NYGAARD'S PROPOGANDA SERIES

This is the series by Jeff Nygaard on "The Media". Very interesting read and good info, especially right now with the media blitz by candidates coming down to the wire on Tuesday.
I have done some editing to reduce the size of this post, but all of the series material is as it was originally written.................PEACE...........Scott

Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 343, August 31, 2006

On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/

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This Week: What IS the Media?

1. “Quote” of the Week
2. Off the Front Page: Poverty
3. Media and Propaganda, How It Happens Part 1: What IS the Media?

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Greetings,

Here at the end of August, as many people prepare to go back to school, I thought it would be a good time to attempt a brief summary of some of the most basic points that I use in my writing about the nature of the mass media in the 21st century. In many issues of Nygaard Notes I offer little “case studies,” where I take apart this media story or that media story to reveal what lies beneath the surface. But I don’t often spell out the basic theory of how and why the media works the way it does. I usually save that for my presentations, classes, and workshops. So I thought it was about time to put the basics into these pages.

It’s too long for one issue, of course, so it’s time for another Series. This week’s Part 1 will focus on the nature of the media industry. There will probably be about four installments after this one, on these themes: What a Journalist Does; What Propaganda Is; How It Is That the Industry and the Journalist Together Produce Propaganda (it’s not a conspiracy!) and; A Little Bit about What We Can Do about All of This. I haven’t actually written any of this yet, so all of this could change. As always, I invite you all to offer feedback as we go along.

Happy September!

Nygaard

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1.
“Quote” of the Week

This is from the New York Times of August 30th:

“‘Peaceful nuclear energy is the right of the Iranian nation,’ said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeating what has become a mantra of his administration.”

What if a “mantra” is true? Here are two facts:
1. Iran is a signatory of (“party to”) the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
2. Signatories of that treaty have the right to develop peaceful nuclear energy. Here’s what the treaty says (Article Four): “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes...”

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2.
Off the Front Page: Poverty

“Four years into an economic recovery, the country has yet to make progress in reducing poverty, raising the typical family’s income, or stemming the rise in the ranks of the uninsured, compared to where we were in the last recession. It is unprecedented in recoveries of the last 40 years for poverty to be higher, and the typical working-age household’s income lower, four years into a recovery than when the previous recession hit bottom.” [ Ed note: It hit bottom in 2001.]

That’s Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), commenting on the release on Tuesday, August 29th of a U.S. Census Bureau report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States.

This remarkable news made the front page in a few cities—Baltimore, St. Louis, and Columbus Ohio—but for the most part was relegated to the inside pages. In my own local newspaper, the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!), a different Census Bureau report apparently released on the same day made the front page, with the lead sentence: “The number of long commutes in the Twin Cities area rose sharply during the first half of this decade, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday.” The Census report on unprecedented poverty and declining income, on the other hand, was slotted in on page 6.

So, for the record, here are some facts that probably won’t be a part of too many conversations in this country in the coming week, unfortunately. These are all from an analysis of the Census Bureau report done by CBPP:

“The poverty rate, at 12.6 percent, remained well above its 11.7 percent rate in 2001.”

“Median income for non-elderly households declined for the fifth consecutive year and was $2,000 (or 3.7 percent) lower in 2005 than in the recession year of 2001.”

“The median earnings of both male and female full-time workers declined in 2005.”

“Census data also show a trend of deepening poverty among those who are poor. The amount by which the average poor person fell below the poverty line in 2005—$3,236—was the highest on record. So was the share of the poor (43 percent) who fell below half of the poverty line.”

“Income inequality appeared to grow again in 2005, with high-income groups securing the largest gains.”

“The number of uninsured people climbed by 1.3 million in 2005 to 46.6 million, a record high. The percentage of people without insurance rose from 15.6 percent of the population to 15.9 percent. Both figures were substantially above the figures for the 2001 recession year, when 41.2 million people—14.6 percent of Americans—were uninsured.”

“Last year’s hurricanes do not appear to have had much of an effect on the new poverty, median income, and health insurance figures.”

As a little bonus, here’s a quotation from a related article in the New York Times from the previous day, August 28th: “Wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as ‘the golden era of profitability.’”

George W. Bush, meanwhile, was heard to say on August 18th that “our economy is maintaining solid growth, and performing in line with expectations.” Hmm...

No comment yet from the White House on the Census report.

Do you think I’m making this stuff up? Read the 7-page CBPP analysis for yourself at http://www.cbpp.org/ Or, if you like, check out the Census Report (86 pages!) at http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p60-231.pdf

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3.
Media and Propaganda, How It Happens
Part 1: What IS the Media?

In order to understand how the media works, we first have to understand what the media is, which is not as obvious as you might think. The media is an industry, made up of businesses operating in a marketplace. (Not too controversial, so far, eh?). As with any market, the media industry is composed of a bunch of businesses buying a product produced by other businesses. Still with me? Most people, if they think about it, imagine that the product that is produced by the news industry is “news.” And they imagine that the seller is the media company. And, finally, they imagine that the buyer is the person who “consumes” the news, that is, you and me. That all seems reasonable enough, but it’s completely wrong.

In fact, only one-third of that theory is correct. The seller is, indeed, the media company. NBC News, for example, sells something. But their “customer” is not you and me. Their “customer” is other corporations, the corporations who buy the ads that pay for the news. And the product? The product is you and me. That is, the more “news consumers” that a media company can prove are looking at their news program or paper, the more they can charge for advertising. And the more money they can charge, the more money they make. And that’s what it is all about. “News” is produced, but it’s produced as a tool used to attract the main product, which is an audience that advertisers will buy.

So, in summary, here are two ideas about the nature of the media business:
#1: Seller = News company, Product = News, Buyer = Viewers. INCORRECT.
#2: Seller = News company, Product = Viewers, Buyer = Advertisers. CORRECT.

(This is not particularly controversial, by the way. Ask any economist, or business consultant, or anybody who studies this stuff. Even reporters and editors know it, and the honest ones will say so.)

A Propaganda Model of The Media Industry

The best theory that I’ve found to explain how and why U.S. media do what they do is the “propaganda model” developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their 1988 book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.”

A propaganda model focuses on inequalities in wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to FILTER out the news fit to print, MARGINALIZE dissent, and ALLOW the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential factors at work in Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model [revised somewhat by Nygaard] look something like this:

Factor #1. The SIZE, CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP, AND OWNER WEALTH OF THE DOMINANT MASS-MEDIA FIRMS. The sheer size of the big media firms makes it possible for a small number of people to impose their values and news judgement on a large number of people. Most media organizations in this country are now owned by five huge corporations, and this has resulted in a “high level of manipulation of news to pursue the owners’ other financial and political goals,” according to Professor Ben Bagdikian in his amazing book “The Media Monopoly.”


Factor #2: The PROFIT ORIENTATION of the dominant mass-media firms. There are only so many people around to “buy” news, so when the news market is “saturated,” news organizations do what other companies do to keep profits up: they cut costs. In the news business, this means a continuing reduction in “the resources devoted to original newsgathering: reporters, producers, editors, correspondents, boots on the ground.” That’s according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism in its report on “The State of The News Media 2006.” (I reported on this in Nygaard Notes #328.) That leads to our next factor...


Factor #3: SOURCES. Fewer reporters producing more stories make reporters more reliant on news that is easy to get and unlikely to be challenged by anyone who can cause trouble (See Factor #5 below.) Acceptable sources will be: Official, Accessible, “Credible,” Cheap, and Easy. These criteria are easily met by sources in government and business, and the “experts” that are funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power. The easiest-to-get news comes directly from public relations firms and, ultimately, from the people who can afford to hire them.


Factor #4: ADVERTISING as the primary income source of the mass media. While it’s true that advertising pays the bills, that doesn’t mean that advertisers consciously conspire to shape the world (although some do). Among many points worth mentioning on this subject, here are the two main ones to keep in mind: 1. The more viewers a media outlet can deliver, the more money it can charge for advertising. That is why media must “give people what they want,” as opposed to making some assessment of what information is important to the health of the society. This explains why, a couple of weeks ago, NBC devoted 15 times more airtime to news the JonBenet Ramsey story than to the story of the “President” saying he “strongly disagrees” with the judicial ruling that his administration’s warrant-less surveillance program is unconstitutional and must be stopped. Nobody would argue that news of JonBenet is more important than news of the President defying the courts. But JonBenet news pulls in the viewers that can then be sold to advertisers.

2. Media outlets know that advertisers are concerned not simply with audience size, but also with audience composition. That is, advertisers don’t want just any viewers; they want affluent viewers, viewers who can and will buy their products. So there is a built-in bias against media that serve primarily working class or lower-income audiences.


Factor #5: “FLAK” as a means of disciplining the media. “Flak,” Chomsky and Herman say, “refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action.” They add that “The ability to produce flak, and especially flak that is costly and threatening [to a media corporation], is related to power.”


Factor #6: ANTI-TERRORISM as national religion and control mechanism. In the original Chomsky and Herman book, this factor was “anti-Communism,” but with the end of the Cold War, a substitute had to be found and, in September of 2001, it was found. The effects can be seen in two primary ways. First of all is the manipulation of the idea of a particular type of “national security” as a criterion used to choose what is “news” and to frame those choices. This is easy to see. Two examples would be the media hysteria about immigration, and the willingness of the media to swallow administration propaganda about Iraq as a “threat” to the U.S.

The second use of “anti-Terrorism” is to intimidate, delegitimize, and silence critics of administration policy. This negative power of anti-Terrorism can take the form of lawsuits against whistleblowers, blacklisting of university professors, harsh criticism of media outlets that report on administration misdeeds, and so forth. It’s a particularly powerful form of Flak.


Factor #7: The SOCIAL LOCATION of reporters and editors in the major media. By “social location,” I mean things like who we are (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.) and what we do (occupation, political party membership, union membership, etc.) All of these things influence the premises that are used as starting points to organize the “news,” and even influence decisions about what IS or IS NOT “news.” Several historical factors have brought us to a point where almost none of these “news judgements” are now made by lower-income or working-class people. And the National Association of Black Journalists reported recently that “America's newsrooms are still overwhelmingly white and male.” This lack of diversity in the nation’s newsrooms has a profound effect on the questions that journalists ask, the editorial choices they make, their choices of language, their judgements about the credibility of sources, and much more.

If you want to read the original summary of the Propaganda Theory, it can be found online at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html )

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Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 344, September 8, 2006

On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/

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This Week: What Does a Journalist Do?

1. “Quote” of the Week
2. Off the Front Page: Dumb and Dumber in the U.S.
3. Norm Coleman = Fox. U.N. = Chicken Coop
4. Media and Propaganda, How It Happens Part 2: What Does a Journalist Do?

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Greetings,

Last week, in Part 1 of “Media and Propaganda, How It Happens,” we looked at the media as an industry, focusing on the buyers, the sellers, and the product being sold. We also considered some of the things about the media industry that tend to steer the news in certain directions rather than others. But what about individual journalists, and their role in producing the “news?” They don’t all sign an “Intent to Propagandize” agreement when they go to work for the corporate media, do they? Of course they don’t.

And if you ask working journalists—as I have on many occasions—if their news judgement is affected by advertisers, or by flak-producers, or by stockholders’ desire for profit, or by any of the other factors I mentioned last week, they will universally deny being affected in any way. Usually they are offended. So, this week, I take a look at the job of the journalist, and how it is that they so often end up playing a role in the propaganda business despite their best intentions.

Welcome to the new subscribers this week! I look forward to your feedback, ideas, concerns, and all that stuff. I really do love to get mail, and not just from new subscribers. I answer all of it, too, and we learn from each other that way, y’see. Welcome aboard!

Nygaard

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1.
“Quote” of the Week

In the January 2005 issue of the magazine Monthly Review, in an editor’s note on propaganda, appeared these words:

“Following the First World War some of the leading figures in the development of modern communications research in the United States, such as Walter Lippmann and Harold Lasswell, pioneered the exploration of propaganda techniques, arguing that manipulation of populations was necessary for managing formally democratic societies....

“In the work of Lasswell and others ... propaganda became a sophisticated tool geared to mass audiences, subject to the mass media, and controlled by those with economic and political power. These and related ideas on the organization of communications for the benefit of elites became enormously influential in the training of professional journalists, who, though schooled to professional standards of objectivity with respect to disputes between the leading factions of the ruling class, nevertheless had to learn to follow the overall establishment bias, internalizing the ruling values, if they were to hope to rise within the institutional order of the media.”

How journalists “rise within the institutional order of the media” is the subject of this week’s Nygaard Notes.

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2.
Off the Front Page: Dumb and Dumber in the U.S.

On page 24 of the September 7th New York Times was an important (worthy of front page) news item headlined: “Report Finds U.S. Students Lagging in Finishing College.” The focus of the story was the release of a report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, called “Measuring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education.” This report should be a wake-up call to anyone concerned with higher education in the United States. Too bad almost nobody will hear about it, since it’s ‘way off the front pages. For a hint of what’s in the report, here are two interesting paragraphs from the Times’ report:

1. “The United States, long the world leader in higher education, has fallen behind other nations in its college enrollment and completion rates, as the affordability of American colleges and universities has declined...”

2. “Over all, the report said, while other nations have significantly improved and expanded their higher education systems, the United States' higher education performance has stalled since the early 1990's.”

Not only does the report compare the U.S. to other countries, it also compares state-to-state, and gives all sorts of information that is not so directly tied to education. It’s worth a look. Find the report on the web at http://measuringup.highereducation.org/

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3.
Norm Coleman = Fox. U.N. = Chicken Coop

In the media today (September 8th) is a report that Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has been appointed by the White House (on the recommendation of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist) to represent Congress as a delegate to the United Nations when it meets this month. Oh, my. The local paper in Minnesota reported this in a tiny story on the bottom of page 12, with the simple headline “Sen. Coleman Named Delegate to United Nations.” The Associated Press story had a more informative headline: “Bush Administration Will Appoint Fierce Senate Critic of United Nations to U.S. Delegation.” Fierce critic, indeed.

Each of the major parties recommend a lawmaker as its representative in the official delegation to the UN. The president's staff makes the nominations official, and the Senate approves them. The Democrats appointed Barbara Boxer. Ms. Boxer is not a “fierce critic” of the UN, which is what one might hope for an official delegate.

But this is, after all, the Bush administration, well-known for their dislike of any rules or institutions that might possibly limit their freedom to... well, to do whatever they want. And at or near the top of their “We Don’t Like This” list is the United Nations. (Evidence: John Bolton is the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. See http://www.stopbolton.org/ for a few reasons why I say this.)

Meanwhile, it is the U.S. Congress that approves the considerable share of U.N. funding that is provided by our very rich and very powerful nation. And that is where our own Senator Norm Coleman comes into the picture. In fact, I had written a piece a couple of months ago about Norm Coleman and the United Nations, then ran out of room to put it in the Notes. So, in honor of Mr. Coleman being named one-half of the official U.S. Congressional delegation to the United Nations, here is that article:

“Leverage for Reform” = Extortion

Consider this definition of the word “extortion,” from the Oxford English Dictionary:

“The act of obtaining something from a reluctant person by threat, force, importunity, etc.”

Now consider that the United States, by virtue of the size of its economy, currently pays 22 percent of the assessed budget for the United Nations.

Next, consider that the United States has been using its power to try to force a range of changes in the way the United Nations is run. Last December a cap on spending at the U.N. “was adopted under pressure” from the United States as a part of this effort to reform the U.N.

Now, here are the first two paragraphs of a story on this issue in the June 29th New York Times:

“The General Assembly budget committee lifted a cap on United Nations spending Wednesday night, thus averting a showdown that once threatened to shut down the organization's activities by the end of June.

“The measure passed by consensus, without a vote, in the 191-nation committee, but the United States, Australia and Japan declared that they were officially ‘disassociating’ themselves from the decision.”

And, finally, here are the final two paragraphs of this short article, which I highlight because I live in Minnesota and this threat of extortion by the junior Senator from our state has not been reported in either of the local newspapers.

“In Washington, Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who has been a harsh critic of the way the United Nations is run and has called for the resignation of Secretary General Kofi Annan, said, ‘It appears that the reform of the United Nations has been left in the dust. I intend to urge my colleagues in the Senate to use our funding to the U.N. as leverage for reform, including withholding funds if reform fails to move forward.”

This sounds a lot like Mr. Coleman wants the U.N. to live by the Golden Rule. As in, “Those who have the Gold get to make the Rules.” Such use of one’s power—in this case, financial power—to threaten people with retaliation if they don’t do as you want is called extortion. It should be reported in the home-town newspapers. And they should call it what it is.

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4.
Media and Propaganda, How It Happens Part 2: What Does a Journalist Do?

Since most of us don’t typically go to a White House press conference, or travel to New Orleans after a hurricane, or head off to a war zone, our information system produces people we call “journalists” who go to such places and ask the questions that the readers of their newspaper might ask if they were there. The journalist, in other words, is a surrogate for you and me.

Fundamentally, therefore, the job of a journalist is to ask questions. The news reports that we see and hear every day are nothing more than the answers to those questions.

Writing down the answers is what most people think of as the reporter’s job—and that is a necessary skill for a reporter—but before writing down any useful answers, one has to come up with the right questions. Keep that in mind as we explore the job of the journalist a little further.

What Makes a Successful Reporter? The Sisson Documents

First of all, by “successful,” I am talking about conventional success. That is, success as measured in terms of rising up in the media world to a position of status, wide distribution of one’s work and the influence that comes with that, and a relatively high income. How does a journalist achieve such success?

If you accept my idea that the job of a journalist is to ask questions, then a successful reporter will be one who typically asks the “right” questions and avoids asking the “wrong” ones. That’s simple enough. What is not simple, and not at all obvious, is exactly what defines that “right” and “wrong.” To explain how not-obvious it is I will now briefly refer back to World War I. (I wrote more about this in Nygaard Notes #186, if you want to read the original version.)

Back in the days of World War I, a man named Edgar Sisson was the associate chairman of the Committee on Public Information, President Woodrow Wilson’s wartime propaganda ministry. In the spring of 1918, Sisson made a trip to the brand-new Soviet Union, where the Bolsheviks had recently come to power. Recall that, in 1918, anti-communism was not yet the national religion of the United States; the great enemy at that time was Germany, and all efforts in this country were aimed at getting people to hate the Germans.

So, Sisson comes home and presents to President Wilson some documents he had obtained “under dramatic circumstances” in Petrograd. The documents “proved,” in Sisson’s eyes, that “the present Bolshevik government is not a Russian government at all but a German government acting solely in the interests of Germany and betraying the Russian people, as it betrays Russia’s allies, for the benefit of the Imperial German Government alone.” This was the “spin” put on these documents when the CPI published them as Pamphlet #20 in the War Information Series, “The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy.” And this spin was widely believed and reported, as reflected in the headline in the New York Times of the day: “Documents Prove Lenin and Trotzky Hired By Germans.”

The documents turned out to be crude forgeries, and false in every important respect. But, no matter. As James Mock and Cedric Larson wrote in their book Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919, “By the great majority of Americans [the Sisson Documents] were accepted as proving not only German connivance in the Bolshevik Revolution (which connivance nearly everyone was prepared to grant on the grounds of reasonableness if not actual proof) but also that Lenin and Trotzky were serving only a German cause.”

And that’s it, in a nutshell: A journalist with a future in mass media will exhibit an ABILITY AND WILLINGNESS to base her or his articles on premises that “nearly everyone is prepared to grant on the grounds of reasonableness.” That is, articles that will not alienate the mass audience that media needs to produce to attract advertisers.

To summarize, a successful reporter will:

1. Have a good sense of what his or her readers will believe and won’t believe. In other words, he/she must know what their readers will accept without question—AND—what will have to be justified.

2. Have a knack for writing articles that answer questions that interest readers and that readers would ask themselves.

3. Write stories that alienate neither his/her sources nor his/her editor.

To put it in the “asking questions” framework, a successful journalist will habitually ask—and answer—the “right” questions, and avoid the “wrong” ones, using these guidelines (usually unconsciously).

Journalists like to tell themselves that they produce news that is “balanced” and “objective” and “verifiable” and so forth. (They’ll tell you, too, if you ask them.) They’ll also tell you that their job is to “tell stories,” and I agree. But here’s the problem: The only things that can really be “verified” are the individual facts, or groups of facts, within a story. Whether or not the overall story makes sense depends on a whole other set of things. And those things are all matters of opinion and unverifiable beliefs. I’m talking about ideas about how the world works, about economics, about political systems, even about abstractions like “human nature” and “good and evil.”

So, believe it or not, we are now getting into the realm of Propaganda. And how that works will be the subject of next week’s Nygaard Notes.

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Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 345, September 18, 2006

On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/

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This Week: The ABCs of Propaganda

1. “Quote” of the Week
2. Media and Propaganda, How it Happens, Part 3: The ABCs of Propaganda
3. Colombia: A Case Study in Deep Propaganda

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Greetings,

In the first two installments of the “Media and Propaganda, How It Happens” series, I have explained something about the nature of the media industry and something about the job of the journalist. This week I explain some basic ideas about how Propaganda works. (Part of this will be a refresher course for long-time readers, but will likely be news for more recently signed-up Nygaardians.)

Next week, in what I think will be the final installment of the series, I will attempt to show how the structure of the media industry and the nature of the modern journalist come together to produce some very powerful Propaganda. I’ll tell you right now, it’s NOT a conspiracy. That’s too easy! It’s more complicated, and more interesting, than that. You’ll see what I mean in the next Nygaard Notes.

Lots of new readers this week. Welcome to you all! I love feedback, so if you feel moved, or irritated, or confused, or anything, by something you read in these pages, send me a note. You’ll get a prompt response, I promise. And that goes for you “old-timers,” as well.

Happy autumn to everyone!

Nygaard

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1.
“Quote” of the Week

>From the “How Cynical Can We Get” archives, here is the lead paragraph from a front-page article in the New York Times of September 5th:

“As they prepare for a critical pre-election legislative stretch, Congressional Republican leaders have all but abandoned a broad overhaul of immigration laws and instead will concentrate on national security issues they believe play to their political strength.”

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2.
The ABCs of Propaganda

Propaganda can be seen to operate on two distinct levels: There is Overt Propaganda, and there is Deep Propaganda. I wrote about this at some length in Nygaard Notes #172, but here’s the basic idea:

Overt Propaganda tends to be specific and conscious. Deep Propaganda, in contrast, is usually general and unconscious. To put it another way: Overt Propaganda is the thing you are supposed to believe, and Deep Propaganda is what makes it believable. Deep Propaganda (DP) is found in the assumptions, premises, and unwritten foundations upon which a story or a news report rests. Because it is unwritten and “taken for granted,” DP is rarely discussed. In fact, it is rarely noticed, by either the purveyor or the consumer of the news. It’s just “the way the world is.”

The Nature of Deep Propaganda

All of us have certain basic ideas about how the world works. Many of these ideas are received unconsciously, at very early ages, from the various doctrinal institutions that surround us. These are institutions like our education systems, the mass media, and advertising. When we let these ideas reside in our minds, undisturbed by new information, for a long, long time, as many of us do, they can go beyond being simply “ideas,” and can harden into attitudes, beliefs, and conceptions about the world. By this I mean that they can become stronger and deeper than mere “ideas,” and can begin to seem like “common sense.” They can become so familiar and useful that we stop thinking about them. At this point, I call them the “ABCs of Propaganda.” That is, they are our basic Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions about the world.

Examples of ABCs include the idea that our country is always and everywhere trying to promote democracy, or the idea that every individual person is only looking out for him or herself, or the idea that a “Free Market” is the best way to organize an economy. ABCs encompass all sorts of biases and prejudices, like “They don’t value life as much as we do,” or “Islam is a religion of violence,” or “All politicians are corrupt.” They’re not just ideas, in the sense that you can argue about them using facts. They are deeper than that, to the point of being articles of faith. They are general, and mostly unconscious.

Everyone has such a set of ABCs, because without them we would not be able to make any sense out of the information we receive each day. When we share that same basic set of ideas with most other people, and when that basic set reflects the interests of the most powerful sectors in society, then they can be said to be the ABCs of Propaganda. That is, they are the ideas that make believable—or not believable—specific facts and news items that we see and hear every day, and they will tend to be in line with the interests of the powerful, who will use every opportunity to reinforce these ideas, and discourage opposing ideas. The more dominant the “prevailing wisdom” is, the less it will be challenged, and the less you will see it being defended.

Different sets of ABC’s can make the same “fact” seem obvious to one person and silly to another, as the article about Colombia in this week’s Notes makes clear (I hope).

When you see a news item that doesn’t seem “right” to you, but there is no explanation or justification given for it—that is, it is assumed that readers or viewers will just accept it without needing any evidence—then you are most likely in the presence of Deep Propaganda. For example, the standard procedure of failing to record or report statistics on innocent Iraqi victims of U.S. violence may simply reflect a slavish reliance on the part of the U.S. media on official military sources (General Tommy Franks on Afghanistan: “We don't do body counts.”) Or it may reveal the presence of DP, which might include a casual attitude toward the suffering of Iraqis, or a belief that the U.S. doesn’t kill innocent people so there is nothing to report.

The important thing to remember is that every time you are told something and asked to believe it, you will be expected to already “know” something that makes it believable. That’s how Overt Propaganda and Deep Propaganda work together. A good propagandist not only puts out Overt Propaganda, but they also promote, reinforce, and rely on the Deep Propaganda that lies beneath the specifics.

So, do members of the media consciously conspire to propagandize the people? I don’t think so. They just do what they think is right. How the media system produces a certain kind of “right-thinking” journalists is something that I started to explain a couple of issues ago. I’ll wrap it up in the next edition of Nygaard Notes.

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3.
Colombia: A Case Study in Deep Propaganda

On August 19th a major 2,500-word article appeared on the front page of the New York Times that, on the surface, seemed like a piece of hard-hitting journalism. And, in a sense, it was, since it exposed a major U.S. government initiative as more or less a total failure. But if one looks a little closer, the story presents a little lesson in how Deep Propaganda works. Let’s have a look.

The headline read: “Colombia's Coca Survives U.S. Plan to Uproot It.” Here’s the lead paragraph: “The latest chapter in America's long war on drugs—a six-year, $4.7 billion effort to slash Colombia's coca crop—has left the price, quality and availability of cocaine on American streets virtually unchanged.”

The story here is a U.S. program, begun in 2000, called “Plan Colombia.” The Plan had a specific goal of cutting the Colombian coca crop in half in five years. (Coca is where cocaine comes from.) Furthermore, the Times quoted a State Department report from “soon after Plan Colombia began” that said “The closer we can attack to the source, the greater the likelihood of halting the flow of drugs altogether. If we destroy crops or force them to remain unharvested, no drugs will enter the system.”

Stop laughing! They were serious! Nothing of the sort happened, of course, and the Times now reports, no doubt accurately, that “As much coca is cultivated today in Colombia as was grown at the start of the large-scale aerial fumigation effort in 2000, according to State Department figures. Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the leading sources of coca and cocaine, produce more than enough cocaine to satisfy world demand, and possibly as much as in the mid-1990s, the United Nations says.”

(For more on this, see Nygaard Notes #51, “How Not to Fight Drug Addiction.”)

“Bush administration officials,” the Times tells us, “say this latest phase, the largest foreign assistance [sic] program outside the Middle East, will take still more time, but they insist that Plan Colombia is making inroads.” Nevertheless, “some politicians are questioning the drug war's results as well as its assumptions.” And, despite this “questioning,” the Times reports that “the war on drugs... has moved inexorably onward, propelled by decades of mostly unflagging political support on both sides of the Congressional aisle.”

Finding “Bipartisan” and “Liberal” Propaganda

Let’s look at the Propaganda here. First of all, there is Overt Propaganda on a couple of levels. One level is the Bush administration claim that Plan Colombia “is making inroads.” This article is pretty good at countering that. Of course, it’s fairly easy, as the facts have been clear for years. For example, here’s a headline from the London Financial Times of January 2, 2002: “Concern as Plan Colombia Fails to Cut Supply of Illegal Drugs: Despite Crop-spraying with Herbicide and Crop-substitution Pacts, Coca Production Is Still Flourishing.” There have been innumerable articles saying the same thing in the years since then. Good for the Times for putting in on the front page; better late than never! That’s what the media should do.

It’s a little harder to find the Deep Propaganda (DP), but I’ll point out two major examples. One may be called the “bipartisan” DP. The other I’ll call the “liberal” DP.

The “bipartisan” DP is that there is some sort of scourge caused by “drugs,” and our nation is addressing it by pursuing (with “unflagging political support on both sides of the Congressional aisle”) a War on Drugs. In fact, in the Times story the phrases “war on drugs” or “drug war” appear 17 times. Is there really a “War on Drugs?” If there is such a thing as a “War On Drugs,” there is almost no evidence that it is doing anything to reduce drug use or drug addiction. And the “War On Drugs” in the Andes, including in Colombia, is a particular failure.

Is it possible that the violence and crime associated with “drugs” actually has more to do with the “War on Drugs” itself than with the actual drugs? Is it possible that, as the Drug Policy Alliance says, “Many of the problems the drug war purports to resolve are in fact caused by the drug war itself”? It’s extremely unlikely that the U.S. media will investigate such questions. The fact that there is no questioning of the highly-debatable idea that “fighting drugs” is a high priority of the U.S. government—in Colombia or anywhere else—is what marks it as Deep Propaganda. The general idea is unconsciously accepted, both by the reporter and by the majority of the readers.

The Times’ story did say that “the drug war” has a “political impact on the region,” as it is “helping Colombia to sharply reduce violence by beefing up security in many towns, aiding the fight against leftist guerrillas.” While there is no doubt a “political impact,” the Times’ claim of “sharply reduced violence” is contradicted by the Red Cross. The head of the Colombian delegation of the Red Cross said in May of this year, “The problems that have confronted Colombia in recent years generally remain unchanged.”

The Times points out that, while “the leftist insurgency is on its heels, today right-wing paramilitary commanders operate the drug trafficking routes instead.” The idea that “the fight against leftist guerrillas” may have been, and may still be, be the intent of the program, and not simply an unintended consequence, is unthinkable. In order to imagine such a thing, one would have to question the idea that the War On Drugs is about drugs, or even that there is such a thing as a War on Drugs. By not questioning the existence or validity of these ideas the effect is to reinforce these ideas, which are questionable at best.

Considering The Third Option

Another layer of Deep Propaganda here is very common among liberals, or other opponents of the Bush administration. This is a tricky one, as it sounds on its face like a criticism of the administration. After all, the reporting tells us that these people continue to pursue a policy (Plan Colombia or, more broadly, the War On Drugs) that has been widely reported to be a dismal failure.

But consider the effect of such “adversarial” journalism: It serves to reinforce the idea that there are two options to consider when evaluating “Plan Colombia” or the “War On Drugs.” One option is that it is a long struggle that will take more time to show real success, which is the Bush administration position. The other option is to say that the policy is not working, and therefore the Bush administration’s continued support for it shows incompetence, or stupidity, or insanity, or some other “failure.”

The idea that Deep Propaganda rules out is an idea that I reported in Nygaard Notes #297, back in May of 2005. I quoted the words of British journalist George Monbiot, writing in the London Guardian in 2001, who said that “Plan Colombia is not a war against drugs... Its ultimate purpose, as several international observers have pointed out, is to eliminate both leftwing guerrillas and grassroots democratic movements, in order to facilitate the seizure of the country's most valuable land. The US envisages a new inter-oceanic canal through the north of the country, to bypass the congested Panama canal, [and] its companies have identified billions of dollars' worth of oil and mineral deposits.”

So, if Monbiot is right, then suddenly there is a third option to consider when evaluating “Plan Colombia.” That option is that the policy is actually succeeding. In order to consider that option, however, one has to imagine that the actual policy—not the one that administration officials tell the press about—has little or nothing to do with drug use and addiction, but is instead based on an entirely different set of goals. In order to imagine such a thing, one has to break away from the standard Deep Propaganda regarding U.S. government benevolence and humanitarian intent.

That would be a big break for many people. Some ideas about how to make that break will be found in the next edition of Nygaard Notes.

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This Week: Where's the Propaganda Hiding?

1. “Quote” of the Week
2. Hidden Propaganda 1: Cheap Drugs at Wal-Mart
3. Hidden Propaganda 2: Thank You, Mr. Billionaire
4. Hidden Propaganda 3: Where Is It Hiding?

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Greetings,

In the last issue I said, no fewer than three separate times, that Part 4, the conclusion, of the “Media and Propaganda, How it Happens” series would appear in this issue. Well, since I wrote that I have done a lecture and taped a TV show where I discussed the ideas that I had planned to publish in this issue. And in that process—and thanks in large part to some excellent questions from the students in Prof. Hooper’s class—I realized that it might be useful to bring home the idea of “Deep Propaganda” with some concrete examples from current news reports before I go into the theoretical conclusion of the series. So, that’s what you see this week. Consider it a sort of “Part 3, Continued” in the series. Part 4 will appear next week (fingers crossed!). Thank you, students!

Some of those students are new subscribers to the Notes. Welcome! (We're in the middle of a series, so if you want to read the first three parts, go to the website and check 'em out.)

As usually happens when I do a series on some theoretical point, the news rolls on, and there is an ever-growing stack of newspaper clippings on my desk, just begging for comment. So, be patient and we’ll get back to the business at hand before long. In the meantime, I hope you take to heart the underlying message of this issue, which is: Don’t Believe Everything You Think!

Thoughtfully yours,

Nygaard
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1.
“Quotes” of the Week

This is from a September 21st report from IRIN, the Integrated Regional Information Network. The speaker is Barak Ibrahim, a political analyst and professor at Mustansiryiah University in Iraq, and he was speaking about “violence in Iraq.” IRIN reports that “Ibrahim and other specialists at the university say that violence in Iraq will continue despite different reconciliation plans being proposed because insurgency and militia actions are a response to the US-led occupation.” Then Ibrahim is quoted as follows:

“If we go deep into the cause that prompted such violence we will find in the end that the presence, especially, of U.S. troops in the country
has generated revolt and loss of patience by fighters and only when they [the occupation forces] leave the country can we start to
speak about improvement in security issues.”

AND

>From the New York Times of September 24th comes this related news, on the release last Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee of a “classified National Intelligence Estimate” which the Times describes as “the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began.” An opening section of the report, says the Times, “cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.” The Times then quotes “one American intelligence official” who cut to the heart of the matter, saying, that

“[The report] says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

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2.
Hidden Propaganda 1: Cheap Drugs at Wal-Mart

Quite a number of newspapers had on the front page this past week a decision by Wal-Mart to “slash prices on generic drugs to $4 for a month's supply.” Actually, the Wal-Mart plan—initially limited to the Tampa, Florida area but soon to expand nationwide—will only cover 300 out of roughly 11,000 generic drugs available, but that didn’t stop Florida Guv Jeb Bush from claiming that “This act of good corporate citizenship will help consumers manage health care costs.”

Wal-Mart: a “good corporate citizen?” Well, it’s true, as the Los Angeles Times politely put it, that “Wal-Mart offers little in the way of health benefits to its employees.” Maybe they’re talking about the fact that over one-half of Wal-Mart employees—at Wal-Mart, they are called “associates”—have no health benefits at all. Or, possibly, that the average full-time “associate” electing for family coverage would have to spend between 22 and 40 percent of his or her income just to cover the premiums and medical deductibles.

One has to read pretty deeply into the news reports to find out that “there is a huge profit margin in the generics,” and that “Wal-Mart appears to be taking some of those profits from the traditional middlemen to lower the prices it is charging for these generic drugs.”

The Times report also stated, without comment, that “Wal-Mart said that by covering one-fifth of the generic drugs it prescribes at its more than 3,000 United States pharmacies, the new program would make it possible for thousands of people to buy drugs they either cannot afford or currently ration, sometimes by cutting pills in half, to cut costs.”

Nowhere in any of the numerous news accounts I read did I see any attempt to engage with the obvious questions: Why are so many lifesaving drugs unaffordable to so many people in the first place? Shouldn’t a PR gimmick like the Wal-Mart decision to “slash” prices on a few drugs be unnecessary and irrelevant in a wealthy country like the United States?

Instead of delving into such ideas, the Times chose to end its September 22nd report, amazingly, with this paragraph: “Wal-Mart's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., said that ‘competition and market forces have been absent from our health care system, and that has hurt working families tremendously.’”

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3.
Hidden Propaganda 2: Thank You, Mr. Billionaire

All over the news last week was the story of British billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s decision “to fight global warming by investing in alternative fuels with all the profits from his Virgin airline and train businesses over the next 10 years—an estimated $3 billion.”

Sir Richard’s announcement, made at a “three-day summit of political leaders, tycoons, corporations and nonprofit groups” in Manhattan last week organized by Bill Clinton, was widely reported in the nation’s media. The New York Times, in its report, found an expert in philanthropy who commented that Sir Richard’s decision is an example of a shift in “the way wealthy people were pursuing a legacy.” The expert said that “This is all new—the scale, the vision, the techniques and the decentralized nature of it.” The Times also produced a quote from another well-known billionaire, Ted Turner, who “called Sir Richard's plan a ‘brilliant move.’”

All in all, the coverage was mostly more of the familiar “feel-good” news about the power of billionaires to change the world for the better—as long as there’s a profit in it. Turner mentioned that part of the “brilliance” of the airline mogul’s move is that “He'll probably make more money off of this [“philanthropy,” that is] than he would off the airlines themselves.” Save the world, and make a handsome profit = Brilliant!

I don’t know what the average person makes of stories like this one, but I had three thoughts about it.

First of all, I wondered what $3 billion means in the scheme of things. Now, don’t get me wrong: $3 billion dollars is a lot of money, at least for people like you and me. In fact, it is roughly equivalent to my personal income for the next 200,000 years, should I continue to work that long (yes, I said two hundred thousand years). For a government like the United States, however, which collects taxes from hundreds of millions of individuals and businesses every year, this is not a lot of money.

Consider, for example, that one major public custodian of the environment in this country, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has an annual budget of around $8 billion. If you have a calculator handy, you will see that Sir Richard’s annual commitment equals about four percent of the annual funding for this single agency.

My second thought: The Bush administration, in its most recent budget proposal, wanted to cut the funding for the EPA by about 6 percent, which amounts to fifty percent more than the total commitment from Sir Richard. If one adds together the total cuts recommended by the Bush administration for this federal environmental agency over the past four years, the cuts would total about 13 percent ($8.4 billion in 2004, $7.3 billion proposed for fiscal 2007).

My third thought: There were maybe thirty or forty articles in the nation’s press on the $3 billion decision by Sir Richard and its potential impact on global warming. In contrast, my database search of the nation’s newspapers for the month of February (that’s the month that the “President” announced his 2007 budget) revealed not a single article focusing on the impact of the proposed cut in EPA funding, despite the fact that this elected official’s decision would equal between $4 billion and $5 billion over the same period as Sir Richard’s commitment.

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4.
Hidden Propaganda 3: Where Is It Hiding?

So, I’ve just looked at two stories: one about Wal-Mart making generic prescription drugs available at tremendously-reduced costs, and another one about a British billionaire plowing some of his billions into research to address the threat of global warming. How are these two stories connected, and where in the world do I see Propaganda in the two of them?

Well, in the Wal-Mart story we see wide media coverage of an act of public-health “good citizenship” on the part of a wealthy and powerful corporation, coupled with a general failure on the part of the media to discuss the broader public health failure which is the very thing that makes this corporate decision (I guess) relevant and newsworthy. In the Branson story, we see wide media coverage of an act of environmental “good citizenship” by a wealthy and powerful individual, coupled with a system-wide failure by the media to report on what is certainly a more significant act of environmental “bad citizenship” by our elected leadership.

What amounts to Propaganda, in my mind, is the failure to mention an idea that, within the doctrinal system unconsciously accepted by most of us, is essentially unthinkable. And that unthinkable idea is the idea that effective action in regard to major social problems could be undertaken by means of non-wealthy, non-corporate entities (you and me) working together—through government or in other ways.

By failing to mention that idea, while highlighting the behavior of unaccountable private entities—in regard to health care, global warming, or whatever—the media AS AN INSTITUTION perpetuates a number of important ideas, including the idea that the only power that is effective is private power. That idea may be true, but it’s highly debatable, and thus should not be assumed as the basis for news stories. Such an idea is not a “fact.” It’s an attitude, or perhaps a belief, or maybe a conception about how the modern world works. Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions, you’ll recall from last week, are what I call the ABCs of Propaganda.

A conspiracy? No. It’s highly unlikely that any of the individual reporters or editors who collectively shape the daily news patterns intend to perpetuate such ideas, or any ideas at all. But that doesn’t matter. If the effect of these sorts of patterns of reporting is to reinforce certain ideas and marginalize other ones, then that amounts to Propaganda. And the very unconsciousness and non-factual nature of it is what makes it what I call Deep Propaganda.

Since this idea—the idea that influential people can be unconscious Propagandists—really bothers some people, let me put it another way: Imagine that a significant number of the big-time journalists who set the media agenda had not unconsciously accepted the idea (probably a long, long time ago) that power inevitably rests in the hands of a few wealthy individuals and corporations. Once you imagine that, then you might imagine that those journalists would not consider the thoughts and actions of the wealthy more newsworthy than the actions (or inaction) of publicly-accountable entities. Finally, you can imagine that the general patterns of the daily news that we all experience would be significantly different. That’s a lot of imagining!

To further illustrate, I’ll quickly give a hint of how I might cover the two stories I highlight this week, were I to suddenly be made the Mega-Editor of the U.S. Media.

First, the Branson story. I likely would not cover this one at all. If I did cover it, I would place it in the context of a gesture—perhaps a cynical one, perhaps a well-intentioned one—but in any case one that is far less significant than the our larger, system-wide, failure to seriously address the genuine crisis of global warming. I might even find an “expert” or two to question the social usefulness of letting a single individual amass such wealth in the first place (and by running a polluting business like airlines, to boot!).

In regard to the Wal-Mart story, I would place it in the context of the ongoing lunacy of leaving drug research and development (largely) in the hands of the private sector. Furthermore, that lunacy would have gotten extensive and ongoing treatment in the media for years before the Wal-Mart decision was ever reported. In fact, it’s possible to imagine that, if we had the kind of media that I would like to see, we wouldn’t even HAVE such a thing as Wal-Mart, since our economic system—like the media that reports on it—would be largely cooperatively-owned and controlled, with no single corporation having as much power as Wal-Mart seems to have.

As you can see, the very nature of Deep Propaganda is that it is much more than simply the foundation for our daily news reports. It also is the foundation for our understanding of the everyday policies and institutions that shape our lives. To question Deep Propaganda, then, is to question the basis for “the way things are.”

Consider that recent opinion surveys show that approximately two-thirds of United Statesians right at this moment believe that “things in this country are seriously off on the wrong track.” Maybe this is a particularly good time to do some serious questioning of “the way things are.”

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Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 347, October 4, 2006

On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/

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This Week: The Investment Theory of Propaganda

1. “Quote” of the Week
2. The Investment Theory of Ideology in the Media
3. Media and Propaganda, How it Happens, Part 4: A Non-Conspiracy Theory

******

Greetings,

Well, I’m done predicting when the “final” installment of the “Media and Propaganda, How it Happens” series will occur. I thought it was going to be last week, then this week. Now I think it will be next week. Actually, since the next (final?) part is so closely related to this part, I may send it out sooner than next week. I hope that doesn’t overwhelm people.

One reader wrote to me after the last issue and asked if I had thought about writing a book on this subject. Of course I’ve thought of it (partly because people keep telling me to do it!) but, alas, I haven’t been able to find the time to do it.

So, in the meantime, readers of Nygaard Notes will be treated to these “mini-books,” which come out in the form of a series of related articles. Email readers may not realize that the length of an issue of Nygaard Notes is limited by the format of the paper version, which only has room for about 2,000 words. So that’s why each issue is only so long, and not longer, even when the subject calls for more length.

I know these series-things tend to stretch the attention span, but that’s exactly the point of publishing my own newsletter. In order to present dissenting ideas (and this series is one long dissent from the standard view on media and propaganda) one has to separate from the “business as usual,” sound-bite world of the corporate media. In fact, I talk about how “sound bites” perpetuate Propaganda in this week’s installment. As if I could even get a job in the corporate media if I wanted to...

So, all of that is to say: This is ALMOST the final installment in this series.

Non-conspiratorially yours,

Nygaard

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1.
“Quote” of the Week

Reporting on the recent United Nations General Assembly session in New York, the September 24th Washington Post remarked that “this year's gathering of world leaders demonstrated an unusually strident disrespect for the United States.” The word “strident,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, means “Loud, harsh, grating, or shrill; discordant.”

The Post remarked that “resentment of American power” has been made stronger by a number of factors. They seemed surprised that this includes “even the administration's campaign for greater democracy throughout the Middle East.”

It’s difficult to pick out a single “Quote” of the Week from such a bizarre article, but I think I’ll settle for the headline on the piece:

“Anger at U.S. Policies More Strident at U.N.; Speeches Show Resentment of Idea of Forced Democracy.”

Note those final two words; an oxymoron if I ever saw one. The acceptance of such a self-contradicting phrase illustrates wonderfully the power of Deep Propaganda as it pokes its way through the colonial mindset that animates this piece of “journalism.” Remember, this was not an “opinion” piece.

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2.
The Investment Theory of Ideology in the Media

Back in January of the year 2000, in these very pages, I wrote an article called “So... How About That Campaign?” In that article I described what I call the Investment Theory of Money in Politics. It’s not an original idea; it’s based on the ideas of Thomas Ferguson. (I recommend his 1995 book “Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems.”) I’ll summarize the theory briefly here.

Just a couple of weeks ago the Miami Herald fired three journalists when they found out that they were secretly being paid by the U.S. government to produce anti-Castro propaganda. Journalism ethics people call this “a fundamental conflict of interest” and the publisher of the Herald called such behavior a “violation of a sacred trust between journalists and the public.” Many people would call this simple corruption, and would say that this is a great example of how it works: Journalists get “bought off” by accepting money to write certain things. While I agree that money has seriously corrupted our corporate media, I don’t think this is how it usually works. I think it usually works more like the stock market works.

Years ago I was listening to Minnesota Public Radio, and they had on the leader of a Political Action Committee who was responding to an accusation that money from groups like his has... well... corrupted our political system. Here’s what he said in his defense: “We don’t ever try to buy politicians in Minnesota because, frankly, I don’t think they are ‘buyable.’ What we do is, we study their records and their statements. If we like what they are doing, we say to them, ‘Hey, we know campaigns are expensive, and we want to help you get your ideas out to the public.’ That’s how we make our decisions on whose campaign to contribute to.”

He was explaining—in unusually frank terms—how people with money “invest” in politicians who they believe are likely to do what they want. I do the same thing, actually. But the difference is that I donate, maybe, $25, while the monied classes donate thousands, or millions.

In a money-driven system like ours, the politicians who get those thousands and millions are then the politicians who will succeed. Anyone who follows politics has seen candidates drop out of a campaign before any vote is cast because a lack of money has made their campaign “non-viable.” But it’s not that the remaining candidates have been “bought off.” It’s simply that the monied classes “like what they are doing.” So they invest in them.

That’s how politicians are “selected” in the political arena. And you can see the problem that comes from relying on financial “investment” to elevate or dismiss certain politicians (or ideas): In an unequal society like ours, where some people have massive amounts of wealth to “invest” and others have little or none, the “have-mores” not only have more money, but have more power than the “have-nothings,” which is not how democracy is supposed to work. This, by the way, is the root of the problem in the larger scheme of things in what we call a “market-oriented” economy: Power in the “market” is related to money, and not everyone has money. So not everyone has power.

As With Politicians, So With Ideas

Now consider that, in our market-driven media system, it is a similar kind of “investment” that elevates certain sets of ideas, or ways of thinking, to prominence and relegates other ones to the margins. Remember that a “set of ideas” or a “way of thinking” is what is known as “ideology.”

Have you ever noticed that a lot of newspapers have “Motoring” sections, and “Style” sections, and “Travel” sections? And they all have “Business” sections! Have you noticed, also, that it’s a rare daily newspaper indeed that has an “Environment” section, or a “Labor” section, or a “Community Organizing” section? That’s no accident. A few years back I was at a meeting with the editor of our local daily newspaper, and I heard him say, “We wouldn’t have a ‘Motoring’ section if we didn’t have lots of advertisers who want to advertise in it.” What he didn’t say was that “We don’t have an ‘Environment” section, or a “Labor” section, or a “Community Organizing” section, because advertisers don’t want to advertise in it.” But he could have said that, because it’s true.

The lack of in-depth reporting on the environment, or labor, or grassroots activism is not the result of a conspiracy. It’s just a bunch of corporations, all seeking an audience for their advertisements, and calculating what types of newspapers are likely to behave in such a way as to attract the “right” kind of readers to those advertisements. Over time, they will tend to place their ads in “Business” sections, or in “Motoring” sections, which tend to attract people with money, or people who are “in the market” to buy something. If there were an “Environment” section—especially a “political” one, one that allowed a diverse collection of voices to call into question our national patterns of waste and overconsumption—who do you imagine would advertise in it? By the same token, which corporations do you imagine would advertise in a “Labor” section, where the power of corporations themselves would be likely to be challenged on a daily basis? And ad for an SUV next to a hard-hitting article about global warming? I don’t think so.

This pattern of elevating certain sets of ideas, or ideologies, to prominence, even as benign neglect relegates other sets of ideas to the margins, cannot be explained by looking at the conscious intentions of any single individual, or even any group, who might “conspire” to do so. It’s really just how “the system” works. And “the system” is based on money, which is allocated, over time, according to the needs of those individuals and corporations that have it.

And that, in very brief summary, is the Investment Theory of Ideology in the Media.

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3.
Media and Propaganda, How it Happens, Part 4: A Non-Conspiracy Theory

So far in this series I have talked about the nature of the media system, the job of the journalist, and the nature of Propaganda (especially “Deep Propaganda”). Last week, in what probably should have been Part 4 but I guess was Part Three-and-a-Half, I gave a couple of examples from current news reports to illustrate how Deep Propaganda “hides” in otherwise objective-sounding news reports. In this issue and the next, I will conclude the series by explaining how all these things come together to produce CERTAIN TYPES of propaganda that are predictable and understandable. I hope to show how this happens without journalists ever intending to do anything of the sort.

The Values of the Market

Remember that news in this country is delivered to us through a “market.” And, like any market, the “news market” is made up of buyers and sellers. Remember that the “sellers” in the news market are news corporations, and that the buyers are other corporations, known as advertisers. And remember that the “product” for sale is potential consumers that the advertisers want. That is, you and me.

Now, wouldn’t it be a miracle if a “market” didn’t reflect the values of the buyers and the sellers?
Since the buyers and sellers are large corporations (REALLY LARGE corporations), one would expect the ideas and values that normally get expressed in the “news” (which is used to attract viewers) would be in rough agreement with the ideas and values held by the buyers and the sellers. I think, generally speaking, that is what we see.

Here’s an example: The language used by the media generally reflects the views of the corporate classes. For example, most of us have been trained (not only by media, to be sure) to refer to the parts of business that deal with workers as the “Human Resources” department. That’s a business term, and it is routinely reinforced in the media. The same department, in a worker-oriented world, might be called the “Labor” or the “Workers’” department. It’s subtle, but these sorts of choices of language reveal a point of view taken by some people, and not others. And it’s always the SAME “some people.” Media don’t conspire to make this happen, they simply report “the way it is,” and by doing so normalize certain values.

Another example: It is extremely common—in fact, it’s almost always the case—that an increase in wages for U.S. workers is reported in the corporate media as presenting a threat of inflation. The assumption, or Deep Propaganda, here is that inflation is a more important problem than low wages. Certainly the people paying the wages would agree with this. And, of course, the people paying the wages are, for the most part, the people who have enough money to make more money by loaning out that money. And for the “loaning class,” inflation is THE worst problem, because the higher the inflation rate, the less the money that they loaned out will be worth when it is paid back.

But how about the people earning the wages? For us, a higher wage is probably more important than a certain amount of inflation, unless it’s really high. That’s especially true because, in addition to earning the wages, we are usually the ones borrowing the money. For borrowers, inflation is a GOOD thing, for the same reason that it is a BAD thing for those loaning it to us. It is no accident that the general perspective reflected in reporting on such issues is the perspective of the employing, wage-paying, money-loaning classes who own the media institutions.

The “Sound Bite” as News Selector

Now remember the concept of Deep Propaganda. That concept says that there are some general ideas, usually unconscious, that form the basis for the news stories we see and hear. I argue that these ideas tend to reflect a set of Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions about the world in which we live, which I call the ABCs of Propaganda. I call them that because Overt Propaganda—that is, the specific facts and ideas that we are told to believe—is much more difficult to carry out without a widely-shared set of deeply-held, unconscious ideas that make the Overt Propaganda believable.

In a cultural context where most people share similar ABCs (such as an acceptance of the idea of workers as “Human Resources,” for instance), anyone stating “facts” that are supported by those ABCs will find it easy to speak in sound bites and easily-understood shorthand. That’s because the dominant ABCs will make those facts seem “sensible.” The result is that reporters come to see “sound-bite friendly” sources as “good” sources, as they tend not to stretch out an interview too much, or otherwise say things that don’t “fit” easily into a news story.

On the other hand, anyone who has a different point of view will, typically, be asked to justify that point of view, not only for the mass audience that the news outlet is obliged to attract, but also for the interviewer or reporter for whom the dissident ideas will not seem “sensible.” While most activists, and some elected officials, would be glad to offer such justification for their dissenting views—and unknown numbers of viewers and readers would be interested in hearing them—it is becoming increasingly difficult to give them the opportunity to do so. Why? I’ll explain in the next Nygaard Notes. (Coming your way soon!)

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Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 348, October 6, 2006

On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/

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This week: Media, Propaganda, and Class

1. “Quote” of the Week
2. Media and Propaganda, How it Happens, Part 5: Profits and Class
3. Media and Propaganda, How it Happens: Summing It All Up

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Greetings,

I realize that the last issue of the Notes came out just two days ago. This is the shortest between-issues interval in the history of Nygaard Notes! The reason is that I thought this final installment of the “Media and Propaganda, How it Happens” series was so closely related to the previous installment that it made sense to put them closer together. So, read at your leisure. This is not topical stuff, it will still be timely next week, or next month.

In the next issue of the Notes I hope to do some catching up. The issue after that I hope will be the autumn 2006 Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive. If you haven’t been through one of those before, you’ll soon see what you’ve been missing. Pledge Drive issues are never solely Pledge Drive stuff; I always produce something original that should make it interesting to everyone, even those who have already made their pledges. There’s a high premium on originality here at Nygaard Notes!

All for now,

Nygaard

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1.
“Quote” of the Week

This week’s “Quote” is from two of the best media thinkers that I know of, Robert McChesney and John Nichols. It’s from an article entitled “The Rise of Professional Journalism; Reconsidering the Roots of Our Profession in an Age of Media Crisis,” that appeared in the December 8, 2005 issue of In These Times:


“Professional journalism places a premium on legitimate news stories based upon what people in power say and do. The appeal is clear. It removes the tinge of controversy from story selection—”Hey, the Governor said it so we had to cover it”—and it makes journalism less expensive: Simply place reporters near people in power and have them report on what is said and done. It also gives journalism a very conventional feel, as those in power have a great deal of control over what gets covered and what does not. Reporting often turns into dictation as journalists are loathe to antagonize their sources, depending upon them as they do for stories. Indeed, successful politicians learn to exploit journalists’ dependence upon official sources to maximum effect. This dependence also makes possible what the modern public-relations industry does in its surreptitious manner.”


You can read the entire article—it’s a good one!—online at http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2427/

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2.
Media and Propaganda, How it Happens, Part 5: Profits and Class

I ended the last issue by saying that many activists would love to explain their dissident views to readers and viewers of the media, and there are some unknown number of media “consumers” who would like to hear them. Yet such explanations almost never appear. Part of the reason for that is that our media system has to make a hefty profit.

The Profit Squeeze and Deep Propaganda

This past month I’ve been following a fascinating story about the editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Times. It seems that the Times, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper and winner of numerous Pulitzer Prizes in recent years, is “only” earning a profit of 20 percent. The Tribune Company, which owns the LA Times, recently ordered the editor of the Times to cut 200 jobs in their newsrooms in order to boost the profits closer to the 30 percent that the Chicago Tribune “earns.” (For purposes of comparison, consider that the average stock in the overall stock market has earned about 8.5 percent in recent years.)

The fascinating thing about this story is that the editor of the Times, backed by the publisher, has simply refused to make the cuts, saying that the cuts “would significantly damage the quality of the paper.” The media world is watching this showdown closely to see if the editor will keep his job. I don’t think he will.

Two senior reporters at the Times point out that such cuts will eliminate “the kind of expensive, long-term” investigative reporting that has earned the Times the respect of their peers. Why is this kind of reporting expensive and long-term? There are many reasons, but one of them is that investigative journalism involves a lot of thinking, a lot of talking, the cultivation of multiple sources, a lot of waiting for confirmation, a lot of trips down dead-end roads, and often a lot of travel and phone calls. In other words, it’s very different than stationing one reporter at the White House and another at the Capitol and asking them to simply write down what their powerful sources say in their press conferences.

The types of cuts ordered for the LA Times are happening all over the news industry. 111 newsroom employees at The Dallas Morning News were just axed a couple of months ago, a 20 percent cut. In August, the Akron Beacon Journal laid off 40 editorial employees, about 25 percent of the newsroom staff. As I reported in Nygaard Notes back in May of this year, the newspaper industry in this country has lost 3,500 to 3,800 newsroom professionals since 2000, or roughly 7% of the total in the nation. And, as I said in Part 1 of this series, “Fewer reporters producing more stories makes reporters more reliant on news that is easy to get and unlikely to be challenged by anyone who can cause trouble. Acceptable sources will thus be: Official, Accessible, ‘Credible,’ Cheap, and Easy.” Who are those sources? Well, whoever they are at any particular moment, you can bet they’re not likely to want to challenge widely-shared ideas that support their power and privilege.

Social Location and the Modern Journalist

If it’s true that the nature of the media industry itself tends to narrow the points of view that can be easily brought forward, then why don’t the journalists themselves use their positions to broaden the range of acceptable ideas? Well...

The past 100 years or so has brought what has been called “professionalism” to the job of the journalist. This means a lot of things, but the relevant point for this discussion is that a job that once was a trade—one that could be picked up by anyone if they hung around a newsroom long enough—has now become a “profession.” That is, an aspiring journalist now must possess a college degree and must be “groomed” and socialized in the more-or-less standardized system of journalism schools before being admitted into “the club” of working journalists. (There are exceptions, of course.) But, overall, I think commentator Mano Singham is on the right track when he says that “The rough edges of the working class journalist [have been] eliminated, and we now produce journalism graduates who fit smoothly into the corporate media structure.”

Adds Singham, “Reporters now are likely to have little in common with the poorer segments of societies.” Now, that’s not entirely true. A reporter or editor at a small-town newspaper might only earn $25,000 a year, which doesn’t place one in the upper classes. But it is true that small-town reporters are not the people who set the news agenda for the nation.

In the highly-concentrated media world of today it is increasingly true that the people who set the agenda for the news of the day are a very small group of producers, editors, and reporters. I’m talking about the folks at the top of the Washington Post, the TV networks and, most powerful of all, the New York Times. Just this past Sunday, October 1st, the “reader’s representative” for my local paper pointed out that: “Every Saturday, usually before noon, the New York Times sends an advisory to newspapers subscribing to its wire service on which stories it plans to run on page one the next day.” In other words, a few people in New York are telling the nation’s editors what is “front-page news.” That’s what I call “power.”

New York Magazine reported a few years ago that, at that time, “mid-level editors can make $110,000 to $250,000, while those closer to the top net $300,000 to $400,000,” reporters start out at $70,720 a year and go up to $120,000, and columnist pay “ranges from $150,000 to $350,000.” Many reporters at this level also go out on the lecture circuit and make even more money that way. So you see what Singham is talking about. The agenda-setters in the media are not, as a group, working-class types. And they have always been, and still are, overwhelmingly white and male.

What this means is that they are less likely to question the premises—the Deep Propaganda—that form the basis for the comments of the wealthy and powerful (and white and male) people who are increasingly their sources for “news.” Without going into a big discussion of social class, one of the things that differentiates between the upper and lower classes around the world (and class is closely tied to race and gender) is that the upper classes are used to giving orders, while the lower classes are used to following orders.

Now imagine that a politician or military official claims or implies that the U.S. has the “right” to give the orders in Iraq, or at the U.N. security council, or anywhere else it chooses. You can imagine that such claims might sound different to a journalist who has been socialized to give orders than they would to a journalist who is accustomed to taking them. And if we had better racial representation in the newsroom—as in, more journalists of African or indigenous American descent, members of groups who were and are on the receiving end of colonial order-giving, not to mention genocide—it might be even more likely that the assumptions underlying such statements by today’s “newsmakers” would be questioned.

So the “professionalization” of journalism, while it has clearly brought some improvements over the “old days,” also has made the profession more homogenous in class terms, and has not seriously challenged the long-term pattern of domination of the news business by white males.

To sum up, it is increasingly the case that the journalists upon whom we all rely to ask questions and interpret the events of the day are located in a similar spot in the social hierarchy as are their powerful sources, and will tend to see the world through a similar lens.

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3.
Media and Propaganda, How it Happens: Summing It All Up

This series has gone on for a number of issues now (it started five weeks ago!), so here is a brief summary of what it’s all been about:

1. NATURE OF THE BUSINESS. What we call “The Media” is a business involving the sale of consumers to advertisers. What we call “The News” is really just the packaging that is used to deliver those consumers. Having good packaging is important, but it’s not why news corporations exist.

2. PROFIT. The modern news corporation is only a subsidiary of a much larger corporation, one that cares nothing about “news,” or the good citizenship that the news is supposed to support, or anything else that you might think defines “the media.” The parent corporation demands nothing but high profits, however they can be gotten.

3. TWO LEVELS OF PROPAGANDA. Propaganda operates on two levels, on the overt level and on a deep level. Overt Propaganda is the specific thing you are supposed to believe, and Deep Propaganda is the general idea or ideas that make it believable. An example of Overt Propaganda would be the idea that racial profiling makes sense. The Deep Propaganda that you would have to believe for that to make sense would be the belief that something called “race” actually exists, and that it somehow determines behavior.

4. WHAT QUESTIONS ARE OFF-LIMITS? Some ideas are so widely shared that they are rarely questioned by the media. Instead, they are assumed to be true, and function to organize and make sense of the daily news flow. These ideas I refer to as the “ABCs of Propaganda.” These are our society’s generally-accepted Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions about the world. By failing to question these ABCs, the mass media in effect perpetuate and reinforce them.

6. WHAT QUESTIONS ARE OK? The job of the journalist is to ask questions. The writing down of the answers to those questions is what we call “the news.” In the modern media industry, a successful journalist will habitually ask—and answer—the “right” questions, and avoid the “wrong” ones, in line with the prevailing ABCs.

5. THE CLASS MAKEUP OF JOURNALISM. Modern-day journalists are more privileged than their working-class predecessors, and thus less likely to question (or even notice!) the prevailing orthodoxy of ideas. Should any aspiring journalists pass through the journalism school socialization process and still retain any intentions of seriously challenging the ideological orthodoxy, the internal systems of promotion and sanctions within the corporate news environment will generally prevent them from ascending to positions of authority.

6. INVESTMENT, NOT CONSPIRACY, BREEDS PROPAGANDA. A similar process is at work at the institutional level. That is, the media institutions that will thrive will be the ones that generally behave in ways that suit the needs of the wealthy individuals and/or corporations that have the resources to invest in the media. These interests do not “conspire” to propagandize the population. It’s simply that the monied interests in a culture will, over time, tend to invest in things that don’t rock the boat. And, equally important, dissenting or counter-cultural media institutions will fail to attract the investments needed to reach a wide audience.

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Jeff Nygaard
National Writers Union
Twin Cities Local #13 UAW
Nygaard Notes
http://www.nygaardnotes.org