PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT: The Perfection of Propaganda

Until recently, I’d never heard the term Perception Management. The term originated with the U.S. Military after my time. The DOD formally defines it in stilted “Federalese”.

For those unfamiliar with “Federalese”, it is a form of English communication which requires the average person to read the same sentence two or three times, after saying “huh?”, to get the full import or meaning of same. As a matter of fact, I think I did a credible job of imitating Federalese with the first sentence of this paragraph.

Succinctly, I can sum up their 63-word definition in 13 words: Perception Management is how to lay modern, sophisticated “snow jobs” on foreign countries.

At least targeting against foreign countries was its original purpose; sophistication advanced beyond simple, old fashioned propaganda. PM evolved to the selective uses of truth, deception, operational security, psychological manipulation, misinformation and disinformation in such combinations as to get the best “snow job” bang for the buck!

Of utmost and critical importance is hiding or disguising the origins or actual source of generated PM. Even though it is a real weapon, albeit ostensibly non-lethal, any discovery or revelation of source combined with real evidence of intentional PM use would not only be publicly embarrassing, but the virtual end of the source’s credibility.

The way the originators of PM hide themselves is by using many layers of and varied means of communications and filtration methods prior to dispensing or, like biological warfare, dispersing the information they want leaked for successful and untraceable hit pieces or snow jobs. 

 

We should not care a wit about Perception Management being a military tool or even a government tool used in targeting countries hostile to us, or even those friendly, for that matter, especially when it’s in our national interest. 

 

What should concern us, personally and with enormity today is that governmental agencies, businesses and more especially, political entities, have wholeheartedly adopted and adapted the DOD/Military Perception Management concepts to domestically weaponize PM to manipulate and deliberately mislead us citizens!

Everyone knows public relations firms have been in existence for a long time to cover stenches with perfumes. But now some of these firms have been converted, co-opted or newly created to provide the Democratic Political Party funded by far-left socialist-billionaires like George Soros, other America-haters and miscellaneous ignoramuses with high-powered PM.

David Brock is one of the kingpins supporting the Democratic Party as their “Joe Goebbels” in charge of PM through a dozen and more political front organizations/PACs co-located in the same building in beautiful downtown Burbank, oops, Washington D.C. 

Though Sharyl Attkisson outed and revealed much of Brock’s dirty works and other’s shenanigans in her outstanding exposes, Stonewalled and Smear, she mostly investigated the who’s, locations and funding operations with some examples of political smears that suggested but did not really amplify the subtleties of malicious PM (e.g., attacks on Trump).

PM is currently doing a bang-up job of persuading people that Trump is evil incarnate, a racist, a dictator and a descendant of Hitler. Look at how successful PM has been in manipulating all those Hollywood intellectuals. What else, with his many successful accomplishments thus far, explain his low poll numbers? Snow Jobs!

Paradoxically as the sophisticated use of PM expands and is refined and redefined, we’ll all someday reach the point where we won’t be able to believe Dan Rather when he admits he’s lying, let alone what mom and dad tell us.

What’s deliciously ironic is that amateurish users of PM such as the New York Times, Washington Post and the other usual suspects we refer to as fake news (including CNN, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, etc.) frequently allow themselves to become easily manipulated pawns of the professionally skilled purveyors of PM because their biases and predilections are well-known and readily exploitable! Often it doesn’t work well since they’ve discredited themselves so much.

For example, the PM pros know that many of the Times and Post reporters are smug, arrogant and complacent egotists who tend to be lazy or purposely careless about fact-checking information, especially when the “information” fed them meshes precisely with their individual ideological and snarky bents.

The internet is now, without doubt, the main conduit or super-highway for the dispersal of PM by absolute professional experts at psychology, believable prevarication, invention of “fictional facts”, and embellishing, modifying and/or distorting truths.

Take a pinch of truth, add a large dollop of conjecture, and garnish with invention/prevarication and there you have a blogger’s dream and The Huffington Post to spew an “anonymous” or “reliable” source for fake news to puke.

Are we out on a limb? Who do we believe, what do we believe? The PM purveyors don’t give a damn about you and me. They are mostly concerned with non-skeptics who are easily manipulatable ideologues, the “What Me Worry?” clones of Alfred E. Neuman, people too busy with living their lives of survival and those closely watching Real Housewives of New Jersey, unconcerned with any realities beyond a cursory glance.

They are the real Perception Management targets because they vastly outnumber the thinkers, skeptics, or those who through osmosis and hard scrabble experience, like me, became Real Cynics from Somewhere.

John C. Frock, Dec., 27^th, 2017