When the Media Plant the Stories; Everyday Inception

Look closely during Election Primary season and you will notice how often the source of a big question about a candidate, or about the nature of the election in general, is the journalists themselves, not the public. One of the most clear examples of this was the “highly concerning question of if a woman can be elected President.” Articles like these would crop up all the time during the 2020 Democratic Primaries, and would generally take the form of questioning whether a female candidate could win, or “documenting” supposed voter apprehension about whether their fellow voters would cast their ballot for a female candidate.

But this supposed documentation would almost always take the form of the journalist inserting the idea, and the prospective voter, in a pavlovian response, saying that it “certainly is a concern. I would love a female President, I just don’t know if my fellow voters are ready.” Interestingly, this sentiment was a common theme among Democratic voters, with actual evidence or any instances of people expressing that they would not vote for a candidate if she were a woman, nonexistent. Whenever I came across these articles during the 2020 Democratic Primaries, I kept hoping one of them would lead me to these mysterious figures who wouldn’t vote for a female candidate, but was always disappointed.

Of course, this is not just relegated to politics; if a day ends in y, you can be sure that there will be a sports writer who will already have their story and their narrative written out, and after a game will ask the player a leading question to get just the quote they need. To be fair to reporters and writers, I can imagine how difficult it is to always fill the amount of content necessary and to get stories written in limited time while quite exhausted. This article is more to remind people that many stories, questions or quotes from people are not really organic; they are results of leading questions, or the planting of an idea in one’s head and making them think it was their own. Inception can be done much more blatantly and easily, and for more mundane reasons than we saw in the movie!