-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
MICHAEL SPITZER wrote:
>
> So in reality, there is a Vast Left-wing Conspiracy (VLC) firmly
> in place in America with the mainstream media its controlling
> player and willing accomplice that will stop at nothing to keep
> these people in power....
--
from:
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", by Noam Chomsky
<http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9710-mainstream-media.html>
--
Studying the Media
From a talk at Z Media Institute June 1997
Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I
am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of
it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day.
You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare
yesterday�s version to today�s version. There is a lot of
evidence about what�s played up and what isn�t and
the way things are structured.
My impression is the media aren�t very different from
scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual opinion�there
are some extra constraints�but it�s not radically different. They
interact, which is why people go up and back quite easily among
them.
You look at the media, or at any institution you want to
understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional
structure. You want to know something about their setting in the
broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power and
authority? If you�re lucky, there is an internal record from
leading people in the information system which tells you what
they are up to (it is sort of a doctrinal system). That doesn�t
mean the public relations handouts but what they say to each
other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot of
interesting documentation.
Those are three major sources of information about the
nature of the media. You want to study them the way, say, a
scientist would study some complex molecule or something. You
take a look at the structure and then make some hypothesis based
on the structure as to what the media product is likely to look
like. Then you investigate the media product and see how well it
conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in media analysis
is this last part�trying to study carefully just what the media
product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about
the nature and structure of the media.
Well, what do you find? First of all, you find that there
are different media which do different things, like the
entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so on, or even most of
the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming majority of
them). They are directing the mass audience.
There is another sector of the media, the elite media,
sometimes called the agenda-setting media because they are the
ones with the big resources, they set the framework in which
everyone else operates. The New York Times and CBS, that kind of
thing. Their audience is mostly privileged people. The people who
read the New York Times�people who are wealthy or part of what is
sometimes called the political class�they are actually involved
in the political system in an ongoing fashion. They are basically
managers of one sort or another. They can be political managers,
business managers (like corporate executives or that sort of
thing), doctoral managers (like university professors), or other
journalists who are involved in organizing the way people think
and look at things.
The elite media set a framework within which others operate.
If you are watching the Associated Press, who grind out a
constant flow of news, in the mid-afternoon it breaks and there
is something that comes along every day that says "Notice to
Editors: Tomorrow�s New York Times is going to have the following
stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you�re an
editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don�t have the
resources to figure out what the news is, or you don�t want to
think about it anyway, this tells you what the news is. These are
the stories for the quarter page that you are going to devote to
something other than local affairs or diverting your audience.
These are the stories that you put there because that�s what the
New York Times tells us is what you�re supposed to care about
tomorrow. If you are an editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of
have to do that, because you don�t have much else in the way of
resources. If you get off line, if you�re producing stories that
the big press doesn�t like, you�ll hear about it pretty soon. In
fact, what just happened at San Jose Mercury News is a dramatic
example of this. So there are a lot of ways in which power plays
can drive you right back into line if you move out. If you try to
break the mold, you�re not going to last long. That framework
works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a
reflection of obvious power structures.
The real mass media are basically trying to divert people.
Let them do something else, but don�t bother us (us being the
people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional
sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional
sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or
something like that. Anything, as long as it isn�t serious. Of
course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We" take care of
that.
What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New
York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are
major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them
are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger
corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on.
They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private
economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are
basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above. If you
don�t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are
just part of that system.
What about their institutional setting? Well, that�s more or
less the same. What they interact with and relate to is other
major power centers�the government, other corporations, or the
universities. Because the media are a doctrinal system they
interact closely with the universities. Say you are a reporter
writing a story on Southeast Asia or Africa, or something like
that. You�re supposed to go over to the big university and find
an expert who will tell you what to write, or else go to one of
the foundations, like Brookings Institute or American Enterprise
Institute and they will give you the words to say. These outside
institutions are very similar to the media.
The universities, for example, are not independent
institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in
them but that is true of the media as well. And it�s generally
true of corporations. It�s true of Fascist states, for that
matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It�s dependent
on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such
as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the
government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power
you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the
universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don�t
adjust to that structure, who don�t accept it and internalize it
(you can�t really work with it unless you internalize it, and
believe it); people who don�t do that are likely to be weeded out
along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There
are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a
pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have
been through college know that the educational system is very
highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don�t
do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering
device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren�t
lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the
surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions
like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges,
for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go
through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is
teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper
classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.
If you�ve read George Orwell�s Animal Farm which he wrote in
the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a
totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns
out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed.
It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his
papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about "Literary
Censorship in England" and what it says is that obviously this
book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian
structure. But he said England is not all that different. We
don�t have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out
pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who
think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.
He talks a little, only two sentences, about the
institutional structure. He asks, why does this happen? Well,
one, because the press is owned by wealthy people who only want
certain things to reach the public. The other thing he says is
that when you go through the elite education system, when you go
through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that there are
certain things it�s not proper to say and there are certain
thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization
role of elite institutions and if you don�t adapt to that, you�re
usually out. Those two sentences more or less tell the story.
When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what
Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry.
They say, quite correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I
write anything I like. All this business about pressures and
constraints is nonsense because I�m never under any pressure."
Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn�t be
there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to
tell them what to write because they are going say the right
thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something,
and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have
made it to the positions where they can now say anything they
like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more
ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization
system.
Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What
do you expect the news to be like? Well, it�s pretty obvious.
Take the New York Times. It�s a corporation and sells a product.
The product is audiences. They don�t make money when you buy the
newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for
free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But
the audience is the product. The product is privileged people,
just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know,
top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a
product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers
(that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or
newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations
sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite
media, it�s big businesses.
Well, what do you expect to happen? What would you predict
about the nature of the media product, given that set of
circumstances? What would be the null hypothesis, the kind of
conjecture that you�d make assuming nothing further. The obvious
assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what
doesn�t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest
of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power
systems that are around them. If that wouldn�t happen, it would
be kind of a miracle.
Okay, then comes the hard work. You ask, does it work the
way you predict? Well, you can judge for yourselves. There�s lots
of material on this obvious hypothesis, which has been subjected
to the hardest tests anybody can think of, and still stands up
remarkably well. You virtually never find anything in the social
sciences that so strongly supports any conclusion, which is not a
big surprise, because it would be miraculous if it didn�t hold up
given the way the forces are operating.
The next thing you discover is that this whole topic is
completely taboo. If you go to the Kennedy School of Government
or Stanford, or somewhere, and you study journalism and
communications or academic political science, and so on, these
questions are not likely to appear. That is, the hypothesis that
anyone would come across without even knowing anything that is
not allowed to be expressed, and the evidence bearing on it
cannot be discussed. Well, you predict that too. If you look at
the institutional structure, you would say, yeah, sure, that�s
got to happen because why should these guys want to be exposed?
Why should they allow critical analysis of what they are up to
take place? The answer is, there is no reason why they should
allow that and, in fact, they don�t. Again, it is not purposeful
censorship. It is just that you don�t make it to those positions.
That includes the left (what is called the left), as well as the
right. Unless you have been adequately socialized and trained so
that there are some thoughts you just don�t have, because if you
did have them, you wouldn�t be there. So you have a second order
of prediction which is that the first order of prediction is not
allowed into the discussion.
The last thing to look at is the doctrinal framework in
which this proceeds. Do people at high levels in the information
system, including the media and advertising and academic
political science and so on, do these people have a picture of
what ought to happen when they are writing for each other (not
when they are making graduation speeches)? When you make a
commencement speech, it is pretty words and stuff. But when they
are writing for one another, what do people say about it?
There are basically three currents to look at. One is the
public relations industry, you know, the main business propaganda
industry. So what are the leaders of the PR industry saying?
Second place to look is at what are called public intellectuals,
big thinkers, people who write the "op eds" and that sort of
thing. What do they say? The people who write impressive books
about the nature of democracy and that sort of business. The
third thing you look at is the academic stream, particularly that
part of political science which is concerned with communications
and information and that stuff which has been a branch of
political science for the last 70 or 80 years.
So, look at those three things and see what they say, and
look at the leading figures who have written about this. They all
say (I�m partly quoting), the general population is "ignorant and
meddlesome outsiders." We have to keep them out of the public
arena because they are too stupid and if they get involved they
will just make trouble. Their job is to be "spectators," not
"participants."
They are allowed to vote every once in a while, pick out one
of us smart guys. But then they are supposed to go home and do
something else like watch football or whatever it may be. But the
"ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" have to be observers not
participants. The participants are what are called the
"responsible men" and, of course, the writer is always one of
them. You never ask the question, why am I a "responsible man"
and somebody else is in jail? The answer is pretty obvious. It�s
because you are obedient and subordinate to power and that other
person may be independent, and so on. But you don�t ask, of
course. So there are the smart guys who are supposed to run the
show and the rest of them are supposed to be out, and we should
not succumb to (I�m quoting from an academic article) "democratic
dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own
interest." They are not. They are terrible judges of their own
interests so we have do it for them for their own benefit.
Actually, it is very similar to Leninism. We do things for
you and we are doing it in the interest of everyone, and so on. I
suspect that�s part of the reason why it�s been so easy
historically for people to shift up and back from being, sort of
enthusiastic Stalinists to being big supporters of U.S. power.
People switch very quickly from one position to the other, and my
suspicion is that it�s because basically it is the same position.
You�re not making much of a switch. You�re just making a
different estimate of where power lies. One point you think it�s
here, another point you think it�s there. You take the same
position.
@PAR SUB = How did all this evolve? It has an interesting
history. A lot of it comes out of the first World War, which is a
big turning point. It changed the position of the United States
in the world considerably. In the 18th century the U.S. was
already the richest place in the world. The quality of life,
health, and longevity was not achieved by the upper classes in
Britain until the early 20th century, let alone anybody else in
the world. The U.S. was extraordinarily wealthy, with huge
advantages, and, by the end of the 19th century, it had by far
the biggest economy in the world. But it was not a big player on
the world scene. U.S. power extended to the Caribbean Islands,
parts of the Pacific, but not much farther.
During the first World War, the relations changed. And they
changed more dramatically during the second World War. After the
second World War the U.S. more or less took over the world. But
after first World War there was already a change and the U.S.
shifted from being a debtor to a creditor nation. It wasn�t huge,
like Britain, but it became a substantial actor in the world for
the first time. That was one change, but there were other
changes.
The first World War was the first time there was highly
organized state propaganda. The British had a Ministry of
Information, and they really needed it because they had to get
the U.S. into the war or else they were in bad trouble. The
Ministry of Information was mainly geared to sending propaganda,
including huge fabrications about "Hun" atrocities, and so on.
They were targeting American intellectuals on the reasonable
assumption that these are the people who are most gullible and
most likely to believe propaganda. They are also the ones that
disseminate it through their own system. So it was mostly geared
to American intellectuals and it worked very well. The British
Ministry of Information documents (a lot have been released) show
their goal was, as they put it, to control the thought of the
entire world, a minor goal, but mainly the U.S. They didn�t care
much what people thought in India. This Ministry of Information
was extremely successful in deluding hot shot American
intellectuals into accepting British propaganda fabrications.
They were very proud of that. Properly so, it saved their lives.
They would have lost the first World War otherwise.
In the U.S., there was a counterpart. Woodrow Wilson was
elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. The U.S. was a very
pacifist country. It has always been. People don�t want to go
fight foreign wars. The country was very much opposed to the
first World War and Wilson was, in fact, elected on an anti-war
position. "Peace without victory" was the slogan. But he was
intending to go to war. So the question was, how do you get the
pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so they
want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda. So
they set up the first and really only major state propaganda
agency in U.S. history. The Committee on Public Information it
was called (nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel
Commission. The guy who ran it was named Creel. The task of this
commission was to propagandize the population into a jingoist
hysteria. It worked incredibly well. Within a few months there
was a raving war hysteria and the U.S. was able to go to war.
A lot of people were impressed by these achievements. One
person impressed, and this had some implications for the future,
was Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf, he concludes, with some
justification, that Germany lost the first World War because it
lost the propaganda battle. They could not begin to compete with
British and American propaganda which absolutely overwhelmed
them. He pledges that next time around they�ll have their own
propaganda system, which they did during the second World War.
More important for us, the American business community was also
very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at
that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A
lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The
country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate
and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.
So what do you do? It�s going to be harder to run things as
a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what
people think. There had been public relation specialists but
there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy
hired to make Rockefeller�s image look prettier and that sort of
thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S.
invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World
War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In
fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel
Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called
Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have
negative connotations in those days. It was during the second
World War that the term became taboo because it was connected
with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the
term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So
he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off
by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The
propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that
he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the
public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies."
These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to
be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that
the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we
have these new techniques.
This is the main manual of the public relations industry.
Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic
Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public
relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the
democratic government of Guatemala.
His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame
in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn�t smoke
in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You
know all the techniques�models and movie stars with cigarettes
coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got
enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the
industry, and his book was the real manual.
Another member of the Creel Commission was Walter Lippmann,
the most respected figure in American journalism for about half a
century (I mean serious American journalism, serious think
pieces). He also wrote what are called progressive essays on
democracy, regarded as progressive back in the 1920s. He was,
again, applying the lessons of the work on propaganda very
explicitly. He says there is a new art in democracy called
manufacture of consent. That is his phrase. Edward Herman and I
borrowed it for our book, but it comes from Lippmann. So, he
says, there is this new art in the method of democracy,
"manufacture of consent." By manufacturing consent, you can
overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to
vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture
consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be
structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell
them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we�ll
have a real democracy. It will work properly. That�s applying the
lessons of the propaganda agency.
Academic social science and political science comes out of
the same thing. The founder of what�s called communications and
academic political science is Harold Glasswell. His main
achievement was a book, a study of propaganda. He says, very
frankly, the things I was quoting before�those things about not
succumbing to democratic dogmatism, that comes from academic
political science (Lasswell and others). Again, drawing the
lessons from the war time experience, political parties drew the
same lessons, especially the conservative party in England. Their
early documents, just being released, show they also recognized
the achievements of the British Ministry of Information. They
recognized that the country was getting more democratized and it
wouldn�t be a private men�s club. So the conclusion was, as they
put it, politics has to become political warfare, applying the
mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the
first World War towards controlling people�s thoughts.
That�s the doctrinal side and it coincides with the
institutional structure. It strengthens the predictions about the
way the thing should work. And the predictions are well
confirmed. But these conclusions, also, are not allowed to be
discussed. This is all now part of mainstream literature but it
is only for people on the inside. When you go to college, you
don�t read the classics about how to control peoples minds.
Just like you don�t read what James Madison said during the
constitutional convention about how the main goal of the new
system has to be "to protect the minority of the opulent against
the majority," and has to be designed so that it achieves that
end. This is the founding of the constitutional system, so nobody
studies it. You can�t even find it in the academic scholarship
unless you really look hard.
That is roughly the picture, as I see it, of the way the
system is institutionally, the doctrines that lie behind it, the
way it comes out. There is another part directed to the
"ignorant meddlesome" outsiders. That is mainly using diversion
of one kind or another. From that, I think, you can predict what
you would expect to find.
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