Thursday 10 July 2008

Chomsky: What makes the mainstream media mainstream? (part two)

Orwell

Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the mid-1940's, a satire on the Soviet Union, on a totalitarian state. "Literary Censorship in England" was an introduction to that novel, but it was suppressed and wasn't discovered until some 30 years later. In it Orwell says that whilst England isn't a totalitarian state, and doesn't have the KBG breathing down peoples necks, the result is pretty much the same: "People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out."

People only succeed in the media when the power structure knows they're going to say the right thing. Much like university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They've been through a system.

"Corporations sell audiences to other corporations."

"The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would be kind of a miracle."

This hypothesis is extremely sound and stands up under the harshest scrutiny.

Such discussion is unlikely to be found in the education system. And obviously not in the media. Why would it?

Leninism

It's a system simi;lar to Leninism. We - the elite political and corporate class - do things for you and are doing things in the interest of everyone. We let you vote once in a while. But otherwise shut up, do as we say, think what we tell you to think, and let us get on with making the decisions.

How did this evolve?

Much of it comes from the first World War, after which the US went from being a debtor to a creditor nation.

Highly organized state propoganda was first seen during World War I in the form of the British Ministry of Information (BMI). The BMI was used to pursuade the US to enter the war, otherwise Britain was in trouble. It was geared towards sending the US propoganda, massive fabrications of "Hun" attrocities, largely aimed towards US intellectuals. It succeeded. BMI documents show that their goal was "to control the thought of the entire world," as Chomsky puts it.

Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform, in spite of the fact that he intended to go to war. The problem for Wilson was this: how do you get a pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics who want to kill people. To this end they set up the only major state propoganda agency in US history: the Committee on Public Information, often called the Creel Commission. It worked, stirring up enough hysteria to convince Americans to go to war.

A lot of people were impressed by this, including Hitler, who cited (in Mein Kampf) state propoganda as a reason why Germany lost the first World War. The US business community was also impressed.

Public Relations industry

A US invention, a 'monstrous' industry derived from the Creel Commission. Edward Bernays was a leading figure of the Creel Commission and went on to write Propoganda, published in 1925. (Incidentally, whilst 'propoganda' means something different today, at the time it meant simply 'information' and didn't have the negative conotations it has today.) In Propoganda, following his experience of the first World War, Bernays says that it is possible "to regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies".

Also of the Creel Commission, Walter Lippman (the most respected 'serious' journalist in the US for over half a century) spoke of a new art in democracy which he called the "manufacture of consent". Chomsky says:

"By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate."

[Which is why Chomsky says elsewhere that "Democrat and Republican are two sides of the same business faction". It doesn't particular matter which side you vote for because the same interested parties (the corporations and banks) are backing both sides and their interests will served no matter what.]

Academic political and social science derives from the same propoganda industry (Chomsky cites Harold Lasswell as their founder). Lasswell and others realised that "politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World War towards controlling people’s thoughts."

Strangely, "controlling people's thoughts" is not somemthing you'll study in media classes at college.

James Madison, during the constitutional convention, said that the goal of the new system was "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority".

Sunday 6 July 2008

Chomsky: What makes the mainstream media mainstream? (part one)

What follows are detailed notes of a talk Chomsky gave at the Z Media Institute in June 1997. The talk was called what makes the mainstream media mainstream?

The media readily lends itself to being studied. The evidence of what is and is not being reported, the focus of what is reported, what is ignored or suppressed, etc, can be analysed every day by looking at the press itself.


Studying the media - or any institution

Ask questions about its internal structure. How does it relate to other systems of power and authority? Internal records (memo's, letters, that sort of thing) from leading figures in the instituion can be highly revealing, valuable tools for understanding how the institution works.

Institutions should be studied as a scientist would study a complex molecule. You make a hypothesis about its nature and then see how it holds up under scrutiny. In the case of the media, make a hypothesis about what the media product will look like. How does the hypothesis hold up?


What do you find?

There are different media that do different things, such as entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, newspapers, and so on.

One sector of the media is the "elite media". This is the "agenda-setting" media, the large media institutions with the vast resources. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, for example.

So you have a news editor in Dayton, Ohio, who doesn't have the resources "to figure out what the news is"; who has to fill the quarter page he devotes to non-local stories and diverting his audience. Well, he puts there what the New York Times says he should. Local papers do not have the resources to do much else. They do not have 'foreign correspondants" littered around the world.

If you get out of line and start producing stories that the elite or agenda-setting media doesn't approve of, you'll soon hear about it. (Chomsky cites a recent San Jose Mercury News incident as a dramatic example of this.) If you try to break the mold, you simply won't last long. All of which is an understandable reflection of the obvious power tructures of corporations. They are tyrannical institutions.


"The real mass media are basically trying to divert people."

Let them do something else - watch sports, soap operas, etc - keep them occupied while we run the show, while we take care of the serious stuff and make the big decisions.


Who are the elite, agenda setting media?

Take the New York Times and CBS. They are major, highly profitable corporations. Most are either linked to or owned outright by much bigger corporations, for instance General Electric, Westinghouse, etc. They are way up in the power structure of an extremely tyrannical private economy, an economy that is hierachical, controlled from above.

Universities

The media are a doctrinal system, a sytem based on a body or set of principles, on dogma. The media interact closely with universities. A reporter writing about, for instance, Southeast Asia or Africa, is supposed to go to a big university and find an expert to tell him what to write; or to foundations such as the Brookings Institute or the American Enterprise Institute. These corporate funded foundations are very similar to the media.

"Universities are not independent institutions."

"There may be independent people scattered around in them, but that's true of the media as well." In fact that's generally true of corporations and of fascist states.

Universities are dependent on outside sources of support: from private wealth, big corporations, and from government, which is so closely linked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them.

People who don't accept this structure, and internalize it, are likely to be weeded out anywhere from kindergarden up. Conformity and obedience are rewarded, people who think independently are not. They are often marginalised, isolated.

[Part two will follow.]

Friday 4 July 2008

The BBC: "a mouthpiece for establishment views"

"Media commentators have been quick to point out that the communal door linking BBC, government and business executives has been turning for a very long time."
~
Thanks to a recommendation I was recently introduced to the website medialens, a 'UK-based media-watch project which offers authoritative criticism of media bias and censorship'.

Whilst I'm new to the site I was particularly interested in the following article by David Edwards, one of two medialens editors:

New Chairman confirms the BBC as a mouth-piece for establishment views (September 2001)

The new chairman at the time was Gavyn Davies. Whilst the BBC would have us believe they are an impartial organisation without corporate bias, Davies CV tells a different story. In 1997 Davies was touted as the next governor of the Bank of England. He was former chief economist for Goldman Sachs. He has a wealth of over £150million. Davies and Greg Dyke (BBC director general at the time) are both New Labour supporters and have given money to the party. Davies wife ran Gordon Brown's office. Their children were pageboy and bridesmaid at Gordon Brown's wedding. Blair has stayed in Davies holiday home.

Edwards also notes that Sir Christopher Bland, outgoing BBC chairman at the time, went on to become chairman of British Telecom.

In other words, it would be hard to find anyone more biased in favour of both government and corporate interests. As Chomsky might say, to expect otherwise of Davies would take some kind of miracle.

According to Edwards such bias can be found throughout the BBC's history, right up to the point of its inception:

"The BBC was founded by Lord Reith in 1922 and immediately used as a propaganda weapon for the Baldwin government during the General Strike, when it became known by workers as the "British Falsehood Corporation". During the strike, no representative of organized labour was allowed to broadcast on the BBC; the Leader of the Opposition, Ramsay McDonald, was also banned."

It's an insightful article. I was talking to someone recently about this. We're told that the BBC is perceived around the world as some kind of beacon for truth. That it's free from corporate and governmental bias, "because of the unique way the BBC is funded." It's content and the credentials of its chairmen tell quite the opposite story. The BBC is obviously biased and we have little reason to expect it not to be.

"The idea that the "non-corporate" BBC somehow counterbalances the corporate media is made absurd by the fact that, on issue after issue - global warming, sanctions against Iraq, the bombing of Serbia, Western support of Indonesia, inaction over East Timor, the history of US and British support of Third World tyrants - all promote near-identical establishment views."