The Propaganda authors write about a third person effect–the personal notion that propaganda is a problem, and it affects our society, but not me. I’m immune. Like advertising. I don’t pay any attention to it (said the brain to the mouth). 

TV advertising and product sales paint a different picture. If TV advertising didn’t work, would companies pay millions to ad agencies to produce them and media outlets to air them? When Mattell Toys began advertising on TV, they observed over time a 24-fold increase in sales. Benson & Hedges began a goofy series of commercials about the pitfalls of their 100mm long cigarettes, and quickly saw a 7-fold increase in sales. Post Grape Nuts used wild food expert Euell Gibbons to push their cereal and saw a 30% sudden increase in sales. Does TV work? You decide.

So, what to do? Some social psychologists suggest ‘arming’ ourselves. Forewarning seems to provide some protection, but is limited (in other words, a message that causes the viewer to brace oneself for a propaganda launch). Anything that increases ‘message scrutiny’ and triggers the ‘central’ route of persuasion, where the viewer/reader/listener is engaged, also helps.

How would it work? What should be counter ‘talking points’ to social security, for instance? The authors offer some other ideas about arming ourselves:

• Ad regulation. Especially for children’s programming. This happened in the 1970s, but was scaled back and became ‘voluntary’ in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration. But could regulation of deceptive ads work? How? Where would one draw the line? What would be the fines for violation? What about political campaigns and deceptive ads? Are these all incursions against free speech and the first amendment? (‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’). Do wealthy benefactors have the right to spread unsubstantiated accusations across the media landscape to influence public opinion? Could Fox News be sued for false advertising? Flak occasionally travels uphill . . .
• Role of the Federal Communications Commission. Instead of dealing with media ownership monopoly, fake news (they’ve recently been pressured on this one), false and often slanderous political advertising, they’re often making sure that the industries they’re supposed to regulate are their favored clients. This means issues like ownership concentration, misleading or false news reporting, lack of disclosure of conflicts of interest (e.g., Glenn Beck warning of imminent economic doom, recommending buying gold, while he plugs his advertiser, goldline.com). This is a public agency, remember. There was a time when the fairness doctrine was seen as reasonable and, well, fair. The odds of the fairness doctrine returning are slim, however. Obviously Fox News is against it, because it would radically change what they do.
• Play devil’s advocate. Take the opposite position, assume what you’re hearing is untrue and try to figure out what the message is intended to do, and who it’s intended to benefit. When you hear terms like ‘clear skies‘ to describe pollution regulations, ‘healthy forests’ to describe logging operations, and ‘extraordinary rendition‘ to describe kidnapping people to be tortured in third party countries, skepticism may be a healthy reaction.
• Develop immunities. Some strategies to watch for include ‘stealing thunder.’ It’s always best to reveal something before one’s opponent does. It tends to minimize the damage, make the message receivers believe the revelations aren’t really so bad, if a person is willing to admit to them. As the authors mention, ‘a concession coming from your mouth is not nearly as hurtful as an exposure coming from your opponent’s.’
• Inoculation. Like a vaccine, brief exposure ‘immunizes’ people to more full-scale exposure. The authors mention a study on peer pressure and smoking: saying no can be seen as the cool, buckling under pressure as the uncool thing. See if you can come up with examples. Here are some ad campaigns that may help illustrate:
  • Virginia Slims and rebellion–‘You’ve come a long way, ba-bee, to get where you got to today, You’ve got your own cigarette now baby, you’ve come a long, long way!’ Very effective at making cigarette smoking look like a rebellious act, rather than classic conformity;
  • Nike and revolution–they were using John Lennon’s ‘Revolution‘ from the Beatles. As if buying Nike shoes, made in low-wage labor countries, priced out of the market for even many middle class to afford, is revolutionary . . .

  The inoculation technique is most effective with cultural truisms, according to the authors. A cultural truism is one of those things that a majority of Americans have been exposed to so much, they simply take it for granted as a given, as the truth. For instance, The U.S. is the best country in the world to live in. We’re the most generous. Hard work will help you achieve the American Dream (so if you’re unsuccessful, you’re probably lazy and unmotivated). Patriotism means supporting our troops, no matter what sort of misadventure their Commander-in-Chief has sent them to fight. The authors suggest that the ‘best way to help soldiers resist anti-American propaganda, and to challenge resistance to pro-communist propaganda, would be to challenge belief in American way of life.’ What do you think? Expose them to the truth? Can one make the same argument for religious beliefs? Evolution? Does a small dose inoculate us against an epidemic? As they say, ‘the person easiest to persuade is the person whose beliefs are based on slogans that have never been seriously challenged.’ One of the reasons John Kerry tightened the election after the first debate is because the smear campaign against him waged in TV ads painted such a caricature that, when people were confronted with the person in front of them, saying intelligent things and not quoting from Mao’s little red book, some began to realize they’d been fed propaganda.

Media reform

What’s to be done? Well, part of the answer comes from understanding some of the problems, which we’ve spent a great deal of time discussing in this class. Corporate concentration of media outlets, and pressure from owners with varied political and economic interests. Advertising-driven industries that can put pressure on news divisions. The corruption of money, which creates the ‘echo chamber’ (Limbaugh, Hannity, Larson, Liddy, North, Reagan, etc., Fox, think tanks, Weekly Standard, weblogs, flak organizations, Washington Times)–all of the media outlets aligned with corporate interests. Stiff competition among media outlets for shrinking market share, prompting cost-cutting measures and less investigative reporting. A lack of independence between news divisions and the rest of the media outlet, and a push to have news divisions sustain themselves financial (back to advertising …). The rise of TV as the medium of news and entertainment, and as the model for entertainment.

Then there’s the ‘demand’ side–the propagandists have figured out how to tap into traits of human nature, vulnerabilities to various techniques of persuasion. Yes, it’s manipulative, but it’s more than that. People seem to have a need to believe in certain things, such as legitimate insitutions, authorities, symbols, and are resistent to question their credibility or legitimacy. The complexity of modern societies and issues, politically, economically, socially, scientifically, culturally, etc., means that the average media consumer depends on ‘experts’ in many cases to translate policy and issues into lay terms. Are the ‘experts’ credible and neutral? How can the public evaluate such questions, without the intellectual and practical tools to question propaganda?

You’ll find there is no silver bullet that will solve all of the problems that have accumulated and rendered corporate news so incapable of informing the public. We’re back to who can afford free speech here. Organization, grassroots cooperation, both in terms of news content AND education, are critical to countering corporations’ corrupting influences on a free press and processes central to a functioning democracy.

Media analyst Norman Solomon (in Censored 2005) talks about moving away from high-profile cases to the trenches–local outlets, forums, broad-based participation, greater diversity of viewpoints. Ever wonder why the corporate interests go to such great lengths to make their astroturf sites and front groups seem to have popular support? Ideas and movements with popular support have more credibility. Real support takes hard work and organizational skills. Media Alliance is a good example of how grassroots movements are building coalitions. The trend toward more ethnic-centered news is exemplified by Pacific News Service. California has over 40 million residents, the majority of whom will be Hispanic in the not-too-distant future, is the fifth largest economy in the world, and is a laboratory for many media democracy movements. So many of the movements are based in Northern California. There are people pushing the legal angles of media democracy (for instance, trying to prevent presidents from stacking the FCC with corporate ideologues). There are hundreds of organizations, hundreds of thousands of people, pushing against monied interests and for a truly free press. And the numbers are growing, as mistrust of commercial media increases.

There are many counter trends that a ‘media democracy’ movement has to contend with. Corporate consolidation, TV dominance and the dominance of visual culture, the advertising industry (and the consumption it promotes), the spread of global capitalism, well-financed corporate movements, think tanks, all favoring pro-business, pro-corporate political agendas.

There’s no money in grassroots social change.

Open source, grassroots organizations

The course resources page has links to various entities.  Sourcewatch.org is an excellent site (here’s an interview with its founders). There are other media literacy tools on the news page. Imagine . . . the notion that media are there to serve the public interest, the public good, rather than corporate executives, bought-and-sold politicians, shareholders, advertisers, and essentially the residents in the corridors of power.

Use of these outlets changes the landscape of media-supporting the growth of a social movement. I’m sorry–there are no miracle solutions to the problem–as individuals we can change our media consumption habits, we can support the groups and organizations that seem to believe in a mission of public service. We can be critical consumers of the news, become involved in public debate and dialogue, where people are actually forced to face each other. It is also good to seek out and try to understand different viewpoints on media issues. They might even change our opinions and views. Where they never do, self-righteousness sometimes settles in.

As individuals

Defensive and offensive action–this is mostly common sense stuff, much of it from class and from the books we’ve read.

• Evaluating source credibility–this also implies having the tools to do this, understanding how sources can be used and abused, where this is most likely to happen, etc. Part of this is impartiality. Does the communicator stand to benefit?
• Get in touch with your feelings–propagandists are good at this–it works well with cinema, advertising, telemarketers, sales people. These are good places to practice figuring out how media can affect your emotions, and why, and learning how to divorce yourself from phony manipulation, fearmongering, or heartstring-tugging. I hate to point this out–but Hollywood movies and TV series are particularly good at this. Keep in mind that most of the people who use these deceptive sales pitches are in it for the money–you aren’t offending any moral sensibilities by tuning them out. The director of a film or TV series may truly be trying to do art, but he/she understands the financial pressures, and especially in the case of TV (where the viewer needs to feel involved in the story), must produce various kinds of ‘bait’ to keep viewers on the line.
• Seeking perspective: Facts, evidence, framing – for instance, the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal was presented by the Pentagon as the case of a few bad apples. We came to find out later it was policy with memos leading up to the White House condoning it (by our current attorney general), that it was not limited to Abu Ghraib, that the images Americans saw were simply the ‘softening up’ of targets for the real torture, and that the U.S. was also practicing ‘extraordinary rendition’ (sending people without charge to third party countries that practice more extreme forms of torture). Talk radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh equated torture with fraternity prank mentality. In essence, the supporters of the war sought to make it difficult if not impossible to put the story into a broader perspective of what the goals of U.S. occupation were, whether the ends justified the means, whether it was really torture, etc.
• Are alternatives being considered? When you’re being presented with a problem (e.g., pay no attention to those reports, Iran’s developing nukes!), and driven to one conclusion (War!). That’s also sometimes called a false bifurcation. The NRA (National Rifle Association) often does this–either we live in a society where no one can have guns, not even air rifles or BB guns, or we make them available to every man, woman and child who wants them, regardless of age, mental states, criminal records, etc., to protect themselves from criminals.
• Questioning the ‘official versions’–It would be nice if we could trust our political leaders to tell the truth, but the most cursory glance at the White House and commercial news shows that propaganda tends to prevail–that is, what the White House says, and what it does, are often entirely different if not opposite. And reporters think twice before asking tough questions. Listen to what they say, or what the TV says they say, if you must, but watch what they do–this is nothing radical–it’s pretty simple accountability that a real democracy requires. In other words, watch for source filtering.
• About talking points–does endless repetition make it news? Or a manufactured product? If you hear the same ideas, the same wording, repeated over and over, in different media outlets, be skeptical.
• Know the ‘other side’s’ argument, even if you disagree with it (you can’t push your own argument unless you know others’) – this means checking out a variety of sources, and having a good idea of how they usually report. Sometimes it’s not so much about what the news is, but how it is being defined by corporate sources.
• Use multiple sources. This is one way to distribute risk that you’re being misinformed. Also, avoid advertising-based news (which means especially network TV).
• Pay attention to distractions, entertainment. For what they are–distractions and entertainment. You’ll be surprised how often they constitute the majority of network or local news. And how quickly you can identify them, with practice.
• Support campaign finance reform. Why (hint)?
• Support TV shows that inform. If you can find any. Check out documentaries–this is one of the most valuable and untapped sources of alternative news (although, alas, often part of the historical record).
• Promote institutions of democracy–free press, voting, diversity, FCC as a regulatory body, an Internet relatively free of the influence of corporate money, etc.
• Learn to watch TV in a critical way–not as a passive observer–remember the two routes to persuasion–the peripheral and the central (the latter which engages rational thought and skepticism). Inflict this on others. But be gentle . . .
• Practice these skills. Philosopher Bertrand Russel talks about the concept of ‘cosmic laziness.’ Even our brains tend to conserve energy, and neurons fire in ways that conserve energy. We become creatures of habit. Thinking in different ways, things that may cause cognitive dissonance, take effort. Being an active media consumer takes effort. But then, having a democracy takes effort. The more you practice these skills, the better you’ll get at using them, and the more accustomed your neural pathways will be to firing in certain ways. Wouldn’t it be great if cosmic laziness meant a lapse into critical thinking??