrote,

 [*]

 " To a great degree, these are all in part related to a high-tech-driven television/internet culture which eschews real extensive reading and thought.  

   Your lament is rooted in that, too.  So I wonder: how would you attack this massive and deeply-rooted problem?  I inveigh against television, for example.  It is simply death to critical thinking.  And the most common objection I get is from very bright people who assure me that they watch television with discriminating taste and judgement and, thus, almost entirely escape its harmful influences.

    They actually believe this."

 

    The real issue is not about the "content" of any given program, or its "subject matter".  The issue, it seems to me, is rather the medium of television itself and how it operates, in my view, on those who routinely watch it---no matter what they watch.  Thus, to oversimplify, there is no such thing as I see it as "safe" or "good" television.  All television viewing does the same things at a basic level and one's supposed tastes, discrimination, keen powers of perception, analysis, questioning, what-have-you, provide no effective bulwark against those malign effects.  

   It's a bit as though someone asserted that his living in the mountains at an altitude of, say, 6500 ft. was no different than if he lived at sea-level---that it would be all the same to him, no change, no differences in any sensations, any physical or mental influences on him from the differing altitude; in other words, his life as a mountain-dweller wouldn't differ in any significant respect from what he would "be" and "do" if he lived at sea-level.

   The only way for one to really recognize how television viewing is altering him, to discover how it effects him, is to completely eliminate it for an extended time and observe the changes--- of sensation, of outlook, etc.    If one claims that television viewing "takes no toll" on him, he should test such a belief by completely eliminating it---removing the set(s) from the house, office or wherever it may be that he usually finds himself watching television for some months.  That would also mean completely avoiding those places where others' are watching.

"In the interest of democracy, repressive actions were taken; In order to preserve democracy, repressive actions were taken"