Blog 9

In Chapter 14 in Persuasion and Social Movements, many strategies that institutions use to resist social movements are outlined. One of these strategies is the strategy of evasion. Evasion is the act of an institution trying to make its audience believe that a social movement does not exist. They do this by making sure their audience doesn't hear about it at all meaning they manipulate the media. Manipulating the media is easier than it sounds thanks to the fact that mostly all of the news channels, websites, and newspapers are controlled by corporations or licensed by the government meaning that they cannot produce anything that that their "boss" does not approve of. Because of this, many social movements lose momentum and cease to exist because when the public does not continually hear of something they forget it is even happening.

Examples of this happening are hard to come by due to the fact that institutions are so good at evading their audiences that we do not realize its happening. But one instance that this has occurred is in coverage of 9/11. There are many conspiracy theories out there that claim that the government was behind the attacks, but we do not here too much about it because whenever they appear on television, interviewers and reporters turn them down and barely give them a chance to explain their side of the argument. Over and over the tragic events of 9/11 were covered by the media but rarely did they ever show any sort of idea that maybe this wasn't what happened.

Today, its rare to find a news channel or media company that reports everything without bias. If new ideas are presented that are not in favor of the government they make sure to either tailor it to their audience (Fox News leaning right and MSNBC leaning left) , they shut it down on the air so that people think of it as a movement with little to no evidence, or they do not cover the movement at all so people do not even think of it as a social movement. If something does not receive repetitive media coverage, its very unlikely that it will be taken seriously by the people.