Episode #148 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is the first in a series on media and its uncanny ability to shape our beliefs. I hope you love the show today.

So, I want to begin this series on media by taking a look at it from a bit of an alien perspective or at least alien to how we often hear people talk about media and what it does for us. I want to begin today by talking about the concept of media as a plural form of the word medium because, ultimately, that’s what it is.

You know, we don’t often think of media in this way, especially things like the news media. Like, how is the news typically described? Well, it’s often described as the fourth estate of government, the implication being that these people that report the news to us are practically thought of as public servants. The tip of the spear going out there into the world while we live our daily lives, they’re the people that are going to ask the tough, hard-hitting questions that help keep us informed, so we can know what’s going on in the world and vote accordingly every four years. They’re often framed as though they’re performing a service for us: many of them passionate about the truth, passionate about getting to the bottom of what’s going on.

But what if we were to think of media as a plural form of the word “medium?” Dictionary defines medium as the “intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses.” Another way it’s defined is as the “substance in which an organism lives or is cultured.” Now, regardless of any sort of fourth-estate mythology that could be tacked on about news media -- forget about what our culture tells us the media is doing for us -- I want to consider on this episode here today that both of these definitions for the word “medium” could equally describe the service that the news media provides for us every day.

See, to the thinkers we’re covering today, it may be incredibly useful to think of the news media as an intermediary between us and reality: meaning the reality of the world is that we can’t get on a jet ski, rocket across the ocean, and see what’s going on in Bolivia, for example. But, man, isn’t it great that we have these thankless, truth-loving public servants out there on the news that can do it for us and then create a nice, little, short set of moving pictures that tell us exactly what is going on on the other side of the world.

Media in this way serves as a filter: the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses. But another thing the thinkers we’re covering today would want us to consider is that -- look, say you could somehow have control over those impressions that are conveyed, to give people their impressions of what the world is like, to have the only key to a lock on a door that people wanted opened for them every day -- well, needless to say, you’d have quite a bit of consolidated power. What would a media landscape look like if such a concentrated level of consolidated power existed? Would we even know about it? Would it require a conspiracy on a level so vast that it would just be impossible?

We’re going to be exploring the origins of modern mass media today by looking at the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published in 1988 entitled Manufacturing Consent with many other references to Chomsky’s later work entitled Media Control. Now, the term “manufacturing consent” is actually a borrowed term. Rightfully so, Chomsky and Herman begin making their case about media by alluding to theories originally laid out by Walter Lippmann in the early 20th century, a time they saw as a point in history where the filter of media between us and reality started to take on a very different role in our lives.

Right off the bat, some of you out there might be wondering -- and rightfully so -- when you live in a democracy, why does it even make sense to try to control media in the first place? How evil would you have to be? I mean, don’t we all stand to benefit from people being educated: knowing what’s going on in as accurate a way as is possible? Well, this is part of the beauty of Lippmann’s work. There are philosophical arguments you could make and defend without being evil, necessarily, that make a strong case for controlling what the average person consumes.

Lippmann says these ideas are nothing new. They were used with Lenin. They were articulated by Marx. The only thing relatively new here is that these same tactics are now starting to be applied to the democratic societies in the early 20th century. So, again, why would doing this benefit anyone at all?

Lippmann lays it out like this. There is a type of person out there that could think of a democratic society in terms of there being three major classes. We have on one hand people that hold real positions of power. More on them in a second. The second class are what he calls the specialized class, which are more or less just elected officials that do the bidding of the public in a democracy. And the third class is what he calls the bewildered herd, which are the rest of us: you and me; the masses. And, just to clarify, these are not the views of Lippmann himself; he’s describing one way that people could view a democratic society and how to run it.

Now, people that hold real positions of power have ways that they control and direct the behavior of these other two classes. They control the specialized class, the elected officials, by controlling the parameters of their entire lives as elected officials. So, in this way, theoretically, a politician with all the qualifications in the world, with the best intentions in the world, cannot survive for very long or even win an election in the first place if they’re not willing to play by the rules of the people that make the rules. What inevitably happens next is they become tacitly indoctrinated into a way of getting things done politically.

There’s a method. This is the way you do things in Washington if you want to become part of a committee that can actually get things done. You don’t fundraise by appealing to certain powerful private interests; you don’t get reelected. You don’t rub elbows with the right people in the existing government; your elbows aren’t going to be around for very long.

And, so far, this all makes sense. But the more difficult problem that has to be solved by people in positions of power is how do we control the herd? Don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a lot of people out there. The masses are scary to people in positions of power. How do you control the multivariate nature of all the things they could possibly want?

Well, to the people that believe in this view of society, the herd is most effectively controlled by keeping them distracted in a number of different ways. But, again, this brings us back to the original question: why distract the herd in the first place, especially in a democracy? Why not give them access to the best information we possibly can so that they can vote in the best way they can?

Chomsky gives a great example of the worldview behind this kind of thinking. He essentially says, imagine you’re a parent and you have a three-year-old kid that you need to take care of. For anyone that’s been around a three-year-old kid, you know that kid is about four seconds away from destroying itself at any point in time throughout the day. And, to combat this as a parent, you need to set up an extremely narrow set of parameters for their existence. You may give them a toy to play with. You may put on some cartoons just so you can have a few minutes where they’re distracted enough that they don’t try to explore the light socket with Daddy’s barbecue fork.

But here’s the thing, Chomsky says, as a parent you have the ability to give that toddler as much freedom as you want, really. You can do anything you want. You could give that toddler permission to run across the street any time they thought it was a good idea. But why would anyone ever actually do that as a parent? Not only would that be completely dumb, but it would be irresponsible. And “responsible” is going to become an important word to these people in power that have this view of society.

This is how people holding this view of society see members of the herd. We need to limit the parameters of their lives, keep it very simple, and keep them distracted. Give them some toys to play with; give them some cartoons to watch so they don’t do too much damage with their complete lack of understanding while we let them explore the light sockets of the world.

Similarly, you can’t have a bunch of what they call “irresponsible men” running the show. We need responsible ones, ones that actually know how to bring about positive change in a society, ones that recognize the dangers of giving the herd political power. Because similar to the impulsive, unaware nature of the toddler running across the street, the herd reacts impulsively and often violently to the emotional stories of the day lacking the knowledge and experience and foresight to make measured, long-term decisions.

Bottom line is, we need to treat the herd like they’re little kids. Make them think they have freedom of thought but, again, freedom is always freedom within certain parameters. And, if we can limit those parameters, we can limit the possible worldviews that people can have and, thus, keep them in line more or less with what the “responsible men,” the truly qualified individuals have deemed to be the best way forward for the herd.

Now, limiting what ideas are acceptable to believe has been pretty easy throughout human history, and it only became more easy within a totalitarian state. I mean, people organized in the street with some message of political dissent that’s inconvenient to the responsible class -- you just send people out into the street and beat them into submission. But throughout the 20th century that had become less effective, largely in part due to democracy: freedom to assemble, freedom of expression. These things are spreading at a rate that they never had before.

So the people in the positions of power had to come up with a new tactic, a new way to limit the parameters of people’s thinking while still making them believe that it was their idea to hold the position that they defended and vote the way that they voted. This was the moment that people in positions of power came up with an idea that would change the course of democracy in the age of mass media. Noam Chomsky has a famous quote about it. He says, “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

Let’s talk about the history of this. The origins of this shift in strategy predate World War I, though Chomsky and Herman cite one of the big points of inception as Woodrow Wilson’s Creel commission right around the time of the First World War. When working in coalition with the British Ministry of Propaganda, they created a campaign to deliver specific messages to a United States that, at the time, was not really that interested in getting involved in foreign affairs. They did this to drum up support for a type of patriotism that aligned itself with US involvement in World War I.

Well, the US ended up getting involved in World War I in a big way. And the strategy worked so well for people in power that we can see an example of the same tactics immediately after World War I in McCarthyism and in the Red Scare. In other words, the interests of corporations, the government, and large institutions at the time benefitted from us entering into World War I and to have communism as a pejorative via the Red Scare. And, to Chomsky and Herman, this new strategy of propaganda worked extremely well for them all the way up until around 1935 with the passing of the Wagner Act, most notably that it allowed laborers to organize and vote in a collective way that just had never been possible before.

Once the effects of the Wagner Act started to show up, once laborers started getting small levels of power over the interests of large corporations and people started getting elected that were actually acting on behalf of these workers, people in positions of corporate power had to do something to try to get things back to the way they were. Not a coincidence that just two years later in the year 1937 is the first time we see a brand-new innovation in these media propaganda tactics, something that came to be known as the Mohawk Valley formula.

The Mohawk Valley formula is a strategy where you use media in various ways to bust a strike: meaning that, if workers have a problem with some policy that a corporation has because they feel like they’re being mistreated, and they use this new power to organize to strike against that policy, the Mohawk Valley formula is a formula designed to align the motives of the strike with some message, a message that really has nothing to do with the strike or the policy in question, but this message diminishes the support that the workers are going to get from the public.

At the time it was popular to paint striking workers as anti-American: the interests of unions and of organized laborers were against the interests of America and its future. So, in other words, they effectively switched the conversation away from anything about specific policies that were being protested and turned the conversation into whether you were for the interests of America or against them.

Now, I’m not trying to make any points here about unions or corporations or anything like that. It’s not what this show is. The significance of this when it comes to this series has less to do with labor unions and more to do with how we can see echoes of this very same strategy in the media landscape that we live in today. I’m sure any of you can recount a time that you turned on the news and you see some organized protest being painted in a light good or bad that it really didn’t deserve, and the people painting the picture benefited greatly from it being painted in that way. Consider also how common it is for a campaign of any variety to effectively sidestep the entire question at hand that has to do with specific policy and turn the conversation into some sort of witch hunt against something or fist pumping for something that’s practically impossible to disagree with.

Just as a point of reference here, as an example, let’s look at some popular slogans from US presidential campaigns that the whole family can enjoy. Keep America Great. Okay. Now, what citizen voting in a US presidential election could possibly disagree with that statement? You could disagree with the policy behind that campaign, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. You could disagree that America was great in the first place, but there’s a sense in which you could reread that statement to mean that we should keep America great and get away from the way things are now. Point is, to disagree with this statement is to be anti-American by default. So why even consider someone’s opinion about who should be president if they don’t agree with it?

In other words, Chomsky would say, the statement is utterly meaningless. The statement is so vacuous that it’s really not saying anything of substance. But it’s not trying to say anything of substance anyway. The real point is to switch the conversation away from the real policy that lies underneath the slogan, much like corporations would do so that people weren’t discussing what the laborers were actually striking against.

Another example: Hope and Change. What human being can possibly disagree with the idea of hope being a good thing? Like, who even sits around coming up with an argument for something like that? No, I think we’re better off if we’re all hopeless. Change. What person is against change in the face of social unrest and an economic downturn at the time that left people immiserated?

Once again, the point is not actually to say anything of substance here. The point is to subvert substantive conversations about the policy that’s going on behind the catchy, vacuous one-liner that only a lunatic could disagree with. The statement is shallow by design to get people to think the question of this election is as deep as a kiddie pool, when in reality it probably is more like the depth of the ocean. But a bewildered herd of cattle can’t last very long in the ocean, or they’d all drown.

How about slogans like Support Our Troops? Not, do you support the policies connected to the war in which they’re fighting; do you support the troops? Well, how can you not support the troops? To even start making that argument, Chomsky says, you have to start by saying, “Well, I don’t not support the troops.” And he says, by that time, you’ve already lost.

What if you heard the slogan Peace and Harmony somewhere? Now, on one hand, how can anyone ever disagree with that? Meanwhile, Thanos might be handing out t-shirts and buttons behind the scenes. The point to Chomsky and Herman is that this is one propaganda tactic that uses media to drastically limit the parameters of a discussion, which in turn effectively manufactures the consent of the herd -- hence the title, Manufacturing Consent.

We can see how this whole thing is structured more clearly if we move away from things like presidential slogans and move more towards how consent is manufactured in the news media in particular. Because here’s the thing, if this is all true, we have to ask the question, are people like Wolf Blitzer self-censoring for the sake of pandering to these people in positions of corporate, government, and institutional power?

Like, is W. Blitz coming to work every day choosing news stories himself, choosing them because of the direction he’s getting from some cabal of corporate overseers he has secret backroom meetings with? How about every other anchor, journalist, reporter, editor, columnist, blogger? Are these people all on the payroll? Are they all getting an email in the morning from the Monopoly guy telling them what to report on?

The answer to Chomsky and Herman is no. The problem is much more insidious than that. Chomsky writes in his book Media Control, “Journalists are not normally kept under control through top-down intervention but by journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.” But he actually illustrates it even better in an interview he did with a reporter in the 1970s.

The reporter asked Chomsky, “Do you really think that I’m self-censoring right now?” clearly, the reporter knowing that every day the only intent when he does his job is to get to the bottom of what the truth is and not to peddle some narrative that’s been given to him. Chomsky says back to him, “I’m not saying that you think you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe every word that you’re saying. What I’m saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

What Chomsky’s referencing here is the primary argument presented in the book Manufacturing Consent. The news media is full of people that do their jobs really well. They can be ethical, hardworking, have a true desire to deliver the best news they possibly can. They can be all these things, but they will always be operating within parameters that have been preset for them by people in positions of corporate, government, and institutional power that have an inordinate amount of control over media outlets and use that control to limit the narrative so as to keep the herd distracted and voting their way.

In keeping with the view of society articulated by Walter Lippmann we talked about earlier in the episode, there are certain messages we need reinforced to the herd that keep society moving forward in the correct direction and not at the whims of what they see as just a bunch of toddlers. Media is the delivery system for those messages. And, when you control the framework the news is delivered in, then anyone that falls too far outside the norms put in place either never gets a job reporting the news in the first place or doesn’t last very long, not unlike the public officials we were talking about before.

Now, the first question you got to be asking here is, how exactly are they accomplishing this? Seems like a pretty ambitious goal. Chomsky and Herman lay out five primary filters that our news media has to pass through before it ever gets to us and begins informing our views about what’s going on in the world.

The first one is what they call media ownership. Chomsky says in an interview, “Make no mistake, the word ‘media’ is just another word for company,” meaning these are not public servants; this isn’t St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. These media outlets are for-profit endeavors, and we should never forget that fact. The same reason you’d never go into a meeting with your boss and read them off all the reasons you’re secretly horrible at your job, if there was some hard-hitting story or interview that a news outlet could potentially run and it was going to go directly against the interests of the company at large and maybe put it out of business, why would anyone ever run that story?

Now, on the other hand, let’s say you come across a story that strongly goes against the interests of one of your competitor stations. You might be much more inclined to run that story than you ever would have otherwise. This dynamic serves as a filter of the information we get to inform our worldviews.

The second filter our media has to go through is advertising. Now, initially you may think this is similar to the filter of media control, but part of what’s being referenced here is that there’s not just one single customer that a media outlet has. They have you as a customer, sure. But, equally, they have advertisers as a customer. And what do they sell to these advertisers? You; audiences. So, if it serves the interest to curate an audience that corresponds with the values of some specific brand of toilet paper, for example, so be it.

The third filter we need to consider is the massive influence held by what they call the media elite. This is an interesting one that’s essentially saying that people in high levels of corporate government or institutional power effectively decide the standard for what is newsworthy at all. They decide what news is. For example, say there’s some sort of large public relations scandal that the government has to deal with. Well, the government itself gets to appoint a spokesperson to give the official statement. Journalists, if they want a credible news story, look to their sources on the inside of government to try to get the scoop.

In other words, they’re forced to maintain relationships with their sources on the inside if they ever want to get something newsworthy. And what happens if they don’t play by the rules, if they leak a piece of information the source didn’t want them to? Well, now they’re cut off, can’t get any official statements. They can’t get the news. Their name isn’t going to be on the list of reporters that are allowed to go to the next press briefing and ask questions. Their reporting gets too critical of things; oftentimes they become slandered as people, eventually falling into obscurity or labeled as crazy.

This is the fourth filter that they call flack. Your job as a journalist is to get the news. And, if you had to follow a specific set of parameters in order to get it, probably wouldn’t deviate too far outside of them because, if you did, you wouldn’t be very good at your job anymore. We’ve been conditioned to think that we see some sort of person-on-the-street interview, hearing random people’s opinions about things, and we think, “Well, look, that’s interesting and all, but when are we going to get to hear the official statement, the one worth remembering, the newsworthy statement?”

When you are the source of newsworthy information, when you’re the transnational corporation that controls a media outlet, when you have power to push certain stories you like and not cover ones you don’t like, when you get to determine who the resident expert is and can pick and choose which expert agrees with you, when you decide what is newsworthy, you decide what journalists even have to look for in the first place. You decide who gets to have access to the news. You decide the lane the reporters have to stay in.

This is why otherwise totally ethical people who are good at their jobs could be participating in delivering information that manufactures the consent of the herd. And, make no mistake, that’s the way they see it. The people in this way are being treated like a bewildered herd. The word “corral” is often used. We need to corral the herd by corralling public opinion.

And this corralling is often accomplished by reporting the news through the filter of fear, fear of some common enemy that’s out there. This is the fifth filter Chomsky and Herman lay out, and it’s a big part of the reason people continue to tune into the news every day and are willing to listen to ads about dishwasher tablets in the meantime. We need to keep people afraid of some common enemy that’s out there.

Popular ones that have been cited: communists, terrorists, illegal immigrants, maybe even democrats and republicans. But in all these cases the message is exactly the same: you need to stay informed about what this group is up to or it could be the downfall of our society. Tune in tomorrow to get the latest scoop about their evil plans.

See, because when we think of media as the plural form of the word “medium,” when we think of news media as a filter between us and reality, instead of a group of public servants working tirelessly to tell us the objective truth about what’s going on in the world, you can start to soften a bit. You can start to see that enemy out there, that you fear, that’s destroying the world, really are just fellow human beings that have lived a different life than you with their own fears, with their own desires to save the world their kids will one day have to live in. You can start to question the very foundations of what grounds our social epistemology at all, which will be the topic of episode two in this series, coming soon.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.