Recognising Propaganda - Quareness Series (43rd "Lecture").
In our daily lives we now seem to be incessantly bombarded with propaganda masquerading as news through increasingly sophisticated techniques deployed against us (yes...against us) by the modern "mainstream" media. And perhaps the best way to counter this propaganda is to seek to understand the techniques involved and how they are used. Here's a sample....
Framing the Debate:
This involves debating a legitimate issue with ostensibly both sides represented, but having one from the middle of the continuum of opinion and one from an extreme view, thus containing the debate to meet the desired ideological framing and goals. Alternatively, we might have a strong debater for one side and a weak debater for the less favoured point of view.
Programming Reader/Listener/Viewer Attitudes:
A very common technique...covering a story complete with ideological spin and then following up with interviews of supportive "ordinary people" framing such as the popular or indeed only point of view (= a powerful form of sub-conscious attitude programming).
Distraction:
Instead of stories that matter, covering irrelevant/trivial stories about entertainers or celebrities and blowing them up into grand productions so as to avoid discussing anything that really matters. Or when something unwanted happens that popular opinion would ordinarily demand to be covered, generating a distraction for discussing instead.
Fluff:
Running feel-good stories about puppies, teddy bears, etc. Regardless of what really happens or the actual state of affairs, conveying the message that all is good and our country is great and things are happily the same as they always have been. Leveraging what people like and what people are compassionate about in order to build trust and feelings of happiness and complacency.
Artificial Reality:
Framing the entire presentation...posing as the truth e.g. if xyz is the desired reality or propaganda point, use of a good looking/likable/trusted newscaster to say "I believe xyz and I think the majority of people are right there with me".
Direct Programming:
Covering a story with the specific intent that the reader/listener/viewer will walk away holding a desired point of view. The actual coverage could range from slightly true to entirely untrue.
Special Interest Ads:
A special interest advertisement crafted as if it is a news story and presented as such.
The Big Lie:
Telling a lie so large that no one will question its authenticity because of its sheer size.
Omission:
For news that doesn't fit the desired agenda, or news that might cause advertisers or special interest supporters to withhold support, or news that might not fit with the overall story line and talking points...just not covering the story. Alternatively, if a high profile person carries an undesired opinion or message...not ever inviting that person's view.
Friendly Fire:
Repeatedly featuring people who strongly support the desired causes, or alternatively having weak debaters appear to represent undesired causes.
Historical Revision:
Omitting unflattering feedback and generating own positive feedback.
Winning the Reader/Listener/Viewer:
Fostering goodwill and reader/listener/viewer loyalty through fluff stories using likable or attractive people and personalities in a way that the ordinary public can identify with, so that people are more likely to swallow the dope.
Emphasis and Repetition:
Covering stories which match the desired agenda over and over and over.
Shills:
Often featuring people with so-called "credentials" (posing as "experts" or "professors" or other lofty titles) who support the desired point of view as if it is the truth. Quite often these people will have a financial or career interest or some other political or ideological affiliation regarding their point of view that is not disclosed.
Repeating a Lie:
As George Orwell said...if you repeat a lie frequently enough, people will take it to be true.
Vilification:
Where people or personalities whose opinion or positions are to be suppressed are subtly (or not so subtly) vilified and sabotaged, usually by over-blowing a trivial issue relating to something people are sympathetic towards.
Retaining only Team Players:
If a newscaster, commentator or journalist or editor has the wrong opinion, firing and replacing them with those holding the correct opinion.
Embedding Editorial Views in News Stories:
In journalism, opinion is normally expressed on the editorial page, but editorial views can be subtly introduced into "news" to program the reader/listener/viewer.
Lies as Truth:
Running a story or headline known to be untrue in order to support a point of view...in a subtler form, publishing mis-translations or mis-quotations to suit. Alternatively, publishing or sponsoring polls intended to give a desired result.
Deciding Sanity:
Portraying undesired points of view as extreme or crazy or dangerous or not legitimate. And if necessary, calling in supportive "experts" for emphasis.
Advertising as News:
Running goodwill stories about advertisers, parent company, etc. as if covering news or human interest stories.
Hostile/Friendly Interview:
Interviewing people with supportive views in a friendly manner and people with undesired views in a hostile manner...most effective when kept low key. A variation of this technique is to invite a guest for an "interview" and then have an aggressive personality talk over them the whole time repeating as truth things they never said or taking what is said out of context.
Humour:
Featuring comedy acts or jokes that support the desired point of view.
Handles:
Corralling an entire group of people into a pidgeon hole by crafting labels that carry positive or negative connotations using the power of words for emphasis e.g. he is a "conspiracy theorist" sometimes used to tar anyone who contradicts the party line.
Divide and Conquer:
Creating simple-minded divisions between groups of people to keep them distracted and arguing among themselves over mostly trivial issues.
Anonymous Sources:
Generating "news" using anonymous sources ranging from mis-quoting to outright fabrication (i.e. an anonymous source that is entirely fictional and created to generate a certain reaction or artificial reality).
Guided Imagery:
An advanced technique which is now pervasive...a takeoff on the idea popularised by George Soros that "markets influence events they anticipate". There is an assumption that when people are told something as if it is true, then it will in fact become true...shaping public opinion e.g. "70% of the country is in favor of xyz" if repeated will have the effect of causing the public opinion to actually be that. Other examples..."we have green shoots" or "the country is out of the recession", with the idea being that if stating this as fact, then people will have more confidence and spend and it will become true.
Music/Lighting Effects:
Music and lighting effects can be powerful promoters of feelings and emotion. When promoting the party line, having the music set to create all the right feelings and emotions, or creating emphasis by dramatic lighting or by talking loud and fast or soft and sombre.
Fabricated Evidence:
Promoting as self-sourced or repeating evidence that could range from non-existent to fabricated. This could involve doctored photographs to include or exclude or exaggerate information or audio recordings or video productions, as well as dossiers or written documents. Any or all of these being promoted as "the truth" which in fact may have only some basis in truth or be entirely fabricated (might even be a "paid for" promotion).
Leveraging the Media Empire:
The media empire can be used by the parent company for advertising, propaganda and goodwill e.g. using a music empire to promote own viewpoint or to eliminate alternative points of view, advertising for own theme park in the name of news, etc. Promoting own ideals with a consistent message throughout subsidiaries and enterprises, or promoting or demoting points of view agreed with or otherwise. As media empires become fewer, larger and ever more powerful, this tactic becomes more and more potent.
Serialising a Related Chain of Events:
This involves reconciling incompatible truths by deconstructing all events to a serial chain and discarding all past information unless not doing so proves particularly useful. This is what George Orwell referred to as the "memory hole" where if you remember the past version of the truth, the current version is not compatible with that version and therefore there should be no memory of the past unless it is a "reverse-engineered" version...otherwise incongruences are generated. We are supposed to forget the past and concentrate on what we are being told today. It's all a serial chain of sound bytes and propaganda intended and engineered to give desired current results.
Cooking Headlines:
Headlines offer endless opportunities for revisionist or deceptive news and fast, efficient propaganda programming with more people reading the headline tickers than follow the actual stories e.g. those receiving a news stream on the internet may be looking only at headlines. Cooking the headlines effectively gives "propaganda leverage" with many people remembering the headlines without necessarily following the actual story. Typical of such "cooking" are deceptive headings designed to convey a certain message although based on an actual event, false headlines repeatedly making claims that are entirely untrue (e.g. "WMD found in Iraq), embedding propaganda as causes/reasons in headlines (e.g. stocks soared today because...).
A subtle variation on this is based on banking that of those who read on beyond the headlines most take in only the first sentence or two of any story (and listen the same way) and therefore the desired conclusion is placed in the first sentence and the contradictory information in the last.
Repetition and Trust:
There's a relatively tiny number of the population who are invited to contribute on our main media organs as regulars. The point is that if "trusted" sources are developed and cultivated by the corporate media, people will come to believe what they say, regardless of what they say or how wrong they have been in the past. Propagandists are held out by the corporate media to the public as "experts" but they rarely if ever represent the centrist views of the majority of people, have been consistently wrong about they've said, and are hardly ever held to account. At the same time, people who have been correct or people who have views more in line with the general public remain off the radar, and are rarely invited as guests except maybe for a hostile interview.
This technique facilitates a heavy-handed dose of artificial reality.
All of the above seems to underpin the power of perception and how it can so often overwhelm reality, giving the wherewithal to shape opinion and drive agendas to whoever gets to define what "news" is.
Why is there a need to understand this matter?
The ex-CIA man Robert David Steele argues in his "The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust" that today's capitalism is inherently predatory and destructive...
"Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditised by the Industrial Era." He sees predatory capitalism as "based on the privatisation of profit and the externalisation of cost. It is an extension of the fencing of the commons, of enclosures, along with the criminalisation of prior common customs and rights." He sees that "most of our problems today can be traced to the ascendance of unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory capitalism, all based on force and lies and encroachment on the commons. The national security state works for the City of London and Wall Street – both are about to be toppled by a combination of Eastern alternative banking and alternative international development capabilities, and individuals who recognise that they have the power to pull their money out of the banks and not buy the consumer goods that subsidise corruption and the concentration of wealth. The opportunity to take back the commons for the benefit of humanity as a whole is open – here and now."
For him our goal at this time should be to reject "concentrated illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth."
Cooperation was the quintessential quality of the first humans that enabled them to survive their dangerous environment. Malignant egotism, greed and ignorance might be our destruction.
The tail wagging the dog is a hallmark of tyranny, and yet this cannot occur without complicity from a significant section of the population (as history repeatedly shows). The underlying real enemy therefore is corruption and the cure is its recognition and redress on every level of society, at least to the point that corruption is aberrant rather than pervasive. That means among other things, respect for truth and rejection of the influence of those who patently lie or erect excessive barriers to disclosure, even should a truth be “inconvenient” for our own agenda. You can never be certain that you know the truth but you know when you are choosing to hide or distort it. We could reasonably hope that a real“revolution” (as distinct from the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" type) would occur if we ceased to behave reactively and thought long and hard about what poisons our society.
Those who hunger for absolute power have spent many years promoting incessant and carefully crafted propaganda to cultivate reactions from our reptile brains over common sense. Resistance has been weak or misplaced but we still have choices. Incompetence or worse (e.g. deliberate disinformation) can only be sustained by suspension of accountability. It's time we paid far more attention to the clowns behind the curtain, and began to run our countries like adults.
Perhaps what has been getting in the way for any 'critical mass' say, to vote or voice their 'innate wisdom' is the ideology of a false centrism tieing together much of our religious traditions with residual 'monarchic' dynasties, and capitalism.
Is the problem, therefore, we the people? Are we at fault for having been seduced by those in power to sell us a blank bill of goods, drugs, products and policies that are more harmful than beneficial? Are we at fault for having deceived ourselves to believe that their illusion is the truth? Or is the elite, the best and brightest of the corporate and political worlds, in fact a special breed of psychopath with no moral compass, striving solely to maintain their power, control and wealth?
Several decades ago those with strong psychopathic characteristics serving in an executive function would have been relatively rare birds. Most people’s entire careers were often with a single company or institution and they climbed through the ranks based upon seniority and time spent at the firm. Because corporations and banks were more stable then, it was therefore incumbent that business leaders be psychologically stable as well. Today that has all changed. Given the dramatic deviations within high finance and large corporations, the business culture and ethics have degenerated and given way to a landscape of classical psychological derangement. The advent of radical deregulation and the rise of our still present "free market" with its neoliberal capitalist paradigm made way for a new dominant economic system that is fundamentally amoral. As the American environmental and social activist Jerry Mander put it in "The Capitalism Papers Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System"...Within an amoral system we would expect to find chairmen, CEOs and executives who are also amoral and callous about the financial decisions and policies they make and that consequently have a profound deleterious impact on the lives of others.
Data collected in the US on personality traits common to specific professions has identified superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness & lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others as common traits of both psychopathic killers and of many politicians. And this raises the question of whether or not the entire "free market" capitalist system within which private corporate industries and our government structures function and progress is now programmed to be psychopathic. Has corporate culture now de-evolved to such a degree that psychopathology has been legalised and is above the law?
Again, the hope for a badly needed real revolution at this time in our human story may rest on our ceasing to behave reactively and to think long and hard about what poisons our society.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
June, 2014.