Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

How much is your view of the world shaped by what you see on television?

On average, Americans spend more than 150 hours watching television every month, and it is called “programming” for a reason. If you allow anyone to pour ideas and information into your mind for five hours a day, it is going to change how you look at reality. Everyone has an agenda, and every single news program, television show and movie is trying to alter your views. Sadly, our society has become absolutely addicted to media, and the mainstream media is completely dominated by the elite.

In fact, about 90 percent of the programming that comes through your television is controlled by just 6 gigantic media corporations. Most of us are willingly plugging ourselves into this “propaganda matrix” that is completely dominated by the elite for several hours each day, and that gives them an enormous amount of power over the rest of us.

In Part I and Part II of this series, I discussed how the elite use money as a tool to dominate the planet. Today, we are going to talk about how they use information. If you control what people think, then you control a society. And through their vast media empires, the elite are able to shape how we all think to a frightening degree.

Just think about it. What do we talk about with our family, our friends and our co-workers? To a large extent, those conversations are about movies, television shows, something that we just saw on the news or a sporting event that just took place. The reason why we talk about certain things is because the mainstream media gives those things attention, and other things we ignore because the mainstream media does not make them seem to be important.

The mainstream media literally sets the agenda for our society, and it would be difficult to overstate the power that is in their hands. And as I mentioned above, the mainstream media is almost entirely controlled by just 6 colossal corporations. The following list of these 6 corporate giants comes from one of my previous articles, and this is just a sampling of the media properties that they each own…

Comcast

NBC

Telemundo

Universal Pictures

Focus Features

USA Network

Bravo

CNBC

The Weather Channel

MSNBC

Syfy

NBCSN

Golf Channel

Esquire Network

E!

Cloo

Chiller

Universal HD

Comcast SportsNet

Universal Parks & Resorts

Universal Studio Home Video

The Walt Disney Company

ABC Television Network

ESPN

The Disney Channel

A&E

Lifetime

Marvel Entertainment

Lucasfilm

Walt Disney Pictures

Pixar Animation Studios

Disney Mobile

Disney Consumer Products

Interactive Media

Disney Theme Parks

Disney Records

Hollywood Records

Miramax Films

Touchstone Pictures

News Corporation

Fox Broadcasting Company

Fox News Channel

Fox Business Network

Fox Sports 1

Fox Sports 2

National Geographic

Nat Geo Wild

FX

FXX

FX Movie Channel

Fox Sports Networks

The Wall Street Journal

The New York Post

Barron’s

SmartMoney

HarperCollins

20th Century Fox

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Blue Sky Studios

Beliefnet

Zondervan

Time Warner

CNN

The CW

HBO

Cinemax

Cartoon Network

HLN

NBA TV

TBS

TNT

TruTV

Turner Classic Movies

Warner Bros.

Castle Rock

DC Comics

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

New Line Cinema

Sports Illustrated

Fortune

Marie Claire

People Magazine

Viacom

MTV

Nickelodeon

VH1

BET

Comedy Central

Paramount Pictures

Paramount Home Entertainment

Country Music Television (CMT)

Spike TV

The Movie Channel

TV Land

CBS Corporation

CBS Television Network

The CW (along with Time Warner)

CBS Sports Network

Showtime

TVGN

CBS Radio, Inc.

CBS Television Studios

Simon & Schuster

Infinity Broadcasting

Westwood One Radio Network

If nobody tuned in to their “programming”, they would not have any power over us.

But according to a report put out by Nielsen, Americans are plugging into “the matrix” more than ever before. The following is how our daily use of media breaks down by device…

Live TV: 4 hours, 31 minutes

Time-Shifted TV: 33 minutes

Radio: 1 hour, 52 minutes

DVDs: 8 minutes

Video Game Consoles: 14 minutes

Multimedia Devices (Apple TV, Roku, etc.): 13 minutes

Internet on PC: 58 minutes

Smartphone: 1 hour, 39 minutes

Tablet: 31 minutes

When you total those numbers up, it comes to 10 hours and 39 minutes.

In essence, Americans are spending most of their waking hours plugged in to something.

And if you only add together “live television” and “time-shifted television”, Americans are spending an average of more than five hours each day just watching television.

Of course many of us spend countless hours on the Internet as well. It has been estimated that 54,907 Google searches are conducted, 7,252 tweets are posted, 125,406 YouTube videos are viewed, and 2,501,018 emails are sent out every single second.

You may have guessed this already, but most of the news and information that we consume on the Internet is also controlled by the elite…

Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found. The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.

This is why the “alternative media” is so important. All over America and all over the world, people are waking up and realizing that they aren’t getting the truth from the mainstream media, and they are hungry for truly independent sources of information.

The only way that we are ever going to be able to throw off the insidious system of control that the elite have established is by winning the information war. We are literally in a constant battle for hearts and minds, and the good news is that we have made a lot of progress. Over the past decade we have “red pilled” millions upon millions of people, but we still have a long way to go.

Faith in the corporate media is dwindling, and the elite are deeply concerned about this.

The Internet has allowed ordinary people like us to communicate on a mass scale, and this has never been the case before in human history. We have a window of opportunity to fight back against the elite, and we must not let this opportunity pass us by.

We are literally engaged in a battle for the future of this planet, and let us never waver in our pursuit of victory.

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Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.