This barely deserves commentary, but I think it’s interesting to compare O’Reilly’s “Far Left Fiesta” with the Lessig post below. Just a few quickies. It’s curious that Robert Greenwald is identified as the director of Xanadu rather than OutFoxed. Hmmm. And calling the conference a fiesta I guess means that media reformers are illegals in the Fox universe. And fascists to boot! Again, look at the Lessig video. Makes one think. How is it possible that we can co-exist in such reality tunnels? For the answer, read True Enough.
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Corporate owners have a vested interest in keeping courageous and intelligent reporting a journalism-school dream, especially when it comes to the Iraq war. After all, General Electric doesn’t want its reporters at MSNBC to question the war while it’s busy churning out Apache helicopters. It turns out that everyone — from the military analysts espousing Pentagon rhetoric to the corporate news owners to the government itself — have shared interests in leading the American people to war.
To consolidate their control, Big Media owners like Rupert Murdoch have cozied up to Washington, deploying legions of lobbyists and lawyers to craft U.S. communications policy, while doling out millions of dollars in campaign contributions to squelch any challenge from elected officials.
Hence, propaganda, misinformation and government spin become the daily news norm — so normal, in fact, that many in the news punditocracy are having trouble understanding what all the hoopla over propaganda is about. Isn’t this the way news is “made”?
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I know I was a bit harsh on the last Obmama video that hit the circuit, so I’m please to share a stranger, freakier video that better suits my personal tastes. You can guess who the target audience is for this one, and it ain’t so-called Reagan Democrats.
You have to admit, as propanda goes, these are absolutely brilliant. At least your tax dollars are finally paying for something that works. Enter the Air Force’s current “a changing world” campaign. It is so rich with paradigm it’s hard to summarize in a short paragraph what they are putting forth. Suffice to say they are still thinking in terms of visualizing grid space (see it, identify it, destroy it, solve problem), which is a linear control model. Their slogan, “It takes air dominance to defend American in a changing world,” made me think about air from a elemental standpoint: mind, mental, airy, not the body.
Anyhow, have a look:
God’s angels? Interesting how the Air Force portrays itself as a kind of protective shield, but as the article below suggests, most future weapons systems are actually offensive in nature.
UPDATE: An astute reader has corrected me to point out that the video is for the Singapore Air Force. Goes to show the danger of being too shrill! But… it is interesting how moving image media have become such an international language. I suppose this message could also be targeted to international business travelers to assure them not to worry about Singapore (unlike other places in the world!).
CyberCommand? Sounds like a saturday morning kid’s show. Given the military’s track record, they seem more interested in domestic dissenters engaging in their Constitutional right to be critical than real military threats. So I wonder if our friends at CyberCommand they reading posts like this, or those that actually pose a real threat? Again, the trope is technology is the solution for peace.
Do domination and freedom belong in the same sentence?
The snip that follows is from a great, detailed deconstruction of this ad campaign by an Air Force veteran. Click the article link below to read the full analysis.
Our capability to deliver damage and death across the globe — at virtually no immediate risk to ourselves — gives extra meaning to the words “above all.” But with great power comes great responsibility, a tagline I learned as a teen from Spider-Man comic strips, but which is no less true for that. The problem is that our “global reach” often exceeds the grasp of our collective wisdom to employ “global power” responsibly.
Listen to the Air Force’s own pitch for its “global reach” and “global power,” and you know that today’s service is indeed an imperial instrument focused on “power projection” and “dominance” (with nary a thought of how others may respond to being dominated). Worse yet, our “capabilities” have so detached us from delivering death that it’s become remarkably close to a video-game-like exercise.
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“You have propaganda eyes” by Antonio Lopez
What follows are some thoughts in response to my propaganda piece that ran here and at Reality Sandwich.
The problem is that sometimes, like most bloggers, I shoot from the lip and was writing in a bit of the writer’s equivalent of road rage. I wish I had the time and space to deconstruct the psychological mindset of propagandists. Jacques Ellul did the most comprehensive analysis (“Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”) and the grandfather of advertising, Edward Bernays, lays out a good blueprint (“Propaganda”). The problem is that they write about media in a one-to-many broadcast environment in the context of WWII. Admittedly I’m not an expert on Nazi history, but as a student of media I think one thing that distinguishes the current moment from that period was the power of film as a novel form of communication. I’m fairly certain that the average person now is more media savvy than someone from the era of Nazi Germany, but I have no way to prove that. Of course it depends on who you talk to. As a recent Pew study showed, those who watch the Daily Show are better informed than those who watch Fox. Is it the shows themselves, or the kind of person attracted to those programs?
One of the points I was going for was that that a problem for propagandists who disregard truth is that they end up believing their own lies, which leads to a feedback loop that is ultimately self-destructive. Disinformation always is at least 25% true, we just don’t know which part. But to play the “game,” as the KGB called the power plays around the world, one must certainly hold the quest for control and power far above morals and truth. The problem with these guys, as Seymour Hersh once said in an interview, is that they actually believe what they say. With Kissenger, he said, at least you knew there was an angle on every deal.
Some feel that people who cannot read are susceptible to propaganda, yet the Nazi-era Germans were highly literate and educated. Is this reconcilable? In other words, in the case of Germans, education didn’t matter. What they didn’t have is the ability to critically engage film and other kinds of mass media. I think this is why many of us believe *media* education is so important. What makes contemporary society different is that we have more antibodies in our media consumption habits; we are more immune to their effects because we have simply been exposed to so much. I believe advertisers are well aware of this as evidenced by their increased volume and sensory output. Yes, current media are incredible intense and manipulative, far beyond early film, still I think that they keep ratchetting up as a result of our own desensitization. From what I read in the marketing trade papers, advertisers are freaking out because they believe they are losing relevance. Though youth are more mediated, the kind of media they are consuming is a lot more interactive. The Nazi era and roughly the last 100 years of our media habits have been conditioned by the one-to-many model of information distribution. The exciting thing about our moment is the change into a many-to-many model. Of course the large corporations want as much of that pie as possible. Will they succeed? I don’t know the answer.
Seems like every time we peel a layer from the onion, we find something stinkier inside. For example, I was looking at a new Air Force recruitment Website and it is apparent that the mentality behind all their slick new media is still pretty old: as long as you can identify something visually and can destroy it, you will successfully control the world. This is a consequence of what I call GridThink, which is a left-brained kind of rationality that reduces everything to things in a grid. Reality from this vantage results in the situation we are in now (I wrote more extensively about this in my book, Mediacology, out this month).
I believe the top-down media model is dead, and not worth the amount of energy media activists put into criticizing it. Based on my reading of media and emergence theory, I believe that face-to-face contact remains the most powerful kind of communication, and it is the reality of sidewalks, trade and public space that shape language and civilizations. For example, after the last presidential election I looked at a county-by-county colored-coded map of who voted Republican or Democrat (the so-called blue and red voters). I saw a very clear pattern: people who vote Democrat tend to live on water—rivers, lakes or the sea. Since these are usually places of trade, movement and immigration, my guess is that a Democrat-oriented voter tends to be exposed to different cultures and ideas. Not surprisingly, red states are in the interior, which have less contact with the outside world, and generally see things through mediation devices like television. This supports my idea that media very much behave like ecosystems, and different niches require different strategies. For years I went to these “fly-over” states and did media literacy workshops around the issue of tobacco and alcohol awareness campaigns. Occasionally someone would make an important connection, as once happened at a youth conference in Phoenix: “If you are saying all ads are manipulative, is that true for military ads too?” Bingo! So I think context is the key. On the one hand there needs to be counter arguments and other media sources to balance the information presented on MSM, on the other there needs to be more human discussion and context outside of media.
Unfortunately, both the Republicans and Democrats depend on a 10% margin of those “undecided” who tend to live in gated communities and suburbs. It depresses me that our electoral system has come to who can fight and win theses electoral “crumbs.” This is why you see Hillary pulling out the Rove playbook as she tries to Swift Boat Obama on her way to the Democratic ticket. Fear will decide this next election, I have no doubt about that.
Anyhow, moving on. I do feel that the multitudes and “here comes everybody” flash mobs are the future. We cannot succeed by fighting GridThink on its own terms, we have to fight it with Aikido. Confuse and conquer! A nonlinear, emergent, distributed intelligence is at the basis of nature and system-thinking; it is a holographic manifestation of universal laws. Our ability to think like that gives us a great advantage. The GridThinkers won’t see it coming, and are ill prepared to deal with that emergent paradigm. I’m still trying to solve the pedagogical problem of how that is taught. But I’m sure that in many ways it is emerging regardless.
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Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex — an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives. Mapping out what should more properly be called the Military - Industrial - Technological - Entertainment - Scientific - Media - Intelligence - Corporate Complex, historian Nick Turse demonstrates just how extensively the Pentagon, through its little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with America’s major corporations, has taken hold of the nation.
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Of all the nefarious propaganda strategies, the one that irks me the most is the use and abuse of war veterans to justify war. I’m not just talking about the “support our troops” hammer used to pound peace activists, but the parade of retired generals and so-called experts who come on television to legitimate violence. An explosive article NY Times article demonstrates how these “experts” are not random observers, but many have financial ties to war contractors and benefit financially from the slaughter. Does anyone in the news business have integrity any more?
Ironically, the more the Pentagon PR apparatus uses deception to mask reality, the worse it gets for them because they have no check against delusional policies. As the report demonstrates, rather than acknowledge the flawed war strategy (or that it was wrong to begin wth), Rumsfeld– the grand wizard of self-deception– and his aids believed it was the media’s misrepresentation of the situation, and not what was happening on the ground, that was causing the dissent. We could say that media management has become an institutionalized form of denial that would make coke addicts blush. Sneaking and hiding is funny when it’s depicted in a Bid Lite commercial, but when it involves life, death and ultimately a threat to the foundation of democracy, then some kind of community intervention is surely require. Trouble is, how do we get these guys into a reality detox center?
Don’t forget these are the same policy makers who brought us Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Try to remember that historically people who use torture do so because they have no other way to change reality. Think back to the heretics who said the world was round, or that the Earth orbited the sun. Rather than concede to the simple evidence of nature’s laws, it’s more convenient to simply torture, imprison or murder those who refute you. That, or give them company stock from your friendly, local military contractor. Regardless, the Pentagon and its pliant media could surely benefit from this geography lesson: Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.
I find it strange but not surprising that peace activists who generally predicted the outcome of the war accurately (that occupying Iraq would be difficult and bloody, the invasion would certainly lead to civil war among the divergent populations leading to a wider war in the Middle East as refugees flee the fighting, and, finally, Iraq would be a magnet for extremists wanting to take the fight directly to the US) are generally absent from the debate about war. The fear of being unpatriotic has made news so cowardly that most often what you get is a plug-and-play propaganda device that the Pentagon can play like a “Mighty Wurlitzer” (CIA jargon for psychological operations). It feels too obvious to call this situation pathetic and sad, but unfortunately the net result is more senseless death and unchecked psychosis.
Thankfully, the NY Times is finally doing its job as the “fourth estate” by presenting a detailed report on how these shenanigans are perpetrated. The multimedia presentation that accompanies the article demonstrates how hybrid newspaper reporting that combines words, video and images can create a very powerful communications tool to counter the kinds of Spic and Span lies that TV news so readily dispenses with. In an ideal world, counter arguments would make their way into larger media discourse, but alas I think larger corporate media are generally immune to arguments that are outside the self-generating reality loop of power. Unless you are having the three martini lunch in downtown DC with the same group of generals, media professionals and contractors, it’s hard to get a word in edgewise. I appluad the NYTime for doing this coragous reporting, but also wonder, what took you so long? What will it take to get a bug into the institutional sheets of the broadcast networks to get them to go beyond Fox-inspired gossip journalism as was recently demonstrated by the ABC Pennsylvania debate debacle?
Ultimately, there is no propaganda on Earth that can cover up a war gone badly. Propaganda works best during the build-up of war, and when war is executed successfully in a climate of fear and paranoia. Would the U.S. public have the same critical attitude about the war in Iraq if American soldier were not killed on a daily basis or if the military could control the situation on the ground? Consider the legacy of Granada and Panama. Who among the general populace opposes those actions?
When Siegried Kracauer was commissioned in 1945 by the U.S. government to survey Nazi newsreels he concluded that one characteristic that separated fascist and democratic propaganda was a complete disregard for truth. Democracies, he argued, have to tell a “good story” and “refer to the truth even if they defy it.” In Germany, on the other hand, “where all powers are actually monopolized by the Nazi rulers and their allies in the sphere of great business, truth has lost any authority of its own; for the sole concern is to maintain and extend their monopoly through appropriate propaganda that unhesitatingly confuses truth and untruth to these ends. Thus truth is put in the same position as untruth: it becomes a pure means, it is no longer recognized as truth.” Something to consider, especially in an era when fake news is real, and real news is fake.
Anthropologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson argued that deceptions behind the negotiating of the Treaty of Versailles set in motion World War II. His point is that communications are cybernetic: they exist in a feedback system, and lying always comes back to haunt the liar. There is no running from hypocrisy. After 9-11 the U.S. government had an opportunity to tell a good story, but instead used fear to justify a war with dubious intentions. Over time propaganda cannot hide murder, torture, or illegality, especially when a global society is increasingly transparent. After all, who could have anticipated that one could view Al Jazeera at a falafel stand in Brooklyn? Or that a vibrant blogosphere is increasingly becoming non-Westernized? These are just a few examples shattering hierarchal notions of the flow of communications and ideas.
Another thing we often forget when discussing propaganda is that it is not simply a situation of the producer inserting information into the minds of innocent subjects. Not only do the receivers of information have agency and an ability to contextualize and form their own opinions, but propaganda makers are also susceptible to their own deceptions. Kracauer’s analysis should serve as a cautionary tale that spin for power’s sake has a self-destructive logic: nice (or scary) metaphors are no substitute for competence or morality. You can’t tell a good story if it’s based on fallacy and fantasy. That should only happen in Hollywood. And when it comes to war, no special effects can solve political or social conflict. It requires human intelligence, negotiation, and a commitment to peace. A social structure predicated on war generates perpetual war. It is poisonous.
We as a culture should realize that in a global feedback system that inserting more violence and death into the circuit of civilization is ultimately nihilistic. I have a sense that this is not the definitive path of humanity, and that in the end we’ll reject once and for all the deceptions and lies that have driven us towards the brink of oblivion. It remains my belief that education based on the principle of self-empowerment, sustainability and nonviolence is a critical anecdote to the situation that confronts us at this historical juncture. Contrary to the Neocon axiom that Empire defines reality, I believe wholeheartedly that it is everyday humans that shape the world, and in the great drama of known history, they have always rejected empires and petty tyrants regardless of the technology and communications systems they deploy.
The good news is that young people are watching less TV. I hope new media completely compost and destroy the “news.” Otherwise there will be little else to stop the grand denial, self-deception machine that it has become.
Here’s a chilling excerpt from the article (you may need to register to view it)…
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
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A controversial new Hillary Clinton attack ad caused an Internet stir Tuesday among critics who claim it deliberately darkens Barack Obama’s skin color.
Lesson 1: The Public Won’t Support You, Unless You Do Things “Harshly”: Soon after 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, Ailes sent a “back-channel message” to President Bush, suggesting that he needed to take “the harshest measures possible” in retaliation for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He added that “support” for war “would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly.”
Lesson 2: The Public Does Not Need To Know The Full Reasons For Going To War: In 2003, a University of Maryland study found that “those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions” about basic facts related to the war. 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News as their primary news source believed at least one of three lies: the discovery of alleged WMD in Iraq, alleged Iraqi involvement in 9/11, and international support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Lesson 3: When Things Go Bad, The Public Doesn’t Need To Know: “Fox spent half as much time covering the Iraq war than MSNBC during the first three months” of 2007, “and considerably less than CNN.” Fox News “were obviously cheerleaders for the war,” said CNN U.S. President Jon Klein. “When the war went badly they had to dial back coverage because it didn’t fit their preconceived story lines.”
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Sometimes cool has its upside, because though I harshed on Obama’s music video too much in my last post, at least it has a modicum of class and taste. Now this. It’s hard to believe this Hillary video is nothing other than an Up With People out take. No wonder she’s loosing badly down the stretch. You’ve got to wonder when she will escape the ’90s Clinton time machine (or is it the ’80s, ’70s. 60s???? They don’t know what era they live in). The lesson with this, which is highly symbolic of Clinton herself, is that when you try to be all things to all people, you become aesthetic mush, not unlike public art.
Talk about a bad virus that catches on for the wrong reason.
PS I realize that both videos in question are “unofficial,” but this may be a case of learning to judge by the friends one keeps.
PPS In case you are wondering if there is a political ad I do like, check this one out.
So I believe we can say it’s official: the “Yes, We Can!” Will.i.am-produced celebrity Obama love fest is viral, and since the video link landed in my inbox five different times in one day I figure it requires a response.
With so many good vibes and celebrity endorsements in one impressive eyeful should we let the images and words bubble through us like the temporary elation of a pill or cocktail? Makes one wonder if feeling good is all that is left of the Democratic platform.
The video itself is a quintessential artifact of the postmodern political system in which images are the map, and there is little left of the policy territory to explore. Politics have been reduced to toothpaste slogans, and this is certainly a clever one. The “Yes, We Can!” incantation rifts the Latin American protest chant, “Si, Se Puede!,” and is not unlike Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” jingle– yes it sounds great and meaningful, yet when you scratch the surface there is no there there (I don’t mean to harp on my fave act PE, but as a media literacy dude I have to call it like it is). After watching the video, I’m still starved for meaning. Yes, we can… but what? What is it that we can do? Propel another media creature into the White House? Have hope, change… I’m sorry but these are the most hollow and meaningless words to pervade politics since the invention of television. They are no more substantial than a product claiming it is “30% more free.”
Obama strikes me as the perfect PoMo politician. As a chameleon he can be many things to many people. In “Yes, We Can!” he is clearly invoking the rhetorical style of MLK. Yet this is populism without the populous, i.e. a “movement.” Yes, Obama is a big phenom among certain enthusiastic throngs, but every time I examine his views, it’s like poking the Pillsbury Doughboy– my finger just moves the fat around while he giggles in response. Obama is still an organ of corporate lobbyists and fails to challenge in any fundamental way the entrenched militarism of our system. So yes, he is very good at cribbing style, and with Will.i.am at the helm, style is in abundance. Obama has found a perfect partner for the manufacture of slick imagery and corporate pseudo culture (for more on Black Eyed Peas and selling out hip hop to Snickers, read this post).
Believe me, it pains me to write these words. I don’t enjoy slamming a popular icon, but when it comes to the Democrats, please don’t check your well-cultivated critical faculties at the door. They sold us out after the last election by failing to stop the war (among many things), as was their mandate. With this monstrous political machine, you’ve got to keep your BS radar on full power.
In Latin American protest there is generally a clear aim, but with this dude I have no idea what it is, beyond getting elected President. I would hope that a true opposition does emerge, and it has clear aims to do something substantial about climate change and to end militarism. Until I hear stronger challenges on these fronts, yet again I will be forced to hold my nose when I pull that voting lever in the Fall.
PS Please correct me if I’m wrong about Obama. I really have no desire to be “right.”
