The Puppet Master: How Manipulation is Used in Media

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In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the Netflix docu-series, “The Puppet Master.” Specifically, they dissect the methods of manipulation the “ultimate conman” used to explain the events that led to his eventual release after his arrest. The two elaborate further on how the media uses language and communication to manipulate its audiences. They cite the recent incident between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz as a prime albeit more nuanced example. Tune in for an interesting conversation that tackles how news outlets are now putting emphasis on high ratings versus integrity.



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The Puppet Master: How Manipulation is Used in Media

Bill, it is amazing sometimes to see how some people are able to influence others to the point of complete alternate reality. That would be a great thing to talk about. I know we have a few examples to cite here and refer to.

It is such an interesting thing because manipulation is a word that has a very strong vibration to it. The vibration of the word is that somebody is doing something to another person at that person's expense and then creates a victim on the other side. The safest and most effective way to talk about manipulation is the loss of choice. The person loses choice. Does it realize that the other person is benefiting from that person's loss of choice?

It is because this is a language show that we need to learn how to catch ourselves using words. I will keep framing the word choice right after the word manipulation so that it does not grab the energy and take it into blaming and helplessness because that is what winds up happening with certain words. For example, people will say the phrase, "I felt manipulated by." That is not a true sentence because being manipulated is not a feeling. It is a mental construction of what somebody is doing to us or doing to a person.

As somebody that listens as a mediator and listens to people communicate, when somebody says, "I felt manipulated by that boyfriend or girlfriend. That person is such a manipulator," they have no idea that when they are saying it in that way, they are giving up their advocacy and choice. As soon as you blame others, what happens is you are molecularly tied to that person through the word manipulation. You do not know that is what is happening. People say, "No, I am not." The answer is you are defending them now.

How did you do that? If you say, "No, I am not," and you are not even looking at the power of language, you think you can override your subconscious mind and logical mind and things that can do that. Have you ever been in your own body and walked through a kitchen with a plate full of cookies? Your subconscious mind will take hold of you at any time. That is the challenge with manipulation and messaging. You watched a TV show about that. Tell the readers a little bit about that because that was fascinating. I have not seen it yet but I am looking forward to it.

It came out here in January 2022. It is a Netflix docuseries with three episodes. It is not that long and not even three full hours' worth of content. It is an amazing true story shared in this documentary called The Puppet Master. The phrase puppet master is the person pulling the strings of the marionette and controlling the situation. I will try and sum it up pretty quickly. It is a man in Great Britain beginning in his late teens or about twenty years old at college using his skills in language and manipulation. As you watch this story, it is about the loss of choice of these people that are his victims.

It is starting in the early '90s and then stretching through even nowadays. There are several different key stories that the documentary takes you through him manipulating at different times 2 or 3 different groups of people and individuals. You learn as the investigation happens. Eventually, the guy is caught in the early 2000s, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in the UK. He appeals that conviction, wins, and is still out doing the same thing he has been doing, which has been bilking millions of dollars from his victims and not just money.

If this was a con artist taking money from people, that is one thing. This is someone who has been manipulating person after person and these poor people for ten years, not having control over their own lives. I know this may sound hard to believe to our readers. It is like, "Who can do that? Who can make someone do things against their will for a period of ten years or more, person after person and victim after victim?" It is so shocking and sad at the same time, which is why it makes for a good documentary and television.

From the outside, you are observing it and seeing, "How could this person believe or let this person do this?" When there is the investment of, "I care about this other person. This person needs my help. I am loyal to this person. I love this person. This person said this and this is meaningful to me," the puppet master or the person that is in that position is using language similar to putting bait on a fish hook.

What they do with language is they throw it in front of the person, "They did not bite on that sentence. They bit on that sentence. I am going to give this person those kinds of sentences because they are going to bite on that sentence. They will do what I would like them to do." They are using that sentence as bait on the hook. That person says, "Something my father never gave me was the acknowledgment that I need. This is what my mom never gave me. It is the encouragement that I needed." He figures out which one to use. 



This is where it gets a little bit dicey because this is happening in different levels from the range of pathology, which is where this person is doing it at the extreme expense of others, to modestly motivate somebody to do something, like a football coach on a football team trying to get his players to play harder and saying things to inspire them to do well.

The light version is, "Could you bring me that dish from the sink and put it in the dishwasher? It would make a difference." The person/child is not giving up their choice. You are trying to give them a good reason to take their cereal dish from the table and put it in the dishwasher because that is what responsibility is. You want to give them a good reason.

Is that manipulation or a moment of accountability? It is a moment of accountability, but you can see now that there is a range from the way I have described that. Where does society step in and say, "Where does the line of pathology step in?" If a court is putting this person in prison for life and some court goes, "This person is a danger to others," and through some legal technicality, this person gets off, is out and is ripping off people, did the law of the land protect its people?

You are going to love this one. This one is going to blow your communications mind. Keep in mind this person was tried and convicted. The conviction was overturned in the British Court of Law. It is British Law, which I do not understand. I am not even a lawyer in the United States. Certainly, from a lot of things, we tend to understand our laws in the US of what is legal and what is not. It becomes more complicated in another country.

He was convicted under a law, which was something about false imprisonment over people that he had manipulated and was keeping under his control. His attorneys argued that the people that were his purported victims were free to leave at any time. He was not locking them up in a room, chaining them to a radiator in the room, and physically restraining them. They were free to go at any time. Therefore, he was not guilty of this false imprisonment.

This is what we are talking about in this show. Communication and words can be weaponized and be as powerful to restrain someone as physical restraints can. It is because of the way the law was written and people were not physically restrained that he got off after spending a few years in jail. This appeal took a while. He gets back out and goes right back to what he had been doing that got him in legal and criminal justice trouble in the first place. It is mind-blowing.

The laws are to protect people and individual rights. If those people want to be taken advantage of, what does society do to protect them? There is a whole bunch of people on the planet that goes like, "That is too bad. If they are so 'weak-minded,' why does the law have to protect weak-minded people?" There are no ethics or morals to that.

You are going to start to push one of my buttons. Weak-minded people know ethics or morals. To me, there is not a very big leap from what this puppet master did to his people. I know our readers are not going to understand the details of this until they watch this Netflix docuseries. We are talking about verbal manipulation to the extreme. I do not see a big difference between that and what Tucker Carlson did on his show to Ted Cruz after he was berated by Tucker Carlson for saying on the Senate floor that the January 6th, 2021 mob and insurrectionists were terrorists. That word set Tucker Carlson off. He was abusive on his own show to Ted Cruz like an abusive parent would be, it seemed.

He did not know what to do. He went to apologize and did this. He became weak. It was the new version of Lindsey Graham's flip-flopping of, "I am this, then I am not." You are being as moldy as a piece of clay. All you got to do is squish this, and then you are disjointed over there. It is very tough because people do not understand that language has a vibration to it. There is physics to it. If I use words, the vibration of the word hits your ear like it is hitting these readers. The vibration then changes the physiology of the person so that the physiology then adjusts to the word. Tom, you have favorite ice cream. What is your favorite ice cream?

For me, it is Ben & Jerry's Strawberry Cheesecake.

As soon as we start talking about Ben & Jerry's Strawberry Cheesecake, then that strawberry cheesecake is like this and that, notice how the vibration of Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz is out. Your cells started changing. Your physiology started to lighten up. You felt delighted about this cheesecake because I am talking about a different vibrational thought. The vibration changed inside your body by changing the topic to ice cream.



One of the things that are happening in media, especially polarized media, is that the person keeps coming back to that negative message. They want to hear the doom and gloom, "If it bleeds, it leads. If it is more egregious, I am going to listen to it." What happens is we, as listeners, say, "Does the end justify the mean?" The end for messaging is engagement at any cost.

It is not just engagement at any cost. Sticking with Tucker Carlson is engagement at any cost but it is also engagement to serve a purpose for a specific agenda. It does come back to this manipulation word you used. We have, in a court proceeding, Tucker Carlson being defended in court. His own lawyers argued to the judge successfully that the things that Tucker Carlson says on his show, no "reasonable" person would believe what Tucker Carlson says on his own show is true.

That is a shocking and scary honesty coming out of a courtroom that says, "Tucker Carlson is a form of puppet master himself," and to an extent, many of the shows on the Fox News network. I am going to get a lot of pushback on that. This is scary. You use the word propaganda a lot on this show. It seems we are right there in our media.

News to be sold as a product of entertainment is something that we and many businessmen have realized is valuable property. You can sell news as entertainment. The funny part of our society has moved to the emphasis on when something has a high rating. It means that it is valuable and right. It is valuable to the advertisers but it is not valuable to the listeners and the country. It is valuable to the messenger because that is engagement. Former President Donald Trump would say, "Look at CNN ratings. They are boring. They have low ratings."

They have low ratings because they are not trying to sell and message as much as other entertainment-first and news-second. They are doing news and facts first, trying to keep the engaged person to come to the next show, and staying away from too much language of enticement. The language of enticement keeps the listener coming back. Both sides are doing it. They are trying to keep the viewer on the show, so they keep listening. They are trying to keep them hooked. I can listen to Rachel Maddow and go, "This is what she is doing. She has her form of outrage, upset, and this."

There is no better example than Rachel Maddow promoting the show on, "We finally have a version of Donald Trump's taxes." Everyone was watching her. In every break, she says, "Come back. More will be revealed." By the end of the show, even everybody watching was going like, "There was nothing revealed other than you kept me coming back to wait more than reveal." All she did was another small version of outrage throughout the entire show. It is like, "The laws are written that way. He got away with it. That is the way he positioned it and that was pretty smart and interesting."

If somebody is in the place of being unethical, then nobody challenges the person because there is a backlash to do it. People do not like it when you take down a person of wealth and affluence because there are so many people that look up to the person of wealth and affluence as being a model, "It is only until you get to the Bernie Madoff guys. That is the reason why the economy crashed." That was one guy doing one thing. All the other people around that story got away with stealing money from other people because those stories were not as sexy or enticing. What he did was clearly criminal. What they did was play by the broken rules and steal from people.

The whole movie The Big Short shines a light on exactly this type of thing. The entire mortgage and financial system of America were on the brink and almost came crashing down to kill our economy. Only one person at one company out of all that ever was even prosecuted and saw some jail time. You have all these people.

The biggest one that I remember in all that is the bond credit agencies like Moody's that were putting their stamp of approval on these completely junkie bad risk investments, rating them as an A, AA, or AAA rating and saying, "These are safe investments." They admitted, "If we do not rate them as A, then our customers are going to go down to the next rating agency and have them do it. We lose the business." They admitted they were falsifying these garbage funds or groups of mortgages as being good. The whole system fed on itself and collapsed.

Watching that movie is bringing up a lot of emotions for me because of the amount of money I lost because of that. When you are not playing in those fears and do not have an awareness of that thing, it is similar to The Puppet Master, where we are being messaged that what we are doing is right and good, and we are on top of things. Meanwhile, there is the manipulation/the lack of choice. Notice I am going right back to the word choice because the choice is the spotlight language-wise to melt the manipulator.

This is where I come back to Ted Cruz in that episode of Tucker Carlson's show where he is not buying Ted Cruz's response.

If I was coaching Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson would have gone into him, then I would go, "Ted Cruz could have become presidential at that moment." He could have whipped up on that, took Tucker Carlson's viewership, and put it on the head and you go, "Tucker Carlson, you want to call it this. I called it an insurrection because that definition looks like this.

There are a lot of Americans that have the truth that it is this. They voted this way. A lot of Americans believe what you do and vote this other way. To be honest with you, there were some people that died and were inflamed there. That was violence. People came to the Capitol with weapons. Do you want me to ignore that truth or would you like me to keep the party in line and apologize to you? Is that what you would like to do?"

What winds up happening is Tucker Carlson's viewership would take a hit because Ted Cruz would be peeling back the curtain a little bit. Tucker Carlson's viewership has other places to go but not too far because they have already invested in the bait that Tucker Carlson puts in the water. Rachel Maddow puts a different bait in the water to get people to follow her messaging and have that version of an enraged listener.

We are trying to keep eyeballs in a society that has, through the internet, diversified its listening platform and viewership. The people at the top are grasping for attention from the latest tweet and outrage. We are very much in a volatile situation. That is where people who can use language to build loyalty thrive at the expense of others.

That is exactly what Tucker Carlson did. He made Ted Cruz bend on his knee and kiss his ring through the language he used, berating and manipulating him. It was sad to see. Instead, as you suggest, Ted Cruz could have become very presidential at that moment, schooled Tucker Carlson, and won over a huge amount of his listeners.

He could have stood there and gone, "This is the way I do it." He could have even gone down and said, "It was not the best choice of words." Tucker Carlson called him on that, and then he submitted again.

He admitted, "What I said was sloppy. I did not mean it."

That is to keep the base he has from turning on him instead of realizing that there are people who are going to turn on him. That pot of gold is four feet away from what he needs to do to get elected. I am not suggesting I would like to see him be elected because these situational ethics and mindset are not what I would like to see in leadership. I would like to see in leadership people that can have an adult response to difficult problems.

At the same time, on this show, you and I call up both sides on their communication tragedies, debacles, and errors.

Joe Biden has his problems. Elizabeth Warren has hers. Bernie Sanders has his problems. All of them have problems with language because what they are doing is, like Donald Trump, they try messages similar to a fisherman changing lures to see which thing is going to bite. Donald Trump was great at doing it on stage. He would try this message, spin this message and come back to this other message. He would come back to messages that would get him cheers. He is not chaotic. He is a person that is testing engagement like, "What voltage do I get out of this? What cheers do I have out of this?" He is testing the vibrational energy of messaging.

I can see that with Donald Trump. Bill, I appreciate how you are able to show our readers and me, and I hope our readers appreciate it too, how you are willing to even show Ted Cruz and/or his people what he could have done to come out of this apology and repair reputation. He views his reputation repair interview on Tucker Carlson as how he could have turned it around, been strong, been the leader, and come out of it looking like he is the adult in the room, not Tucker Carlson. Maybe he would have gotten more people to say that Ted Cruz has got integrity in standing up for what he said.

At least he is pushing back. Tucker Carlson minimized his degrees and academic achievements on air. It is like, "You allowed this guy to take it away. You are a scholar. You are this and that."

It is like, "You were a Supreme Court candidate at one point. You are a lawyer." It completely took him down. He played to his audience, put out more propaganda at Ted Cruz's expense, and manipulated his viewers.

Ted Cruz can still go on stage, bring his new version of a tackle box of language and test something else in the environment. People will be there to bite the bait of word selection that he puts in front of them to vibrationally feel better. Everyone is looking for their strawberry cheesecake ice cream from a political point of view. They are looking for messages aligned with their bias, beliefs, certainty, habits and are familiar with. That is why a fishing lure looks like a fish.

It is plastic, but it looks like a fish that they would normally buy. That is the way the language is being used, "How can I get somebody to engage with me where I can get them on the hook, cultivate, and build loyalty from that moment? I have got that person on the hook. They are going to vote for me every time." That is why with incumbents, once you win once, it is hard to get you out because the messaging has got to be so much counter to what you have accumulated.

Whether it is a Democrat or Republican, they are in that fight because all you got to do is take a whole bunch of money and then counter-message somebody to get them out of the seat. This is one of the problems that we are living in and living through in our society. It is going to be interesting to see what is coming up because the fight is going to be on integrity and what does the cold civil war look like. People are worried about the skirmishes.

I was listening to an interview. We will bring this up next time. You cannot have one Army against the other Army in the United States. You can have these skirmishes. Unless the law becomes a little more robust against violence and there is a little bit more public accountability for language, what winds up happening is the fight is on, "Are we going to live with the integrity of the rule of law? Are we going to bolster the rule of law to have integrity? Are we not going to do that and do something different, like have a strong man or autocracy where for the next ten years, you got to suffer from this leader that is on the top and ripping people off, and we are not voting for anything?"

Apathy shows up next because the votes are already rigged and people believe the votes are rigged. There is no accountability at the local level. The willingness to hold integrity in place is not there anymore in regards to voting. That is a little bit about where things are because that is a longer discussion about what is going to take place. What we can pick up next time is how we maintain integrity through the cold civil war.

That maybe gets us further away from the puppet masters that are out there. That is part of that.

Thanks, everybody, for reading.

Thanks, Bill.

Important Links:

• https://Youtu.be/vsVjVu31KL0
• https://www.IMDb.com/title/tt15479704/ 
• https://www.Cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a38880991/netflix-puppet-master-fan-reaction/
• https://www.HelloMagazine.com/film/20220119131244/the-puppet-master-fans-devastated-watching-harrowing-netflix-documentary/