Media Control Paper 1991

[Guest guest]

The different levels of control in different countries

and how informed or misinformed they are determine

life.

 

That can explain how we have the strange situation of

how we can have people in England fighting tooth and

nail to keep out GMO frankenfoods and at the same time

have the majority of the population in the USA knowing

almost nothing about GMO foods and to have been

unknowingly eating them for 8 years. Frank

 

 

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9103-media-control.html

 

Media Control

 

Noam Chomsky

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 17, 1991

Excerpted from the Alternative Press Review, Fall 1993

 

....Let me begin by counter-posing two different

conceptions of democracy. One conception of democracy

has it that a democratic 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....

 

An alternative conception of democracy is that the

public must be barred from managing of their own

affairs and the means of information must be kept

narrowly and rigidly controlled. That may sound like

an odd conception of democracy, but it's important to

understand that it is the prevailing conception....

 

Early History of Propaganda

 

....[The Wilson administration] established a

government propaganda commission, called the Creel

Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in

turning a pacifist population into a hysterical,

war-mongering 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 were the progressive intellectuals,

people of the John Dewey circle, who took great pride,

as you can see from their own writings at the time, in

having 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. They were all invented by the

British propaganda ministry, whose own committment at

the time, as they put it in their secret

deliberations, was " to control the thought of the

world. " But more crucially they wanted to control the

thought of the more intelligent members of the

community in the U.S., who would then disseminate the

propaganda that they were concocting and convert the

pacifist 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

 

....Walter Lippman, who was the dean of American

journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy

critic and also a major theorist of liberal

democracy...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 didn't want by the new techniques of

propaganda....

 

....He argued that in a properly-functioning democracy

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. That's the

specialized class. They are the people who analyze,

execute, make decisions, and run things in the

political, economic, and ideological systems. That's a

small percentage of the population... Those others,

who are out of the small group, the big majority of

the population, they are what Lippman called " the

bewildered herd. " We have to protect ourselves from

the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd...

 

....So we need something to tame the bewildered herd,

and that something is this new revolution in the art

of democracy: the " manufacture of consent. " The media,

the schools, and popular culture have to be divided.

For the political class and the decision makers have

to give 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 disguise this from themselves -- has to do with the

question of how they get into the position where they

have the authority to make decisions. 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

society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the

specialized class can come along and say, I can serve

your interests, then they'll be part of the executive

group. You've 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, they're not

part of the specialized class. They have to be deeply

indoctrinated in the values and interests of private

power and the state-corporate nexus that represents

it. If they can get through that, then they can be

part of the specialized class. The rest of the

bewildered herd just have to be basically distracted.

Turn their attention to something else....

 

....In what is nowadays called a totalitarian state,

then a military state, it's 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

democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian

state....

 

Public Relations

 

The U.S. pioneered the public relations industry. Its

committment was to " control the public mind, " as its

leaders put it. They learned a lot from the successes

of the Creel Commission and the success in creating

the Red Scare and its aftermath. The public relations

industry underwent a huge expansion at that time. It

succeeded for some time in creating almost total

subordination of the public to business rule through

the 1920s....

 

Public relations is a huge industry. They're spending

by now something on the order of a billion dollars a

year. All along its committment was to controlling the

public mind....

 

....The corporate executive and the guy who cleans the

floor all have the same interests. 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... Mobilizing

community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts

like Americanism. Who can be against that? Or, to

bring it up to date, " Support our troops. " Who can be

against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against

that?... The point of public relations slogans like

" Support our troops " is that they don't mean anything.

They mean as much as whether you support the people in

Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do

you support our policy? But you don't want people to

think about the issue. That's the whole point of good

propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's

going to be against, and everybody's going to be for,

because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't

mean anything, but its crucial value is that it

diverts your attention....

 

That's all very effective. It runs right up to today.

And of course it is carefully thought out. The people

in the public relations industry aren't there for the

fun of it. They're doing work. They're trying to

instill the right values. In fact, they have a

conception of what democracy 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 organization, because

organization just causes trouble. They ought to be

sitting alone in front of the TV and having drilled

into their heads the message, which says, the only

value in life is to have more commodities or live like

that rich middle class family you're watching and to

have nice values like harmony and Americanism. That's

all there is in life. You may think in your own head

that there's got to be something more in life than

this, but since you're watching the tube alone you

assume, I must be crazy, because that's all that's

going on over there....

 

So that's 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 mentioned. The bewildered herd is a

problem. We've got to prevent their rage and

trampling. We've 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 " Support our troops. " You've

got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they're

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 they're not competent to think.

Therefore it's important to distract them and

marginalize them.

 

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 during the First

World War. The public sees no reason 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....

 

To a certain extent then, that ideal was achieved, but

never completely. There are institutions which it has

as yet been impossible to destroy. The churches, for

example, still exist. A large part of the dissident

activity in the U.S. comes out of the churches, for

the simple reason that they're there. So when you go

to a European country and give a political talk, it

may very likely be in the union hall. Here that won't

happen, because unions first of all barely exist, and

if they do exist they're 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

crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large

segments 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, that's an

advance in democracy. By the prevailing conception

that's 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 hasn't 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 overcome this malady. It was called the " Vietnam

Syndrome. " The Vietnam Syndrome, 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 didn't understand why

we should go around torturing people and killing

people and carpet bombing them. It's very dangerous

for a population to be overcome by these sickly

inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then

there's a limit on foreign adventures. It's necessary,

as the Washington Post put it the other day, rather

proudly, to " instill in people respect for the martial

virtues. " That's important. If you want to have a

violent society that uses force around the world to

achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it's

necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial

virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about

using violence. So that's the Vietnam Syndrome. It's

necessary to overcome that one.

 

Representation as Reality

 

It's also necessary to completely falsify history...

There has been a huge effort since the Vietnam war to

reconstruct the history of that. Too many people 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 necessary to rearrange those bad thoughts

and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a

recognition that whatever we do is noble and right. If

we're bombing South Vietnam, that's because we're

defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely the

South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there. It's

what the Kennedy intellectuals called " defense against

internal aggression in South Vietnam. " That was the

phrase that Adlai Stevenson used. It was necessary to

make that the official and well understood picture.

That's worked pretty well. When you have total control

over the media and the educational system and

scholarship is conformist, you can get that across...

The picture of the world that's presented to the

public has only the remotest relation to reality. The

truth of the matter is buried under edifice after

edifice of lies. It's all been a marvelous success

from this point of view in deterring the threat of

democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which

is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian

state, where it's done by force. These achievements

are under conditions of freedom. If we want to

understand our own society, we'll have to think about

these facts. They are important facts, important for

those who care about what kind of society they live

in.

 

Dissident Culture

 

Despite all of this, the dissident culture survived.

It's grown quite a lot since the 1960s. In the 1960s

the dissident culture first of all was extremely slow

in developing. There was no protest against the

Indochina war until years after the U.S. had started

bombing South Vietnam. When it did grow it was a very

narrow dissident movement, mostly students and young

people. By the 1970s that had changed considerably.

Major popular movements had developed... In the 1980s

there was an even greater expansion to the solidarity

movements, which is something very new and important

in the history of at least American, and maybe even

world dissidence. These were movements that not only

protested but actually involved themselves, often

intimately, in the lives of suffering people

elsewhere. They learned a great deal from it and had

quite a civilizing effect on mainstream America. All

of this has made a very large difference....

 

These are all signs of the civilizing effect, despite

all the propaganda, despite all the efforts to control

thought and manufacture consent. Nevertheless, people

are acquiring an ability and a willingness to think

things through. Skepticism about power has grown, and

attitudes have changed on many, many issues. It's kind

of slow, maybe even glacial, but perceptible and

important. Whether it's fast enough to make a

significant difference in what happens in the world is

another question... Organization has its effects. It

means that you discover that you're not alone. Others

have the same thoughts that you do. You can reinforce

your thoughts and learn more about what you think and

believe. These are very informal movements, not like

membership organizations, just a mood that involves

interactions among people. It has a very noticeable

effect. That's the danger of democracy: If

organizations can develop, if people are no longer

just glued to the tube, you may have all these funny

thoughts arising in their heads, sickly inhibitions

against the use of military force. That has to be

overcome, but it hasn't been overcome.

 

Parade of Enemies

 

....There is a very characteristic development going on

in the U.S. now. It's not the first country in the

world that's done this. There are growing domestic

social and economic problems, in fact, maybe

catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of

doing anything about them. If you look at the domestic

programs of the administrations of the last ten years

-- I include here the Democratic opposition -- there's

really no serious proposal about what to do about the

severe problems of health, education, homelessness,

joblessness, crime, soaring criminal population,

jails, deterioration in the inner cities -- the whole

raft of problems. You all know about them and they're

all getting worse... In such circumstances you've got

to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start

noticing this they may not like it, since they're the

ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the

Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have

to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s

Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and Gypsies.

You had to crush them to defend yourselves. We have

our ways, too. Over the last ten years, every year or

two, some major monster is constructed that we have to

defend ourselves against. There used to be one that

was always available: the Russians. But they're losing

their attractiveness as an enemy, and it's getting

harder and harder to use that one, so some new ones

have to be conjured up... So it was international

terrorists and narco-traffickers and crazed Arabs and

Saddam Hussein, the new Hitler, is going to conquer

the world. They've got to keep coming up, one after

another. You frighten the population, terrorize them,

intimidate them so that they're too afraid to travel

and cower in fear. Then you have a magnificent victory

over Grenada, Panama, or some other defenseless Third

World army that you can pulverize before you ever

bother to look at them -- which is just what happened.

That gives relief. We were saved at the last minute.

That's one of the ways in which you can keep the

bewildered herd from paying attention to what's really

going on around them, keep them diverted and

controlled....

 

Selective Perception

 

....[in May of 1987,] the surviving members of the

Human Rights Group of El Salvador -- the leaders had

been killed -- were arrested and tortured, including

Herbert Anaya, who was the director. They were sent to

a prison -- La Esperanza (hope) Prison. While they

were in prison they continued their human rights work.

They were lawyers, they continued taking affidavits.

There were 432 prisoners in that prison. They got

signed affidavits from 430 of them in which they

described, under oath, the torture that they had

received: Electrical torture and other atrocities,

including, in one case, torture by a North American

U.S. major in uniform, who is described in some

detail. This is an unusually explicit and

comprehensive testimony, probably unique in its detail

about what's going on in a torture chamber. This

160-page report of the prisoners' sworn testimony was

sneaked out of prison, along with a videotape which

was taken showing people testifying in prison about

their torture. It was distributed by the Marin County

Interfaith Task Force. The national press refused to

cover it. The TV stations refused to run it. There was

an article in the local Marin County Newspaper, the

San Francisco Examiner, and I think that's all. No one

else would touch it. This was a time when there were

more than a few " light-headed and cold-blooded Western

intellectuals " who were singing the praises of Jose

Napoleon Duarte and of Ronald Reagan. Anaya was not

the subject of any tributes. He didn't get on Human

Rights Day. He wasn't appointed to anything. He was

released in a prisoner exchange and then assassinated,

apparently by the U.S.-backed security forces. Very

little information about that ever appeared. The media

never asked whether exposure of the atrocities --

instead of sitting on them and silencing them -- might

have saved his life.

 

[...]

 

....In February, right in the middle of the bombing

campaign, the government of Lebanon requested Israel

to observe U.N. Security Resolution 425, which called

on it to withdraw immediately and unconditionally from

Lebanon. That resolution dates from March 1978. There

have since been two subsequent resolutions calling for

immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from

Lebanon. Of course it doesn't observe them because the

U.S. backs it in maintaining that occupation.

Meanwhile southern Lebanon is terrorized. There are

big torture-chambers with horrifying things going on.

It's used as a base for attacking other parts of

Lebanon. In the course of these thirteen years Lebanon

was invaded, the city of Beirut was bombed, about

20,000 people were killed, about 80% of them

civilians, hospitals were destroyed, and more terror,

looting, and robbery was inflicted. All fine, the U.S.

backed it. That's just one case. You didn't see

anything in the media about it or any discussion about

whether Israel and the U.S. should observe U.N.

Security Council Resolution 425 or any of the other

resolutions... That's just one case. There are much

worse ones. The Indonesian invasion of East Timor

knocked off about 200,000 people. They all look minor

by that one. That was strongly backed by the U.S. and

is still going on with major U.S. diplomatic and

military support....

 

The Gulf War

 

That tells you how a well-functioning propaganda

system works. People can believe that when we use

force against Iraq and Kuwait it's because we really

observe the principle that illegal occupation and

human rights abuses should be met by force. They don't

see what it would mean if those principles were

applied to U.S. behavior. That's a success of

propaganda of quite a spectacular type.

 

[...]

 

Let's take the question of the reasons for the war.

Reasons were offered for the war. The reasons are:

Aggressors cannot be rewarded and aggression must be

reversed by the quick resort to violence. That was the

reason for the war. There was basically no other

reason advanced. Can that possibly be the reason for

the war? Does the U.S. uphold those principles, that

aggressors cannot be rewarded and that aggression must

be reversed by a quick resort to violence?... Has the

U.S. opposed its own aggression in Panama and insisted

on bombing Washington to reverse it? When the South

African occupation of Namibia was declared illegal in

1969, did the U.S. impose sanctions on food and

medicine? Did it go to war? Did it bomb Capetown? No,

it carried out twenty years of " quiet diplomacy. " It

wasn't very pretty during those twenty years. In the

years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about a

million-and-a-half people were killed by South Africa

just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was

happening in South Africa and Namibia. Somehow that

didn't sear our sensitive souls. We continued with

" quiet diplomacy " and ended up with ample reward for

the aggressors. They were given the major port in

Namibia and plenty of advantages that took into

account their security concerns. Where is this

principle that we uphold?... No reason was given for

going to war. None. No reason was given for going to

war that could not be refuted by a literate teenager

in about two minutes. That again is the hallmark of a

totalitarian culture. It ought to frighten us, that we

are so deeply totalitarian that we can be driven to

war without any reason being given for it and without

anybody noticing it or caring. It's a very striking

fact.

 

[...]

 

....The fact of the matter is, this [iraq] was a Third

World country with a peasant army. It is now being

conceded that there was a ton of disinformation about

the fortifications, the chemical weapons, etc. But did

you find anybody who pointed it out? Virtually nobody.

That's typical. Notice that this was done one year

after exactly the same thing was done with Manuel

Noriega. Manuel Noriega is a minor thug by comparison

with George Bush's friend Saddam Hussein or George

Bush's other friends in Beijing, or George Bush

himself, for that matter. In comparison with them,

Manuel Noriega is a pretty minor thug. Bad, but not a

world class thug of the kind we like. He was turned

into a creature larger than life. He was going to

destroy us, leading the narco-traffickers. We had to

quickly move in and smash him, killing a couple

hundred or maybe thousand people, restoring to power

the tiny, maybe eight percent white oligarchy, and

putting U.S. military officers in control at every

level of the political system. We had to do all those

things because, after all, we had to save ourselves or

we were going to be destroyed by this monster. One

year later the same thing was done by Saddam Hussein.

Did anybody point it out? Did anybody point out what

had happened or why? You'll have to look pretty far

for that.

 

Notice that this is not all that different from what

the Creel Commission did in 1916--1917, when within

six months it had turned a pacifistic population into

raving hysterics who wanted to destroy everything

German to save ourselves from Huns who were tearing

the arms off Belgian babes. The techniques are maybe

more sophisticated, with television and lots of money

going into it, but it's pretty traditional. I think

the issue, to come back to my original comment, is not

simply disinformation and the Gulf crisis. The issue

is much broader. It's whether we want to live in a

free society or whether we want to live under what

amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism,

with the bewildered herd marginalized, directed

elsewhere, terrified, screaming patriotic slogans,

fearing for their lives and admiring with awe the

leader who saved them from destruction while the

educated masses goose-step on command, repeat the

slogans they're supposed to repeat, the society

deteriorates at home, we end up serving as a mercenary

enforcer state, hoping that others are going to pay us

to smash up the world. Those are the choices. That's

the choice that you have to face. The answer to those

questions is very much in the hands of people exactly

like you and me.

Go back to the archive.

 

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