It’s an old and hackneyed saying that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on but it’s a saying that’s proven true most days, even more so in the digital age. Of course when you control the media it’s even easier: you can lie about your opponents with virtual impunity and there’s no-one to gainsay you.
The Right in the US has always known this. They’ve not exactly been secretive about their belief, fostered since before WWI by the father of modern political PR Edward Bernays, that control of message and political process is essential to the getting and holding of power. If your political grouping can take ownership of both message and process then it has cornered the market for political ideas, has become a monopoly supplier and can theoretically hold power in perpetuity.
Here’s Digby,with a topical example of how the US media, built as mouthpieces by those very corporations and individuals that have historically funded the political Right, is still, nearly a century later, controlling the message for its political masters by firing up the fake smear machine before elections have even begun:
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I know this is all boring, arcane history now, but it’s important to note that we are seeing similar stuff happening already with respect to various “deals” that are being reported in the press about Harry Reid and John Edwards. So far they are thin, nonsensical “exposes” written by one man, John Soloman, formerly of the AP and now of the Washington Post. Soloman is known to be a lazy reporter who happily takes “tips” from the wingnut noise machine and faithfully regurgitates them. He holds a very important position at the paper that was second only to the Times in its eagerness to swallow Ken Starr’s spin whole.
We are also seeing some similar reporting begin to emerge on Obama, much of it generated by hometown political rivals, just as we saw in the Clinton years. Today the LA Times implies that Obama is exaggerating his activist past. A couple of weeks ago we saw a truly egregiously misleading report on a deal he made to buy some land from a supporter.
These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)
No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” right?
The major media has never copped to their role in the tabloid sideshow that politics in the 90’s became. They have never copped to their part in elevating Bush to the status of demigod and running beside him like a bunch of eunuchs waving palm fronds during the lead-up to the war. Even today we see them pooh-poohing the significance of a federal trial that exposes them for whores to Republican power.
But it happened and it will happen again. They have learned nothing and feel they have nothing to answer for. Clinton’s spokesman is right when he says “I think that history demonstrates that whoever the nominee is is going to engender opposition from the right, and we will certainly be prepared” but it is only part of the story. All Democrats will also engender reporting from a press corps that persists in seeing politics through the lens of the rightwing narrative that was set forth by Scaife and his various hitmen back in the 1990’s.
1990’s? And the rest.
The narrative that was sketched out for the US Rght way back during the first world war by Bernays (who was also Sigmund Freud’s nephew) was one of expansionist, exceptionalist America-firstism and jingo, and entirely fictitious: it did not derive from the dreams or aspirations of US citizens but was created, just as any modern tv show or marketing strategy is.
Berners saw political ideas as yet more product to be sold and no medium was sacred from his pyschological selling methods, so he encouraged corporations to buy or create their own radio stations and newspapers as tailor-made outlets for his sales methods; as he said in the ‘twenties:
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.”
Because of Bernays’ theories and influence that kind of control was built into the structure of the US media right from the outset, because it facilitated selling. Whether ideas or products were sold was largely irrelevant at times, as both worked to the advantage of capital.
It must seem like such a swizz to USAnians to find out out that the grand historical American narrative was written during the Gilded Age by the Karl Rove of his day at the behest of very rich men.
Chomsky has been pointing this out forever:
This huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.” 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.”
But Chomsky is a left-wing nutter according to the media smear machine and so can be dismissed with an airy wave.
See how it works?
The only difference between the media/political machine of the time of the robber barons and now is immediacy: where once it would’ve taken weeks for a negative story to get round the country, now it’s almost instant. (This also works to the advantage of the Left for rebuttal of smears, but the Right is now moving to take control of those channels too.)
Given that the modern mainstream media was and is a creation of the Right, funded and supported by rich industrialists and bankers as a conduit for their political ideas, to expect it ever to be fair or to search for truth seems naive to say the least.
The modern mainstream media operators are just as ravenous for crumbs from those rich mens’ plates as they ever were in the time of the likes of JP Morgan and they’ll do what whatever it takes to get them: lie, spin, smear, out secret agents, whatever.The line between journalist and PR flack, if it ever really existed, has completely disappeared.
I feel the mainstream US media has been a lost cause since the beginning and that progressives would do better to concentrate themselves on maintaining free speech rights by developing alternate outlets and keeping the internet free of rightwing interference and monopoly.
That’s an issue that hardly seems to register in the progressive blogosphere, but I suppose that’s understandable while it’s hunkered down returning fire from the paid smear and disinformation merchants. That circumstance in itself points to the success of Berners’ theories. We’re all still dancing to Edward Berners’ tune, whether we want to or not.
