How Media, Business & Government Lie and Spread Psychological Warfare

What we believe to be real is the result of our information environment. Outside of what our own senses tell us, we depend greatly on the media, which answers to business, as does the government. Do business and government also have to answer to the consumers and the electorate? Ultimately they do, which is why systematic disinformation plays such a large role in what we see, how we react, how we spend our money, and who we end up voting for. Therefore, the control, manipulation, distortion and outright fabrication of information are crucial to the smooth operation of the machinery of war and power. A war such as the Iraq war is as much a business venture as is it anything else, and as such, it needs to be marketed to those who must ultimately pay for it, the American taxpayers.

"The key to understanding information dominance is to be clear that it is not dissent in itself that the US planners object to. Rather it is dissent that hampers their ability to do whatever they want that matters." (Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control Miller 2004:16)

Other objectives of disinformation campaigns have included, and continue to include; anti-drug hysteria, racism and anti-Semitism, capitalizing on fear through "tough on crime" political initiatives, and the depiction of various youth-culture, pop-culture and countercultural trends as harmful to the mental health of teenagers and young adults. In the case of youth culture, this negative publicity actually assists in the marketing of these cultural commodities, while simultaneously creating demand for authoritarian solutions among those who fear a changing world.

The images used by the mainstream media in while presenting its stories give many clues to the various propaganda messages put forward by the manipulators of our collective consciousness. Look for the replayed image at the end of a TV news story. The image from the story that is selected and repeated at its close is the important one, the image that the producer is trying to get you to focus on and remember. Images of violence abound. Footage of heroin cooking in a spoon and a syringe drawing the liquid up into its barrel are also common. I have seen, after coverage of a turbulent and somewhat disastrous day at the New York Stock exchange, the image of an Orthodox Jew approaching a window and transacting some kind of business, repeated at the end of the story (the insidious message being "it's the Jews again!"). At the end of a story on an anti-globalization demonstration in Genoa Italy that turned violent (where the one fatality was a protester), a clip of a dreadlocked anarchist throwing something at an advancing wall of teargas and riot-police is used (the message here being "only violent anarchist crazies oppose the WTO"). At the end of a story on a demonstration by Mexican-Americans and Mexican Nationals in Washington DC, protesting the increasingly anti-immigrant political climate in America, the repeated image is that of a Mexican gentleman wearing a red, white, and green sombrero and waving a small Mexican flag.

Some other uses of visual imagery include the juxtaposition of the marijuana leaf to pills, powders and syringes in the graphics that appear behind the news anchors during drug-related stories. The image of the 9-11 disaster has been repeated so many times that I doubt any of us can remove it from our conscious mind even temporarily. Osama bin Laden, however dangerous and fanatical he may be, has been given way too much free publicity by the media, and his face is as well known as that of any of our celebrities. The goal of terrorism, by definition, is to create terror, and to the extent that terror is increased by the media's obsessive coverage of terrorists, the media helps the terrorists achieve their goal.

Is there any consistent political message in all of this? While some networks have blatantly manipulated the political behavior of their viewers (such as FOX during the 2000 general election), the political message changes from season to season. The only consistency to the coverage is the creation of fear, the aggravation of class-based, ethnic and racial hostilities, and advancement of the idea that only the experts of business and government can save us. Paradoxically, those who benefit most from this propaganda effort often try very hard to be the apparent advocates of reason, moderation and tolerance, while advancing the agenda of war. The word "democracy" is used often by those are transforming America, gradually and consistently, to a totalitarian society.

All of the above is consistent with a "divide and conquer" strategy.

As the primitive reactions of hate and fear, and the "higher" and more cerebral impulses of righteous indignation, moral outrage, and the belief that "something must be done" are triggered and exploited, the incidence of criminal violence seems to increase. The terms "school shooting," "mall shooting," and "church shooting" have become part of our national vocabulary. Many believe that the media's excessive coverage of these events has contributed to their increasing frequency. Crime rates rise and fall, but the media's focus on violent crime increases fairly constantly, creating the illusion of a constantly increasing crime rate.

"Although homicides made up less that 1 percent of all arrests, homicides made up more than a quarter of all the crimes reported on the evening news on TV. While homicide coverage was increasing on the network news by 473 percent from 1990 to 1998, arrests for homicide dropped 32.9 percent during the same period."(Salim Muwakkil 4-16-2001 Media's Warped Interpretation of Chaos )

While some of this phenomenon is motivated by the crass desire for better ratings and more advertising dollars, it still serves to make an authoritarian and repressive sociopolitical agenda more palatable to the American people. While the desire for security is understandable, historically societies that have traded in their most basic rights for comfort and (the illusion of) safety have ended up losing all of these things, often being placed in harm's way by their own governments. An obvious recent example of this was Hitler's Germany , which also was controlled through astute psychological manipulation and propaganda, mostly through the "big lie" technique.

While much of this may seem dismal, the fact that I can research and write this piece, and subsequently publish it online without (I hope) immediately being imprisoned shows that the American Way of Life is still alive and kicking. Sometimes Americans will buy all kinds of crap, and be fooled into going along with all kinds of schemes that are as horrifying as they are nonsensical. And while terrorism, violent crime, drug addiction, and alienated subcultures are very real problems, the corporate/government solutions that have been implemented have accomplished nothing (other than increasing the wealth of various well known individuals and corporations). However, Americans don't like being lied to, and our patience with deceptive and wasteful government has is its limits. Trying to determine what is actually going on is very difficult, but if one watches carefully it is entirely possible to detect the lies and manipulations present in our information environment. The arrogance of the powerful virtually guarantees that these distortions will always be present. In the words of PSYOPS expert Colonel Sam Gardiner:

"Clearly, the assumption of some in government is the people of the United States and United Kingdom will come to a wrong decision if they are given the truth" (p.4 Truth from These Podia )

The final responsibility falls on us, as individuals and as a nation, to take the time and make the effort to obtain the truth, even if our "leaders" are reluctant to give it to us.

References:

Truth from These Podia, 2003
Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.)
www.prwatch.org/documents/truth.pdf

Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control
David Miller, 2004
http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.04/Essays.04/Miller.pdf

Media's Warped Interpretation of Chaos
by Salim Muwakkil
Published on Monday, April 16, 2001 in the Chicago Tribune
www.commondreams.org/views01/0416-06.htm

Capital Crimes,
George Winslow, 1999
Monthly Review Press,
New York, NY