Censored 2012 (48 page)

We face a Truth Emergency in the United States, largely as a result of dominant, top-down, managed news agencies of information control. Both the US government and the corporate media essentially have a
duopoly on manipulating the public mind for political or commercial gain. Leading the public to one view or another is the name of the game, rather than reporting all the facts and letting the chips fall where they may. In America, consumers of corporate news broadcasts are the most likely to be confused about the facts of what is really going on in the world,
¹
and those who follow political discourse among elected officials, are likely to come away equally confused based on the increasing ideological nature and partiality of these exchanges.

This ongoing Truth Emergency is created by a lack of purity in news (transparency and accurate sourcing), a lack of full factual reporting by the press, and a lack of critical thinking by journalists and the public at large. In this climate, propaganda thrives, as it generates a society based on hyperreality and illusions—one unable to discern fact from opinion, one incapable of deconstructing dissembling demagogues. This clearly represents a crisis for democracy; the truth of major issues remains illusive to the public. The antidote lies not only in exposing the charlatans of the establishment order as propagandists, but also in providing a broader understanding of how propaganda works, what it looks like and how to detect it, and what the public can do about it. Namely, the solution is to create an independent free press, one not beholden to moneyed interests, but rather one that tells people the truth about all matters, regardless of which powerful parties may be exposed for their possible state crimes against democracy.
²

The Truth Emergency section of this year’s
Censored
volume is dedicated to exposing propaganda in our culture and offering better ways to understand it, to deconstruct it, and to create alternatives to the deception we call “the news.” Included in this section are some of the brightest voices in the important area of Propaganda Studies. The first four contributors are professors of philosophy. Randal Marlin’s chapter gives a brief though mandatory primer on the history of propaganda, creating an anchor for the section as a whole. Without history, we lack context, which makes us easier prey for the propagandist. Jacob Van Vleet offers a significant theoretical framework through which to understand propaganda and its dangers by looking at the influential scholar Jacques Ellul. Robert Abele analyzes the structural framework of propaganda in a concise seven-point argument,
and Elliot D. Cohen looks at the issue of net neutrality as a vehicle for informing the public and explains why it is under attack by establishment politicians and media moguls alike. Communications scholar Anthony DiMaggio concludes our Truth Emergency section this year, giving us a case study in propaganda by looking at Astroturfing and the mass media–generated phenomenon of the Tea Party. All of these subjects are worthy of book-length treatments and, indeed, many already have been published as such (or will be soon).

Walter Lippmann, the twentieth-century journalist known for his work in support of elite management of information, warned about the dangers of propaganda after the First World War, where its use was widespread especially in the US under the Committee on Public Information. Lippmann wrote in
Liberty and the News
, “Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation.… The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.”
³
Understanding this is one antidote to the current Truth Emergency.

Even more critically, two generations later, Jacques Ellul, the subject of Professor Van Vleet’s chapter, wrote, “Propaganda feeds, develops, and spreads the system of false claims—lies aimed at the complete transformation of minds, judgments, values, and actions (and constituting a frame of reference for systematic falsification). When the eyeglasses are out of focus, everything one sees through them is distorted.”
⁴
It is for these very reasons that the public must not only have access to accurate information, but also understand and combat propaganda along the path to forming a better, more democratic free press structure. Ultimately, this helps to create a more informed, more thoughtfully engaged citizenry, one no longer susceptible to propaganda. This is a crucial step toward the restoration of our republic, a major component of the media revolution.

1
. “Jon Stewart Says Those Who Watch Fox News Are the ‘Most Consistently Misinformed Media Viewers,’ ”
Politifact.com
, project of the
St. Petersburg Times
, June 20, 2011,
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/20/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-says-those-who-watch-fox-news-are-most/
.

A remark by late-night television host Jon Stewart about misinformed viewers of Fox News reignited debate about this topic, which in turn brought up previous studies that suggested corporate news viewers in general were quite misinformed about key issues of the day, not merely viewers of Fox. The article contained several studies confirming the broad misinformation from corporate media sources over the past eight years from Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (
http://pewresearch.org/
) and the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland (
http://worldpublicopinion.org/
).

2
. For more on the Truth Emergency, see Peter Phillips, Mickey Huff, et al., “Truth Emergency Meets Media Reform,” in Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, eds.,
Censored 2009: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007–08
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 281–95; Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Truth Emergency: Inside the Military Industrial Media Empire,” in Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, eds.,
Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008–09
, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 197–220; and “Truth Emergency,” sec. 2, in Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips, eds.,
Censored 2011: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009–10
, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), 221–352. Also see the 2008 Truth Emergency conference website,
http://truthemergency.us
.

For more on the concept of hyperreality, see Andrew Hobbs and Peter Phillips, “The Hyperreality of a Failing Corporate Media System,” in Phillips and Huff, eds.,
Censored 2010
, 251–59. And for more detail on this concept, see Jean Baudrillard, “The Procession of Simulacra,” in
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
, eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1729–41.

For more on State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs), which were a major focus of the Truth Emergency section in
Censored 2011
, see Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” in Huff and Phillips, eds.,
Censored 2011
, 231–66; and Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “New Academic Research on State Crimes Against Democracy,” Global Research, March 4, 2010,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17922
.

3
. Walter Lippmann,
Liberty and the News
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008, originally published in 1920).

4
. Jacques Ellul,
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
(New York: Knopf, 1968), 61.