27 April 2004Paul Street
* An abbreviated version of these comments was presented at a session on corporate media and the FCC at the Self-Publishing and Media Reform Fest, Chicago, Illinois, April 24, 2004
During the last three years, the United States has moved farther to the corporatist, imperialist, fundamentalist and even fascist right than many of us thought possible. We have the "mainstream" corporate and its great public sector partner and enabler the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to thank for much of that accelerated reactionary drift. We've got an actual FCC expert (Mike Szczepanezyk of Chicago Media Action ) here today, so I think I'll talk mainly about why media reform and the FCC matter. As I hope you agree, these subjects matter quite a bit.
Neither Dictatorship nor Democracy
I put my e-mail address at the bottom of most of my essays and if I do an especially relevant or provocative one I get messages from distant corners of the earth. One of the interesting things about these "foreign" communications is the sense they give me of the misconceptions (thoroughly understandable) that some people overseas have about life and politics in the United States.
There's a curious false dichotomy across some of these notes. On one hand, I've had people write to me to express amazement that I am able to say harshly critical things about terrible U.S. policies like the invasion and occupation of Iraq. "Aren't you worried for your life?," one person asked me. "You'd better watch out...they're going to come and shoot you." The writers of this note and others like it look at US support for foreign dictators and death squads and figure that the U.S. must itself be a literal internal dictatorship.
I write back and tell them two things. First: I'm not a big name left critic like, say, a Noam Chomsky or a John Pilger and so it's questionable whether anyone in power cares all that much about what I'm saying. Second, and more to the point, even big names can pretty much say what they want without having to worry about getting shot over here. This is thanks to free speech, won by popular struggles in the metropolitan core of the world capitalist system and most strongly entrenched in the U.S.
On the other hand, I've gotten messages that operate on the opposite but equally wrong premise that the United States is a real democracy and so all Americans are equally knowledgeable about and responsible for Uncle Sam's actions. These notes are often angry in tone, the general theme being "what the hell is wrong with you Americans...this is what you do with your glorious democracy... invade and oppress others abroad?"
I write these people back and say that it's not entirely what they think. U.S. policy is determined and works on behalf of a relatively small, privileged and globally-expansionist segment of the population. The mass of the populace tolerates this to a large extent, true, but it's not exactly out of democratic choice.
What these foreign correspondents of mine are struggling with is the fact the U.S. is neither a dictatorship nor a democracy. The U.S. is an imperial corporate plutocracy where domestic debate and thoughts are confined within narrow, privilege-friendly parameters. Americans are free to speak their minds. But their minds are under constant assault from propaganda, partly because of that freedom.
Propaganda at Work: Simon Says 2 +2 = 5
The best definition of propaganda I know belongs to the late Alex Carey. "By 'propaganda,'" Carey wrote, "I refer to communications where the form and content is selected with the single-minded purpose of bringing some target audience to adopt attitudes and beliefs chosen in advance by the sponsors of the communications. 'Propaganda,'" noted Carey, is very different from education at its best, whose "purpose is to encourage critical inquiry and to open minds for and against any particular conclusion, rather than close them to the possibility of any conclusion but one." Propaganda is the management and manipulation of public opinion through misinformation and the use of political and cultural symbols to create popular consent for policies, practices, and hierarchical societal arrangements that are contrary to popular interests. Propaganda is public relations for private and authoritarian gain (Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, 1986).
I can think of few better examples of propaganda at work than the remarkable American state-media public relations campaign that set up and accompanied the imperial conquest of Iraq. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was and is thoroughly illegal, totally immoral, and completely unnecessary. It was and is also contrary to the interests of large numbers of Americans in a number of ways. It's transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from needed social programs and basic social needs to the wasteful, and murderous military system, falsely called "defense," and to super-wealthy high-tech "defense" contractors, modern day masters of war like Lockheed Martin and Chicago's own corrupt and blood-soaked Boeing Corporation.
When combined with Bush's massive tax cuts for the super wealthy, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is helping - and this is by design - feed a runaway deficit that promises to cripple basic social programs in areas like education, health, and child welfare for many years to come. It's increasing American's vulnerability to terrorist attack. It's eroding what was left of the moral authority of the United States. It's fueling massive global anti-Americanism and it's putting a bunch of predominantly working class American soldiers in a terrible, dangerous, and unfair situation.
There are other ways in which the invasion and occupation of Iraq is a disaster for Americans, not to mention Iraqis and others around the world. Still, the Bush administration and the Pentagon and their friends, allies, and enablers in the dominant media were able to create a critical mass of popular American support for this illegal, ridiculous, and murderous policy. They did this through propaganda. They combined monumental deception with the powerful deployment and merging of key political and cultural symbols. They convinced enough Americans that Saddam Hussein was the ultimate embodiment of despotic Evil on Earth and a genuine threat to the virtuous, Freedom-Loving and Democratic American Way of Life. They convinced enough Americans that Saddam possessed sufficient terrible weapons, terrorist connections, and malevolent suicidal willpower to pose a clear and present danger to ordinary Americans and that he was directly linked to Osama bin-Laden and 9/11.
Of course, much of the propaganda that people receive in America is less about specific policies than about overall societal arrangements. Less through any sort of reasoned and open debate than through simple repetition and ubiquitous assumption, masses of Americans are led to believe a number of patently false things, such as the following:
Democracy is a system in which the key decisions are basically monopolized by the "leading sectors of the business community and related elites" (Noam Chomsky) and the public are only "spectators, not active participants" (see Chomsky's What Uncle Sam Really Wants for a useful informal discussion of this)
The public is best off spend most of their time in depoliticized atomization and alienated isolation, focusing mainly on local, personal and family matters and leaving the big policy decisions and politics in general to supposedly expert and benevolent masters- people like the shameful George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. We non-elites are supposed to keep our mouths shut and stay out of the "elite's" hair by not interfering in the public arena, where we don't belong (again, see Chomsky).
Democracy refers only to the political system and cannot have anything to do with the economic system. There can be no real popular input on how the economy is run, the workplace is structured. Democracy is going to the polls every few years or so to pick your rulers from a small elite pre-selected in advance.
America does not expand its power out of any venal or self-interested objectives but out of concern for the well being of humanity. The United States is a benevolent, forward-looking, humanistic, and democratic world power. Those who resist and criticize American policy at home and abroad are by definition enemies of freedom, democracy, justice, and civilization.
An Invitation to Thought Control
It might seem paradoxical that large numbers of people in a land, THE land (if you like) of free speech - a country with strong democratic and especially civil liberties traditions - would fall prey to such disempowering, nonsensical, false, and authoritarian ideas. This becomes much less paradoxical, however, when you factor in broader interrelated forces of class and empire.
Free speech and strong democratic and civil libertarian traditions are wonderful, glorious, inspiring things in and of themselves. But they are an invitation to thought-control when they exist side by side with the stark socioeconomic inequalities and the related expansionist imperatives of modern American capitalism.
Currently in the United States, the top 1 percent owns nearly 40 percent of all household wealth. The top 10 percent owns two thirds of the wealth and a probably larger share of the nation's elected officials and policymakers. Many of us barely get by from one paycheck to the next while Donald Trump owns numerous luxury states and his own airplane and his own helicopter. At least 23 million Americans stood in food lines in the U.S. during the last year. Many of those "food insecure" Americans are part of the "working poor," a group that "plays by the rules" and still can't keep their heads above water in "the world's richest nation."
Trump and his cohorts receive more income in one hour than these "working poor" will in their entire lives. Meanwhile Americans can't fund their local schools adequately or properly fund drug treatment programs or provide basic health insurance to all its citizens. "Their" country can however afford huge tax cuts for the already super-wealthy. It can pay for massively expensive Haliburton contracts and attack helicopters in Iraq, Saudia Arabia, and the West Bank and the "reconstruction" of Iraq, required thanks to the massively expensive U.S. destruction of Iraq.
The privileged American few aren't content to own a disproportionate share of the wealth only of the United States. They seek as much of the world's wealth as they can grab, which is why we have more than a hundred military bases around the world and a "defense" budget that is bigger than the combined military expenditures of all conceivable U.S. "enemy" states. It's why America sends its working-class sons and daughters to kill and die in foreign lands.
The invitation to propaganda and thought control arises from two things. First, ordinary Americans are human beings endowed with a basic sense of moral decency. Since we are not born with some sort of masochistic, self-hating impulse us to like all this shitty interrelated empire and inequality, the majority of us (not privileged) have to be ruled.
Second, thanks to the British, American and French Revolutions and the living legacy of the Enlightenment, we are free to say that we don't like it. It's not generally legitimate to shoot us if and when we voice displeasure with the consequences and - in some cases even the existence - of empire and inequality.
And precisely because we can't be dominated in purely coercive ways, we must be controlled more softly, through propaganda. Because we are free to speak our minds, our minds but be controlled. Thus, there's a huge investment in the U.S. in what Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman call "manufacturing consent."
It makes sense, then, that, as an American academic named Norman Meier noted in 1950, "Americans are the most propagandized people of any nation." That's what you'd expect in a nation that combines stark class inequality (the U.S. is by far the most unequal and wealth top-heavy nation in the industrialized world), concentrated (corporate and state) power, and remarkable private/corporate communications capacity (organizational and technological) with the world's strongest free speech and related civil-libertarian traditions and protections
As Bad, if Not Worse than the USSR
The invitation to propaganda is taken up and acted upon by the very wealthy men who own "our" media and have no interest in the population getting the real story about U.S. society and policy. The results of their impulse towards thought-control in "free" societies and of their remarkable capacity (technical, organizational, and financial) to act upon that drive are about as bad, maybe worse, that what we would expect in an openly totalitarian society, as Orwell suggested in an unpublished introduction to his anti-Stalinist novel Animal Farm.
One way it's actually worse in the "democratic" west is the covert and therefore more difficult-to-discern level at which it operates. In the Soviet Union, everyone knew that their state communications system was censored and filtered. At the bottom of each day's Pravda (sort of the New York Times of the Soviet state), in fact, you could see the daily censors' initials. The modern west's private media is much less transparently censored and in that way (and other ways) it is more insidiously thought-controlling.
No Such Thing as a Free -Speech Lunch
In short, there's no such thing as a Free-speech Lunch in the eye of the world-capitalist hurricane. In this as in other ways, we pay an enormous price for the partial, nature and inherent limitations - including the restriction of "democracy" (such as it is) to the political sphere and the maintenance of the "the economy" as a private domain (ruled on a day-to-day basis by "the private sector," which is enabled and protected by a captive public sector) - of the "bourgeois" revolutions that brought us free speech in the first place. In an age of stupendous communications technology and advanced corporate media organization, the price is paid in Orwellian and [Aldous-] Huxlean spades.
There's an impressive literature on the structure, mechanics, and content of how this price is exacted. See the writings of Carey, Chomsky and Herman (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media), Robert McChensney (Rich Media, Poor Democracy), Norman Solomon (Weapons of Mass Deception), and others. I think these writers tend to underestimate the role that "softer," more Huxlean entertainment (as opposed to the more explicitly Orwellan/hard-ideological news and commentary that tends to absorb their focus) media play in the manufacture of consent, but this criticism (see my "Killing Us Softly: Politics and Entertainment," ZNet Magazine (April 21, 2004), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=21 &ItemID=5372) comes from within the analytical framework that these brilliant left media critics have advanced.
Corporate Media Isn't Beholden to the Establishment, it IS the Establishment
It's very significant and telling that our land of "democracy" and "free speech" is also the land of concentrated corporate media ownership. What is it now ...eight, seven...six gigantic multinational media conglomerates - all them all of them deeply in bed, embedded in numerous interlocking ways with American policy - that own more than fifty percent of all American media print and electronic combined? Whatever (the latest is six, I think) the latest shrinking number is, it's horrifying and Orwellian. A land of corporate media monopoly is a land without an adequate number of independent sources of information and commentary - and entertainment - that are committed to resisting state propaganda and telling the truth about empire and inequality.
Each of "our" reigning "mainstream" media conglomerates is itself an internally totalitarian, savagely hierarchical institution structured to serve the interests of investors and advertisers and expand market share around the world. Modern corporate media is not simply beholden to the global capitalist-imperialist establishment. It IS the capitalist-imperialist establishment. Expecting it to provide an honest account of current events and relevant past history is (as Chomsky says) pretty much like expecting General Motors' company newspaper to give an honest account of shop-floor conditions and collective bargaining issues in GM's auto plants.
FCC
The FCC is the public agency that is supposed to represent the American public on questions relating to media ownership and behavior. When it says that X number of firms can own X number of stations and/or newspapers in the nation or in communities X, Y and Z, it makes decisions that belong on the front page of the first section of the newspaper and not just in the business sections, where you usually find most coverage on FCC and media ownership issues. When it reserves huge swaths of the public airwaves for private, profit-oriented use, when it denies broadcasting licenses to small and independent radio broadcasters, and when it permits fewer and fewer giant firms to own the modern communications system, it creates a world where journalists and musicians and screenwriters and novelists and critics must toe investors' and advertisers' bottom line on everything they write and say. The space collapses for honest, thorough, fully informed, and many-sided discussion of key public issues.
When it gives the communications commons away to corporate masters, the FCC betrays its popular charter and attacks the heart and soul of American democracy, or what's left of it. It cuts to the core of our popular free-speech birthright. It contributes to the creation of a dangerous mind-controlled world that is closer to the worst nightmares of Orwell, Huxley, and Vonnegut than the best dreams of Jefferson, Paine, Lincoln, and Dewey.
Paul Street ([email protected]) is a regular ZNet commetnator who writes on imperialism, racism, and thought control. See his blog "Empire and Inequality," which can be linked off the ZNet top page at http://blog.zmag.org/empire/
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=5410
