Well, it's been six years since last I blogged here, and it's time to re-ignite.
What follows is a book review I wrote for YES! Magazine in 2003, and it seems more relevant than ever:
TAKE A PAGE FROM THE SECOND IRAQ WAR
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq
By Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber
Tarcher/Penguin, 2003
By Stephen Silha
When I worked at the United Nations during the Cold War in the 1980’s, I was amazed at the propaganda I saw daily in both Pravda (the Soviet news service) and The New York Times. I’d been taught to expect it from Pravda. But not the venerable Times, then known as journalism’s “gray lady,” the newspaper of record.
In fact, both operated in and out of the propaganda environments of their respective countries. The Times’ distortions were much more subtle; they lay in the narrow way stories were framed. How stories are framed – and which chunks of truth’s messy spectrum get highlighted – help define how we view the world. It determines what counts as a story and what counts as real. Reporters hate to admit it, but they ARE our national storytellers, our myth-molders.
Today’s information environment is infinitely more complex than it was in those Cold War days before the multi-voiced Internet, before the dizzying array of cable television stations, before weblogs and digitally-altered photos. Lacking adequate tools for sorting through the complexity and arriving at a reasoned picture of reality, Americans tend to oscillate between cynicism and credulity—hostility to Washington “insiders” and “big government” paired with embrace of fundamentalisms and widespread belief in the Bush administration’s (false) claims that Saddam Hussein played a role in 9/11, to name a few examples.“The media” get lumped together, obscuring the vast differences between the big businesses owned by a few vast conglomerates such as AOL/Time Warner and a small independent magazine or a lone person posting a web log [as blogs were known in 2003]. More than ever we need what John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton give us in their new book, Weapons of Mass Deception: a deconstruction of the layers of a complex propaganda machine that transcends administrations and political parties and profoundly shapes our perception of reality.
It doesn’t surprise me that The New York Times has yet to review this book, even though it’s consistently shown up on the “gray lady’s” bestseller list. This book is dangerous; Rampton and Stauber see through the spin and the spin around the spin. They run PR Watch (www.prwatch.org), an on-line publication that documents how governments and corporations daily insinuate themselves into our psyches – or try to.
In this evenhanded, well-documented book, you’ll learn about the people and the motivations behind the multiple messages, repeated phrases, and battles for global hearts and minds that make up a huge part of the War on Terrorism. While most Americans assume that the truth is slippery in the hands of politicians, few realize the role of public relations firms, doublespeak, and branding enumerated in this book like a barrage of psychic cannonballs. The corporate-style marketing, Disney-designed sets, Hollywood-influenced messages that work so well to sell products – the buying of which is sold to us as patriotic – aren’t working so well on the global stage.
“Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century,” write Rampton and Stauber, “attempts to market the United States [abroad] as ‘brand freedom’ came into conflict with a U.S. tendency to talk rather than listen, combined with U.S. support of undemocratic regimes whose own political objectives contradicted America’s stated principles.”
The ethnocentrism I noticed decades ago on the part of the U.S. seems to have entrenched itself even further in our political institutions, public policy, and approaches to the terrorist threat. Our media, when they look at all, increasingly cover the rest of the world like some odd curiosity. TV news networks in 1989 devoted 4,032 minutes to foreign stories, compared with 1,382 minutes in 2000. (After 9/11, foreign coverage went up to 2,103 minutes in 2002, only to dip again until the Iraq war.)
Truly radical or transformational institutions that could change the way the world operates, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, get almost no attention in the U.S. press. The number of foreign news bureaus has steadily decreased in most media organizations, to the point where most news organizations found themselves as clueless as the rest of us when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. “Rather than changing the way we actually relate to the people of the Middle East, [U.S. officials] still dream of fixing their image through some new marketing campaign cooked up by Hollywood or Madison Avenue,” Rampton and Stauber conclude. They are not speaking just about the Bush administration.
They document how corporate-style product “branding” in foreign policy uses feel-good glitz to cover over the deep issues, further alienating an Arab world that is already skeptical of the U.S. It’s not working. As one Indonesian student from a focus group told The Christian Science Monitor, “We know that there’s religious freedom in America, and we like that. What we’re angry about is the arrogant behavior of the U.S. in the rest of the world.”
The authors also take us on a tour of the propaganda tactics used by the U.S. government on its own people. This effort has been more effective than its propaganda abroad, thanks to a largely docile domestic press. They make clear that the 2003 Iraq war (as well as the one in 1991) was sold to the public based on questionable distortions and sometimes outright lies planted by public relations firms. Once these lies are repeated in the echo chamber of the media, they become “truth.” The book serves up the best accounting yet of who said what and who knew what about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden (who scowl at each other in Tom Tomorrow’s hilarious cartoon on the book’s cover while film-director Bush coaches them to look like buddies).
While the book is a meticulous snapshot of what lay beneath the surface of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” it invites further exploration. It gives citizens – including those who may disagree with the authors’ assumptions – useful tools to understand the war on terrorism, and even its relationship to products like SUV’s, marketed as “urban assault luxury vehicles” to make the reptilian part of our brain feel more safe, even though the vehicles are not so safe, and even as our increased gas guzzling fuels the terrorism we say we’re fighting.
The book invites viewers, listeners and readers to examine how various media filter points of view, and whether media actually offer opportunities for dialogue between multiple points of view. It notes how many “experts” cited by the media tend to be from think tanks sponsored by corporations or foundations whose allegiance to current power structures give them a common perspective.
After a description of government secrecy and the fear-based Patriot Act, Rampton and Stauber conclude: “Democracy and the free sharing of information … may offer our best protection against future terrorist threats. Paradoxically, this is precisely what we may surrender if we allow fear to rule our lives.” In these dark days, books like this cut through the misinformation haze to help us determine our own best take on truth—by exploring multiple perspectives and learning from each other’s experience. The new information environment has been exploited by government and corporate propagandists, but it can also be wielded by citizens to find our way out of our current propaganda quagmire. Just as citizens in China and the Eastern Bloc used new technology (faxes, cell phones) to overthrow corruption, we can, too, if we’re aware and awake.
Stephen Silha is a former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor and The Minneapolis Star who guest edited the first Beta 2 issue of YES! in 1996.
