Manufacturing consent – Page 28

Dancing To Mr. Bernay’s Tune

Published on February 20, 2007

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:

[…]

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.

Great Moments In COINTELPRO, Part Umpty-something

Published on February 17, 2007

Look! Your tax dollars at work – not as you might think, funding public services or fighting crime, but paying agents provocateurs and Nazis to intimidate and provoke those peskily vocal yet peaceful minorities and liberals into violence.

From the Orlando Sentinel via Raw Story:

SENTINEL EXCLUSIVE
Neo-Nazi rally was organized by FBI informant

Henry Pierson Curtis | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted February 15, 2007

A paid FBI informant was the man behind a neo-Nazi march through the streets of Parramore that stirred up anxiety in Orlando’s black community and fears of racial unrest that triggered a major police mobilization.

That revelation came Wednesday in an unrelated federal court hearing and has prompted outrage from black leaders, some of whom demanded an investigation into whether the February 2006 march was, itself, an event staged by law-enforcement agencies.

The FBI would not comment on what it knew about the involvement of its informant, 39-year-old David Gletty of Orlando, in the neo-Nazi event. In court Wednesday, an FBI agent said the bureau has paid its informant at least $20,000 during the past two years.

“Wow,” Gletty said when reached by phone late Wednesday. “It is what it is. You were there in court. I can’t really go into any detail now.”

Read full story

You can’t even trust a fascist not to be fake these days. Why, one might almost think they were trying to provoke a reaction they could clamp down on.

It wouldn’t be the first time the FBI attempted to engineer violent political events recently. Before the big post 911 hate-on for the Moslems and antiwar activists, the big ‘danger’ was from the anticapitalist left:

One activist who has had experience with how the DC police handle demonstrators is Rob Fish, a cheerful young man with the Student Environmental Action Coalition profiled in a recent Sierra magazine cover story on the new generation of environmentalists. If you were watching CNN during the protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, in April, you would have seen Fish, 22, beaten, bloody and bandaged after an attack by an enraged plainclothes officer who also tried to destroy the camera with which Fish was documenting police harassment.

Fish is a plaintiff in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for Civil Justice against the DC police and a long list of federal agencies including the FBI. This suit–along with others in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, where the party conventions were held in August; in Detroit, which declared a civil emergency during the June Organization of American States meeting across the border in Windsor, Ontario; and in Seattle–is exposing a level of surveillance and disruption of political activities not seen on the left since the FBI deployed its dirty tricks against the Central American solidarity movement during the 1980s.

Among police agencies themselves this is something of an open secret. In the spring the US Attorney’s office bestowed an award on members of the Washington, DC, police department for their “unparalleled” coordination with other police agencies during the IMF protests. “The FBI provided valuable background on the individuals who were intent on committing criminal acts and were able to impart the valuable lessons learned from Seattle,” the US Attorney declared.

The US’ population hasn’t had it’s legitimate right to dissent so closely spied on, monitored and blatantly interfered with since the worst of the McCarthy years and the days of that paranoid psychotic Nixon. The aim of this covert activity is to discredit people who organise against the Bush administration and to smear them as violent revolutionaries, even to the extent of siccing the far-right on them in the hope of engineering a violent response.

This type of covert entrapment, deliberate provocation and incitement to illegality is known as cointelpro*:

COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government (such as the Weathermen); non-violent civil rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders.

According to the US government and other reports COINTELPRO officially stopped in 1971.What are all these cointelpro reports then, chopped liver?

There’s currently a leftwing activist and blogger who’s been in jail for over a year in California for refusing to release a samizdat video he made that may have featured possible FBI agents provocateurs attempting to engineer a riot at the San Francisco G8 protests.

Then there’s the mysterious yet ubiquitous supposed peace activist known as ‘Anna’ for instance, who has been doing the rounds of US peace groups attempting to incite them to illegality.

For more background on COINTELPRO and its history see here and Congress’ 1976 report here and for a review of the actual methods, see here.

[*For the pedants, I’m using lowercase cointelpro as the noun for the modern activity rather than COINTELPRO, as that’s the historical acronym for the government programme]

The Difficulty of Finding An Untainted Candidate

Published on February 16, 2007

Is it possible for the Democrats ever to put forward a presidential candidate who’s not in hock to Israel and who might actually show a little actual leadership?

Avedon Carol gives me even more reason to think that Hillary Clinton is definitely not that candidate:

Okay, here’s Hillary’s statement on Iran (and here’s where you can tell her how you feel about it). Hillary says, “No Military Action On Iran Without Congressional Authority.” Think about that. Don’t do anything completely insane without getting our permission, first. Now, I do think it’s important that the point be made – strongly – that Bush does not have the authority to use military force against Iran, no matter how he’d like to pretend that some previous legislation granted him that power. But that isn’t how it’s being phrased – they sound more like, “We might let you do something completely insane only if you get our permission first.” That’s not good enough, the emphasis is all wrong. And the reason Clinton is getting the emphasis wrong is that she’s trying to be really macho about Iran and doesn’t dare say that there are worse things than Iran getting nuclear power, and one of those things would be using military force against Iran. And she apparently does not understand that nothing makes Iran want nuclear power like the constant belligerence from the United States against Iran. So just shut up about Iran and tell Bush flat out that he can’t go there. Draw up the articles of impeachment right now and hold them up on television and swear to God that if there is the slightest inkling that Bush is moving against Iran, impeachment proceedings start in the morning.

But Hillary won’t do that. She’ll never do that. Political caution and triangulation is so ingrained in her she can longer operate in any other way. I’m sure she’s assiduous in ministering to her constituents in NY State and advancing its interests, but at national level, on her record she’s incapable of bold and decisive political action because she’s beholden to other interests.

Can anyone show me where she’s actually demonstrated real leadership against this warmongering administration at any point at all during the last 6 years? Has she rallied her fellow Democrats to act in concert against government wrongdoing, or has she just done what’s currently expedient to advance her career?

She’s actually in an advantageous position electorally at the moment, what with Edwards holed below the waterline already, Obama bang in the sights of the rightwing media race hate machine and somewhat hors de combat as a result. So is she taking advantage of the lull and out there making her case for the leadership of a nation that’s crying out for it?

Dream on.

No, she’s wittering on about giving Bush permission to go to war, as though it were still the nineties and he weren’t a dangerously unstable man who’s already devastated one country and who’ll take no notice whatsoever of what those hippies in Congress say, because he is beyond the law, and all his lawyers say so.

Why is she doing this? Hillary Clinton’s a bought and paid for creature of AIPAC and the Israel Lobby:

If neither strategic nor moral considerations can account for America’s support for Israel, Mearsheimer and Walt ask, what does? Their answer: the “unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.” At its core is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is ranked second after the National Rifle Association (along with the AARP) in the National Journal’s 2005 listing of Washington’s most powerful lobbies. AIPAC, they write, serves as “a de facto agent for a foreign government.” The lobby, they say, is also associated with Christian evangelicals such as Tom DeLay, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson; neoconservatives both Jewish (Paul Wolfowitz, Bernard Lewis, and William Kristol) and gentile (John Bolton, William Bennett, and George Will); think tanks (the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute); and critics of the press such as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

She should never be President because when it comes down to it she’ll puts the interests of another country above her own

Clinton’s close involvement with AIPAC and the Israel lobby makes any statement of hers at all viz Iran, Israel or the Middle East generally, suspect. She is answering to another constituency altogether and its not Democratic; it has much more money, much better connections and much more influence on her thinking than those boring nobody small voters ever could:

How to handle journalists

Published on February 13, 2007

Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley thinks people are too harsh on journalists in general and Michael Gordon especially:

Here’s what I wish. I wish that the blogosphere could think in less dispositional terms. When Gordon, or anyone else, writes a bad article, we tend to attack them on dispositional terms; Gordon failed because he’s a friend of the administration, an arrogant stenographer, a neocon, etc. We don’t have a vocabulary that, for lack of a better phrase, allows us to hate the sin and love the sinner. I love the blogosphere, but I loathe this aspect of it. A few weeks ago, we all had a terrific rage fest against the hack pundit Joe Klein. Then, Klein started to write things that we liked, and the declarations of hackishness and bad faith went away. I still think that Joe Klein is a hack, but that’s rather beside the point; he’s either a hack or he’s not, and just because he starts directing his hackery in directions we like doesn’t change that fact. Same thing with the various writers for the New Republic, the blogospheric reaction to whom vacillates wildly between “foul servant of Dark Lord Peretz” and “Oh, hey, that’s an interesting point”. To use a nearer and dearer example, only part of what makes me loathe Mickey Kaus is his political position; much more irritating to me is his manifest inability to convey a thought in writing and his trivial approach to political questions.

Robert makes two complaints here: one that Michael Gordon is more than just a voice activated tape recorder as he’s been called by the progressive blogosphere and second, that the general treatment of journalists depends too much on whether the blogosphere agrees with what they’re saying.

To start with Gordon, I’d argue that he actually fits a pattern of journalists who are quite willing to criticise the government’s actions, as long as it’s either long after their criticism could’ve had any impact or in fora which are inaccesible to the hoi polloi. that sort of criticism isn’t helpful and certaintly isn’t damaging to the administration. It’s nice to read that the War on Iraq was doomed to be a failure after it had become a failure, but it would’ve been better if that case had been made before the war.

I do agree with Robert’s more general point, that you should be careful not to judge journalists just for whether they agree with you or not, but also on the quality of their reporting. A hack working for your side is still a hack. At the same time however there is merit in “training” journalists to get better at reporting the truth and not just Republican talking points, by praising them when they do things right and by getting out the sledgehammers when they don’t.

In the current climate, the left needs to be very very blunt and aggressive to even get itself heard through the haze of the wingnut media machine. The recent troubles with Amanda Marcotte are the perfect example. Within days something was ginned up and repeated at louder and louder volumes until she had to resign from the Edwards campaign.

With this sort of thing happening every day being consistently partisan in approaching the news media is not a sin; it’s survival. Which means keep hammering them when they get things wrong, reward them (but not too much) when they get things right and keep exposing hackery.