How many times have you seen — or been a part of — a group of people who sit down together and talk about people?
There is an expression that “Little minds talk about other people, average minds talk about events and great minds talk about ideas.” The challenge with that expression [which is nice, by the way, and encapsulates what I’m thinking], is that it is limited when it says ‘Little minds talk about other people’. No. I believe the correct phrase should be ‘Sinful minds….’. That is, it’s not just that such a person has a little mind; such a person is causing trouble. The habit of talking about people, saying negative things about them, is something that we have to unlearn. When it’s said that you have a little mind, you could be super intelligent, and you might be able to talk about great ideas, but also like talking about people too much. I mean, I don’t even like talking about people in the news; like presidents and governors and all that. I don’t like talking about them, because not everything you read or hear about them in the news is true. Did you know that? Many people don’t know this. You think that everything that news media report is true. No. They’re not.
Listen, most of the times, the news media make news. Do you know the difference between ‘reporting’ something and ‘making’ it? To report would be to say what someone is doing, just state what’s happening. To ‘make’ something, on the other hand, is to say what you want people to think a person is doing. So if I want people to think that you’re doing something, I take a picture that seems to show you doing what I said you’re doing, and I post it.
So let me give you an example, and this is real. Someone who used to work in the news media got born again and began to talk about the kinds of things that they do. So if the media is covering a gay parade, and all those guys are pro-abortion in the US, and there are about 20 or 30 people parading, when you watch the video you’d think there were hundreds of people in that parade — because the guy on the camera knows how to hold the camera. If you have ever been involved in handling a camera [especially in Church meetings], you should know how it works. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just telling you that it’s possible. It happens. So they hold the camera in a way that magnifies the number of people in the meeting. When you watch it, you wonder, “Is that the same prayer meeting I was in?” because the people seem so many. How it works is this: if there are empty seats on one side, the camera does not go over the edge. The camera will never show the empty seats. It will always stop at the edge so it gives the impression that the maximum capacity was reached, that the seats were filled up. And there is a method, because even the cameras are set in a way that makes the videos look as though the cameras are at a very far distance. At the end, there is a massive difference between real life and the fake thing. I remember walking into a very popular church building in Lagos and I was surprised at the number of people there. I had gone to just take a peek in, I didn’t really have the time to stay for the meeting. But this church broadcasts her meetings on TV, and you should see how different real life is from TV. On TV, with all the lights, the background and camera effects, it looks really cool. But in real life, it doesn’t look that nice. And the number of people in the meeting are not actually what the videos portray.
So it’s fascinating what the cameras can do. They lie. And they do it so well that what is projected looks different from reality. So this fellow who got born again said that they reported a protest by Christians against abortion or something, and there were like 300 people in that rally, but if you watched the video, you’d think there were only 20 people there. They made the gathering with only 20 or 50 people look like there were hundreds of people in it, and they made the gathering with many people look like there was just a handful of people who attended the event. They would look for the stragglers, the people on the side, and hold the camera in a way that makes them look so few. That is how they make the new. When you watch that on TV, you’ll begin to feel embarrassed and think, “But why are these Christians so few? They should just leave the place and let things be.” And when you watch the event with the people who don’t fear God, even though they are actually very few, you’d think they were so many. 15 of them will be interviewed, while for the meeting of Christians, they would interview 2 or 3 people. Then they would spend a long time talking. Out of those they interviewed from the Christian meeting, they would only broadcast the worst speakers.
Now this happens all the time. You watch all sorts of things on TV and you believe all of it. Didn’t everyone believe that Donald Trump would lose? If you watched the news — and it doesn’t matter if you loved him — you believed that he would lose. The foreign news [BBC, CNN, etc.], all said that Hilary Clinton had a 90% chance of winning. The question I’m asking is this: “Where did all the people who voted Trump come from? Did they just come from the moon that night?”
I’m using that example because the whole world saw it happen. People said things like, “It’s a miracle.”
What miracle? There’s no miracle about anything; there was always that number of people who were in support of Donald Trump before then, but the news media were completely against him and they used their power against him — making it seem like he had very few supporters. Don’t joke with the power of the news media.
— Pastor Ita Udoh
22nd February, 2017
© God’s Lighthouse 2017