by Jon Rappoport
May 2012
Q & A with Ellis Medavoy:
It's rare, these days, for me to get messages from retired propaganda
master, Ellis Medavoy. He's always been a difficult man. Now, he's even
tougher to coax out of his cave.
Nevertheless, because I'm persistent, I interview Ellis 28 times (290 pages) in my new collection,
THE MATRIX REVEALED. The quality of his information on the nuts and bolts of The Matrix is priceless.
Q (Jon): So the job of the propagandist is to make fiction look and feel like fact.
A (Ellis): Propagandists know who they're feeding, and they know what
morsel will be snapped up by these newspeople. They know how to shape
the morsel and color it and flavor it so that it becomes a drug.
Q: The memories of these newspeople...
A: Are data banks. Their memories are all data all the time. The
memories form their reality. INTERRUPTION of reality is the primary sin.
It can't be tolerated.
Q: What do you mean by interruption?
A: A place in the mind where a corrosive question or doubt is inserted
about the nature or character of a fact. For the regular human, this can
be dealt with, at least to some degree. For the newsman, this is like a
hammer blowing time to pieces. The flow is interrupted. It would be
like one of those old stock brokers, when he followed the
second-to-second transmission of stock prices by looking at a narrow
piece of paper tape. He'd hold the tape in his hands and read it as it
came through, yards and yards of it. But suppose the tape came out of
the machine blank for a few minutes. This is why some people can't
meditate. They're instinctively afraid they might come upon a silent
moment where thought stops.
Q: So to ask your own question back to you, where DO these newspeople come from?
A: They, at an early age, see power as the capacity to know "what's going on." They plug into that kind of power.
Q: It's strange.
A: It's superficial. It's all about surface flow of information. They
stick to the surface. What they're looking at, what they're fascinated
by is a kind of theater. They're looking at theater. I've known that for
a long time. It was part of my job to know it, because then I could
present stories that would get through to reporters in a form that would
have that theatrical feel.
Q: The players know their roles.
A: The reporters know, their editors know, their reliable sources know,
and people like me, who feed those reliable sources, are like directors.
It's hard to describe this, but there is a certain pulse and pace and
feel to the way you should supply stories to sources or reporters or
editors. You know when to go fast and when to go slow. You know how to
plug into their sense of theater. Their need for theater.
Q: So the addiction of these newspeople has a theatrical dimension to it.
A: Have you ever seen a junkie operate? A great deal of his action and
talk is theater. He presents theater and he wants theater back. The
newsman confuses theater with facts. It's all rolled up into a big
space. I've sold stories to reporters based purely on the theatricality
of my presentation. See, let me tell you something. When I talk to a
reporter, I know I'm walking into a theater where the play is ALREADY
underway. It never stops for a reporter. So I hit the ground running. I
enter the scene mid-stream. I don't think, "Now, I'm starting to pitch
my lines, now the scene is beginning." No. I'm intuiting and seeing
where he [the reporter] is right now, in the middle of one of his
scenes, so to speak, and I plug directly into that place, that moment.
Do you understand? This is the subtlety of the art.
Q: You understand his psychology.
A: Yes, and I understand his flow. I read the signals. Oh, this is Death
of a Salesman or Streetcar Named Desire, or Hamlet, and they just
shoved me out on the stage, and I have to know how to match the emotions
of the moment, where the scene has already been going on for five
minutes. It sounds a little odd, but that's how you play the game if you
want to win. It could be a very quiet moment in the scene, and then I
need to talk in a whisper. It could be the peak of the scene, where the
emotions are running high, and I have to drive right in and be there for
it, with my feelings turned on high, too.
Q: But behind that, you were doing something quite different.
A: Of course. I had my marching orders and my agenda.
Q: You know, it's almost like you're talking about frequencies.
A: I am. Propaganda runs on carrier waves. What are you using to
transmit messages? What wave? I knew my targets: reporters and editors
and their reliable sources. So I had to understand and tune into the
frequencies they would accept. If you watch the best television news
anchors, you see they're adopting several tight emotional frequencies,
and they use them to transmit, with their voices and demeanor, the news
to the public. They use a nearly perfect imitation of several things:
concern, objectivity, dignity, intelligence, with a bit of a rosy glow
of sincerity and humanity. That's the recipe.
Q: Imitation, you say.
A: Yes. They're a cartoon. They create a cartoon persona. A very well crafted one. And the audience is a cartoon, too.
Q: Why is the audience a cartoon?
A: Because, underneath it all, they know they're being conned. At some
level, they realize it's a show. So they pretend, and they do it well.
They pretend they're very involved.
Q: You can see that?
A: See it? I lived by it for many years. I staked my reputation on all
of this, on everything I'm talking about here. It wasn't just theory. I
went into the trenches with my understanding, and I made it succeed.
Q: You're talking about using your skills on people who report the news, who tell the public what's going on.
A: As I just said, it's all a cartoon. On both sides. Broadcasters and
audience. You may not like it that I take a hard line on the audience,
but too bad. The audience is faking it just as much as the newscasters.
You have to admit there are levels to the mind.
Q: Meaning?
A: On one level, the audience appears to accept what the mainstream news
is telling them. But on another level, as I'm saying for the third
time, the audience knows it's a fake. And why don't they admit it? Why
don't they say, 'I'm sitting here at night buying what I know is fake.
I'm watching the screen and the anchor is giving me the news and I know
it's cooked.' Why don't people do that? Because they refuse to look at
their own little drama of stimulation, in which they are titillated by
what the newspeople are giving them. They don't want that professionally
produced titillation to go away.
Q: You may have heard of something called the Internet. It's changing things.
A: Sounds vaguely familiar. Yes. The ground is splitting beneath the
audience's feet. I'm not a praying man, but I do something close to that
every day, as regards The New York Times and NBC. I ask for them to go
bankrupt. The Times is on the road to perdition and insolvency. If they
go, it will make an interesting sound.
Q: Is your blood pressure okay? You're a retired senior citizen.
A: I think I can hold my own.
Q: If you need to take a break, we can do that.
A: (laughs) Everybody needs to take his medicine.
Q: I can think of two or three meanings for that sentence.
A: See, I'm a little sick of people saying that the great unwashed
masses of very fine people are being fooled and duped by the big bad
controllers. It's a mutual dance. I knew that thirty years ago.
Everybody has to own up to his part in the cartoon, in the theatrical
presentation. I know the difference between real victims and fake
victims.
Q: What is that difference?
A: The real victims, in certain countries, are being taken out by
massive corporations with their assisting government troops and all
sorts of other support. The fake victims are sitting in front of
television sets eating sugar and tuning right into the frequencies of
the presentation of the news. They're frequency addicts, and I'm very
serious about that. This is exactly what they're hooked on. Why do you
think all this research on the brain is being done? To home in on the
best frequencies for the insertion of information. That's what we're
discussing here. But good newspeople already understand the frequency
game. Intuitively. They understand it better than the brain researchers.
And the audience needs that human face and voice to transmit the
addicting frequencies to them. It isn't just the old flicker rate of the
TV or the frames per second or the illuminated screen. It's the person
delivering the news. He's the prime force. He's addicted to the
frequencies he's using! He's addicted, too, and he's transmitting and
sharing his addiction with the audience.
Q: And what's the cure for this addiction?
A: The world is resonating every day with what humans want. Here is what
they want: they want to ingratiate themselves with each other.
Ingratiation. Acceptance. Those are the frequencies. That's the theme of
the play. Those are the resonating frequencies. That's how information
is built and fabricated to invoke belief and faith. That's the carrier
wave, the resonance.
Q: When did you realize this?
A: When I was nine. But that's a whole other story. Realizing it pushed
me into the work I did. It also rescued me from continuing to do that
work. I got out. You know what getting out means? It means I don't any
longer accept what I was doing, AND I refuse to accept the conditions
that made it possible to do that work. I didn't just get out part way. I
got out all the way. I don't buy the basic theme of the play or the
ingratiating resonance anymore. I offloaded the whole thing. You know
what? Tomorrow, if I wanted to, I could start a new religion. And it
wouldn't really involve any of the factual deceptions I used to use in
my work. I could start a non-denominational religion based, say,
entirely on charity. That's all. And it would look like a very good
thing. But I WOULD be using my ability to put out my messages on
frequencies and resonances that would attract people. See? That's how
I'd build my audience. And I won't do that. I know how to do it very,
very well, but I won't do that. That's what getting out all the way
means.
Q: You know---
A: I know a few solid truths. You can get people to sleepwalk from "bad
things" to "good things" and they're still sleepwalking. And that's the
real problem. That's one element of The Matrix.
Q: Scientists tend to believe in operant conditioning. They believe
people think and act according to one type of operant conditioning or
another, and there are no other choices.
A: That's right. That's the problem.
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