Who communicates what to whom, in what voice and why? Why do countless Pakistani people go along with what is said on television? Why are so many people impressed by the power of broadcast media? Media power is a crucial, although often taken for granted, concept. We assume the media is powerful because if it were not, why would there be so many controversies over its regulation, control, impact and processes? Audiences are often treated as highly vulnerable to media influence and too much ‘power’ in the broadcast media is seen as risky and potentially dangerous. In order to defeat media propaganda it is imperative that people understand how they think and what they believe in.One of the vehicles used to indoctrinate the masses is the usage of the television set. This is not to say that all things on television are geared to proselytise you. They are probably not. Most of the programming on television today is run and edited by the largest media corporations that have interests in politics. This makes perfect sense when you see how slanted and warped the news is today. Examining conflicts of interest is merely glancing at the issue, although to understand the multiple ways that lies become truth it is important to examine the techniques of media propaganda that networks are employing.Turn on the cable channels’ newscast: a few minutes of crime, hours of sports, random political gibberish, a casual look at the weather that no one is forecasting correctly. Is this what happens in the world? Mainstream media openly supports the interests of the commercial, corporate, financial complex. Most importantly, notice the repetition behind the lies politicians and their corporate media groupies tell us on airtime. We tolerate the unimaginable fallacies that are presented as truth not because they are logical or provable but because they repeat the refusal phrase time after time. No matter how ridiculous the lie, it is repeated often enough so that the brain does not know the difference between reality and nursery rhymes. Network programming, whether it is the news or drama, is geared towards artificially creating an opposite world and reality. With the proper amount of entertainment and sensationalism, we may even be living our lives through the television set. Instead, cable network news designs editorials about frustrations and fear because the owners, producers and editors now understand that fear sells. The end result is desired ratings, delivered like expected. The masters of modern spin understand that people like to be terrified. It is difficult to avoid success in the suspense, action and terror genres that have plopped onto the conveyor belt and are packaged for our glee and consumption. When editors found out that simply plastering a terror alert to breaking news did not scare people in the same way it used to, they began to kick up the campaign of terror a few notches with new and creative ways to instil fear and panic among viewers.Many anchors and actors are beautiful and research shows that attractive people are usually perceived as trustworthy. While the real news rolls quickly by at the bottom of our screens, the anchor works on the idea of causing utter confusion, panic and sensationalism in an attempt to score points and increase the television programme rating (TPR). The end of the world as we know it is being sold. Today, the media is tool of brainwashing and indoctrination, utilised on behalf of the owner’s interests. The media drums to the heartbeat of its owners, whose interests are nothing to do with the general public. They are interested in their other financial endeavours like more advertisements and TPR. Conflicts of interest are monumental with the poor regulation of the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA). The lines are now blurred between one network’s coverage of the political issue and the other.If we come to the conclusion that the media is intentionally misleading us, we can exercise the principles of problem, reaction and solution. This prescription takes a problem by either creating it or allowing it to happen and presenting that to the population. It could be terrorism, molestation, kidnapping or political atrocities. These topics create fear; no one in their right mind would support terrorism or crime but they are allowed to storm the television, the papers and radio. The natural reaction from the people is a request for more control to ensure more safety. At the same time, so-called journalists are cogs in a much larger machine, who know that if they report a story that paints the government in a dark light, it is likely to remain on air and on the front page, increasing TPR.The reason our airwaves are drenched with general trash talk is because it is selling. In the meantime, a large number of our children, young adults and older audiences are copying what they see and hear because the current ‘norm’ is selling this behaviour as cool or chic. When this is the norm, everything else seems either bizarre or uninteresting to the common man’s attention span, which is decreasing by the day. Imagine, if the producer on a network got away with a cover story exposing government corruption at the highest levels, chances are the large impact necessary would not be realised because the common viewer’s brain has already been conditioned to regularly seek out breaking news.We share a world where the majority give their minds away to the official version of an event. It is a world in which the prosecutor and the judge sit on the same side of the bench. The most obvious reason behind why our minds are being controlled on a massive scale psychologically is because our culture has been conditioned incriminatingly to television, radio and paper. We are given the world’s reality through a screen, ink or radio waves. We must recognise the truth behind why the system is fallacious and disenfranchise ourselves if we wish to beat it. The most important solution to resisting this type of indoctrination and mind control is to start with ourselves and our own awakening in the smaller things. Fighting and arguing with people on talk shows and forcing them to understand self-perceived ‘truth’ is not a solution. If our collective free will created this nightmare, than only our collective free will change it. The fracas begins in the heart and mind of the beholder and then extends outward from there, only to stop for those open to genuine criticism. The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com