On the following page:
Psychology: Social control http://www.truthmove.org/content/social-control/
the TruthMove website says:
There is a dangerous tendency in US society to characterize the suspicion or study of controlling forces as “paranoid†and “delusional.†Instead, we are encouraged to simply “have faith†and not wonder about what or who is influencing our lives.
The often repeated attitude that “things are just crazy†or “nobody controls things†or “the world is just chaotic†is a particularly anti-intellectual, anti-questioning and anti-democratic perspective. This attitude seeks to unburden itself of responsibility for understanding its own world and doing anything to make it better.
I think it's important to avoid two opposite errors: (1) dismissing the idea of social control altogether and (2) assuming that EVERYTHING is controlled and has been planned by some elite group.
A LOT of things really can and should be chalked up just to human error. For example, in every news story I've ever seen on ANY topic that I've had independent knowledge of, I noticed at least a few errors and distortions, including things as basic as getting names and places wrong. There is certainly no reason to believe that all these errors are deliberate, let alone dictated by some elite group for some nefarious purpose. Some of the newspaper errors I've noticed over the years have involved matters on which it's almost inconceivable that anyone could have a deliberate agenda, such as biographies of nonpolitical historical figures. A major problem in the mass media, I think, is simply that many reporters are too pressed for time to do an adequate job of fact-checking. Too many stories to write, with too-short deadlines.
At the same time, the mass media are owned by people who do have biases, and, over the past several years, ownership of the mass media has gotten more and more concentrated in a handful of large corporations. Naturally this has narrowed the spectrum of acceptable views. And it is only natural that the mass media would be reluctant to discuss topics that threaten the power of their bosses. Also it is only natural that the CIA and NSA would infiltrate the mass media.
But this DOESN'T mean that the mass media have absolute control over all social trends. There are many social trends that started out as grass-roots movements and only THEN were, at least to some extent, adopted and coopted by the mass media. Examples that I know of include the late-1960's wave of feminism and the GLBT rights movement.
To help counter the truly irrational "New World Order"-style conspiracy theories of We Are Change and similar groups, it would be helpful to add some clarifications to the above page on the TruthMove site, warning not only against the common error of refusing to examine or believe in any social control at all, but also against the opposite error as well. Both errors have anti-democratic implications.