My BF is an enthusiastic Trump supporter, but for the last several months before every primary he would sit and watch Fox News for hours, then turn to me and say, “I don’t know; I don’t think he’s going to make it. It looks like he’s losing.”
I would say to him, stop watching Fox then. Yes, they do shape our opinions, don’t they?
If you can step outside of and watch your own mind, even when you are on the lookout for it, you can see your own brain getting warped and morphed by messages delivered over radio and TV.
It works in several ways, on several levels.
One way; I used to listen to Levin every day. Now, I am physically compelled to reach over and turn off the radio when he comes on. I find that find that kind of radical. Forget the reasons, my point is the (my own) reaction.
Another way; I trade stocks very actively. I absolutely can not and make it a point never ever to listen to anything I hear in the media as far as influencing me to make or take a trade. It’s a mind-wrecker. I am definitely not saying I am always right, indeed I am frequently wrong. But trading is not about being right or wrong, it is about being very willing to be wrong and cutting wrong moves short ASAP.
When you surrender to that outside influence, you really do surrender. The folks who pay millions or tens of millions of $$ to get on radio or TV, they are not patzers. They have very highly studied and evaluated and crafted crap to crowbar into your head and they are very successful at it. Scary successful at it.
I believe the only way to combat this is to realize how freaking scary it is to observe how much they can warp your own brain even right as you are watching it, even when you are on the lookout for it. It’s very powerful. This is not an undeveloped science.
That's an excellent point. I rarely watch the news on TV but last Tuesday night, I decided to turn it on and flip between CNN and FoxNews for the election coverage of the Acela primaries. As soon as I turned it on, I got a pit in my stomach because everybody seemed to be down on Trump's chances to win the nomination and segment after segment was playing down his chances to get to the 1,237. I figured that they must have access to exit polls that were not favorable to Trump.
Then at 8PM, we learned that Trump won landslides everywhere. It didn't fit the pre-result narrative at all.