by Bekah Fox
We live in an age where truth is almost impossible to recognize. Every day, we scroll, we watch, we listen, and we absorb information as if it were oxygen. But what if that oxygen has been poisoned? What if the very things we depend on to understand the world news, religion, stories, images, even the voices of authority have been molding our minds not toward truth, but toward control?
This manipulation didn’t start yesterday. It didn’t start with TikTok, Instagram, or cable news. It didn’t even start in the 20th century when World War II-era broadcasts in March 1940 shaped public perception of the war. It started long before that.
Handwritten news sheets in Venice appeared as early as 1566 a small piece of “civilization” that planted seeds of how power could be preserved through curated stories. But the roots of manipulation stretch even deeper. Human beings have been storytelling since the Middle Paleolithic period 300,000 years ago. Stories passed around fires, myths written in stone, religious texts carved in temples all became tools not just for survival, but for control.
From the very beginning, media in all its forms has carried the same weight: the ability to influence how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we define reality itself.
As Malcolm X once warned:
“The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
A Cycle That Never Ends
Every century, every decade, every day the same cycle repeats. We are told what is important. We are told who to fear. We are told who to worship. We are told what success looks like, what beauty looks like, what morality looks like. And the more we believe it, the more it becomes reality.
Religion, politics, entertainment, economics, education all of them are filtered through media. None of them exist untouched. Every sermon, every headline, every breaking news banner, every viral TikTok they’re all part of the same machinery.
George Orwell wrote in 1984:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
We’ve been trained to hyperventilate over the same recycled fears: war, crime, scandal, catastrophe. The words change, the faces change, the technologies evolve, but the script remains the same. Keep the masses distracted, divided, and desperate. Keep them believing that they are powerless.
Colonialism and the Machinery of Power
When we talk about manipulation, we cannot ignore colonialism. For centuries, entire continents were stolen and exploited not only through weapons and armies, but through propaganda. Colonizers didn’t just take land they rewrote history, reshaped religion, and dictated what entire cultures believed about themselves.
The colonized were told they were inferior. Told their gods were false. Told their skin, their languages, their customs made them less than human. And those lies didn’t end when the ships left and the borders changed. They were passed down, reinforced through books, newspapers, school curriculums, Hollywood films, and eventually social media.
As Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks:
“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”
The story of colonialism isn’t just about stolen resources it’s about stolen identities. And media has always been the thief’s weapon of choice.
Race, Hate, and the Illusion of Separation
Racism didn’t simply grow out of human difference. It was manufactured. Black versus white. Brown versus Black. Asian versus everyone else. Entire systems of oppression were crafted by elites who needed division to maintain control.
From slavery-era newspapers that painted Africans as subhuman, to political campaigns that labeled immigrants as criminals, to today’s endless headlines that demonize certain communities the goal has always been the same: divide the people so they can never unite against the real enemy.
- According to a Pew Research study (2022), 61% of Americans believe news outlets intentionally mislead or misinform the public.
- Studies show that negative portrayals of Black men in news reporting are five times more common than positive portrayals, reinforcing centuries-old stereotypes.
- Asian communities have been scapegoated for economic downturns and even pandemics, with media fueling cycles of hate crimes.
We inherit not just our DNA, but centuries of manipulated narratives. This is why racism persists across generations, across oceans, across institutions. Because the lies were written so deeply into the story of humanity that many mistake them for truth.
Poverty as a Manufactured Cycle
Poverty is not an accident it is a strategy. For centuries, the poor have been used as both scapegoats and labor. Media has played a central role in this: glorifying the wealthy, demonizing the poor, and keeping the middle class terrified of “falling down.”
News stories spotlight welfare abuse but rarely corporate corruption. Meanwhile, the richest 1% now own nearly 50% of global wealth (Oxfam 2024), yet media stories frame wealth as aspirational, not exploitative.
Schools in poor communities are underfunded, while media portrays poverty as a personal failure instead of a political choice. This cycle ensures that those at the bottom remain trapped, while those at the top remain untouchable.
Gender, Family, and Generational Control
The manipulation goes even deeper into our homes, our families, our relationships. Media has been at the center of shaping how men and women see each other.
For centuries, religious texts and cultural stories painted women as property, temptresses, or second-class citizens. Media carried that narrative forward from 1950s commercials that confined women to kitchens, to modern “gender wars” on TikTok that pit men and women against each other for clicks.
- A UN Women report found that 73% of women journalists have experienced online violence, often fueled by misogynist narratives.
- Global surveys show that 1 in 3 women will face domestic violence, often excused or minimized by cultural storytelling that blames women for male aggression.
Families are divided, homes are broken, generations are damaged. Even our ideas of “family” have been manipulated. We’ve been taught to worship the “nuclear family” as the ideal, while ignoring the reality that communities, villages, and extended kinship networks have historically been humanity’s true foundation.
Politics and the Endless Theater
We are told politics is the path to change. But politics is often the grandest theater of them all. Every speech, every rally, every debate is a performance carefully crafted for mass consumption. And the media acts as the stage crew deciding what lines the public hears and what scenes get cut.
The left versus right divide is just another story, another distraction. While we argue with each other, those in power remain untouched.
As Noam Chomsky put it:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
Education and the Shaping of Minds
From childhood, we are taught not to question, but to absorb. Education has been one of the most effective tools of manipulation.
- In the U.S., 87% of history textbooks barely mention slavery beyond a few chapters, and indigenous history is often erased altogether.
- Globally, colonized nations still use Eurocentric curricula, teaching children to prioritize Western heroes and philosophies over their own ancestral knowledge.
Generations are raised not on truth, but on carefully edited versions of truth. And by the time we realize it, we are already molded shaped into citizens who will serve systems instead of questioning them.
The Cost of Control
This constant manipulation has shaped not just our choices, but our very identities. How much of who you are is truly you? How many of your beliefs are really yours — and how many were planted there by an ad, a sermon, a news anchor, or an algorithm?
We’ve built entire cultures on false information about what is really important. We are drowning in distractions while the deeper truths about humanity connection, freedom, self-awareness, evolution are buried under noise.
The media tells us lies over truth because lies maintain power. And every time we accept those lies without question, we surrender another piece of our freedom.
Breaking the Cycle
The truth is not hidden. It’s just inconvenient. The truth would free us and freedom is the one thing those in power cannot afford for us to have.
We are living in a world where manipulation is the rule, not the exception. But cycles can be broken. The moment we recognize that every headline, every sermon, every viral post is designed to shape us, not inform us that’s the moment we begin to reclaim our power.
The greatest revolution won’t be fought in the streets. It will be fought in the mind. It will begin the day we choose truth over illusion, awareness over distraction, and connection over division.
Until then, we remain what we’ve been for hundreds of thousands of years: prisoners of the oldest lie.
Written by Bekah Fox
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