A culture of deception

It seems supposedly good people are engaging in deception, and don't have a problem with it. So when one interacts with people, will we start to wonder exactly how real they are? Here's just a few of the many recent cases that have made me think about this:

• The SST article today where they pretend to be terrorists, complete with bomb packs being walked into a rugby match.
• The old guy who spent years writing letters to famous and infamous people pretending to be a young boy with genuine young boy naivety and cute questions. The old guy was a reporter and made a living out of publishing the responses. Now he's released a book. Deception? No, just good fun.
• The people hired to queue from midnight for a Microsoft Windows release. It gets reported as if there are genuine Windows fanatics, when there are really only genuine marketing fanatics. Deception? No, just harmless advertising.
• A series of bad taste prank radio calls where pretending to be some-one else causes massive stress reactions in the callee. The story I'm thinking of is when a radio jockey rang pretending to be Immigration, canceling a residency application and giving the poor women, her husband and her baby a week to move back to South Africa. What made it worse (and excusable in their eyes) was that the hubby was in on the prank, and sat there whilst she broke down in tears. That concept of "approved deception" is now active all over the world with radio stations, and similar pranks continue to extend the boundaries of decency.
• I vaguely recall a fake marketing company was set up and actors hired to pretend to be sexist marketing bastards making politically incorrect statements to raise ire and eventually awareness of a new TV comedy or something like that. Deception? No just a bit of a joke.
• The very serious continuing deception of people posing as something they are not over the internet to lure people to their doom. That's obviously not harmless fun, but where it gets funnier is that every now and then, one entrapper only manages to entrap another entrapper. Oops, missed the real cultprits.
• Then there's the fake letter campaigns by lobbyists and political parties. There was the clean coal energy coalition scandal last year in the US, and NZ Labour party thought is was a great joke to write to pensioners in state homes and suggest National was going to evict them. The letter actually looked like an eviction notice, and alarmed many elderly people. We never learned where they got the mailing list either, for that matter. Deception for the protection of democracy? Trotter called other actions of the Labour party that were like this "Courageous Corruption". It's just deception.

There are many other examples I could probably dig up. Did I miss other obvious ones? Probably. Then there's just the dishonest misrepresentation of facts by the media when they want to push a story. There was a photo in today's paper with a caption about the Pope that was a complete misrepresentation of a story about the Pope. For those that don't bother to read the source information, it's an unfair way to attack a reputation.

But the media are a prime instigator of this culture of deception. If you didn't realise that by now, they've probably fooled you.