Media - Controlling the Narrative

"Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." — George Orwell

“North Americans are loosing the ability to think or reason intelligently - when information is highly regulated freedom to explore and think is curtailed". –-John Groves:The Dumbing Down of America

In North America there are 7 major movie studios, 1,800 daily newspapers, 12,000 magazines, 11,000 radio stations, 2,000 television stations, 2,500 book publishers. Yet a mere 18 corporations control more than 60% of the business in each of these media areas. (Update: Thanks to mergers the numbers currently are, 11 corporations controlling over 83%.) In some cases - television for example - they have a virtual monopoly. In most western countries (Canada, Australia, Britain, etc.) two or three individuals control over 80% of the news media. In Canada three people control/own/direct 90% of all newspapers; these same people set editorial content, and have fired award winning journalists for disagreeing with their political slant. In the United States at time of writing, there are four people. This control of media by a handful of politically connected CEOs has rapidly become the norm in most G20 countries.

The result has been a gross simplification of discourse into black and white. A country/ideology/culture/religion is either good or bad, either for "our" values, or against them. There is little background information given to stories - people attack because they are simply evil and "hate our freedoms". True fact based debate is rare in media. Rather it is filled with trivia. Debate of issues is replaced with the latest deviance of some alleged songstress or alleged misogynist actor.

There are many examples of this. One such is the United States’ FOX News. But first a bit of background:

This use of airwaves for propaganda purposes was made possible in the United States by then President Reagan. He eliminated the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. This single act suddenly allowed the broadcast of false and made-up stories over the public airwaves as if they were true. But no one tested this in the courts for some time.

Enter FOX News. This media outlet owned by one allegedly ultra-right wing billionaire, is watched by the majority of that country’s citizens. Its alleged modus operandi is a blurring of the the borders between news and political commentary. It allegedly presents purposeful misinformation, revisionism, and redirection under the cloak of editorials, disguised as news. Only a very small fraction of is broadcast presents factual events. Instead, the vast majority of time is reserved for diatribe and commentary by pundits, not journalist or content experts. Consider the case of Jane Akre vs. FOX court case. Ms. Akre was hired by a radio station later purchased by FOX. While there, she was allegedly asked to broadcast, in the words of the jury summary “a false, distorted or slanted story” about the use of the allegedly harmful hormone cluster BGH in the dairy industry.

Ms. Akre allegedly told FOX managers that she would report the alleged news fabrication to the alleged Federal regulator, and subsequently was allegedly fired for her alleged actions. She sought protection under whilstblower legislation, and filed a law suit to that effect. Fox filed a $7,000,000 counter-suit. Ms. Akre ultimately lost the case. FOX had allegedly asserted that the Federal alleged regulator had no written rules against purposeful distortion of news by the media outlets it allegedly regulated. And further that under early constitutional amendments broadcasters had the alleged right, distort, and fabricate news over public airwaves. At no point did they dispute Ms. Akre’s alleged claim that she was pressured to present untruth as news, but rather that it allegedly was their legal right to do so.

The United States courts agreed. And so any ’news’ organization in that country became legally free to inflame public opinion and present outright propaganda whilst 1) being immune from prosecution for so doing, and 2) being legally able to lie about doing so. You can imagine the chilling effect on real journalists. And journalism.

That left Canada as the only nation in North America which prohibited broadcast media from making up ’news’ (Mexico had long since given up any regulation in this regard). However the ultra right wing evangelical head of that country’s Republican Party wished to change all that. The head of that party (also Prime Minister) sought to repeal the Canada Radio Act which forbade lying on broadcast news. The Act he wished to negate ensured that "a licenser may not broadcast....any false or misleading news". In other words he saught to repeal the only act that prevented out and out fabrication of news.

Fortunately the Canadian Courts prevented that person’s attempt to legalize lying in the media.

So another approach was tried. His second lieutenant urged the Party’s largest supporters to donate as much as they could to fight against "the hailstorm of negative attacks that are already raining down on [his government]”. What were these “attacks”? Factual presentation of the Auditor General for Canada’s reports on a number of allegedly improper and possibly illegal actions taken by his government. Well documented reports on torture allegations carried out on orders of his government. Media reports of numerous alleged lies by the leader of that government. Media reports that his government had allegedly sabataged several international efforts at eleviating the effects of climate changes. Media reports that his government had implemented hidden taxes on the poor whilst giving giant corporations the largest tax break in history. And so on.

In other words the Party leaders called for funding to cease this presentation of factual information.

A controlled media allows for and enhances the presentation of simplified ideas devoid of historical or cultural background. It also enables the elimination of alternate viewpoints other than in inconsequential and nonthreatening venues such as academic publications. Such marginalization of of true, fact-based discourse in favor of trivia is the de facto operating procedure followed by those who would subvert freedom.

"...the J.P. Morgan interests.... and their subsidiary organizations got together twelve men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the US .... They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of twenty-five of the greatest papers. ... an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information...." — U.S. Congressman O. Callaway, Congressional Record, Vol. 54, Feb. 9, 1917, pp. 2947)
“During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information.” –Joseph Goebbels, Nazi head of propaganda
“Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.” –US General William Westmoreland, Commander in Vietnam
“The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominate political mythology.” –Michael Parenti
“The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed. The editors of Reader’s Digest and U.S. News and World Report do not need to meet covertly with the man from NBC in an FBI safe-house to plan next month’s stories and programs; for the simple truth is that these men would not have reached the positions they occupy if they themselves had not all been guided through the same tunnel of camouflaged history and emerged with the same selective memory and conventional wisdom.” –from Killing Hope, US Military and CIA Interventions since WWII, by William Blum
“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” — Katharine Graham (owner of the Washington Post)
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” –William Colby, former Director of the CIA
‘It is inescapably censorship under guidelines imposed after the fact by those who are in temporary political power, and so it should be treated as what it is — a real-world moral and ethical battle with grimly wrongheaded, un-American types who play pick and choose when they define our freedoms of speech and religion as it fits their particular political needs.’” –Richard Dreyfus (discussing self-censorship on television by producers fearful of religious groups in government)
’We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination [read as ’democracy’] practiced in past centuries." — David Rockefeller, June 5, 1991, Bilderberger meeting: (source: D. Cuddy, “A Chronological History of the New World Order“)

“Power ensures that costly facts and costly ideas are removed to the margins of social discourse and beyond. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” –Noam Chomsky

“There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.” — John Swinton, preeminent New York journalist speaking to media moguls in 1880

In devolving democracies, the primary purpose of media is to deflect attention away from what those in power are really doing. Coupled with ever increasing obstacles to freedom of information access, ingoing bibliocaust, and various other techniques redirection away from reality to pseudo information (e.g. what some doctor did or did not do to revive some dead alleged paedophile rock star) and trivia keeps the citizenry from fact. This is media’s primary role in devolving democracies. Its secondary role is to falsify information when deflection does not work or is to expensive. A single example - crime rates have been steadily dropping for the past two decades in most western countries. Yet constant harping on crime by all media has convinced the mass of people that the opposite is the case. And so support for increasing surveillance, restrictions and freedom of movement, interception and inspection of telecommunication, and all the other constraints on freedom are accepted under the rubric that they are necessary to reduce the frightening threat of increasing crime.

Media can be a force for good, and in true democracies it is just that. Sadly however, this is not always the case.