Mass Media Propaganda

QUESTION: You write in Manufacturing Consent [(Pantheon, 1988)] that it's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector. What are those interests?

CHOMSKY: Well, if you want to understand the way any society works, ours or any other, the first place to look is who is in a position to make the decisions that determine the way the society functions. Societies differ, but in ours, the major decisions over what happens in the society -- decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on -- are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms. They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government. They're the ones who own the media and they're the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens. You know, what's done in the society. Within the economic system, by law and in principle, they dominate. The control over resources and the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and on the ideological system.

QUESTION: When we talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured?

CHOMSKY: To start with, there are two different groups, we can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there's two targets for propaganda. One is what's sometimes called the political class. There's maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They're supposed to sort of participate in social life -- either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They're supposed to vote, they're supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that's one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there's maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything -- and they're the ones who usually pay the costs.

Source: Excerpts from Manufacturing Consent; Noam Chomsky interviewed by various interviewers; Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, The FBI Gets More Power

Remember the Rouge Department of Justice? Of course not, CNN will cover the OJ Trial extensively. As if that fool OJ had any impact on the lives of anybody outside of his close circle. Nope the media will show the American people how stupid they think we are by spending countless hours covering a burglary trial of a has-been NFL jock. Who the hell even cares. Meanwhile Nero Media, your 4th Amendment is burning over in the Republican headed Department of Justice. Does anyone actually trust these crooks and liars to administer justice? The Department of Justice is composed of the folks that former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Monica Goodling hired. Good grief!

According to the Washington Post article, "Rule Changes Would Give FBI Agents Extensive New Powers," by Carrie Johnson dateline 12 September 2008:

The Justice Department will unveil changes to FBI ground rules today that would put much more power into the hands of line agents pursuing leads on national security, foreign intelligence and even ordinary criminal cases.

The overhaul, the most substantial revision to FBI operating instructions in years, also would ease some reporting requirements between agents, their supervisors and federal prosecutors in what authorities call a critical effort to improve information gathering and detect terrorist threats.

The changes would give the FBI's more than 12,000 agents the ability at a much earlier stage to conduct physical surveillance, solicit informants and interview friends of people they are investigating without the approval of a bureau supervisor. Such techniques are currently available only after FBI agents have opened an investigation and developed a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed or that a threat to national security is developing.
Authorities say the changes would eliminate confusion for agents who investigate drug, gang or national security cases.

Lipstick on a Pig Distraction

Michael Kinsley asks "Why Do Lies Prevail?" in the Washington Post dated 10 September 2008. Kinsley writes, "John McCain was not offended when Barack Obama described McCain’s policy agenda as putting “lipstick on a pig.” I can’t prove that, but it seems so obvious to me that it’s more like a fact than an opinion. Nor could McCain possibly have thought that Obama was calling McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, a pig, since Obama didn’t even mention Palin. If Obama had even thought that his words would be misinterpreted as calling Palin a pig, he wouldn’t have said them. That also seems obvious. The whole controversy is ginned up, a fraud, a lie. All obvious.

I know that by even bringing this up, I am falling into the trap that McCain’s people have set and perpetuating this ridiculous controversy. But the routine acceptance of obvious lies now corrodes our politics as much as the money that was the subject of McCain’s famous act of Republican apostasy: McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. McCain has described his motive for McCain-Feingold as a giant mea culpa for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. Maybe when this is over, one way or another, McCain will swear off corrupt lying the way he has sworn off corrupt money."

Read on here.

Book of the Week

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The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy By David Brock

Scared4America strongly advocates reading, researching, and critical thinking. David Brock over at Media Matters for America use to be one of the rightwing mouthpieces. Today, however, Mr. Brock is an advocate for the truth. The truth, according to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joesph Goebbels “ is the greatest enemy of the State.” In other words, if the truth is the only antidote to the Republican big lies. It's like throwing a bucket of cold water on the Wicked Witch in the Land of Oz. The truth melts the big lie.

The big lie is spun an propagated through the media. The lie becomes perceived as true, while the truth is threatened by the fiction. The big lie theory, according to Joseph Goebbels simply states, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Guess what, the big lie works. It worked in Nazi Germany, it worked during the Red Scare of 1919 in the USA, it worked during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Plain and simple the big lie works, until the cold bucket of truth water exposes the big lie for what it is.

David Brock's website Media Matters and his books Blinded by the Right and the Republican Noise Machine offer a a cold bucket of truth to the rightwingnut windbags of propaganda and fear mongering.

In David Brock's article entitled “The Mighty Windbags,” published in Salon Magazine in 2004, he describes the “powerful propaganda organs of the Republican Party.” Brock asserts that “the important sectors of the political media -- most of cable TV news, the majority of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked Web sites -- reflect more closely the political and journalistic values of the Washington Times than those of the New York Times.” The “journalistic values” of the Washington Times, according to Brock, are “governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias [rightwing] and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil.”

Scared4America likens this politically motivated bias and the lack of journalistic integrity to that of Edward Bernays or Joseph Goebbels propaganda.

David Brock wrote, ... People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats, despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections, seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds. While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It's the media, stupid.

When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive their news from the New York Times and National Public Radio give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture -- one that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility -- that is no longer representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets of Rush Limbaugh's radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill O'Reilly's temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel, or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal think I'm a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial.

Those who understand what I mean are either members of the media itself, have read media-criticism books or Internet sites devoted to the subject, or are in the political trenches every day dealing with the media. The gap between those who recognize right-wing media power for what it is and those who don't is wide and deep, as if they inhabit parallel universes. The gap is dangerous to democracy and needs to be closed.

We at Scared4America say, pay attention and stay alert to the lies and media deceptions.

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Media Amnesia Candidate Sarah Palin vs. Run-up to Iraqi War

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The 2008 Election season has now entered into the Twilight Zone. Rod Sterling needs to que the sound track intro. The ghost of Joseph Goebbels sprinkles his “big lie” theory on the Republican candidate for Vice President, Governor Sarah Palin. Now the “big lie” has morphed into the “big narrative.” And just like the run-up to the Iraqi war, the media gorges themselves in Republican Goebbelesque big narrative.
Salon Magazine published an article on April of 2007, by Gary Kamiya, entitled “Iraq: Why the media failed.” Salon's article examines the media complicity with the Republican establishment. As Kamiya's piece asserts in its title, “Afraid to challenge America's leaders or conventional wisdom about the Middle East, a toothless press collapsed.” Why is today different from any other day. The media has proven itself to be the propaganda arm for the Republican establishment, and so it goes during this election race.

The exact same Republican establishment that shoved the Iraqi war down the collective throats of the American people using the same tactics and strategies to push Sarah Palin into the Executive Office. The faces in front of the camera may have changed, Palin and McCain have replaced Bush and Cheney, but the power behind the thrown remains the same.

According to the AP wire reports, the media's Alaskan embedded reporters that can't question the Candidate Palin, nor will she speak on the record. The real kicker is that our fourth estate seems to be as complicit with this arrangement as they were with the Iraqi jingoism.
Heaven help us all.



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