The propaganda system in the US
phil...@my-deja.com
relevant to many English speaking countries) try:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/barsamianewenmay2000.htm
Stuart Ewen is a professor of media studies at Hunter College in New
York. He is the author of a number of books on the media and public
relations, most notably PR: A Social History of Spin.
An interview with Stuart Ewen by David Barsamian
Some excerpts:
"The most effective propaganda is that which is invisible. If propaganda
is seen as propaganda, it's not working. One of the failures of the
Soviet system was that its propaganda was always understood for a large
part, from the early 1930s on, by its own people as propaganda.
What do you mean by that?
One of the things we haven't talked about yet is the issue of
sophistication and this very strong link between PR and social
psychology. Social psychology was a field that dated back to the late
19th century, particularly in France. People who were concerned about
the urban masses started trying to figure out what made the mob tick
because they believed that the mob no longer respected authority and
hierarchy.
Therefore it was necessary to understand the inner psychology of the mob
so that you could offer them the pictures and stories that would subdue
their rage. In the late 19th century a lot of that stuff has a wacky
sound to it. By the end of the First World War, social psychology and
its insights are not only being applied to the mob but are also being
viewed as the way in which you influence it. The basic insight of social
psychology is that people are driven not by rational judgment or
by deliberation, but by unconscious drives, by the irrational, by
instinctual aspects of their inner beings, things that they're not
conscious of.
From the early 1920s on, a lot of what the American PR industry and
advertising industry are about is monitoring public feeling. We see it
all the time today in polls and focus groups. We can produce narratives
that will touch people deeply. Walter Lippman is one of the most
influential American intellectuals of the 20th century, an advisor to
presidents and people of power from Woodrow Wilson through Nixon and
Ford. He wrote a book in 1922 called Public Opinion that is the
first systematic study of how a leader can get public support for
his/her policies. Lippman's basic premise is, we live in a democracy,
and yet people in a democracy are incapable of understanding the world.
They're driven by pictures in their heads. They respond to
pseudo-environments. They have these mental that preordain how they will
respond to the world. As a result, if one wants to lead effectively in
the modern world where the economy and the society and intellectual life
and culture are crossing borders as never before, Lippman is saying, to
lead effectively, a leader must understand how to produce those pictures
that will appear in people's heads in order to get people to support
those executive actions which he is interested in taking.
It is Lippman who coins the term "manufacture of consent." What Lippman
lays out in Public Opinion and in a subsequent book called The Phantom
Public are the basic rules of behavior of those people who are nterested
in influencing public opinion. While some of the technologies have
changed, the basic strategies that Lippman lays out are there from the
beginning, and what is clear is, Never talk to people about real ideas.
Never try to inform people about what issues are at play. Go to the gut.
Symbols are more powerful than ideas. If you give people ideas they're
going to argue with each other. They're going to debate things.
But if you hit them with symbols, particularly symbols that have been
separated from ideas and which have a kind of universal poignancy, you
can turn a heterogeneous mass of opinion into a homogenous perception, a
homogenous will. What Lippman says in the 1920s is that the key to
persuasion is to intensify feeling and to degrade signification. This is
his terminology. Politicians and steering committees and corporate
boards have been behaving along those terms every since."
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