Surprise

When I chose this topic I thought it was going to be all distorted images.  Once I began research it did not take me long to realize that the biggest issues in media manipulation are governement and big corporation cover ups. They infiltrate the media on a large scale and only report the facts that are favorable to their enhancement, even if they are not true. 

There are several different methods of media manipulation.
1) Suppresion by ommision-is just what it sounds like, leaving parts of the story sometimes just critical details or in other cases leaving the whole story out.
2) Attack and destroy- when the media puts out as much information against a story that could not be ignored in order to persaude people to think it isn't true.
3) Labeling- giving a label without any additional details.  An example would be welfare reform. people typically imagine that to be positve but it might mean doing away with important useful parts of welfare such as medical coverage for mental health.
4) Preemptive assumption- the media accepts a policy, that needs to be critical examined, without any questions.  They focus only on things that support the position.

there are many more but a lot them seem to be redundant only slight variations of the ones above.

"The job of media is not to inform, but to misinform: Divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or continuous flood of distractions and insignificant information."(THE INTERNATIONAL COALITION BLOG)

That is a dramatic take on media manipulation it has been used positively in small instances.