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Falsifying Or Filtering News For Promotional Effect

Ringo

Ringo

I like to not get involved in these matters
Joined
Feb 24, 2005
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Stockholm
The jist of it is, when i was at Uni in London, a project required sifting through tons of old copies of tabloid papers.

I began to notice a correlation between major movie releases and breaking stories. many summer and christmas blockbusters were preceeded with news events regarding similar if not identical stories.

Armaggedon with a cosmic near miss and end of the world type story
Jurrassic Park had a dino DNA story to help the box office
Jingle All the Way came out the same Christmas that blood couldn't get you a Buzz Lightyear.
Free Willy was pre-empted by a whale release in real life
I also remember NASA finding life in a meteor which co-incided with another movie. I just can't remember which. I also noted that these stories seemed to last as long as the movie did and then disappeared again.

Anyone else noticed news that serves a promotional purpose and then disappears as quickly as it arrived?
 
i suspect the stories are true it's just that their news worthiness has been increased by the immanent release of a film, after all there is a lot going on in the world that doesn't make national news papers.
 
though the theory that we're conditioned to what we understand and believe by movie moguls is quite cool.
 
Interesting point there, Ringo.
Is it life imitating art, or art imitating life? Guess we'll never know.
 
Greets

have you read Bruce Rux's "Hollywood vs the Aliens. the motion picture industry's participation in UFO disinformation"? Frog Ltd 1997.

one of those books that you wonder if the publisher ever read before sending it to the printers. wonderfully daft.

mal
 
It just seems like various people or groups cashing in on the publicity - which isn't always a bad thing.
 
or that media tycoons create news to increase box office sales is ALSO a cool notion. Tomorrow Never Dies meets Wag the Dog.
 
Hook Innsmouth, that's what I think, news is being created to increase box office sales, especially when you consider who owns the tabloid papers and their share in movie companies. Very Wag the Dog.

My girlfeiend just pointed out that we noticed a similar thing on TV a while back. The commercial breaks often have products/services which are being discussed or used in the programme. This is definitely happening and though it is just a case of strategic advertising, it is surprising how few people notice this.
 
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to."

Humbert Wolfe
Click to expand...
 
Hollywood makes many movies that just sit unreleased. May be due to too much competition at the box office or not enough money to advertise, or as in Collateral Damage a delay due to a disaster. If a news story surfaces that coincides with one of the movies in limbo the production company is sure to take advantage of it by releasing it. It’s like free advertising. It could be possible that a government agency has a film made, or takes ownership of it, then puts the stop on it's release, until the opportune time to help spin a news story.
 
No offence intended, but the questioner is sounding a little naive.

Some journalists are lazy. Others just have impossible workloads, and they have to fill up those pages somehow.

This is where PR (Public Relations) comes in. A good PR person will do all the work for the journalist, and present them with a complete story with all the facts and figures, the quotes and the pictures.

It may be a serious story: eg a charity launches a new initiative to raise awareness of child abuse. As part of this, they will release the story about celebrity X, talking about how they were abused for the same time.

It may be something trivial: incredible pics of tennis players on top of a gigantic skyscraper, just as a one-off to boost tourism in the place where the skyscraper is located.

And it does cut both ways. Scientists want people to listen to them about, for example, the dangers of asteroid impacts. Scientists have limited PR skills. A good PR will be able to turn what the scientists have into a good media story (quotes, pics etc). The scientists love it; the journalists love it; and the film gets some good pre-publicity.

Now, what you may not realise is that these techniques have dark origins and are used for darker purposes than selling movies....we're talking Information Warfare here...
:D :D :D
 
The other side is, of course, that subjects become popular because of books or films, and this produces lots of extra coverage,

I mean, even a respectable journal like FT has occasionally been spotted cashing in on things like the Da Vinci Code.
 
Yesterday (25/2/05) the National Geograhic TV channel had a documentary about Alexander the Great.

He was protrayed as a man who took power after his father, and tried to remove himself from his father shadow. To do this he gathered fellow leaders and insisted that they support him in a bid to conquer the middle east. A task his father tried to carry out but was unable, or unwilling to complete.

As the states of the middle east fall one after the other, he becomes madder eventually killing a good friend when drunk, after the friend describes his campaign as an extention of his fathers.

Today BBC2 showed the film, Alexander the Great.

This must be coincidence as there is currently no madman, living in his fathers shadow, trying to conquer the middle east.

However if I were Tony B, I'd watch what I say when supping a 'cup of tea' with my less than stable friends
 
Ringo said:
Free Willy was pre-empted by a whale release in real life
Click to expand...
But wasn't that the same whale? As far as I remember, the film studio or whatever paid for the whale used in the film to be retrained and released once filming had finished.

Interesting ideas though. As others have said, a story may get more coverage because of the film that's out at the time.

Also bear in mind the different release dates - Hollywood only really cares about the US market so a planted story would be likely to tie in with the US release dates rather than the release dates here that are usually several months later for no apparent reason.

However, you only need to look at the BBC News pages these days and you'll quickly come across some news article only to see that it's really nothing more than a teaser for some documentary showing tonight on BBC2 or whatever.

Steve.
 
There are three main explanations for this phenomenon and all of them are correct in some cases:

1. coincidence (accentuated by the human mind's innate tendancy to find patterns, even where there are none);
2. Press Relations picking up on useful stories and helping them along with a little kindly promotion;
3. the news being manufactured to sell the movie.

Explanation 3 can be considered an extreme form of explanation 2.

CASE STUDY:
A good example is the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Atlantis is a perpetual mill, grinding out stories, but the Disney/ABC machine didn't sit back and wait passively for yet another scientist or crank to "discover" Atlantis again. There was coincidence. There was PR flakery. There was even some "news-mongering"--the ultimate in product placement because you don't have to actually place the product--just pre-condition the brains of viewers and journalists, etc. to notice the product when the product IS placed.

www.andrewcollins.com

Have fun with that! It combines the story about the "lost city" off Cuba (a Fortean topic you may already be familiar with) with Atlantis: The Lost Empire

Disney and ABC went to work on a "documentary" about the Lost Continent which was, to say the least, not Fortean in its skepticism. Some of the documentarians complained that they were pressed to make Atlantis seem more plausible by eliminating contrary facts and opinions. This also made the news, which is why the case comes to mind.

Since the American mass media (and much of the world's media) is now under the control of nine giant combines (which are interconnected in a web of co-projects and co-ownership of various smaller organs), you should not assume that anything is a coincidence.

Mind you, given the often incestuous feed-back loops between various media channels and content providers, even unplanned for coincidence is not so much coincidence as a consequence of the interconnectedness of all things, particularly in the ravenous and omniverous webs of the media.

I believe it was Robert Anton Wilson or the Reverend Ivan Stang (Church of the SubGenius) who declared that the Great Conspiracy is stupidity. He has a point, whoever he is.

All these little conspiracies (which would meet the definition of a Conspiracy Theory scholar) are conspiracies. Business as usual is a great big conspiracy, all of the time. But the greatest conspiracy of them all is the way the world works.

Maya, illusion, as the Buddhists and others call it.

Other keywords: The Matrix, the Web, Small World Phenomena, the Kevin Bacon Game; Interconnectedness, Hypertextuality, the Oneness of All Things, yada, yada, yada.
 
LBD - I think you're overstating rather.

Yes, there are connections - all things are, after all, interconnected, or we would not know about them - but the process we see at ground level is all PR.

There is a connection between the Disney film and the discovery of 'Atlantean' remains off Cuba - the Atlantis myth. But the reason, as you say, for the documentary was to promote the movie. I don't see any stupidity or even Maya, just business as usual.

And if you think those demonstrations in Lebanon were spontaneous and unplanned displays of people power, you might not be right. :D
 
Spinwatch: BBC broadcast 'fake' news reports
David Miller, 15 March 2005

A Spinwatch investigation has revealed that journalists working for the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) have been commissioned to provide news reports to the BBC. The BBC has been using these reports as if they were genuine news. In fact, the SSVC is entirely funded by the Ministry of Defence as a propaganda operation, which according to its own website makes a 'considerable contribution' to the 'morale' of the armed forces.

In the US, Washington has been rocked by the scandal of fake journalists. The Bush administration has been paying actors to produce news, paying journalists to write propaganda, and paying Republican party members to pose as journalists. In the UK this has been reported with our customary shake of the head at the bizarre nature of US politics and media. Implicitly we are relieved that, however bad things are here, at least we are not as bad as they are.

But Spinwatch can reveal that we have our very own fake journalists operating in the UK. The government pays for their wages and they provide news as if they were normal journalists rather than paid propagandists. Normally they work in a little known outfit with the acronym BFBS, which stands for British Forces Broadcasting Service. BFBS exists to ‘entertain and inform’ British armed forces around the world and is entirely funded by the British Ministry of Defence. BFBS is run by the SSVC. But on this occasion no mention of Ministry of defence funding was made. She was introduced simply as a reporter 'from the British Forces Broadcasting Service' who 'has been embedded with the Scots Guards'. As one wag inside the BBC puts it, this suggests a process of 'double embedding', first working for the MoD and second embedding with a regiment. ...

http://spinwatch.server101.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=342
Click to expand...
And this article seems quite interesting too:
Spinwatch: The age of the fake
David Miller, 14 March 2005

This is the age of the fake. We live in an era where the gap between how the world is and how powerful interests try to portray it has grown dramatically wider. Virtually nothing in public debate these days is free of the virus of fakery. Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? Said by all and sundry in the US and UK governments to exist, their message was amplified in the mainstream media. Iraq has provided the most vivid illustration of the age of the fake. But it is only the best known. All over the world the manipulation of imagery and reporting occurs.

...

http://spinwatch.server101.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=341
Click to expand...
 
What happened with free willy was that campainers campained (as campainers do) for the relese of the dolphin* off the back of the publicity generated by the film.
At first i belive 'Willy' was bought a bigger tank to pacify the animal rights campainers as it was felt that the orca would not survive in the wild and the tank he was in was so small he could only swim round it in a circle which caused that flopped over fin thing. Eventully the orca did get released though but he made straight for a fjord where he would get something like the levels of human contact he had had most of his life and was used to. Willy or keiko as he was known in real life then died aged 27 after 2 years of freedom ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3315519.stm )

the Keiko campain and what happened when can be read here: http://www.keiko.com/history.html
They continue to raise funds to help orcas.

*facinateing fact: Orca's or killer 'whales' are not whales but in fact large dolphins
 
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