Spencer and Jeff debate juxtaposition’s role in media distortion, with Spencer arguing it manipulates perception by pairing unrelated ideas—like George W. Bush under a "Mission Accomplished" banner or Tuvia Grossman falsely framed as an Israeli victim in 2000. Fake NYT newspapers in 2016 and divisive memes in culture wars (e.g., gun control, abortion) exploit emotional triggers over facts, while pseudo-propaganda spreads misinformation without centralized control. Spencer warns against confirmation bias, urging audiences to verify claims critically or risk falling for deceptive narratives that prioritize engagement over truth. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm here today again with broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Jeff.
How's it going, buddy?
Good.
How are you?
Not too bad.
Good.
So I want to talk about a new topic today.
I want to talk about juxtaposition and media distortion.
So obviously, we're not going to cover the full breadth and width of everything that happens with media distortion, but focusing on juxtaposition itself and how it's used in media distortion.
Most people don't think about this a lot, although I guarantee they encounter it on a daily basis now.
Juxtaposition is the placement of two ideas so close together that the audience, the person that the ideas are being communicated to, is meant to understand that they are together and then put them together on their own.
This technique of dishonesty, really, is useful because the person doing the communication gets to later say, oh, I didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
I think in our lifetimes, Jeff, one of the most famous incidents of juxtaposition was done by none other than George W. Bush underneath a mission accomplished banner.
Do you remember that?
Yeah.
Well, he never actually said.
He never actually said mission accomplished.
And he didn't actually say mission accomplished.
But we were all meant to believe that he meant mission accomplished because of his placement underneath this huge banner that's banned the width of an aircraft carrier.
What's your first take on juxtaposition as a concept?
Well, I mean, like the classic definition of juxtaposition is like it's got to be two specifically contrasting things, right?
Not necessarily two unassociated things.
They don't have to be contrasting.
Well, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, they do indeed need to be contrasting.
Yeah, they don't like it doesn't have to be like veering into irony where it's like opposites or anything like that.
It can be just two simple things.
Like I can say, the neighbor is coming over.
I'm going to have sex tonight.
And you're going to think automatically, and everyone's going to think, I'm having sex with a neighbor.
Not necessarily true.
They're just two ideas placed side by side, and you're meant to think that they're together.
Yes, I understand the concept you're putting forth.
I'm just raising my hand and saying that it doesn't meet the Oxford English Dictionary definition of juxtaposition.
Because they're not, this is a philosophical exercise.
I'm looking at the Goog right now.
Juxtaposition.
The fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.
Contrasting is even underlined.
So I think that's an important part.
Contrasting effect.
Yep.
Well, in that case, even George W. Bush under a mission accomplished banner wouldn't really fit the bill, would it?
No.
Well, it's also unclear what they mean by contrasting, even in that context.
I would call those guys up and I tell them that their definition is ambiguous at best, and they need to do better because they're supposed to be the pros at this.
It's really unclear what they're going for by contrasting.
Not really opposites, right?
Just sufficiently different in some way.
This would not be the first time that we have boldly, philosophically strode into new definition territory of an old term.
So I don't think we need, I don't think we need to belabor whether or not contrasting fits with the point that's being made.
I understand what you mean when you say juxtaposition.
So I think we can move forward.
Yeah.
This idea, like I say, this is two things that aren't connected, and the audience is meant to understand them to be connected and then often come to the wrong conclusion based on that.
As in the case of my example with the neighbor and having sex, I'm not having sex with a neighbor in case my wife ever hears this.
Yeah.
So media distortion, we have way more media than we ever did.
Media is supposed to be dying, but it's not, really.
It's just less organized.
Yeah.
And less regulated, infinitely less regulated.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And I mean, there are a thousand new outlets that are, you know, imitating journalism all over the place.
And some of them are just blatantly lying.
But juxtaposition isn't really blatantly lying usually.
It's sort of introducing you to something that's you haven't put together on your own and is meant to sway your opinion some way usually.
One example I ran into when I was looking into something about this was an incident that happened in the year 2000, way, way back, 23 years ago, when we were already adults, Jeff.
There was a man named Tuvia Grossman who was in Israel and a picture was taken of him.
This was during the really, really heavy Israel-Palestinian conflicts at one of the big nasty.
One of the big, yeah, I think they call it an intifada or something like that.
I'm not that well versed in the Israel.
The second Intifada on September 30th, 2000.
Right.
And a picture was taken of him, what looked to be badly beaten, blood running down his face.
And right next to him, above and sort of behind him was an Israeli police officer who had a large baton and was waving it angrily.
And he was identified wrongly as a Palestinian in the picture.
And it led, and this came out on Associated Press.
It was in the New York Times.
It was in a few other newspapers, but I think the New York Times were the one that caught the most flack for this at the time.
And it led people to believe that the police officer in question had beaten the man in the photo till he was openly bleeding.
Yeah.
And of course, why wouldn't you think that?
In actual fact, outside the frame of the picture is an entire mob of Palestinians who had beaten that man who happened to be an American citizen in Israel visiting or vacationing or doing a time to study there or something like that.
And the entire story was wrong.
I mean, the story seemed to be told in one sentence.
And of course, that whole story is completely wrong.
All the context is carved away from the photo.
And it looks like something entirely different is happening than what was really happening.
And this is kind of what I mean by an image being used to change the entire picture of what's really happening.
The picture is meant.
Usually pictures are meant to enhance and help us describe and understand what's really happening.
But in this case, it did the exact opposite.
It led us, led the world to believe that something entirely different was happening.
Yeah.
And another example, I don't know why I had two examples that were related to things being Jewish, but it doesn't really matter.
These are just the two examples I found.
There was a moment about seven years ago where someone had printed thousands of fake New York Times newspapers and distributed them in, I believe it was in New York City itself, which is a bold move considering what they had done.
I mean, the New York Times is distributed pretty much everywhere and go right to their home turf and distribute the fake one there.
That's that's bold.
Which I, I mean, this, this is a time, it's really weird that they would print up paper newspapers.
I mean, it's 2016.
Clearly, you had the internet.
You could have just put a blog post or whatever, but I guess you can't imitate the website of the New York Times.
I don't know.
Well, and there was also a great fad in the teens for posting, you know, social media repeats of newspaper articles.
Having something in physical print lends a great deal of weight and authenticity to it.
Right.
So if you're, if you're a propagandist and you want to be a successful propagandist and you had access to printed media, why the hell wouldn't you use it?
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah.
It just seems expensive is all.
I mean, there's a reason why these things usually happen with memes is because they're cheaper.
Yeah, fair.
Which I guess brings us back to, brings us right to memes.
What do you think are memes?
Well, I mean, like, I also had my own sort of interpretation of juxtaposition when it comes to media and propaganda when you sent me your pitch idea for the episode.
I was thinking, as we were talking before we started recording, more about like in the social media culture wars, there seems to be this particular level of Schottenfreud joy that we take out of exposing hypocrisy in the opponent.
So like if you can catch the opponent in ideally in an act of self-contradiction, where, you know, well, on this day they said this, but on this day they said that.
And those two things just can't exist at the same time.
So look at how stupid the opponent is, is usually the thrust of most of these memes.
That's what I thought of with juxtaposition.
Right.
I think I see that a lot with topics that are extremely complicated.
Yes, it's absolutely desire.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Gun control.
Like all of your hot button wedge issues are replete with these sorts of memes where all we're doing is pulling snippets, sound bites out of the air to things that the opponent has said within recent memory that we can put together and highlight how hypocritical the opponent's stance is.
Yeah.
And of course, thinking about this, something like Abortion does have seemingly contradictory things all through it because it's an extremely complex issue, uh, both biologically and emotionally and politically.
Of those three, probably least sophisticated is the political angle, which is so remarkable.
And so, yeah, there's all kinds of aspects of it that you need to take with a boatload of nuance.
And of course, if you strip away all that nuance, it's easy to find things that are apparently contradictory about it and incredibly unfair.
I might add.
I don't know if you ran into this at all, but a few months ago, there was-uh, I mean, probably there's still other things now, but I got into a conversation with someone that I work with about he made a claim that he'd seen something on TikTok.
He got his news from TikTok.
He was so happy because he didn't have to rely on the mainstream media anymore.
And I already knew I should have shut down that conversation.
But anyway, he was so happy and he informed me about the things that were going on in the world.
And he said that our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, had built COVID internment camps.
And he showed me, he even showed me the video of these COVID internment camps.
And I looked it up later, and I was easily able to discover that the video in question was not from Canada at all.
It was from China.
And it was simply a video of something happening in China.
It's unclear whether it's some kind of camp of some kind or some kind of city.
You know, I mean, all you see is 20 seconds or so of what looks like a riot of some kind and some voice telling you that this is a Canadian COVID internment camp, definitely for real.
And you don't need any more evidence because you can see it with your eyes.
And I, I, you know, in the moment, in the moment where this man is showing me this, I can't say anything.
I'm like, well, that definitely is a video of something bad happening somewhere in the world, I guess.
I don't know.
But without being able to go through and look it up in that moment, I can't refute him, which is part of why it's said that it takes roughly eight to 10 times the amount of effort to debunk every false claim as it did to make the false claim in the first place.
And these sorts of things are happening at an alarming rate.
I give people shit all the time on Facebook about it.
And I say, why, why do you post this?
You know it's wrong.
And some people say, well, I thought maybe it was right.
Or sometimes they say, well, it doesn't matter if it's wrong as long as it still, you know, supports my political agenda.
Yeah.
Yeah, we've, we've talked about that before, about like it doesn't need to be right if it agrees with my argument.
Yeah.
The opponent, the opponent can fact check, sling the memes and ask questions later.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I don't, I don't understand that.
I, I personally think that the misinformation in our world now is in some way powered by every lie that's ever been told in history.
And of course, the lies that are told by the powerful people give it much more thrust.
But when you drill down on why a person believes something, it's almost always because they didn't trust sources of information.
And sometimes there's real reasons to not have trusted those in some other moment, but not necessarily in this moment.
There's reasons, there's definitely reasons to not trust Pfizer, but I still take the vaccine.
Yeah.
Right.
I think a lot of one of the big motivators of the sort of juxtapositional memes that I referred to earlier in the whole propaganda game is just it's it's straight up a culture war tool.
Like I really believe that like there's people that are just interested in that having you know working class right-wing and left-wing people constantly bickering at each other.
Well, and like these memes, you know, like when you cherry pick two contradictory ideas and hold them out there as an example of a reason to ridicule your opponent, what you're doing is dehumanizing your opponent.
Like the punchline is always look how stupid they are.
Right.
Look how unworthy of your respect they are.
Don't even bother trying to talk to them or understand their point of view.
They are beyond intellectual redemption.
Right or left, that's the thrust of the message.
Yeah, I mean, this culture war thing is completely self-pervasive and self-fulfilling.
Yeah, there's some notions that, I mean, there definitely was, and it's been well documented.
I'll provide receipts if needed, but it's been well documented by a few institutions that looked into it that during the 2016 presidential campaign,
there was a large amount of, you know, essentially memes coming from Russia and a few other coordinated efforts from Russia to just cause chaos within the U.S. electorate.
And of course, every English-speaking nation that had a large amount of people on the internet, which is really every English-speaking nation, I don't know why I put that extra part in, caught part of the shrapnel from that because when we go to the internet, we get the English-speaking stuff and almost, you know, most of that comes from the United States.
So yeah, that, and it looks like, based on what they found, you know, some people charge that they were trying to get Trump elected, but the findings seem to be more like they were pushing for both sides.
It's not clear based on the metadata that they were pushing for only one side.
It appears that what they wanted more than anything else was chaos.
And that's something to think about.
There's another reason why, I mean, we talked about it in our episode about propaganda.
I think I couldn't talk you around the idea that propaganda itself could ever be anything other than like a state-driven or organized effort from with from a person or a like an institution that has a driving goal.
But I think we came up with something like pseudo-propaganda or something like that.
And it, it was the idea that I had, which was that instead of planting their seeds for their vegetables in a row, someone had just sort of scattered seeds to the wind and they're just growing everywhere now.
And this is the idea that people themselves are just picking these things up and running with them.
They are just creating their own.
And there are, I've run into one or two, very small groups of people that coordinate and work together to create memes for the sides of issues that they collectively believe in.
Yeah.
And those people seem to be doing it for, you know, because they genuinely believe in the causes that they have and they want to, they, they feel that that's an effective way to change minds.
Whether they're right or not, I can't say in this far away.
But I mean, maybe there's, you know, if you can grab the tiller of a ship and pull it one direction, then maybe you can get the thing steered in the right place.
But maybe you just make the ship turn in circles.
I don't know.
And the other thing is that there's people who make this stuff up because they're trying to drive traffic to certain things for clicks, for other engagement, right?
I mean, we see icy juxtaposition a lot as well in clickbait, where they'll say, oh, you won't believe what they just said.
You'll have a picture of something that you think might look interesting or something.
And then you're like, oh, and then you remind yourself, no, that's just clickbait.
You're never going to see how that image relates to what they're saying because that's not what's behind that link.
Yeah.
It's everything other than that.
It's some other link that might lead to that eventually.
Like you can just keep clicking forever and it's turtles all the way down.
And I don't think this discussion is complete without one more example of juxtaposition, which is the use of music.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
Right.
I mean, we have, we, we accept, of course, we invite and encourage our popular movies to have music in them.
The heroes need to have heroic music that goes with them.
Indiana Jones has a theme song.
Superman is a theme song.
And when the hero is about to win or is in danger, the music helps us to feel that moment the way it's supposed to be felt.
And in movies, in fiction, that's useful.
But music isn't supposed to be for anything other than fiction used in this way.
Like music as a way to enhance a narrative is only meant to do so in fiction.
If someone is pretending to tell you facts and there's music.
There's like haunting minor chords going on in the background.
Yeah, that's they're not telling you facts.
They're just not.
Like, please, please, this is me pleading you, pleading the internet at large.
Stop listening to that.
I get into arguments on Twitter with people and they'll say, oh, yeah, but look at this thing.
I, you know, this evidence supposedly I have and it's something or other.
And as soon as I hear the music, I'm like, yeah, no, this is an obvious appeal to emotions.
Obviously, the idea that you can't even see it is just, it blows my mind.
And an appeal to emotion is not factual.
It's just not.
That's the reason why.
Well, no, but like you, you have to argue, you have to argue.
Sorry, I got to bump the brakes here a little bit.
You have to argue that like any media is trying to sell itself.
Like it's trying to sell itself with the story that it's telling, but it's still trying to sell itself.
So yeah, like the, I I understand the the, the hack job youtube videos that you're talking about and their obvious hand-fisted use of um haunting minor chords to impart a feeling of dread on the topic that they're opening your eyes on, um.
But, like you know, air quote legitimate mainstream media has been using a musical backdrop for their stories forever.
Well, they'll have like a jingle right, yeah?
And I remember uh, as a kid, CTV had a, had a logo and it had a little jingle and and they I think you might even hear that at the beginning of their news hour kind of thing.
And and I think CBC had their own right.
Of course, the music that I recall most vividly from the CBC was the Hockey Night In Canada anthem.
That went away sadly, but for those of us old enough to remember, if you, if you hum that at an airport, every Canadian over 35 will turn their head towards you and you'll know who.
Yeah, yeah and that's.
But but those aren't meant to enhance the narrative, right?
Those are like I go to the Onion and the Onion has a little jingle in some of their stuff.
It's just that they'll have an infographic or whatever.
It's meant to be funny and they'll have little jingle music that goes with it or whatever.
And that's my.
Some might remind me that the onion is also not telling you the truth but uh, or even pretending to tell you the truth really.
But yeah, it's just a jingle, it's just something.
It's.
It's more like a brand, like like a jingle for a breakfast cereal or something right yeah, it's more for brand recognition.
It's, and it's the same every time too.
It's not well, yes and no, I mean scary, it's not meant to be.
There are I I don't know how much mainstream media you've been watching lately, but like all the major networks, like when they do, oh well yeah, there we go when it's an editorial, when it's when it's you know um guest columnist telling a long story, with a series of crafted and edited cutscenes of whatever it is they're exposing or whatever story they're telling.
There's always a musical underscore to that, like it's it's a piece of media, but that kind of makes the point, doesn't it?
Well yeah, I guess they're not.
They're not really just imparting facts, they're attempting to engage your emotions with the facts, and that's what the juxtaposition is meant to do and that's why you know, I mean, when you go to read, I mean i'm i'm kind of being a little bit facetious here, but when you read scientific research papers, they don't come with jingles.
There's no infographic.
There might be some tables, but there's no music that goes with the tables.
There's no.
They're not even really telling a story, not really it's.
It's incredibly boring for that reason, and most people don't read them.
But at some point, more of us will have to, I think, before the end if we're going to make it through this.
Because in the end, I think we're going to have to be able to tell the difference between good information and bad information.
And we're either going to have to rely on the media to tell the truth to us, or we're going to have to get the information ourselves.
This is the do your own research crowd, right?
I, in lieu of all that mess, now I've come to find people that I trust online that are attempting to help interpret the complicated things about my world.
Things like hazards of COVID vaccines, for example, or some of the inside scoop on political candidate X, right?
I mean, you have to find a trusted source.
There's a lot of non-trustworthy sources out there, though, right?
If everything that they're telling you is something that you thought you already knew before you showed up, find another source, check another source, at the very least, because that's just confirmation bias.
Yeah.
And I think that's probably where we'll end this off.