Review
Joan Shaw
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Jeremiah
Had It Right
All the time I was reading Ramton's and
Stauber's Weapons of Mass Deception,
I kept thinking of the prophet Jermiah's lament -- perhaps delivered
while he was in a serious snit about the usual recalcitrant masses
around him -- "There are none so blind as those who will not see." I
admit that it was reaching a bit on my part to connect Jeremiah's
quotation to the addiction so many Americans seem to have on turning
for their take on the country's and the world's situation to Network
and Cable TV news, not to mention the overhwhelmingly right-wing Talk
Radio. Because the sum total of actual knowledge they accumulate for
their trouble, according to a survey mentioned below, is very close to
zero.
Well, that's all right. To each her own and all that. And besides, a
large majority of Americans knew that to be true for some time. Except. Given the
government's and corporations' use of propaganda followed by polls to
whip up enthusiasm and support, for instance, for a foreign war, each
one of these viewers, knowing next to nothing about a situation, has
nevertheless plenty of say on which mass of trouble our government will
haul us all into. "An overwhelming majority of American people want to
go to war!" trumpets the media and TV and talk radio. And the
depressing thing about these polls is that they're more or less true.
The authors of Weapons of Mass
Deception explain in their latest book just why this happens.
Rampton and Stauber are part of the Center for Media &
Democracy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization
founded ten years ago, in 1993. The Center‛s mission is to investigate
propaganda in both corporations and governments. In their words,
Whether the issue is health, consumer
safety, environmental preservation or democracy and world peace,
citizens today find themselves confronted by a bewildering array of
hired propagandists paid to convince the public that junk food is
nutritious, pollution is harmless, and that what's good for big
business and big government is good for the rest of us.
Besides
Weapons, the Center has
published three other books, Trust
Us, We‛re Experts (a description of PR spin doctors and
"independent experts"); Toxic Sludge
is Good for You! (an analysis of image manipulation); and Mad Cow U.S.A. (governments
colluding with beef producers to suppress important facts about
interspecies transmission of mad cow disease). The Center also
publishes a quarterly,
PR Watch. All three books listed
above were written by Rampton and Stauber with the help of the Center‛s
research staff
In this, their newest book, Weapons
of Mass Deception, the two authors zero in on government
propaganda. They discuss selling the United States to the world, not by
doing, but by saying, and this by means of hiring high-priced public
relations propagandists. They discuss selling the Iraq war to the
American people, the uses of fear to keep Americans compliant, the
hijacking
of the air waves for propaganda, and how lies are propagated in such a
way that they sound like truth. The chapter on "fronts" is an education
in itself. Fronts are groups with high-sounding names that are covers
for special interests, often corporations, but also religious right
groups and, of course, the government itself. And they're conceived and
controlled behind the scenes by the ever present and supremely clever
PR organizations.
What is Impropaganda?
In clicking through the Center‛s site and through the online material
from its quarterly PR Watch,
I came upon an interesting piece called, "What is
Impropaganda?". It was Edward Bernays
(1891-1995), this article explains, who first used this term when he,
as the father of public relations, described his work as propaganda." I
hope," he added, referring to parts of his work, "[that] it's not impropaganda."
The implication here is that there is good propaganda and bad, or impropaganda. And perhaps there's
something to that. We all use propaganda of some sort in the effort to
make things sound better than they are – a young son's visit to the
dentist, for instance. The doctor's reassurance before surgery that
there will be only a "little discomfort." A bit of propaganda is often
the only way to get things moving.
But Edward Bernays was the father of something else, too, intimately
connected to public relations – the "front group," as noted above. The
term, "front," was bandied about incessantly by Joe McCarthy during the
Communist witch hunt of the 1950s when there were so many groups in the
United States that were claimed by him to be "Communist fronts" that it
was impossible to keep them straight. The term continues to have a
darkish aura about it, and is seldom heard anymore, but the concept is
nevertheless out there, helping to sell things – pharmaceuticals, baked
goods, Humvees, environmental exploitation, war.
The fronts these days are put forward as third party "authorities,"
and it seems there are plenty of experts with PhDs
and professional titles that can be bought by them -- scientists,
doctors, geologists, even military officers. In his book, Propaganda, Bernays, putting the
best possible face on it, claimed that this type of manipulation was
necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society.
But Felix Frankfurter, in complaining of this use of third party
authorities and propaganda in general in the late thirties and early
forties, pointed out the dangers of propaganda in subverting
governments, using Nazi Germany as an example. Rampton and Stauber
describes how this type of subversion could be done today through
examples from the past.
Babies Torn From Incubators
The authors, in fact, do a meticulous investigative report on one of
the most infamous uses of propaganda via high-sounding fronts in the
first Gulf War, Desert Storm -- the" babies torn from incubators"
story. The emotional appeal arising from this story helped build
support for the war to free Kuwait from Saddam's Iraq. Engineered by
the world's largest PR firm at the time, Hill & Knowlton, it
operated under a classic PR front group designed to hide the campaign's
sponsorship by the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the first
Bush administration – Citizens for a
Free Kuwait. Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government
channeled $11.9 million to Citizens
for a Free Kuwait, whose only other funding totaled $17,861 from
78 individuals. The better part of the group's budget – $10.8 million
of it – went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees.
The important part of Hill & Knowlton's campaign was the "Human
Rights Caucus" hearing in the United States. This caucus was an
outwardly official looking congressional proceeding, though
nevertheless a private one, funded by the Citizens for a Free Kuwait front.
During the caucus, a 15-year-old girl, identified by her first
name only to keep her safe from retaliation, testified that while she
was a volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital, Iraqi soldiers stormed the
place, tore premature babies, at least a hundred of them, from their
incubators, left them on the cold floor, then made off with all the
equipment. The story was disseminated through the media, during which
the number of incubators looted from the hospital ballooned to exactly
312, implying an actual count.
An outraged Amnesty International
(among other groups) took up the cause and started its own
investigation. Naturally enough, American people were horrified.
Two months after the war was over, Anmesty
International found the story to be a total fabrication, that
the PR firm had coached the teenager in her emotional testimony, and
that she was actually a member of the Kuwait royal family. The Kuwaiti
doctors interviewed not only disclaimed any such outrage, but added
that there were only a handful of incubators in the whole of the
country.
It was an unfortunate instance of overkill, since Saddam had performed
more than enough atrocities in Kuwait for which there was an enormous
pool of witnesses ready to come forward. But assaults against babies
have proven terrifically effective for drumming up war fever. In World
War I, for instance, German soldiers, "the Huns," were depicted as
bayoneting babies and even eating them. Further, it wasn't a case of
"any means to a good end" because the whole embarrassing episode cast a
blight on Amnesty International
and other groups who championed, and broadcast on their own, this
so-called atrocity. How many will rush to their aid in the future,
wondering if whatever atrocity they're describing is another piece of
theater?
The Air War
The American media has become an important player in terms of feeding
war fever, as we've seen in just the past year. This material, what
amounts to sophisticated propaganda, is overwhelmingly directed at
American sensibilities and concerns and little at educating the viewers
on the situation worldwide. Rampton‛s and Stauber‛s Chapter on the
media noted that CNN, with a 24-hour news schedule, had barely half the
size of the newsgathering network worldwide of BBC, and, as they put
it, "a fraction of what the three largest international newswire
services maintains on a permanent basis." So not only are Network and
Cable television viewers confined to the American and administration
slanted news on the most-viewed channels, they get little or no
exposure to the world of facts behind the news to temper their
judgments. The authors go on,
While Operation Desert Storm was underway
in 1991, a research team at the University of Massachusetts surveyed
public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about
U.S. policy in the region. The results were startling: ‛The more TV
people watched, the less they knew....Despite months of coverage, most
people do not know basic facts about the political situation in the
Middle East, or about the recent history of US policy towards Iraq‛.
Moreover, ‛our study revealed a strong correlation between knowledge
and opposition to the war‛.
The point being made here is that people with access to world news in
the print media, could not see an overwhelming reason to rush
into the first Gulf War.
This phenomenon was the subject of a book I read in 1997,
The More You Watch, the Less you Know, by Danny Schechter of GlobalVision and MediaChannel. At the time
I read this, we didn‛t even have a television, didn‛t pine for one, and
got our news mainly through the print media by way of the Internet and
quarterlies and NPR. So I felt pretty smug about it.
But feeling smug is not smart when Network and Cable News kept hyping
the second war with Iraq so that the American people rallied behind an
administration that used high priced PR propagandist feed the drumrolls
(and paid for it, incidentally with taxpayer dollars). The use in this
case of "true lies" – the sheer repetition of one lie, taken up by the
media, by front groups, then coming full circle back to the
administration and used by them through announcements in the media
citing the increasing support for the citizenry for war – the use of
this type of psychological brain washing is breathtaking. It has the
flavor of the round robin kind of journey involved in money
laundering, only in this case, it's propaganda laundering.
And how often have we heard that facts to back up lies cannot be
brought forward to the American people because that information is
classified? For instance, the facts to back up the charge of
Saddam's ability to hit Britain with weapons of mass destruction within
45 minutes of declaring war? Of drones capable of reaching American
shores carrying nuclear missiles? Of the insidious linking of
Saddam and the September 11, 2001 attack by means of rhetorically
juxtaposing the two in the same sentence so that nearly 70% of the
American people were under the impression that Iraq was behind the
September 11 atrocity?
By this time, the poverty of facts behind these charges is fairly well
known, but it's too late to back off a war that's devastated an already
shattered country and killed perhaps ten thousand Iraqis and over 400
Coalition soldiers, and maimed, so far, at least 1200 American
soldiers.
Weapons of Mass Deception is altogether a fascinating study of the
manipulation of the current, easily available, methods of
communication. The only trouble with the book that I can see is that
the people who should read it are the very people who wouldn't bother,
who prefer getting their news through Network and Cable news, or worse,
through talk radio.
–Joan Shaw
Click to buy Weapons of Mass Deception - The Uses of
Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays
- available, used,
at Amazon, and also available in most university and large city
libraries
The Father of Spin:
Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations
by Larry Tye (Author)
(Paperback) This is a good read on Bernays' work
The More You Watch The Less You Know
by Danny Schechter
Jkshaw photo by Jonathan A. Shaw
Designed and Produced by jkshaw@bridgernet.com
Qestions and comments - jkshaw@bridgernet.com
All contents copyright (c) 2000-2003 by Joan K. Shaw. All rights
reserved.
