From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Sun Jul 05 2009 - 16:30:51 EDT
The Corporate Media State Has Deformed American Culture -- Time to Fight
Back
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on June 30, 2009, Printed on July 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140997/
The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending
credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The
pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands
and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense
of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has
been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the
travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out
and people get a taste of Bill Clinton's draconian welfare reform. And
class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going
to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with
a vengeance.
Our economic crisis -- despite the corporate media circus around the death
of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford's marital infidelity or the outfits
of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest incarnation, Brüno -- barrels forward. And
this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change.
Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must
begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our
embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the
organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize
movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the
Christian right.
American culture -- or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures
-- was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These
corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the
human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old
values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic
expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a
press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their
communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New
desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the
old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate
culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural
homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk
culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the
ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the
idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the
destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American
culture.
How do we recover what was lost? How do we reclaim the culture that was
destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer
culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the
cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?
All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that
brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It
was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic.
We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when
societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces,
which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to
snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt
liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our
permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma
or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap
dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications
and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search,
and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the
rise of totalitarian capitalism.
Stuart Ewen, whose books "Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the
Social Roots of the Consumer Culture" and "PR: A Social History of Spin"
chronicle how corporate propaganda deformed American culture and pushed
populism to the margins of American society, argues that we have a fleeting
chance to save the country. I fervently hope he is right. He attacks the
ideology of "objectivity and balance" that has corrupted news, saying that
it falsely evokes the scales of justice. He describes the curriculum at
most journalism schools as "poison."
" ‘Balance and objectivity' creates an idea where both sides are
balanced," he said when I spoke to him by phone. "In certain ways it
mirrors the two-party system, the notion that if you are going to have a
Democrat speak you need to have a Republican speak. It offers the phantom
of objectivity. It creates the notion that the universe of discourse is
limited to two positions. Issues become black or white. They are not seen
as complex with a multitude of factors."
Ewen argues that the forces for social change -- look at any lengthy and
turgid human rights report -- have forgotten that rhetoric is as important
as fact. Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions,
rarely uses facts to sell its positions. And because progressives have lost
the gift of rhetoric, which was once a staple of a university education,
because they naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone
can move people toward justice, they are largely helpless.
"Effective communication requires not simply an understanding of the facts,
but how those facts will take place in the public mind," Ewen said. "When
Gustave Le Bon says it is not the facts in and of themselves which make a
point but the way in which the facts take place, the way in which they come
to attention, he is right."
The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on
the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War
I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann's book "Public Opinion," a manual for
the power elite's shaping of popular sentiments. Lippmann argued that the
key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to
manipulate "symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached
from their ideas." The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an
"intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance."
These corporate forces, schooled by Woodrow Wilson's vast Committee for
Public Information, which sold World War I to the public, learned how to
skillfully mobilize and manipulate the emotional responses of the public.
The control of the airwaves and domination through corporate advertising of
most publications restricted news to reporting facts, to "objectivity and
balance," while the real power to persuade and dominate a public remained
under corporate and governmental control.
Ewen argues that pamphleteering, which played a major role in the 17th and
18th centuries in shaping the public mind, recognized that "the human mind
is not left brain or right brain, that it is not divided by reason which is
good and emotion which is bad."
He argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a
search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and
rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to
disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion. But this refusal to appeal
to emotion means "we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human
beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason,
and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you
forward. This is not true."
The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse
propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and
labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations
and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the
public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone, Ewen says, make
little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in
a time of crisis we must also communicate in new forms. We must appeal to
emotion as well as to reason. The power of this appeal to emotion is
evidenced in the photographs of Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, who with
a team of assistants at the end of the 19th century initiated urban-reform
photography. His stark portraits of the filth and squalor of urban slums
awakened the conscience of a nation. The photographer Lewis Hine, at the
turn of the 20th century, and Walker Evans during the Great Depression did
the same thing for the working class, along with writers such as Upton
Sinclair and James Agee. It is a recovery of this style, one that turns the
abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of
emotion and passion, which will permit us to counter the force of corporate
propaganda.
We may know that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem. We may be able
to cite the statistics. But the oil and natural gas industry continues its
flagrant rape of the planet. It is able to do this because of the money it
uses to control legislation and a massive advertising campaign that paints
the oil and natural gas industry as part of the solution. A group called
EnergyTomorrow.org, for example, has been running a series of television
ads. One ad features an attractive, middle-aged woman in a black pantsuit
-- an actor named Brooke Alexander who once worked as the host of
"WorldBeat" on CNN and for Fox News. Alexander walks around a blue screen
studio that becomes digital renditions of American life. She argues, before
each image, that oil and natural gas are critical to providing not only
energy needs but health care and jobs.
"It is almost like they are taking the most optimistic visions of what the
stimulus package could do and saying this is what the development of oil
and natural gas will bring about," Ewen said. "If you go to the Web site
there is a lot of sophisticated stuff you can play around with. As each ad
closes you see in the lower right-hand corner in very small letters API,
the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for ExxonMobil and all
the other big oil companies. For the average viewer there is nothing in the
ad to indicate this is being produced by the oil industry."
The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the
irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone
will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of
dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional
sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the
forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film
with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of
traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and
journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform,
justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that
these lines are there.
"As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways
that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and
concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized," Ewen said. "You can't
do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of
the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive
agenda are antediluvian."
Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the
attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered
capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that
power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory,
which "balanced and objective" journalism promotes, has only contributed to
this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer
funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is
being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.
"It is very important for people like us to think about ways to present the
issues, whether we are talking about the banking crisis, health care or
housing and homelessness," Ewen said. "We have to think about presenting
these issues in ways that are two steps ahead of the media rather than two
steps behind. That is not something we should view as an impossible task.
It is a very possible task. There is evidence of how possible that task is,
especially if you look at the development of the underground press in the
1960s. The underground press, which started cropping up all over the
country, was not a marginal phenomenon. It leeched into the society. It
developed an approach to news and communication that was 10 steps ahead of
the mainstream media. The proof is that even as it declined, so many
structures that were innovated by the underground press, things like The
Whole Earth Catalogue, began to affect and inform the stylistic
presentation of mainstream media."
"I am not a prophet," Ewen said. "All I can do is look at historical
precedence and figure out the extent we can learn from it. This is not
about looking backwards. If you can't see the past you can't see the
future. If you can't see the relationship between the present and the past
you can't understand where the present might go. Who controls the past
controls the present, who controls the present controls the future, as
George Orwell said. This is a succinct explanation of the ways in which
power functions."
"Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,' " Ewen said. "Read Frederick Douglass'
autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.' Read
Darwin's ‘Descent of Man.' All of these things are filled with an
understanding that communicating ideas and producing forms of public
communication that empower people, rather than disempowering people, relies
on an integrated understanding of who the public is and what it might be.
We have a lot to learn from the history of rhetoric. We need to think about
where we are going. We need to think about what 21st century pamphleteering
might be. We need to think about the ways in which the rediscovery of
rhetoric -- not lying, but rhetoric in its more conventional sense -- can
affect what we do. We need to look at those historical antecedents where
interventions happened that stepped ahead of the news. And to some extent
this is happening. We have the freest and most open public sphere since the
village square."
The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he
said. The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to
corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to
rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to
openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the
disempowered. And, Ewen believes, we have a chance in the coming crisis to
succeed.
"Pessimism is never useful," he said. "Realism is useful, understanding the
forces that are at play. To quote Antonio Gramsci, ‘pessimism of the
intellect, optimism of the will.' "
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the
Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War
Against Iraqi Civilians.