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 of
establishment 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.
Steve Mizrach
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