Fluent Essays

| After looking at the finalized paper, I have some concerns on the quality. If you look at the paper there is way too much paraphrasing and copying directly from the sources. Also there is not a whole lot of original content, the writer used citations way to much throughout the whole essay. One of the sources is a website on how to write a Argumentative Essay. You even have a page on your own site on how to properly write an Argumentative Essay and this one seems to be all over the place. THE OPEN MEDIA PAMPHLET S E R I E S Copyright © 1991, 1997 by Noam Chomsky A Seven Stories Press First Edition, published in association with Open Media. Open Media Pamphlet Series editors, Greg Ruggiero and Stuart Sahulka. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chomsky, Noam. Media control: the spectacular achievements of propaganda / Noam Chomsky. p. cm. —(The Open Media Pamphlet Series) ISBN 1-888363-49-5 1. Propaganda. 2. Propaganda—United States. 3. Mass media—Political aspects. 4. Mass media and public opinion. I. Title. II. Series. HM263.C447 1997 303.375—dc21 96-53580 CIP Book design by Cindy LaBreacht 9 8 7 6 5 The role of the media in contemporary politics forces us to ask what kind of a world and what kind of a society we want to live in, and in particular in what sense of democracy do we want this to be a democ- ratic society? Let me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy. One conception of democracy has it that a democ- ratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free. If you look up democracy in the dictionary youll get a definition something like that. An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing of their own affairs and the means of informa- tion must be kept narrowly and rigidly con- trolled. That may sound like an odd conception of democracy, but its important to understand that it is the prevailing conception. In fact, it has long been, not just in operation, but even in theory. Theres a long history that goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolutions in seventeenth century England which largely expresses this point of view. Im just going to keep to the modern period and say a few words about how that notion of democracy develops and why and how the problem of media and dis- information enters within that context. E A R L Y HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA Lets begin with the first modern government propaganda operation. That was under the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform Peace Without Victory. That was right in the middle of the World War I. The pop- ulation was extremely pacifistic and saw no rea- son to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda com- mission, called the Creel Commission which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mon- gering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. Right at that time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media, from the business establishment, which in fact organized, pushed much of this work, and it was, in general, a great success. Among those who participated actively and enthusiastically in Wilsons war were the pro- gressive intellectuals, people of the John Dewey circle, who took great pride, as you can see from their own writings at the time, in hav- ing shown that what they called the more intelligent members of the community, namely, themselves, were able to drive a reluctant population into a war by terrifying them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism. The means that were used were extensive. For example, there was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies with their arms torn off, all sorts of awful things that you still read in history books. Much of it was invented by the British propaganda ministry, whose own commitment at the time, as they put it in their secret deliberations, was to direct the thought of most of the world. But more crucially they wanted to control the thought of the more intelligent members of the community in the United States, who would then disseminate the propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifistic country to wartime hysteria. That worked. It worked very well. And it taught a lesson: State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day. SPECTATOR DEMOCRACY Another group that was impressed by these successes was liberal democratic theorists and leading media figures, like, for example, Wal- ter Lippmann, who was the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic pol- icy critic and also a major theorist of liberal democracy. If you take a look at his collected essays, youll see that theyre subtitled some- thing like A Progressive Theory of Liberal Democratic Thought. Lippmann was involved in these propaganda commissions and recognized their achievements. He argued that what he called a revolution in the art of democracy, could be used to manufacture consent, that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they did- nt want by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought that this was a good idea, in fact, necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, the common interests elude public opinion entirely and can only be understood and managed by a specialized class of responsible men who are smart enough to figure things out. This theory asserts that only a small elite, the intellectual community that the Deweyites were talking about, can under- stand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things elude the general public. This is a view that goes back hundreds of years. Its also a typical Leninist view. In fact, it has very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of rev- olutionary intellectuals take state power, using popular revolutions as the force that brings them to state power, and then drive the stupid masses toward a future that theyre too dumb and incompetent to envision for them- selves. The liberal democratic theory and Marxism-Leninism are very close in their common ideological assumptions. I think thats one reason why people have found it so easy over the years to drift from one position to another without any particular sense of change. Its just a matter of assessing where power is. Maybe there will be a popular revo- lution, and that will put us into state power; or maybe there wont be, in which case well just work for the people with real power: the business community. But well do the same thing. Well drive the stupid masses toward a world that theyre too dumb to understand for themselves. Lippmann backed this up by a pretty elab- orated theory of progressive democracy. He argued that in a properly functioning democ- racy there are classes of citizens. There is first of all the class of citizens who have to take some active role in running general affairs. Thats the specialized class. They are the peo- ple who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political, economic, and ide- ological systems. Thats a small percentage of the population. Naturally, anyone who puts these ideas forth is always part of that small group, and theyre talking about what to do about those others. Those others, who are out of the small group, the big majority of the pop- ulation, they are what Lippmann called the bewildered herd. We have to protect ourselves from the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd. Now there are two functions in a democracy: The specialized class, the respon- sible men, carry out the executive function, which means they do the thinking and plan- ning and understand the common interests. Then, there is the bewildered herd, and they have a function in democracy too. Their func- tion in a democracy, he said, is to be specta- tors, not participants in action. But they have more of a function than that, because its a democracy. Occasionally they are allowed to lend their weight to one or another member of the specialized class. In other words, theyre allowed to say, We want you to be our leader or We want you to be our leader. Thats because its a democracy and not a totalitarian state. Thats called an election. But once theyve lent their weight to one or another member of the specialized class theyre sup- posed to sink back and become spectators of action, but not participants. Thats in a prop- erly functioning democracy. And theres a logic behind it. Theres even a kind of compelling moral principle behind it. The compelling moral principle is that the mass of the public are just too stupid to be able to understand things. If they try to par- ticipate in managing their own affairs, theyre just going to cause trouble. Therefore, it would be immoral and improper to permit them to do this. We have to tame the bewil- dered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to rage and trample and destroy things. Its pretty much the same logic that says that it would be improper to let a three-year-old run across the street. You dont give a three-year-old that kind of freedom because the three-year-old doesnt know how to handle that freedom. Correspondingly, you dont allow the bewil- dered herd to become participants in action. Theyll just cause trouble. So we need something to tame the bewil- dered herd, and that something is this new revolution in the art of democracy: the manu- facture of consent. The media, the schools, and popular culture have to be divided. For the political class and the decision makers they have to provide them some tolerable sense of reality, although they also have to instill the proper beliefs. Just remember, there is an unstated premise here. The unstated premise —and even the responsible men have to dis- guise this from themselves—has to do with the question of how they get into the position where they have the authority to make deci- sions. The way they do that, of course, is by serving people with real power. The people with real power are the ones who own the soci- ety, which is a pretty narrow group. If the spe- cialized class can come along and say, I can serve your interests, then theyll be part of the executive group. Youve got to keep that quiet. That means they have to have instilled in them the beliefs and doctrines that will serve the interests of private power. Unless they can master that skill, theyre not part of the spe- cialized class. So we have one kind of educa- tional system directed to the responsible men, the specialized class. They have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of pri- vate power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it. If they can achieve that, then they can be part of the specialized class. The rest of the bewildered herd basically just have to be distracted. Turn their attention to something else. Keep them out of trouble. Make sure that they remain at most spectators of action, occa- sionally lending their weight to one or another of the real leaders, who they may select among. This point of view has been developed by lots of other people. In fact, its pretty con- ventional. For example, the leading theologian and foreign policy critic Reinhold Niebuhr, sometimes called the theologian of the estab- lishment, the guru of George Kennan and the Kennedy intellectuals, put it that rationality is a very narrowly restricted skill. Only a small number of people have it. Most people are guided by just emotion and impulse. Those of us who have rationality have to create nec- essary illusions and emotionally potent oversimpli-fications to keep the naive sim- pletons more or less on course. This became a substantial part of contemporary political sci- ence. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Harold Lass- well, the founder of the modern field of communications and one of the leading Amer- ican political scientists, explained that we should not succumb to democratic dogma- tisms about men being the best judges of their own interests. Because theyre not. Were the best judges of the public interests. Therefore, just out of ordinary morality, we have to make sure that they dont have an opportunity to act on the basis of their misjudgments. In what is nowadays called a totalitarian state, or a mil- itary state, its easy. You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society has become more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear. Propaganda is to a democracy what the blud- geon is to a totalitarian state. Thats wise and good because, again, the common interests elude the bewildered herd. They cant figure them out. PUBLIC RELATIONS The United States pioneered the public rela- tions industry. Its commitment was to con- trol the public mind/ as its leaders put it. They learned a lot from the successes of the Creel Commission and the successes in creating the Red Scare and its aftermath. The public rela- tions industry underwent a huge expansion at that time. It succeeded for some time in cre- ating almost total subordination of the public to business rule through the 1920s. This was so extreme that Congressional committees began to investigate it as we moved into the 1930s. Thats where a lot of our information about it comes from. Public relations is a huge industry. Theyre spending by now something on the order of a billion dollars a year. All along its commitment was to controlling the public mind. In the 1930s, big problems arose again, as they had during the First World War. There was a huge depression and substantial labor organizing. In fact, in 1935 labor won its first major legisla- tive victory, namely, the right to organize, with the Wagner Act. That raised two serious prob- lems. For one thing, democracy was misfunc- tioning. The bewildered herd was actually win- ning legislative victories, and its not supposed to work that way. The other problem was that it was becoming possible for people to organize. People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. Theyre not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the polit- ical arena. Thats really threatening, A major response was taken on the part of business to ensure that this would be the last legislative victory for labor and that it would be the begin- ning of the end of this democratic deviation of popular organization. It worked. That was the last legislative victory for labor. From that point on — although the number of people in the unions increased for a while during the World War II, after which it started drop- ping — the capacity to act through the unions began to steadily drop. It wasnt by accident. Were now talking about the business com- munity, which spends lots and lots of money, attention, and thought into how to deal with these problems through the public relations industry and other organizations, like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable, and so on. They imme- diately set to work to try to find a way to counter these democratic deviations. The first trial was one year later, in 1937. There was a major strike, the Steel strike in western Pennsylvania at Johnstown. Business tried out a new technique oflabor destruction, which worked very well. Not through goon squads and breaking knees. That wasnt work- ing very well any more, but through the more subtle and effective means of propaganda. The idea was to figure out ways to turn the public against the strikers, to present the strikers as disruptive, harmful to the public and against the common interests. The common interests are those of us, the businessman, the worker, the housewife. Thats all us. We want to be together and have things like har- mony and Americanism and working together. Then theres those bad strikers out there who are disruptive and causing trouble and break- ing harmony and violating Americanism. Weve got to stop them so we can all live together. The corporate executive and the guy who cleans the floors all have the same inter- ests. We can all work together and work for Americanism in harmony, liking each other. That was essentially the message. A huge amount of effort was put into presenting it. This is, after all, the business community, so they control the media and have massive resources. And it wrked, very effectively. It was later called the Mohawk Valley formula and applied over and over again to break strikes. They were called scientific methods of strike-breaking, and worked very effec- tively by mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like American- ism. Who can be against that? Or harmony. Who can be against that? Or, as in the Persian Gulf War, Support our troops. Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? Anything thats totally vacuous . In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I dont support them? Its not even a question. It does- nt mean anything. Thats the point. The point of public relations slogans like Support our troops is that they dont mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the peo- ple in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you dont want people to think about that issue. Thats the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogna that nobodys going to be against, and everybodys going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesnt mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? Thats the one youre not allowed to talk about. So you have people arguing about support for the troops? Of course I dont not support them. Then youve won. Thats like Americanism and harmony. Were all together, empty slogans, lets join in, lets make sure we dont have these bad people around to disrupt our harmony with their talk about class struggle, rights and that sort of business. Thats all very effective. It runs right up to today. And of course it is carefully thought out. The people in the public relations industry arent there for the fun of it. Theyre doing work. Theyre trying to instill the right values. In fact, they have a conception of what democ- racy ought to be: It ought to be a system in which the specialized class is trained to work in the service of the masters, the people who own the society. The rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organiza- tion, because organization just causes trouble. They ought to be sitting alone in front of the TV and having drilled into their heads the mes- sage, which says, the only value in life is to have more commodities or live like that rich middle class family youre watching and to have nice values like harmony and American- ism. Thats all there is in life. You may think in your own head that theres got to be some- thing more in life than this, but since youre watching the tube alone you assume, I must be crazy, because thats all thats going on over there. And since there is no organization per- mitted—thats absolutely crucial—you never have a way of finding out whether you are crazy, and you just assume it, because its the natural thing to assume. So thats the ideal. Great efforts are made in trying to achieve that ideal. Obviously, there is a certain conception behind it. The conception of democracy is the one that I men- tioned. The bewildered herd is a problem. Weve got to prevent their roar and trampling. Weve got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like Sup- port our troops. Youve got to keep them pretty scared, because unless theyre properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because theyre not competent to think. Therefore its important to distract them and marginalize them. Thats one conception of democracy. In fact, going back to the business community, the last legal victory for labor really was 1935, the Wagner Act. After the war came, the unions declined as did a very rich working class cul- ture that was associated with the unions. That was destroyed. We moved to a business-run society at a remarkable level. This is the only state-capitalist industrial society which does- nt have even the normal social contract that you find in comparable societies. Outside of South Africa, I guess, this is the only industrial society that doesnt have national health care. Theres no general commitment to even min- imal standards of survival for the parts of the population who cant follow those rules and gain things for themselves individually. Unions are virtually nonexistent. Other forms of popular structure are virtually nonexistent. There are no political parties or organizations. Its a long way toward the ideal, at least struc- turally. The media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two par- ties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesnt even bother voting because it looks meaningless. Theyre mar- ginalized and properly distracted. At least thats the goal. The leading figure in the public rela- tions industry, Edward Bernays, actually came out of the Creel Commission. He was part of it, learned his lessons there and went on to develop what he called the engineering of con- sent, which he described as the essence of democracy. The people who are able to engi- neer consent are the ones who have the resources and the power to do it—the business community—and thats who you work for. ENGINEERING OPINION It is also necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were dur- ing the First World War. The public sees no rea- son to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them. Bernays himself had an important achievement in this respect. He was the per- son who ran the public relations campaign for the United Fruit Company in 1954, when the United States moved in to overthrow the cap- italist-democratic government of Guatemala and installed a murderous death-squad society, which remains that way to the present day with constant infusions of U.S. aid to prevent in more than empty form democratic devia- tions. Its necessary to constantly ram through domestic programs which the public is opposed to, because there is no reason for the public to be in favor of domestic programs that are harmful to them. This, too, takes extensive propaganda. Weve seen a lot of this in the last ten years. The Reagan programs were over- whelmingly unpopular. Voters in the 1984 Reagan landslide, by about three to two, hoped that his policies would not be enacted. If you take particular programs, like arma- ments, cutting back on social spending, etc., almost every one of them was overwhelmingly opposed by the public. But as long as people are marginalized and distracted and have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments, people who said that they prefer social spend- ing to military spending, who gave that answer on polls, as people overwhelmingly did, assumed that they were the only people with that crazy idea in their heads. They never heard it from anywhere else. Nobodys supposed to think that. Therefore, if you do think it and you answer it in a poll, you just assume that youre sort of weird. Since theres no way to get together with other people who share or rein- force that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you dont pay any attention to whats going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl. To a certain extent, then, that ideal was achieved, but never completely. There are insti- tutions which it has as yet been impossible to destroy. The churches, for example, still exist. A large part of the dissident activity in the United States comes out of the churches, for the simple reason that theyre there. So when you go to a European country and give a polit- ical talk, it may very likely be in the union hall. Here that wont happen, because unions first of all barely exist, and if they do exist theyre not political organizations. But the churches do exist, and therefore you often give a talk in a church. Central American solidarity work mostly grew out of the churches, mainly because they exist. The bewildered herd never gets properly tamed, so this is a constant battle. In the 1930s they arose again and were put down. In the 1960s there was another wave of dissidence. There was a name for that. It was called by the specialized class the crisis of democracy. Democracy was regarded as entering into a cri- sis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large seg- ments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena. Here we come back to these two conceptions of democracy. By the dictionary definition, thats an advance in democracy. By the prevailing conception thats a problem, a crisis that has to be overcome. The population has to be driven back to the apathy, obedience and passivity that is their proper -state. We therefore have to do something to overcome the crisis. Efforts were made to achieve that. It hasnt worked. The crisis of democracy is still alive and well, fortunately, but not very effective in changing policy. But it is effective in changing opinion, contrary to what a lot of people believe. Great efforts were made after the 1960s to try to reverse and over- come this malady. One aspect of the malady actually got a technical name. It was called the Vietnam Syndrome. The Vietnam Syn- drome, a term that began to come up around 1970, has actually been defined on occasion. The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force. There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didnt understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them. Its very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then theres a limit on foreign adventures. Its necessary, as the Washington Post put it rather proudly dur- ing the Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people respect for martial value. Thats important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, its necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence. So thats the Vietnam Syndrome. Its necessary to overcome that one. REPRESENTATION AS REALITY Its also necessary to completely falsify history. Thats another way to overcome these sickly inhibitions, to make it look as if when we attack and destroy somebody were really pro- tecting and defending ourselves against major aggressors and monsters and so on. There has been a huge effort since the Vietnam war to reconstruct the history of that. Too many peo- ple began to understand what was really going on. Including plenty of soldiers and a lot of young people who were involved with the peace movement and others. That was bad. It was nec- essary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a recog- nition that whatever we do is noble and right. If were bombing South Vietnam, thats because were defending South Vietnam against some- body, namely, the South …