Absolutely. In the present context of the Western media, that would do nothing but stir-up anti Muslim sentiment. The public gains nothing by having that fact trumpeted loudly at them. Present narratives of Islamic extermism would be unchanged. It would do exactly nothing with respect to dealing with radicalisation or sympathy of some Muslims have towards Islamic extremism.

In the Western media, we are dealing with this issue terribly. We simultaneous split the ideology of terrorism away from Islam (i.e. extremists, who are utterly disconnected from the acceptable group of moderates), while presenting lslamic extremism as the only ideology Islam has, creating a monster which doesn't take the connection of Islam to terrorism seriously (all contained in the extremist box, envisioned to have no relation Islam as a cultural force) AND creates the Muslim boogeyman where anyone related to Islam is thought of as an existential threat.

I'd like to say I'm shocked, but of course I'm not at all.

In hiding facts from people you consider less enlightened than you, you only make things worse. Open discussion is the only thing that can help here. Not only that, but in trying to sweep facts that you find embarrassing under the carpet you disarm the Muslim critics of conservative and extremist Islam. They are the only ones who can lead the internal attack on the likes of ISIS, and against the spread of its ideology. You are suggesting that we pretend that the Islamist ideology is not spreading. That's not a great start for fighting against it.

Shouting out all over the place that a small but greater percentage of Muslims is not an open discussion. It's fear mongering with no benefit to the task of preventing Islamic extremism. We know about the spread of Islamic extremism. News of radicalised locals reaches us everyday. The cultrual connection to Islam is known. Information that X amount Muslims, a small group which is bigger than other groups, makes no difference to our understanding of the issue.

It does have relevance to particular in-depth policy discussions to dealing with radicalisation, or to nuanced analysis of the relationship of Islamic extremism to Muslim communities, but as a headline which supposely captures the nature of a great threat, it is utterly useless. Merely a detail some people will latch onto to "prove" how dangerous Muslims are.

And no, it does not shut down criticism of conservative Islam. Refraining from plastering headlines which characterise Muslims as necessarily dangerous terrorists doesn't stop anyone taking about problems within Islamic culture.

Indeed, I would say it is actually helpful in that regard, as the discussion doesn't become mired in an ineffective blame game. Instead of sitting on releaving but shallow accusations of terribleness, the discussion can move on to people talking about living with under Islam and problems it may have with its values.

As an editor I similarly might make the decision not to run with such a headline, for the reasons you state. But that's not what I meant by suppression. It's about context. What concerns me is the misguided liberal wish to deny the facts.

But let me ask: if it were shown that sympathy for ISIS and Islamic ultra-conservativism were significantly higher among Muslims than among other people, would you want to suppress this fact for fear it would cause bigotry? — jamalrob

I would not suppress the fact (if it were shown to be a fact).

Hindu India has a number of appalling social practices owing to it's religious-cultural history. Of course it is not the case that every Indian Hindu is responsible for the caste system, for instance, nor the sufferings of the untouchable castes. The Brahmin castes deserve the benefits they receive as little as the untouchable castes deserve their neglect. The caste system is a fact, like it or not.

Within the Muslim world, there are groups of people whose religion, social experiences, suffering, history, grievances, and so forth lend themselves to extremism. It is sometimes surprising that there are not more Islamic extremists than there are, considering how fucked over they are, by oppressors both near and far away.

Christian Fundamentalism didn't just spring into existence from a manure pile either. There were events such as Darwin's publications on evolution, new biblical criticism, secularism, modernity, and so on that greatly disturbed a variety of conservative, less-educated, socially insecure Christians. The fundamentalist Christian ideology spread, over the course of decades--eventually a century. It happened that a lot of the conservative, less-educated, and socially insecure Christians were southerners--deep south and southern California. It is factually wrong to equate southernness with fundamentalism. Many southerners (in THE south and in southern California) are not at all conservative.

Change may be the only constant, but quite often it is very destabilizing. Groups experienced unwanted and forced change quite often rebound into rigid, doctrinaire positions in order to resist change and preserve their core belief systems.

The fact that there are processes that produce fundamentalist ideology and perhaps violent opposition doesn't make it OK -- it just makes it comprehendible. ISIS has a history. History doesn't make bad things good, but it can be instructive.

No one can force you to watch, agree with, or listen to anything. I suggested studies that showed that people's values are not significantly altered by media exposure. For instance, people are not made violent by watching violent movies, or playing violent video games. Studies I saw suggested that exposure to political propaganda increased people's knowledge of issues, and view points on the subject, but didn't really sway their opinions of them. — Wosret

I think when it comes to looking at the broad cultural effects of media, it is a bit wrong-headed to rest our conclusions on being able to demonstrate a direct and (mostly) immediate causal link between the consumption of some media and an individual's actions. It doesn't really work like that, although, it does happen at times. Arthur Bremer was moved to shoot George Wallace after watching "A Clockwork Orange", he published his memoir which provided the inspiration for "Taxi Driver", John Hinckley in turn became obsessed with the film and Jodie Foster, wishing to impress her by attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Although even in these cases, I believe there is something more complex and pernicious going on that gets at the broad ideologies and values of a cultural environment, of which these particular films and individual actions are just symptoms.

There's a difference between saying:

(1) The media directly causes individual acts of 'X'

and

(2) As a culture, we treat acts of X as normal or natural because of a host of different reasons, one of which is X's frequent reproduction in the media in normalizing ways.

The type of evidence you're looking for is more relevant in attempting to prove claims of the sort (1), while we don't necessarily need a wealth of such evidence to prove (2). If we hold (2), we can say that 'the media causes violence' only insofar as it proliferates ideologies and value systems that reproduce inherently violent social relations; on a whole, rape is more likely to happen in a culture that considers it normal and even hides the violence inherent in the act.

The trouble with the conspiracy theories about the media is that the ruling cliques that supposedly are in charge of the conspiracies would have to be extremely and unbelievably knowledgeable to have enough insight to know how to manipulate 300 million people in the right way (for their advantage). They would have to know how millions and millions of people would react to a given story, and know the upsides and downsides of all their media manipulations. They would have to be unnaturally imaginative, insightful, ingenious, clever, inventive -- all the time, for decades on end. — Bitter Crank

Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, penned the following in his book Propaganda:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

Bernays was one of the principle architects of modern advertising, and a conscious switch from war-era models of nation-state propaganda and mass cultural manipulation through totalizing political grand narratives to the commercial 'exploitation' and 'channelling' of crowd libidinal energies by a corporate elite into a consumer culture. He used Freudian psychoanalytic theories to develop advertising for major corporations after working for the Wilson administration, and later working with United Fruit Company and the CIA in overthrowing the democratically elected government in Guatemala in the '54 coup, leading to a series of US-backed right-wing dictatorships that committed forms of genocide.

Many corporations and advertising firms still use psychoanalytic techniques developed by Bernays, in efforts to subliminally influence and seduce consumers, obviously now more modulated by empirical and statistical methodologies, using test-groups and so on.

'Conspiracy' has a tinge of the secret cabal, of a completely organized (and competent) malicious intent at the highest levels. There is a 'conspiracy' in the sense that advertising and what's prioritized in the media, and how narratives are constructed, are done intentionally by "cabals" (boards of directors, corporate PR teams, etc.). But the word 'conspiracy' also betrays the observation that power and its ideologies are reproduced in more autonomous ways, by actors and structures all the way down the pyramid. It may be the case that 'intentions' at the top are 'good', but institutions of information and ideological diffusion are still hierarchical structures, the narratives are controlled (even if in self-selecting mechanisms) by a certain strata who exist in a peculiar social milieu and moral universe. It is in this sense that the 'ruling ideology of a culture is the ideology of the ruling class'. It's not the sexy mythic illuminati with robes committing blood sacrifices to Moloch in secret subterranean Medieval chambers, but corporate suits in skyscrapers answering to their investors. Whether they like cosplay and exclusive clubs with rituals is of little consequence to the truth of the matter.

Crazy's watch movies too, identify with movie crazies, and emulate them. If it wasn't for watching one movie, and emulating their actions, they've have just emulated something else, a book, someone else they saw in the media, or get creative.

I don't find it likely that someone could be a non-violent stable person, watch a violent movie and then decide that those are super cool things to do, and then go and do them.

Sure, normalizing certain activities so that everyone's doing it makes their wickedness less visible, especially when regardless of the visceral quality of the acts, they're praised or shamed in order to gradually over time condition people.

I just don't think that I know of any culture that actually upheld cruelty, malicious violence, or unfairness up as ideals. I think that we are all capable of enjoying the misery and harm of people that deserve it, and it requires misinformation, propaganda, and the overshadowing of the visceral force of actions by ideological commitments, and rationalizations.

We're all capable of being mislead, and deceived. Engaging in tribalism, dehumanization, and wickedness -- or just being terribly wrong in ways that leads to evil.

There are of course institutions, organizations, and cultural influences which are wicked, and wrong, but they must not be distanced from ourselves, and seen as something those assholes do, as this is the beginning of their dehumanization by us. Saying that "of course they aren't all like that, but I suspect a statistical significant amount to be complicit" is to legitimize prejudice. It is by no means an unwarranted fear, completely innocent people are the victims of general prejudice every single day, and we must be just as weary of ourselves as we are others.

I just don't think that I know of any culture that actually upheld cruelty, malicious violence, or unfairness up as ideals. I think that we are all capable of enjoying the misery and harm of people that deserve it, and it requires misinformation, propaganda, and the overshadowing of the visceral force of actions by ideological commitments, and rationalizations. — Wosret

Our culture does it, and pretty much every culture in some form or another and to some degree of severity or another. The point is that in doing so, we're conditioned to not see such ideals as 'cruel, malicious, and unfair.'

Very few people with power (or otherwise) fully believe they're playing the part of the villain. Even Hitler thought he was doing good.

The problem with a mythical elite pulling all of the stings, and having such a wide influence on the unwashed masses is that these supposed elite didn't grow up on mars, they're just as much products of their cultures and environments, and just as easily manipulated by tall tales, and conditioning. We all condition each other everyday in subtle, and unsubtle ways, and no one is immune. I think that the socially powerful more so than the unwashed massive underestimate their own vulnerability, and overestimate their influence. They of course have the power and the means to scream the loudist, and be the most visible, and ever force compliance or complicity with economic, class, and violent incentives, but that isn't the same as genuine persuasion.

They'll never have the influence of good author, artist, or musician -- whom are surely corruptible, and even with the best of interests are writing from their own value sets, and dispositions, though in a far less conscious way than such corporate cabals.

The greatest downside I think to being too powerful, too attractive, or too famous is that you can say goodbye to ever hearing the truth again. The more people want you to like them, and the more risky they think that it would be to upset you, the less likely they are to ever tell you what they really think about anything. There is nothing more alienating, and shielding from reality than power.

The problem with a mythical elite pulling all of the stings, and having such a wide influence on the unwashed masses is that these supposed elite didn't grow up on mars, they're just as much products of their cultures and environments, and just as easily manipulated by tall tales, and conditioning. We all condition each other everyday in subtle, and unsubtle ways, and no one is immune. — Wosret

This is a central part of my point and I don't think it contradicts my view of ideology and control. The elite grow up and exist in an idiosyncratic social milieu and moral universe. They select and reproduce these value systems when operating the institutions of cultural diffusion.

In many ways "genuine persuasion" in the sense that you mean it isn't required, even though it happens. With the 'attention economy', the mass of endless proliferation of images and narratives is more compromised by the market and dominated by large-scale corporate structures and state institutions. By dominating the standard for what's acceptable, setting the frame (setting up the audience to view something in a particular way), and ordering things in terms of value and attention, they can set the limits of ideological possibility, order our conception of the world on a cultural scale, and delegitimize and isolate counter-narratives. Many people think of themselves as sophisticated consumers of culture and are incredulous to the mass media, but nobody can escape the influence of one's environment (especially, in my view, if they are philosophically illiterate, but that's another discussion).

It's a difference between Edward Smith the III inheriting his father's media conglomerate, and Joe the construction worker having control over..what, his Facebook posts? One can make raids on the consciousness of a culture, the other can get a few 'likes'.

They'll never have the influence of good author, artist, or musician -- whom are surely corruptible, and even with the best of interests are writing from their own value sets, and dispositions, though in a far less conscious way than such corporate cabals. — Wosret

The artworld itself is not immune to recuperation and compromise but is fully enveloped in this process, not just through commodification and mechanical reproduction, but also as a world largely dominated by a privileged leisure class. Our world is a much different world from, say, the modernists, where many of them were publishing in widely-distributed political and literary magazines (Joyce's Ulysses was first serially published in an anarchist magazine, for example). The author today now must navigate between large corporate publishing companies who produce easily digestible mass-marketed popular novels with editors that assume a large degree of control over content for 'profitability', and potentially not being read and persisting in marginal irrelevance by self-publishing or going with smaller publishers who do not have the organizational and institutional resources for wide distribution to compete on any scale compared to that of the big conglomerates.

But aren't you saying that they are in fact immune, and progenitors of the value systems and narratives in which they isolate and proliferate, rather than being just as much subjects and products of them as everyone else? They definitely have more power to influence than most individuals, but this doesn't mean that they are less susceptible to influence themselves. It's also the inverse of how things actually work, the proliferation of values and norms are bottom up. People adopt and embody them on the individual level and infect, and recruit others with them memes, which catch on because they appeal. At best all elite cabals can do is attempt to appeal to people in a similar fashion, concealing best that they can the direction towards their result that they aim for. The most influential powerful means of manipulation at their disposal is the same thing that is at everyone's disposal: lies.

Yes, corporate influence is indeed ubiquitous in art, but it is renowned for being overwhelming deleterious, and degrading of it. Lessening the quality, lessening the appeal.

Think of it like a giant echo chamber, with the elite having control of the most sophisticated and powerful instruments and sound equipment, and endless funds to hire paid parrots to repeat what they're saying, producing 99% of the noise. They can pick up what other people are saying, but when they incorporate it and rephrase it in a game of telephone, what they say will (rationally) reflect their own interests.

Yes, everyone picks up signs from their environment and echo it, this is vital for ideology and power to function in the first place.

They do listen to what's coming 'from the bottom', only to the degree that it's necessary for mass-marketing. Yet the 'people at the bottom' are also socialized in the same echo chamber, responding to dominant cultural threads.

Occasionally you get art that derives from a counter-culture (some group of people making their own echo chamber), or just frustrated individuals shouting into the void in rebellion. But their lack of resources mean that they are unable to translate these narratives into material infrastructure that can continue to reproduce them. The result is that much of it is 'recuperated' by the elite, or whatever dominant institutions are there to suck it up, chew it, and spit it back out for its own purposes (Che t-shirts, the pacification of MLK featuring him in Apple and McDonalds commercials, etc.). Sometimes contrarian artists are lucky to have their work picked up and praised by institutions, but only when those institutions believe it will be profitable.

Originally subversive signs undergo a process of pacification, institutions stamp them with new mythologies and auras, changing their meaning in the popular imagination to confirm or reinforce whatever processes they need them to.

Lol, no... I find your borderline deification of the rich absurd, and precisely the opposite of the truth. Wealth and power is what insulates one from reality, not the other way around.

I don't know what you mean by "deification of the risk".

And I would agree that wealth and power insulates one from reality, or at least a major aspect of it.

EDIT after your EDIT (or maybe I misread it): I don't deify the rich, but their interests and value systems are organized into super-human structures (that is, mass institutions, governments, corporations). Super-human in the sense that they extend their power and influence in degrees immeasurably more powerful than single individuals (especially compared to members of largely powerless and marginalized groups). This isn't a function of some inborn supernatural qualities of the rich, it's due to their structural location in a nexus of power.

With my ideas, without the level of wealth and material control of elites, I can maybe convince a few people. I can even maybe make a viral post that gets seen by hundreds of thousands before it quickly disappears like a drop in a torrential stream of information and images. But I can't make multi-billion dollar deals with governments and have my ideas instantiated in mass infrastructure that organizes society.

To me, the truth comes from these places of the margins.

Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, penned the following in his book Propaganda: — Shevek

I am generally familiar with Edward Bernays; I grant some truth to his theories about the relationship between 'mass messages" (advertising) and mass behavior. There are, oh, maybe a dozen different methods governments, corporations, religious leaders, parents, peers, teachers, and so on have at their disposal to manipulate behavior. There is modeling, threat, suggestion, leading questions and pat answers, limiting or distortion of of factual information, repetition, group dynamics, stimulation of existing desires, experience, personal fantasy, and so on. We are exposed to these various influences, having sometimes very contradictory aims, simultaneously.

Let's say a conventional ground war is in the making. A Quaker youth taught, modeled, and encouraged by his parents and religious peer group, intends to become a conscientious objector. The Selective Service Administration, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard will be airing notices about registration and all kinds of information encouraging youth to sign up with a particular armed service. (All depictions will involve similar nouns -- valor, bravery, courage, loyalty, service, and so on.)

The SSA and Armed Services messages will fall on fertile ground in many cases. Why does the Quaker youth resist these messages and register as a CO -- something that will involve few if any personal benefits, considerable derision from the public, and risk? Because there are competing contradictory messages, and he sides with those most deeply inculcated. The general's son will immediately sign up to join the marines. Why? Because there are both individual and public messages which happen to be complimentary.

Why doesn't everyone buy the same car? The same computer? The same shirt? The same dog food? Because there are competing messages, and personal preference is capable of discarding most of the messages as 'irrelevant'.

Much advertising runs parallel with desires that are independent of advertising. Ego enhancement, for instance, doesn't require advertising to exist. Someone intent on ego enhancement, however, will be susceptible to whatever enhancement that strikes his or her fancy -- and 'fancy' will vary across the board.

People fantasize about how to enhance their ego (their sense of importance, their engagement with the world, etc) and when they fantasize, they prime the pump for advertising. Someone intent on enhancement may begin looking at ads for $35,000 cars rather than $10,000 cars (new rather than used). Ads for big Macs (from Apple) may have more appeal than a generic off-the-shelf assembled computer that costs $450, rather than $2000.

Both the used car and the cheap computer will fulfill the individual's practical needs, but not provide many ego-strokes. The big Mac will be just much nicer. Especially if ambitious parents planted the seeds for high quality goods.

I'm picking up what you're putting down.

I'd add though that, while 'ego-enhancement' (and wanting to gain the most social capital or whatever), doesn't need the market to exist (and it existed in pre-modern, pre-capitalist times), such social drives change character and are conditioned by new social relations (basically, reordering the terms on which something counts as ego-enhancing or social capital).

As contemporary subjects of the postmodern capitalist consumer society, we're much more likely to see our commodities, our property, as extensions of not only our ego but of our self-constructed identities. Erik Eriksson of pre-modern agricultural Scandinavia is much less likely to have a crisis of identity (he knew 'his place', he's a farmer, like generations in his family before him, he prays to Odin and the gods, and so on). He gains social capital so long as he best fulfils his part in a larger whole.

With the introduction of the pressure of social mobility as a perquisite for social capital, we see an explosion of an invention called madness (and, I mean literally, mental and psychological disintegration). Identity is destabilized, narrowed from a relatedness to a community to a function of individual taste/belief, self-reliance and capacity to outcompete. It does not arise from the local community but a matter of patchworking and pastiche. We go out into the buffet of signs to incorporate them, to color our feathers and paint ourselves in a certain way. A function of 'the society of the spectacle' is that we're constantly concerned with engineering and patching our projected selves in the eye of the other.

Everyone's an expert on social media.

Of course Erik Eriksson probably wanted more cows than the other, and maybe even a bigger house and to be more respected in his community than others. But hoarding and lording (going outside of 'his place') would invite derision and social isolation.

The market seems to tailor to almost every possible desire and identification. But sometimes I think of how identity creation happens (at least in the US). Which usually happens in high school, and as we know, it is much more of a matter of falling into ready-made forms, premarketed identities with their own lines of consumption and associated commodities (the jocks, the nerds, the goths, the punks, the..well you get the idea). Identity-types that undoubtedly have a life in the popular media which instantiate their status as coherent forms, complete with sets of subculture mores and behaviors, attitudes, and codes of dress and consumption. The basic form persists into adulthood from this education in identity creation, basically the terms of being 'cultured' in America.

↪Bitter Crank I'm picking up what you're putting down. — Shevek

I don't really disagree with what you have posted so far. My main reservation is that I don't believe advertisers can jerk us around like puppets. I am not dismissing advertisers, PR, opinion makers, et al as irrelevant. They are not.

we're much more likely to see our commodities, our property, as extensions of not only our ego but of our self-constructed identities. — Shevek

God yes, and too bad, too. Too bad because the commodities come with a lot of pre-loaded meanings (developed by advertising, PR, etc.) so that someone is authoring our self-images more than we know. Google and Apple have some code in my self identity (even though I'm 70) and so do a slew of others. My self identity was formed long before Google and Apple were conceived, but hey -- never too late to update one's self-image. It might be VW or Toyota, Trek or Bianchi, polyester or linen, Buddhist or Baptist, Payless or Allen Edmonds, Kmart or Bloomingdales, blue chips or junk bonds. Whatever.

This isn't all bad, of course. Bloomingdales is a fine store and I am sure there are nice Baptists. Lots of guys like Ford pickups (hauls them to the office).