Consent, American Style
Many cultural critics, such as Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky,
and Ben Bagdikian, have pointed out that in order for American
power to carry out the atrocities it has perpetrated abroad, it
needs to "manufacture" the consent of the American people.
That is because America must at one and the same time carry out
the appearance that it is the freest society in the world (true,
to a degree, as Chomsky acknowledges) while tyrannizing much of
the rest of the world. The democracy of the U.S. is managed, while
the democracy of the rest of the world is deterred, as a host
of militaristic and authoritarian national governments point to
themselves as "allies" of our great nation. Opinion
in our society must be carefully shaped and molded within certain
careful boundaries: those who transgress those boundaries are
libel to wind up "extremists," "ideologues,"
"fanatics," or "agitators." Now that dissidents
in the U.S. can no longer be labelled 'fellow travellers' of the
Moscow-run Commie conspiracy, the task has become more urgent.
And how is it that consent, that most valuable of social products,
is manufactured?
The "Mass" Media (Talk Radio, Papers, TV stations)
Numerous organizations like FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting),
LOOT (Lies of Our Times), and Media Watch routinely scan and critique
the various mass media. Numerous conservative organizations like
Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media suggest that the media have a
"liberal" bias. That may be true, to a certain extent
- in the same way that "liberal" interventionists planned
the VietNam war and "respectable" liberal organizations
take consistently pro-establishment positions. But if the mass
media are closely scrutinized, it is conservative editors, publishers,
and producers who have the final say on the news, not liberal
investigative journalists. The fact is that over 80% mass media
are owned by a grand total of 23 multinational corporations -
TNCs which also control media outlets in Europe and elsewhere
in the world. The media's evident biases - pro-business outlooks
are "pragmatist," pro-labor viewpoints are "ideological"
- betray this fact. These corporations are interested in selling
their programming to advertisers, not giving us accurate information.
Time and time again the public affairs programming of the mass
media is restricted to a very narrow spectrum of opinion - "the
right and the far right" as one critic puts it - and a very
small cast of characters. Shows like Nightline keep trotting out
the same spokesmen - white male professionals representing the
Washington establishment. Soviet dissidents in the 80s had a better
chance of getting on those programs than critics of American policy.
Ever since the Spanish American War and the Hearst papers, the
mass media have always helped whip up the drumbeats for war and
jingoism in this country. They consistently "spike"
stories that they don't want the public to see - like the S&L
scandal and so many others which have made the Project Censored
top ten list. And they run establishment disinformation - like
the so-called "Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope" in 1982
- as if it was given from on high. Many of the media have descended
to the bottom line, imitating the tabloids with tales of lurid
scandal, celebrity worship, and sensationalized non-events, because
that sells papers and draws advertisers. If we are treated to
the colorful but irrelevant charts and graphs of USA Today and
mini-sound bites of "infotainment" on network news,
it is because that is what the advertisers have decreed.
Public or Private? (PBS, NPR)
Conservative media watchers have always had an especially vehement
dislike for public television and radio, which they see as horrifically
and irredeemably liberal. But once again, close monitoring of
these media shows the exact opposite to be the case. PBS, which
is supposed to get its funding from viewers, routinely gets massive
donations from corporate foundations and charitable trusts. Not
surprisingly, PBS has "killed" documentaries like the
anti-GE film "Deadly Deception" produced by INFACT,
for being too "controversial." And National Public Radio's
line has never been so much pro-liberal as pro-establishment,
routinely parroting the official tales of Washington like they
were gospel. Both PBS and NPR do run stories and programming critical
of American policy, from time to time, but these are often drowned
in a sea of talk shows with right-wing pundits, of which more
anon. Since both media systems receive a good bit of government
funding (taxpayer money), the government can and does exert an
influence on their content.
The Punditocracy ("Meet the Press," etc.)
On Sunday mornings (and on other occasions), many of us are treated
to a bunch of talk shows featuring senior journalists. These shows
feature many columnists for mass media organs such as George Will,
John McLaughlin, Robert Novak, and Pat Buchanan. Not surprisingly,
the members of this punditocracy often moved effortlessly in and
out of the 'spin teams' (media management) of the Reagan and Bush
administrations. The punditocracy is excellent at creating media
frenzies around distorted issues, such as the so-called "political
correctness" wave supposed to be swamping independent thought
and free speech on our college campuses. These pundits often fail
to point out increasing corporate and military dominance of these
universities may be a far greater threat to academic freedom.
And they all relentlessly repeat the same mantras - free market,
national interests, insiders & outsiders - with the same mindless
repetition. Radical columnists like I.F. Stone were often shunted
to the side and marginalized, even labelled commie moles, for
questioning Washington's Cold War policies.
PR Firms (Hill & Knowlton, Burston-Marseiller, etc.)
The PR firms often make lawyers look ethical. Many create public
relations campaigns around the most amazing of things - giving
repressive regimes like Haiti and Turkey a better "image,"
trying to "sell" the American public on nuclear power
as the "environmental" choice, "packaging"
regressive policies as "pragmatic," and "giving
a good public face" to some of the most vile corporate polluters,
union busters, and unsafe product manufacturers. PR managers,
known as "spin doctors" when working in government,
are able to carefully craft speeches and advertisements which
evoke powerful images in the American psyche, frequently using
"power words" such as freedom, fairness, liberty, justice,
and peacekeeping for policies which dominate, discriminate, imprison,
exploit, and terrorize much of the rest of the world. Nationalist
groups composed of peasants, students, and laborers become "terrorists,"
while U.S. acts of terror are described as "counterinsurgency"
or "creating stability." The PR firms recognize the
postmodern fact of the ascendancy of style over substance, and
many ways reap the benefit of that situation.
Polling Organizations
Polling organizations are supposed to be nonpolitical and nonpartistan
- in theory, anyway. Yet, as many have recognized, polling is
more than just a process for monitoring public opinion. How the
questions are worded shapes opinion as well. People do not often
realize that "scientific" polling often uses a very
small sample and a narrow set of respondents, in terms of such
things as age, social class, residence, and background. Polls
often measure "horseraces" - things like candidate preference
and presidential approval - rather than issues; with approval
for candidates assumed to be equivalent to approval for their
agenda, despite the knowledge that perception of those candidates
is often heavily shaped by "spin doctors" and the "punditocracy."
When issues are discussed, people are often asked leading questions
which give very narrow ranges of response. Perot's organization
once polled people with "Are you tired of Washington control
by special interests?" Who will answer no to that? The key
is in his definition of special interests - are they labor unions
and consumer groups, or powerful corporate lobby-makers like himself?
"Flack-PACs" (bogus environmental/consumer groups)
You tune in a CSPAN program and you see a group called "Citizens
for the Environment" offering their support for the free
trade agreement. You would assume that this is an environmental
organization. But, like many other "bogus" groups and
PACs like the Global Climate Coalition, this group is a division
of the Center for Free Enterprise (a right-wing think tank, of
more anon) and exists to fight environmental policy, not make
it. In the past five years, a number of seemingly pro-consumer,
pro-environment, or pro-labor organizations have sprung up which
are anything but; many of them are leading the charge to limit
product liability in consumer torts, deregulate environmental
policy, and bust unions under so-called "Right to Work"
(in intolerable conditions) laws. These groups often pretend to
have a large "grassroots" membership (such as the Sahara
Club, a bunch of dune buggy riders which claims 300,000 members
nationwide) but in fact get most of their money from fat cat corporate
donors.
Academic "Experts"
Not surprisingly, many of the conservative cultural critics (culture
managers, actually) mentioned above routinely decry the ivory
towers of academe as festering grounds for tenured radicals, out
to poison the minds of our young. But, as Chomsky has pointed
out, the "experts" of academe and the intellectual class
are typically trotted out at conferences and colloquia to give
seemingly "rational" defenses ofestablishment policy.
These experts are frequently trotted out to decry public concern
(over smoking, radiation, EMFs, asbestos, or chemicals) as "unscientific,"
and to provide the intellectual foundation ("supply-side
economics" and "sociobiology") for reactionary
government policies. Their "expertise" confers authority
to ideas that might otherwise seem silly ("trickle-down economics.")
Academic historians routinely gloss over the faults of past figures,
concealing Kennedy's role in the escalation of VietNam under the
glitter of Camelot. Increasingly, as academic research turns more
and more toward government and corporate control, funding for
areas of scientific study such as women's studies and ethnic studies
get "frozen" out. Many academics during the 1950s participated
eagerly in the McCarthyite crusade and may even have recruited
for the CIA.
The Think Tanks
In the 1980s, right-wing think tanks like the Hoover Institute,
Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and the Center
for Strategic and International Studies proliferated like flies.
Many of them got their funding from right-wing corporate foundations
bankrolled by big-money families such as Coors, DuPont, and Rockefeller.
While there are a scarce number of left-wing think tanks, like
the Institute for Policy Studies, they get nowhere near the media
attention or money that the right-wing tanks do. The think tanks
often have a quite open "revolving" door for ex-members
of government, and when conservatives are in power, many of the
"tankers" assume positions of influence. These think
tanks routinely churn out position papers for Congressional consumption
and are big-time players in molding what passes for consensus
in Washington. Their ideas are often pirated verbatim by governmental
figures, when they are not taking policy prescriptions directly
from the corporate elite.
Advertising: Candidates & Commodities
Political campaigns today rely almost exclusively on television
advertising, with the 30-second "spot" becoming quite
commonplace. Candidates often utilize their "spot" to
make mudslinging and character assassinations against their opponents,
without defining their qualifications or their position on issues.
Their opinions are inevitably reduced to quick and digestible
"sound bites" which sound clever but are devoid of substantive
specifics. Candidates are now "marketed" like commodities:
whatever people are "buying" that year (elitists, populists,
insiders, outsiders, kinder and gentler, 'law and order') is what
they are "sold." Issue "spots" reduce complex
problems to 'slogans' and quick fixes. Political advertising invariably
calls upon all the tired and old repository of symbols (flags,
bells, torches, etc.) which are manipulated to confer legitimacy
to policy decisions which might otherwise be strongly opposed.
("Free trade - it's the American way!," etc.)
Your Opinion Need Not Be Managed
People don't have to settle for the manufactured consensus assembled
in corporate boardrooms, packaged inWashington, and distributed
by its mass media lackeys. There are alternative media outlets
- so-called "packet" and "pirate" radio, independently
published magazines ('zines), and public-access cable TV stations
that offer ideas and opinions not often seen from the consensus
industry. Everywhere, people are trying to bypass the corporate
communications system and to fight its propaganda by distributing
the truth through decentralized networks. You don't have to have
your mind shaped by the cultural managers and the corporate establishment;
there are other sources to which you can turn. You might find
that the manufactured consensus is a mile wide and an inch deep
- that when people find there ideas have been "ready-made"
for them by Consensus, Inc., they might take the radical step
of questioning authority and "authorized" opinion.
by Steve Mizrach from The CyberAnthropology page
Media
Control and Propaganda