The Fog of Modern Propaganda

by Mary Shepard, WAMM

We live in an invisible fog of propaganda. Anyone thinking he or she is immune to the virus it carries is already its victim. Without knowing it, we are all guilty at some time of spreading it. For example, to make a point in an argument we are forced to use a quote from a source we do not trust, such as the New York Times. In doing so, we give the source a validity it does not deserve.

We associate the word "propaganda" with familiar techniques from the past, when we had one of the freest presses the world had ever known. Then, the masters of propaganda were dictators who practiced overt control over the information they allowed their subjects to know. Today's propagandists are different. They have a wealth of techniques with which to control our thinking -- techniques of which the old propaganda masters never dreamed. The techniques have been gleaned from psychological studies and refined by an advertising industry that has been able to persuade us to do and think many things, often against our own interests.

If there is anything U.S. citizens have consistently cherished, it is our passionate defense of free speech. While we were congratulating ourselves over the number and varieties of communications we enjoyed, we failed to heed the warnings of those who deplored the shrinking list of owners of all our means of communication. We are now down to about four major owners, all of whom speak with the voice of the infamous military-industrial complex.

The illusion of being offered many voices and many points of view has been cleverly maintained. For instance, using such terms as "liberal," "conservative," "left," "right," and "center" makes it seem as if many voices are heard or that such categories represent opposing factions. Not only is the spectrum between "conservative" and "liberal" absurdly small, the words are virtually useless in describing public opinion. The "center" keeps moving and the epithets mean different things to different people.

Some media critics complain the mainstream media are "liberal" because they are pro-choice and against school prayer. Such issues do not concern the owners of our communications networks. They are the same corporations whose goal it is to privatize and exploit the world's resources for their own profit. Such words are used to confuse, not enlighten, but even those who are opposed to the corporate takeover of our country fall into the trap of using them.
Other standard techniques are still used with success. Narrow the debate to two sides that are not far apart, leaving the real solution out of the argument. We are now fiercely debating whether to cut school funds or health care when more than half our disposable income goes for war and preparation for war. The military budget is treated as undebatable, but it contains more than enough money to fund both health care and education. Another propaganda technique is to direct our attention away from a monstrous crime by turning the spotlight on a peripheral issue. Successive U.S. administrations have demonized Saddam Hussein to the point that the public at large does not notice that it is the U.S. who is using weapons of mass destruction worldwide.

A lie that is big enough and said with unanimity by the media again and again still has the power to start a war. This was true of the planted fear that the Soviet Union was poised to overrun Europe -- a lie that kept the cold war going years after it was known there was no basis for such an assumption. It was a similar fiction that the U.S. bombed Kosovo for humanitarian reasons. When a lie is successfully planted, it becomes an assumption agreed upon by such an overwhelming majority that it is categorized as conventional wisdom, which enables the lie to become the basis for an endless series of other lies.

The most powerful propaganda weapon today is the withholding of information we need to know to make wise choices. In almost any area of conflict abroad, the role of the U.S. is omitted as if the U.S. government acted as observer, or anxious bystander, or mediator between two warring factions. In truth, the U.S. has been an antagonist -- often even the cause of the violence. The worst case of this is the media coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, where the U.S. arms and subsidizes one side while the media fuels the lie that the U.S. is promoting a genuine peace process.
Randall Robinson (an African American activist working for reparations for the enduring economic injustice of slavery) cautions us all to ask about each media report, "Who profits?" It would also be wise to ask, when reading or hearing about a conflict abroad, "What is the role of our government?"

In this day of corporate media control, profit has everything to do with how we get our news. The groundwork for corporate control of the media was laid by the communications act of 1994, which was passed without public debate. Once the frequencies were auctioned off to corporate interests and the major mergers certified, we lost our press freedom. Whether this was all planned conspiratorially or was just a matter of successive events does not matter. The results are the same: We lost our democracy.

It was corporate control of the media that made the election day coup possible. Neither political party invoked its constitutional right to protest the Electoral College vote. The media chose not to give voice to the protests. An illusion of "business as usual" was created, despite the illegitimacy of the new administration. The media accepted the results without protest. Opposition was not given a voice. Even street protests were only sparsely reported in news columns and on television.

The legislative branch was bought, the judicial branch corrupted, and the executive branch stolen by vote rigging. Unaccountable moneyed interests now create public policy, which is then implemented by our corrupted institutions.
The Congressional Black Caucus (which never gets a fair hearing) and all the disenfranchised voters have been silenced. Others -- who are ignored to the point they are invisible -- simply do not participate in the political system, which is exactly what the corporate-owned media want.

What are the voters thinking now? We cannot tell because we must depend on the propagandists to define and inform us about what is "popular opinion" -- an idea shaped and reshaped by selective polling, anecdotal evidence, and other deceptive practices. Even more dangerous, our policy makers have been deceived into thinking our silence means consent. This is an explosive set of conditions in a time of economic trouble. The usurpers of our democracy may already have miscalculated their ability to undo our hard-won rights.

Word Up!
"The commercial basis of U.S. media has negative implications for the exercise of political democracy: it encourages a weak political culture that makes depoliticization, apathy and selfishness rational choices for the citizenry, and it permits the business and commercial interests that actually rule U.S. society to have inordinate influence over media content . . . "Accordingly, for those committed to democracy, it is imperative to reform the media system. This is not going to be an easy task, for there is no small amount of confusion over what would be a superior democratic alternative to the status quo. The political obstacles seem even more daunting because the terrain is no longer local or even national. Media politics are becoming global in scope, as the commercial media market assumes global proportions and as it is closely linked to the globalizing market economy. The immensity of the task of changing and democratizing media is sobering, but it is a job that must be done."
--Robert McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy