Who Tells Us What To Think? Is The Mainstream Media The Matrix?Michael Snyder, Contributor When you go to work or to school in the morning, what is everyone talking about? Usually, people are talking about something that they saw on television or that they heard about in the news. I dont know how many times over the years I have heard someone tell me some version of the following statement: If that was true we would have heard about it on the news. Has anyone ever said something similar to you? The funny thing is that most of the time I wont even mention something important that I may have heard in one of my articles unless I can back it up with a mainstream source, and I dont even trust the mainstream media. I know that the mainstream media often distorts the facts and often tells outright lies, but I regularly link to them because that gives my articles more credibility in the eyes of those that are still fully hooked into the matrix. In a world where the big media corporations have so much power, is there any hope for us? As long as the big corporations that control the media are dominating and controlling the conversation, is there any chance that there will ever be a mass awakening among the American people? Our young people seem particularly addicted to being constantly connected to the media matrix that is being constructed all around us. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article by Daniel Taylor According to a 2010 LA Times report, young people spend on average 53 hours a week watching TV, playing video games, and sitting at the computer. Facebook users spend about 15 hours a month on the social networking site. People are walking and driving blindly while texting, sometimes walking into fountains and even falling off cliffs. Wow our young people spend more than 200 hours a month connected to the mainstream media? But we only have about 480 waking hours a month to work with. If they are being exposed to that amount of continuous propaganda, what hope do our young people have? In the old days, kids actually played with each other in the streets and adults actually left their homes to interact with one another. But these days we spend nearly all of our time sitting passively in our homes staring at flickering screens. Is that a sign of a healthy society? We were created to be social creatures. We were designed to love and to be loved. But these days people love their favorite sports teams or they love their favorite television shows but we have an increasingly difficult time having real relationships with each other. Meanwhile, the global elite rely on the mainstream media to keep us distracted and to control the boundaries of public discourse. Most of the time, the mainstream media focuses on the latest celebrity scandal or the latest dogfights between the Republicans and the Democrats and they systematically ignore many of the more important things that are taking place out there. Let me just give you one example of how the mainstream media shapes the news. For decades, there was almost a complete and total media blackout on the Bilderberg Group meetings that happen every year. Top newspaper executives from the United States would actually attend these meetings, but then their newspapers would not say a single word about them. If anyone out there did bring up the Bilderberg Group, they were dismissed as wacky conspiracy theorists and were told that it simply does not exist. Of course now we all know that it does exist, although the mainstream media in the U.S. still mostly ignores it. In fact, this has been by design. The following is what David Rockefeller is alleged to have said during a Bilderberg Group meeting back in 1991 We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. Even today, many prominent journalists in the U.S. mock people when they bring up the Bilderberg Group. For example, Lawrence ODonnell of MSNBC says that he is way too lazy to look into the Bilderberg Group and that he doesnt know about it, so it must not exist. For much more on the connection between the mainstream media and the global elite, please see this article: Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Is Pulling The Strings. Instead of telling us what is really going on in the world, the mainstream media keeps us endlessly distracted. The following are just a few of the headlines that can be found on the front pages of major mainstream news sites right now College student creates condom delivery service Michael Douglas is feeling good Golf tournament delayed by kangaroos Rock n roll hamburger experience Lady Gaga cancels tour, set for surgery Wow those are some examples of some really hard-hitting journalism right there. So why do most Americans continue to fall for this nonsense? Sadly, part of the reason is because we have become so dumbed down as a society. Recently, the Guardian conducted an evaluation of the reading level of every State of the Union address in U.S. history. What they found is that Barack Obamas State of the Union addresses have had the second lowest reading level average in history, and that in general the reading levels of the speeches have been significantly declining over time. But it is not just our presidents that appear to be getting stupider. The truth is that our public education system is a total joke at this point. Many of our high school students are as dumb as a rock, and if you can believe it, 23 percent of all Americans cannot even read beyond a fourth-grade level. Of course the elite are quite pleased with this, because a stupid public is a public that is easier to dominate. When a large segment of the population can barely read and is accustomed to letting others do their thinking for them, it becomes easier to lie. For example, on Thursday Paul Krugman of the New York Times made the following statement Growing dependence on government is mostly a myth. Of course most of you that are reading this know that is a flat-out lie. The charts in this article clearly show that the number of Americans on food stamps is at an all-time high and the percentage of the population that is on food stamps is at an all-time high. Back in 1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a household that got money from the federal government each month, Now, an all-time high 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives money from the government each month. Sadly, the truth doesnt seem to matter too much to the media these days. The mainstream media tends to be incredibly arrogant, and most of the time they dont even pretend to be objective or neutral anymore. Fortunately, more Americans than ever are becoming dissatisfied with the mainstream media and are starting to seek out alternative sources of information. According to a recent Gallup poll, the level of trust that the American public has in the mainstream media is now at an all-time low. So perhaps there is hope after all. What do you think? 