Authors: Mickey Huff
15
. Ibid., 30. Ellul also refers to pre-propaganda and sub-propaganda.
16
. Ibid., 31.
17
. Ibid., 34.
18
. Ibid., 31.
19
. Ibid., 31–32.
20
. Ibid., 257.
by Dr. Robert Abele
Even to the casual observer, the last thirty years has witnessed a revolution in American media. No longer fulfilling the valued democratic function of “the Fourth Estate,” the media complex has co-opted itself simultaneously into both mega corporations and government megaphone.
2
The result is a government-corporate media complex, whose function is to profit those who run them and use them. It is the point of the following analysis to elucidate the existence, structure, and values of this mega-complex. The ensuing seven-part argument is intended to produce in the reader the commitment to become the media, since there is currently no Fourth Estate in the US.
The structural analysis I have in mind parallels the method of Noam Chomsky in
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
, in which Chomsky sees syntax as providing meaning to semantics.
3
In this case, the structure of institutions reveals their meaning, in terms of their functions and values. It is derived more directly from Herman and Chomsky’s
Manufacturing Consent
, where such an institutional analysis is actually performed on mainstream American media, and additionally from other authors who contributed to this analysis after Chomsky and Herman published their groundbreaking work.
The primary assumption guiding this analysis is that the more pervasive, complex, and powerful the institutional structure is, the more authoritarian it will be—or will become. The reason for this is that the degree to which these structures embody these traits is the degree to which they have a tendency to become removed from the people they
are designed to serve, and to become
sui generis
—i.e. not only take on a life of their own, but whose functionaries maintain and increase those institutional power structures.
The key indicators of this structural isolation from the people include the constant expansion of state powers, combined with the increased threat to civil liberties. As a primary example, one need only review the main issues of the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001.
4
Regarding the issues of probable cause, privacy, checks and balances, due process, and free speech, the federal government’s power grabs through PATRIOT demonstrate institutional distance from the persons it is designed to serve.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines propaganda as: “Any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice.”
5
The nephew of Sigmund Freud and the watershed for advancing propaganda in a distinct direction favoring political and economic elites, Edward Bernays interpreted propaganda in narrow terms: democracy will only work if the mass of people is guided by an enlightened elite class that is imperceptible to the masses in its crafting of public opinion. This understanding comes from his intellectual mentor, Walter Lippmann, who said that the people “are incapable of lucid thought and clear perception, and are driven instead by the herd instinct, raw emotions, and pure prejudice.”
6
What we may take from this is that propaganda is a form of coercion—the verbal manipulation of the people to whom it is directed by the cloaking of the message in terms with which no one can disagree (e.g. euphemisms such as “American x,” “USA PATRIOT Act,” “Support our troops,” “Fighting to bring democracy,” etc.), thereby creating the illusion in people that they are in control of their lives and their institutional structures, as well as the illusion of having free choice in such matters, while allowing the perpetrator of it to have his way.
7
For the propagandist and the elites behind the propaganda, the function of propaganda is to create ideological conformity by limiting the range of “acceptable” dissent. Lippmann, for example, argues that “the democratic El Dorado” is impossible in America because the populace is incapable of lucid thought and clear perception, and is driven instead by the herd instinct, raw emotions, and pure prejudice, and thus could not make rational and informed decisions.
8
Noam Chomsky interprets Lippmann as maintaining that “the practice of democracy” must be “the manufacture of consent,” based on the position that the opinion of the masses could not be trusted. There are two political roles that are to be clearly distinguished: the role of the specialized class, the “insiders,” who have access to information and understanding, and “the task of the public” which “acts only by aligning itself as the partisan of someone in a position to act executively.”
9
When one examines how this process of “manufacturing consent” works, one finds the following structure.
10
The first structural dynamic leads us to see that there are elite media, such as the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, CBS, NBC, etc., that set the news agenda that others use in their coverage of world and national news. Second, there are five filters the elite media use in determining the news:
This structure of the media is what media analysts refer to today as “the mainstream media.” According to many analysts, its function is to divert attention away from the important issues and into side issues, leaving the elite to determine solutions to the main issues. For example, in the run-up to the US-led Iraq invasion in 2003, the mainstream media focused on issues of the threat of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and also stated, without critical review, the Bush administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was connected to the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Both these tactics inspired fear and bloodlust in the US population. If the structural dimensions of the media had been different, instead of asking such “sideshow” questions, the questions would have been more along the lines of verifying such assertions, and most importantly, asking whether the US had the right, by ethics and international law, to invade Iraq.
12
Instead, not a single voice in the mainstream media highlighted the inconsistencies of the primary mainstream media spokespersons for the invasion of Iraq.
The second structural dynamic reveals that the mainstream media are capitalist institutions. Historically, this process, if not begun by President Reagan, was certainly accelerated by him, when he began a process of allowing mega corporations to form. The
coup de gras
came with President Clinton, who opened the gates to these mega corporations to concentrate US media sources into a few hands. The result is that “the media’s interest is now united with that of the government and the oligarchs.”
13
But one need only examine the balance sheets of the major media outlets to see that they are huge, highly profitable institutions. For example, in 2010, CBS net income rose 53 percent to $317 million, or forty-six cents per share in a single quarter, from $207.6 million, or thirty cents a share, a year ago, the company said on November 4, 2010.
14
Similarly, in July 2010, General Electric released its second-quarter earnings, and operating profit at its media unit was up 13 percent to $607 million compared with the period a year ago. Revenue at NBC Universal was up 5 percent to $3.75 billion, which marked the biggest increase of any GE unit.
15
It is a salient notation that almost all of these media mega corporations are owned completely by larger corporations. For example, GE owns NBC, Disney owns ABC and ESPN, Westinghouse owns CBS, etc.
It would be naïve to believe that such a corporate structure of the mainstream media had no effect on government structure. As we noted, Bernays saw a clear overlap between the methods used to create a profit and the methods used to keep elite politicians in office. Our conclusion that the US government is aligned with corporate, elite interests, and that the corporate media are a part of this complex will be supported in the following four steps.
First, state intervention plays a decisive role in the market system. Government heavily subsidizes corporations and works to advance corporate interests on numerous fronts, such as tax breaks and protectionist tariffs. In fact, the global market economy could not have occurred without powerful governments, such as the US, leveraging pressure on other nations to accept trade deals to make it easier for corporations to dominate the economies from around the world. Here are just three examples, on which we cannot elaborate at this time, but of which a simple reading will suffice to make the point: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s; and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).
16
Second, because corporations benefit from state intervention, they seek, in turn, to control the persons who are permitted to run for office, by either financially bankrolling their campaigns or by rejecting such financial support. The result is that government is being run
by
corporate interests,
for
corporate interests. As a consequence, the philosophy that has come to run the government is called neoliberalism, propagandized by neoliberals as “free market policies,” which are said to encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, while handcuffing the hands of the incompetent, bureaucratic government. For example, Milton Friedman, in
Capitalism and Freedom
, stated that profit-making is the essence of democracy, so any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic. Thus, it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts.
17
Additionally, Robert Nozick, in his classic defense of libertarianism,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
, argues that the notion of equality was not meant for the economic arena, in that it
denies “the fact of our separate existences.”
18
This conception of liberty is important: in the economic sphere, at least, we are atomistic players; there is no sense of community involved: “there is no moral outweighing of one of our lives by others so as to lead to a greater overall
social
good.”
19
However, there are many significant problems with the neoliberal-government complex. First of all, neoliberalism has disastrous effects for true democracy, because the latter requires an emphasis on
civitas
, or a felt connection of citizens, which is both manifested and enhanced by nonmarket organizations and institutions, such as community groups, neighborhood associations, libraries, public schools, cooperative, public parks, public meeting places, and trade unions. All of this is deliberately undermined by neoliberalism, whose only understanding of democracy refers to markets, not communities, and to consumers, not to citizens.
20
Furthermore, neoliberalism, “the free market,” does and must ignore human rights, as in the case of Coca-Cola and many other corporate actions.
21
If it ignores human rights, a
fortiori
it can and must ignore civil rights, since the latter are predicated on the former. It “must” ignore rights because they interfere with profit-making ability, just as regulation does. In neoliberal philosophy, the rights that apply to persons and government relationship are only those involving property ownership and acquisition.
Third, what neoliberalism must do once it controls the government is to dismantle it as a monster institution that impedes corporate interests of profit-making. This is propagandized by such phrases as “getting the government off the backs of the people,” where “the people” means “the elites,” and by political speeches that keep the people in fear of losing their jobs, or more jobs. By reducing government influence in the private sector to protectionist lawmaking and the prosecution of self-chosen illegalities in profit-making (e.g. Martha Stewart; Bernie Madoff), it provides neoliberals with the only thing they desire: an unlimited ability to create wealth for themselves only, and to rig the game further in their favor.
Fourth, the consequence from these structural givens is that the US is formally democratic, in the sense that the people vote for their rulers but don’t do much else; and that the choices of candidates for office are deliberately limited by elites—i.e. the media-government
complex. A problematic aspect of this limited choice, and thus limited democracy, is that both major parties rely on the same corporate sources for money, so their ideologies become the same. In particular, the Democratic set of values that gave primacy to labor and to the people at large, has dissipated, as Democrats seek money from corporations, who in turn require Democrats to do their bidding. So there is no diversity in politics
22
and hence, no true democracy.