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Engineering of Consent The age of spin: perception has at last won its war over reality. ---->There is No Truth Except that which you Create.. ONCE, IT WAS CALLED FICTION, DISSEMBLING, fudging, lying. Now, in professional circles, created truth goes by another name. It's known as "spin." (John Taylor, Esquire - 12/1/1996) But politics is only a part of spin. There is, too, the expansion of public relations, with the top twenty firms reporting $1.14 billion in fee income and 10,661 employees last year, up from only $64 million and 2,654 workers two decades before. (referencing information from the article in Esquire) "In the 1950s, spin, as a verb, was used synonymously with deceive. By the time it made an appearance in politics--in 1972, managers of John V. Lindsay's short-lived presidential campaign were already talking of "spinning" reporters--it had passed from negative to neutral, becoming shorthand for polishing the truth." (ibid) "Central to this semantic shift is the understanding that spin cannot be a demonstrable lie. `It's what a pitcher does when he throws a curveball,' says William Safire, a professional spinner before he became a pundit and lexicographer. `The English on the ball causes it to appear to be going in a slightly different direction than it actually is.'" (ibid) -- Ad spinfinitum -- "FROM DEMOSTHENES PRACTICING PUBLIC SPEAKING WITH A mouthful of pebbles (350 B.C.) to the first evidence of official public-opinion polling (by a seventeenth-century governor of Texas) to the first use of the term "news release" (1907), the elements of spin have been with us for centuries." (ibid) "The final rejection of the progressive credo came with the 1922 release of the book Public Opinion. In it, political philosopher and former leftist Walter Lippmann asserted that, earlier theories notwithstanding, people did not react rationally to information. Rather, they were responding to the `pictures inside their minds.' It was the job of an elite--in government, business, and the press--to fabricate those pictures for them. That, says Stuart Ewen, was `the birthing moment of spin.'" (ibid) Call it spin. It is a lie: Condoleezza Rice said (2003) Saddam is a threat who within a week or a month could give WMD to al-Qaeda. That was the spin around going to war with Iraq. Now the spin has changed and it is about democracy. Saddam wasn't the danger they said he was. George Bush was. Bush and his gang of liars repeatedly claimed Saddam was supporting al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission said there was NO credible evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had assisted al-Qaeda. That was the reason for the invasion of Iraq, because of non-existent WMD and non-existent cooperation between Saddam and Osama - who he didn't even like. "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qa'ida co-operated on attacks against the United States." (9/11 Commission) Even when Bush finally admitted there was no evidence that a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam existed, his vice president, Dick Chaney, who at least one pundit says will run for president in 2008 (in spite of his age and health), he claimed that Saddam was "a patron of terrorism (with) long-established ties with al-Qaeda". So went the spin, ad spinfinitum. And it worked: polls taken long after the lies were debunked, as many as 69% of the American public still believed Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attack. -- Lying Game -- The Bush administration continued to claim a meeting took place between Muhammed Atta, the lead hijacker and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer proving that a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein existed. The problem with that: It never happened. (Propaganda: The lying game - War on Terror (June 2004) -- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=526965 Ahmed Chalabi, that self-proclaimed leader of the Iraq National Congress, a wanted criminal in Jordan, but favorite of the Bush administration collected millions of dollars to be Bush's man in Iraq. We now know Chalabi was a double agent who funneled good information to the Iranians and bad information to the Bush administration. Chalabi is now an official in the new U.S. puppet regime in Iraq - where the election had as many irregularities as the one which brought George Bush to a second term. The Bush administration insisted that WMD could be deployed within 48 hours, a claim which was challenged by both Mohamed ElBaradei, Egyptian head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Hans Blix, the former head of UN weapons inspection. All of the claims and allegations from the Bush administration have been proved to be bogus. Another words, all of them were lies. Just part of the spin which cost over a hundred thousand lives, including Americans who died for nothing and American limbs they left on the streets of Iraq, thanks to the war criminal, George W. Bush and gang. Calling George Bush a war criminal is too generous a term. He is a genocidal maniac, a sociopath who has no business being in charge of the most dangerous weapons on the planet. -- Spin Control -- How does spin get manipulated? With money. The owners and advertisers determine what is news. "Morgan Stanley, whose battle with unhappy shareholders has played out on the business pages, is warning prominent newspapers that it could pull its advertising if it objects to articles." Morgan Stanley's new ad policy says the company "must be notified" of any "objectionable editorial coverage," so that a "last-minute change" in its advertising can be made. If notification is impossible, the policy directs all ads to be canceled, "for a minimum of 48 hours," reports Advertising Age. Morgan Stanley discussed the policy with the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and other major publications. The Journal's publisher called it impractical, since "the ad department has no knowledge of what stories are running." An anonymous "high-ranking editor" told AdAge, "There's a fairly lengthy list of companies that have instructions like this." Last month, General Motors pulled its ads from the Los Angeles Times, due to negative coverage." (Stormin' Morgan Joins Ad Bullies' League Source: Reuters, May 19, 2005) "We can get five reporters a month to do news stories about your product. If you want to be interviewed by 10 to 20 reporters per month, we can arrange that, too. . . . Media Relations, Inc. has placed tens of thousands of news stories on behalf of more than 1,000 clients. (Media Relations, Inc. solicitation) "The PR agency's promises are a stark reminder that the news is, in many ways, a collision of different interests. The traditional tenets of journalism are challenged and undermined by other factors: Advertisers demand "friendly copy," while other commercial interests work to place news items that serve the same function as advertising. Media owners exert pressure to promote the parent company's self-interest. Powerful local and national interests demand softball treatment. And government power is exerted to craft stories, influence content--and even to make up phony "news" that can be passed off as the real thing." (Fear & Favor - FAIR's Fifth Annual (2004) Report) - How power shapes the news - March/April 2005, By Peter Hart and Julie Hollar (March/April 2005) FAIR (For Accuracy in Reporting) "Journalists, on the whole, understand these pressures all too well. A survey of media workers by four industry labor unions (Media Professionals and Their Industry, 7/20/04) found respondents concerned about `pressure from advertisers trying to shape coverage' as well as `outside control of editorial policy.' In May, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a survey of media professionals that found reporters concerned about how bottom-line pressures were affecting news quality and integrity. In their summary of the report, Bill Kovach, Tom Rosensteil and Amy Mitchell wrote that journalists `report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of the newsroom.'" (ibid) "The Fear & Favor report is an attempt to illustrate this growing encroachment on journalism with real examples that have been made public--not an exhaustive list by any means, but a reminder that such pressures exist, and that reporters serve the best interests of citizens and the journalistic profession by coming forward with their own accounts." (ibid) "In Advertisers We Trust, USA Today (5/18/04) served notice that corporate advertisers have a remarkable influence over what we see on the TV screen. As the paper noted, in the media world "there is worry that the flood of grisly images flowing into living rooms from Iraq and elsewhere will discourage advertisers." (ibid) "A General Motors spokesperson explained that her company "would not advertise on a TV program [just] about atrocities in Iraq," while an ad exec explained that "you don't want to run a humorous commercial next to horrific images and stories." A Ford representative said the company keeps a close eye on news images that accompany its ads, saying, "We're monitoring the content and will make decisions based on the nature of the content...." (ibid) A lot of what is advertising is mistaken for the news and the news is often adjusted not to offend the advertisers. (See Michael Parenti's "Inventing Reality" for a very concise treatise on how the media invents what news and changes the public perception) "While Register readers could have mistaken the paper's news for advertising, Boston Herald readers on January 7 could easily have mistaken the paper's front-page ad for news. When discount airline JetBlue launched several new flight services out of Boston's Logan Airport, Bostonians who picked up a free promotional Herald that day found that every item on the front page was devoted exclusively to the airline, including the lead headline, "JetBlue Arrives, Promises a Free TV to All Who Fly," and teasers like "Flight Attendant Gives Passenger Entire Can of Soda." After the front page, the paper resumed its actual news content--but nowhere did the Herald indicate that its front page was in fact a paid advertisement, and the 20,000 recipients of the promo paper missed out on the actual front-page news of the day (BostonPhoenix.com, 1/7/04)." But we don't have a lot of control." But they do, of course. Commercial media wouldn't exist without, well, the commercials. And in order to keep the revenue flowing, media outlets increasingly blur the lines between their advertising and editorial divisions." (ibid) "When a super-sized corporation comes to town, it brings along an ad budget to match, and newspapers sometimes seem more than willing to suspend the rules of critical journalism to ingratiate themselves with the wealthy new arrival...." (ibid) "When Silver City, New Mexico's KNFT brought on progressive host Kyle Johnson as an alternative to the seven hours of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Bill O'Reilly the station aired every weekday, KNFT's advertisers boycotted the show. The station made Johnson raise the cash to pay for his air time, and his listeners anted up. But the advertisers threatened to boycott the entire station if Johnson stayed on; faced with the prospect of a nearly $10,000-a-month loss, the station manager reluctantly gave the progressive host the boot (Silver City Sun-News, 7/21/04)." (ibid) -- Pressure comes in many forms -- "When celebrity reporter Kitty Kelley was promoting her critical book about the Bush family, a White House official called NBC News president Neal Shapiro to discourage the network from doing interviews with her (New York Times, 9/9/04). Even some of the most celebrated journalism is affected by government pressure: CBS's April 28 investigation of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for example, was held for two weeks at the request of the Pentagon." (ibid) --- Money flows both ways --- ".....When California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger traveled to New York for the Republican National Convention, the tab wasn't picked up by the GOP, or even the state he serves; instead, a handful of the largest media companies in the country--including Fox, NBC Universal, TimeWarner, Disney and Viacom--paid the bill (New York Times, 8/26/04)." (FAIR) (Also see the Report at FAIR) And it isn't just the advertisers who manipulate the media with their clout, the rules are bent to please politicians, and these days, that means mostly the Republican Party; although the Democrats can play the same game and do it with verve and the kind of engineering only money can buy. Publishers are all too quick to please politicians; they never know when they will also need a favor. Even university newspapers are not beyond the long reach of their regents and former alumni. Money talks. The truth walks. Hank Roth ----- / o o \ ===OO=====OO========================== Sub/Unsub: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ====================================== http://g0lem.net/ -- Fight the Right! ======================================
