Most of our beliefs about ecological problems have been created by propaganda. That may be a surprise because we know that Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and other totalitarian regimes continually bombarded their people with the party line, but most Canadians think we are not exposed to it.
That's a fallacy. It's true that most of the dictators of the past have used propaganda but, by modern Canadian standards Hitler, Stalin and others did not have the hardware to deliver serious propaganda.
In the 1930s the average German probably read more newspapers than a modern Canadian but while there were some Nazi newspapers, for most of the decade there were also independent publications. The Nazis subsidized home radios but the average was still less than one per household, and perhaps one home in several thousand had a TV set. Many households had record players but most records were of classical or dance music and they were played for the music, not as background. The Nazis used loudspeaker trucks, but these were effective only in densely-populated areas.
The average Canadian spends several hours a day watching TV and listening to a radio or record player of some sort. On the streets and in buses and subways, we are continually assaulted by advertising.
And all this either contains or is propaganda. We know that we are exposed to a lot of advertising and most of us are aware of the public relations industry, but very few of us appreciate how they can control our lives. One of the first to understand it was Edward Bernays -- the man who coined the term "public relations. In his book Propaganda, he wrote ...
"Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
"We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we never heard of.
"This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses."[1]
Bernays wrote those words in 1928. Modern propagandists don't tell us what they can do, but we must assume they have better techniques at their command than the propagandists of Bernays' day could have imagined.
Bernays was one of the first to realize that newspapers and other media depend on big-budget advertisers, and that the people who control those budgets can control the media. He also realized that while advertisers may compete on one level, it is very much in their interest to cooperate on another.
It does me no good to prove that the car I am trying to sell is better than one that someone else offers unless you are convinced that you need a new car, so I have to convince you that you need a new car and so do the people who sell other makes of cars. The message that you need a car is a secondary part of each ad, but it's always there and the effect is cumulative.
Because of that it's very powerful. With a dozen or more competing car manufacturers making conflicting claims I may not be able to convince you that the car I offer is better than the competition but, between us all, we can probably convince you that your present form of transportation is not adequate.
Meanwhile the people who sell appliances tell you that your refrigerator is inadequate, your TV set is obsolete and so-forth. The claims for different products may conflict but they all agree that whatever you have now is not enough and that you will not be happy until you get more, and more expensive, material goods. Because the media is controlled by advertisers, this same message also pervades the supposedly non-advertising component of the media.
Apologists tell us that because many different products are advertised the ads negate each other. It may be true that the brand names balance out but the ads themselves reinforce each other to convince us that we need the kind of product that is advertised.
And where it suits their purpose, advertisers deliberately attack our customs and beliefs. In the 1920s and 30s, according to Prof. Stuart Ewen of the City University of New York, the advertising industry launched what amounted to a deliberate assault on the American family with ads that questioned parental wisdom and encouraged children to challenge parental authority. In Captains of Consciousness Ewen cites examples of deliberately destructive ads from the 1920s and 30s, and quotes advertising agency executives' explanations of the 'need' to undercut parental authority in order to replace the older generation's ethic of saving with the 'new' ethic of consumption.[2]
For the past thirty years or so most advertising has supported the women's movement. This is partly because most advertisers believe that women are more easily led than men but, whether deliberately so or not, it is also an extension of the industry's campaign against the family.
We might see this as an attempt to destroy society but, from the advertisers' point of view, it's just good business. In the 1920s and 30s many adults resisted the consumer ethic, but children could be converted and could help convert their parents. In the modern world the women's movement is very good for business, and it makes sense for advertising to support it.
Part of that support takes the form of hidden messages. Most of us don't see them because advertisers use a bewildering variety of techniques, including many that are not known to or believed by the general public.
When Vance Packard recognized subliminal images in magazine advertisements he wrote a book about them. Hidden Persuaders was a best seller, but the images are still there.[3]
Writer Wilson Bryan Key reported in Subliminal Seduction that a survey found that most business and community leaders believe that subliminal advertising is illegal. In fact, he says, there is no law against it.[4]
Many people don't believe that subliminal advertising techniques could possibly work or that they are used. Key's The Clam Plate Orgy[5] included reproductions of advertisements with secondary images that Key described as subliminal content, but the secondary images are not obvious and some people deny their existence. Writing in the early 1970s, Key said a survey found that 60% of Americans believed that subliminal advertising techniques existed only in science fiction and that 90% believed that they were illegal.[6] In 1971 English psychologist N.F. Dixon wrote that more papers had been published on subliminal perception than on any other subject in psychology, but most textbooks either ignore or minimize it.[7]
Any doubts that subliminal advertising is used were laid to rest in the summer of 2000, when news programs around the world reported and televised the subliminal content of one of then-presidential-candidate George W. Bush's TV commercials. When the commercial was slowed down the word 'rats' was seen to drift across an image of Bush's opponent, Al Gore. Bush said he did not know about the subliminal message and many people believed him, but there is no question that it was there.[8]
Until that subliminal was discovered Bush led the polls by a wide margin but afterward he lost so much popular support that when he was declared winner of the election, many people questioned the win. I can't help wondering whether Bush slipped in the polls because he was caught using subliminals or because he stopped using them.
In this case the subliminal content was easy to find because that particular advertisement used an obsolete technique. Back in the 1970s Key wrote that 'modern' subliminal techniques use constant low-intensity messages, rather than a high speed flash, and they are much harder to detect.[9]
The best of modern advertising bypasses our rational thought processes by presenting images, rhythms and managed emotions rather than ideas.
In one advertisement that became famous a handsome and obviously healthy cowboy rode a beautiful horse through beautiful countryside. The scene had nothing to do with the cigarettes it advertised but it portrayed a life that many people idealized -- and the one part of it that anyone could achieve was to smoke the cigarettes.
Millions of people reacted to that picture, and accepted the cigarettes as part of the scene.
Modern advertising has helped to change our world, but the material we recognize as advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Propaganda is a close relative of advertising but while advertising is an overt attempt to convince us to buy or do this or that, propaganda adjusts our attitudes or our perceptions to make us want something.
If I publish material that urges you to buy an Acme model XYZ gugglerump, or to buy any make or model of gugglerump from the Galumptious Gugglerumpery, that's advertising. If I publish information about the wonderful device we call a gugglerump and how it can improve your life, that's propaganda.
As a general rule the makers and sellers of gugglerumps create and pay for advertisements and the media in which they publish their ads creates and publishes propaganda, and these are separate operations. Granted that the people who make and sell gugglerumps may help to prepare the editorial material or even write it themselves, if it's good propaganda it will promote gugglerumps in general rather than any specific make of gugglerump and it will at least pretend to present an unbiased view. Because the media depends on or hopes for advertising from several makers of gugglerumps the propaganda will usually include information or other material supplied by several or all of them.
And most of the editorial material will be more-or-less accurate and truthful. Some people think of propaganda as 'a pack of lies' but a lie may be caught and, if it is, the propaganda will be nullified. The art of the sophisticated propagandist is to tell the truth, but only that part of the truth that he or she wants known.[10] As the poet William Blake wrote in Proverbs (line 95): "A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent."
The danger of propaganda is that it tends to stray further and further from the truth because the people who create it are, even more than the rest of us, continuously immersed in it. Because they live in a maelstrom of propaganda their point of view is skewed and when they produce their own advertising or propaganda, they start from the skewed viewpoint.
Even honest advertisers and propagandists are themselves likely to be led astray. We may think of them as Machiavellian geniuses who know exactly what they are doing but most of the people who produce our advertising and propaganda are, like you and me, ordinary people who are themselves fooled by the misinformation that assails us all.
Suppose that, as a propagandist, I aim to puff the truth by about 10% in everything I write for my client. When I write about Acme gugglerumps I puff your need for a gugglerump by about 10%, I puff the quality of the Acme brand by about 10% and I puff the benefits to the economy when you buy a gugglerump by about 10%.
If I were the only one doing it that would be no problem because I know the truth and when I write the next ad or public relations release, for gugglerumps or some other product, I will start from the same base.
But I am not alone. After I write my ad I go out into the world where I am assaulted by literally thousands of other ads and promotional articles, all with a 10% puff factor. After a while I will accept that 10% puff as reality and when I write my next ad or release I will puff the facts 10% from my perceived reality, thus producing a puff factor of 21%. Because thousands of other ad-writers are doing the same I will soon accept this as reality and, from then on, when I puff my perceived truth by 10% my actual puff factor will be over 30%.
The problem will be compounded if the makers of rumplegigs, which serve roughly the same purpose as gugglerumps, mount their own campaign. Now every time the rumplegig campaign makes a claim the gugglerump campaign will top it, and vice versa. Before long it will be obvious that no one can live without both of them.
If we had a stable baseline to compare things with we could see this happen, but there is no baseline. We live in a culture of puff and propaganda, and it is running amok.
Most of the propaganda that assails us has a commercial rather than a political purpose, but most of it is based on a single political point of view.
Fifty years ago local newspapers and radio stations were owned by local people and they reflected local opinions. Now almost all of our newspapers, magazines and radio and TV stations are owned by giant corporations. The newsrooms of some newspapers have been merged with the newsrooms of TV stations and for a while newspapers in one chain were required to publish editorials that were written at the chain's head office.[11] That policy has been changed, under public pressure, but no one believes that the papers are free to express opinions that are not approved by head office. One way or another, the company that hires the editor controls the newspaper.
One politician who recognized the advantages of chain newspapers was Adolph Hitler. He was chairman of the board and controlling stockholder of the Eher Publishing Co. which, by 1938, owned more than half of Germany's major newspapers. By 1944, it owned nearly 90% of them.[12]
Canadian media moguls might argue that some papers back the Liberals and others the Conservatives, but that's bafflegab. For practical purposes the most important difference between the main line political parties is that, at any one time, one is in power and the other is not. The leaders and all the senior members of both are members of The Establishment and they have far more in common than they have differences. New Democrats sing a different tune during election campaigns but when they have held provincial power, they made little difference. The most lasting effect of Ontario's brief flirtation with an NDP government was the construction of a privately-owned toll road.
Any radical party would have to hold power through several elections to make much difference, and corporate media will see that no radical holds power for very long.
And we might argue that politicians are mostly window dressing anyway. For practical purposes the media runs the country because, directly or indirectly, it tells us what to think. This would be no problem if we had a variety of media with a variety of views but, in the modern world, we have few sources of information and they all hold essentially the same point of view.
This agreement is itself a powerful tool because the power of propaganda is reinforced by the phenomenon that sociologists call "social proof." In a nutshell, most of us tend to believe what most of the people around us believe. If all the pundits agree most of us will accept their view, and if we all agree we must be right.
But if the pundits agree that may be because they were all chosen by the media. Someone can be found to comment from any point of view and, obviously, the media will choose someone whose point of view the editors of that particular media outlet consider valid. If no notable public figure holds the required point of view that's no problem, because the fact of being invited to comment makes the commentator notable.
Where the media outlet offers a 'balanced view' with opinions from both sides it chooses the spokesmen for both sides, and if the spokesman for one side of a question is less convincing than the spokesman for the other that should be no surprise. If the media outlet's owners support one view of the world, the management will not select a convincing spokesman for the opposite view.
'Experts' and editorialists have the most weight but social proof makes all news reporters important because each one reaches thousands or millions of listeners or readers and their audience is inclined to believe what they say or write. That's why good public relations people will do whatever it takes to get reporters on their side. When I worked as a reporter I got a couple of free trips to Europe, vacations at expensive resorts in Canada, the US and Mexico and some really fabulous meals at the expense of public relations people who wanted to make friends. I think all my reports were honest, but quite a few PR people spent quite a lot of money in attempts to convince me that they and their clients were nice people.
Many of our opinions are based on ideas offered in newspaper editorials and opinion columns, but the most insidious propaganda we are exposed to is presented as entertainment.
French social psychologist Gustav Le Bon saw the potential for this. In 1895 he wrote.... "Nothing has greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representation."[13]
Movies and television are wonderful media for propaganda because we interpret them the same way we interpret real life. When I read a newspaper or a book I use the learned skill of reading, and I have to imagine the scenes and events I read about. Because I have to create the scene in my own mind, I am not likely to mistake it for real life.
But the images and sounds of a movie or TV show consist of images and spoken words, much like real life. In my conscious mind I know that what I see is fiction but subconsciously I can, and some people do, confuse the movie with the real world.
Former US president Ronald Reagan did. Writer and professor Dr. Elizabeth Loftus says that in several speeches Reagan cited a specific act of heroism in which a US Navy pilot won the Congressional Medal of Honor. The incident was portrayed in a movie but it does not appear on the records of any winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor.[14]
Movies are very powerful because film makers use tricks to sway our emotions, and to make us see things the way they want us to see them. One of the most powerful is background music. A scene of a woman taking a shower might be neutral but the same scene can be scary if ominous music in the background tells us that something terrible is about to happen. Even the lighting of a scene can be disturbing, because in life we see the world lit by nature but in a movie we see it lit by skilled technicians who want to control our mood.
Film-makers have to use tricks to affect our moods because that's why we watch movies. If they portrayed the world as it is, we would go out into the world rather than into a theater.
Fictional arguments are often more convincing than real ones because when the writer of fiction presents an argument he also presents the counter-argument, and he presents only the counter-argument that he chooses to present. The result is that we see the point argued and won without hearing any real argument. Even the author of fiction may be fooled, because we can all convince ourselves of the truth of anything we really want to believe.
This does not suggest that novelists and film writers are part of a deliberate plot to manipulate us. There is no need for a plot because in most cases when an American writer presents 'The American Way of Life' as the best in the world, he actually believes that to be so. Most of the people who produce propaganda are trying to lead, rather than deliberately mislead, their audience.[15]
But whether it's deliberate or not the propaganda value of some shows is easy to see. In one popular TV serial the US Navy is portrayed as such a wonderful and caring institution that I am tempted to enlist and get into trouble, just so I can meet the nice people who work in the Judge Advocate General's office.
In one landmark episode, which I saw on Jan 31/05, Navy lawyers successfully defended the United States against charges of war crimes committed in Iraq. Many of the millions of Americans who saw that episode -- and who will never see anything to counter it -- now 'know' that a world court found the invasion of Iraq justified and that no American committed any war crime.
The US Navy has also figured prominently in several big-budget movies in the past few years and the Navy's participation in those films is obvious, because even Hollywood budgets could not cover the fair-rental cost of an aircraft carrier and hours of flight time for modern jet fighters. Without the Navy's cooperation such films could not be made, and we can bet that the Navy does not cooperate with films that do not show the Navy and the world the way the Navy sees it.
This is not necessarily a Machiavellian plot. The American war-film industry got its start in World War II, when the US was at war and propaganda was the order of the day. Canada's National Film Board got its start at the same time, with propaganda as its primary function.
After the war the men who came home had stories to tell, and people wanted to see war films. Because they were popular studios kept making them and, because the public wanted the films, the military cooperated.
But whether it was planned or not, the military found that war films were good for it. Every military force in history has had a perennial need for more recruits and bigger budgets; and popular films that glorify the American military, American fighting men and American weapons help the American military get both. Unfortunately those films also glorify American wars, and they have probably played a part in changing the largely peaceful country that tried to stay out of the First and Second World Wars into the jingoistic war machine of today.
In theory it may be possible to make a movie or a TV show without propaganda but it's hard to see how because every film portrays the world as the director sees it, or as he wants his audience to see it.
Some of the most powerful propagandists in the modern world are pop singers and their bands. Some, like the Beatles, have literally changed the world.
But the success of even the best singers depends on promotion by a record company, and the ones that are chosen for success in the modern world are the ones with a message that suits the record company and the corporation that owns it.
The substance of modern teen music is a mix of the corporate message that the highest aim for a human is to renounce family ties and to consume, plus whatever schtick the singer chooses as his or her personal signature.
In a world of teens who have been taught to resent adults, anger and hatred are good signatures. If Satan's Sodomists or some other band spews hatred and resentment it may not sell records to adults but, whatever they think of the music, some teens will be attracted to any band that adults dislike. Peer pressure will attract others and, because adults dislike it, the band and the attitudes it promotes can be a hit.
Professional sports are also useful for propaganda. Two thousand years ago politicians and patricians in ancient Rome kept the masses sedated with 'bread and circuses.' In the modern world spectator sports are so important that whole cities may be disrupted for one event, television stations re-arrange their schedules around prize fights and ball games and most newspapers have whole sections devoted to 'sports.'
Spectator sports encourage 'fans' to display mindless loyalty and to react as members of a group rather than as individuals. If the fans are then told that their heroes and other members of the group drink this or that brand of beer or whatever, the group loyalty can be transferred to the brand. Most people don't think they can be manipulated so easily, but it is because they can that commercial companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars to support and promote professional spectator sports.
Spectator sports also keep people focussed on the behavior, activities and needs of sports heroes rather than on their friends and family. The ability of men to ignore their wives and children while they concentrate on a TV broadcast of a game between two teams of professionals they have never met, has achieved joke status in some circles.
But if it is distressing to their families the loyalty of sports fans to their chosen team is valuable to advertisers. As the French student of propaganda Jacques Ellul wrote:
"When propaganda makes the individual participate in a collective movement, it not only makes him share in an artificial activity, but also evokes in him a psychology of participation, a 'crowd psychology.' This psychic modification, which automatically takes place in the presence of other participants, is systematically produced by propaganda. It is the creation of mass psychology, with man's individual psychology integrated into the crowd.
"In this process of alienation, the individual loses control and submits to external impulses; his personal inclinations and tastes give way to participation in the collective."[16]
Major sports events also provide convenient news blackouts during which other news will be ignored and potentially embarrassing information can be buried.
As a reporter I didn't notice news blackouts until, more than 20 years ago, I witnessed an attack by local thugs on a camp of migrant fruit pickers in a small town in British Columbia. The thugs were easily identified but they were locals and the victims were not and the local RCMP detachment was reluctant to press charges.
Partly, perhaps, because a reporter had witnessed the attack, charges were eventually laid. Months later the trial was held, on the day of a US presidential election. I came from Toronto to testify but the fruit pickers who had been attacked were not able to come. I had not seen the one man who was on trial, and the charge was dismissed.
I wanted to write a news report about the case but, as one editor told me, "if you had the second coming today, we couldn't run the story." The Crown Attorney and the police could argue that there was no attempt to cover anything up, but the incident was kept out of the national news.
American presidential elections are held only once every four years but major sports stories -- such as 'bowl' football games, the world series of baseball and the Stanley Cup of hockey -- add up to several blackouts a year. If a special blackout is required at a specific time, a 'world-championship' boxing fight or other event can be staged.
Celebrities can also be used to create a news blackout if they happen to get married or divorced, or do something else, at an appropriate time. If no established celebrity is doing anything interesting, a new one can be created.
In Canada in the fall of 2002 a sports announcer whose contract was not renewed by a TV network was front page news for several days until the network agreed to his salary demands. For those few days the fate of one 'TV personality' (whom I had never heard of until after he was let go) distracted attention from the firing of a provincial cabinet minister for abuse of his expense account, from calls for police to investigate the double billing that we now know as the AdScam scandal, other irregularities in government contracts and the news that Prime Minister Jean Chretien had flouted government regulations and apparently saved business friends from a loss when he spent $100 million for two executive jets that the government did not need. These events were all reported, but they all took second billing to the continuing story about a sports announcer's campaign to keep his job.[17]
If we were looking for a conspiracy we might assume that the network deliberately dumped the sportscaster to precipitate a crisis and that the news media took up the cause intentionally, but we don't have to believe in some Machiavellian plot. If the same decision will make life just a little bit easier for you and me and most of our friends, it should be no surprise to anyone if we make that decision.
PROPAGANDA AND EDUCATION
Some people think their education and study of 'news' keep them safe from propaganda, but that's not so. A hermit in a cave on a remote mountain might be immune to modern propaganda but the rest of us are affected one way or another. As a general rule, the more we are part of society the more propaganda we are subjected to and the more likely we are to be influenced by it. As Jacques Ellul says ...
"The uncultured man cannot be reached by propaganda. Experience and research done by the Germans between 1933 and 1938 showed that in remote areas, where people hardly knew how to read, propaganda had no effect. The same holds true for the enormous effort in the Communist world to teach people how to read. In Korea the local script was terribly difficult and complicated: so, in North Korea, the Communists created an entirely new alphabet and a simple script in order to teach all people how to read. In China, Mao simplified the script in his battle with illiteracy and in some places in China new alphabets are being created."[18]
And, a page later in the same book, (italics Ellul's) ...
"Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is in fact one of his great weaknesses and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver, even though basically a high intelligence, a broad culture and a constant exercise of the critical faculties and full and objective information are still the best weapons against propaganda."[19]
Most of us can find evidence of this in our own experience. There were always more Communists in universities than in factories and even now, around the campus of Ryerson University in Toronto, posters announce meetings of Communist and/or neo-communist groups.
We could argue that the control of information is too important to be given to government but it is certainly much too important to be given to private interests. If we allow them free reign, those private interests become the de facto government.
In order to serve the people and retain its own power, government must find some way to break the power of very large media corporations. In the world of today chain media has an advantage over independent media, but it represents a threat to the welfare of the nation.
No single individual or corporation should be allowed to own or control more than one media outlet. Because no single company could own both a newspaper and a TV station, merged newsrooms would be illegal. Press associations, such as Canadian Press, would be allowed and broadcasters could form networks to buy entertainment in bulk and could sell news stories to one another.
We also need to rethink government subsidies for books, movies and TV productions. The overt purpose of the subsidies is to support Canadian artists but, because some projects are subsidized and some are not, the effect is to give a commercial advantage to the projects that are subsidized. Because these projects are more commercially viable and because publishers and film production houses must think twice about anything that might offend the civil servants and politicians who control the subsidies, the net effect is a form of censorship.
Having said that I should admit that I have myself received one provincial government grant as a writer, and that the publishers of two of my books have received government help. No government has helped with the writing or publication of this book.
Hitler's and Stalin's propaganda machines were controlled by the state, and served the political ends of the state, but the state is very nearly obsolete in the modern world. Modern propaganda machines are controlled by private interests and they give those interests far more power than private interests, or even democratic governments, should have.
Propaganda is a serious danger to our culture but even the people who produce it may not appreciate what they are doing. That's not surprising, when you consider how natural systems work.
Australian termites build nests that may be 20 or 30 feet high and 10 or 15 feet in diameter. They go about as far down into the ground as they rise above it and each one has an underground water supply and an elaborate ventilation system. According to entomologist E. O. Wilson the nests of Macrotermes natalensis maintain the temperature of their internal fungus gardens within one degree of 30C and the carbon dioxide concentrations about 2.6 percent, with very slight variation.[20]
The termites that live in the nest eat wood, straw and other cellulose-rich food but they can't digest cellulose. The enzymes that do it for them are produced in a protozoan called Mixotricha paradoxa which swims around in the termites' gut.
But it turns out that Mixotricha paradoxa probably can't digest cellulose either. Fortunately, it plays host to at least two symbiotic bacteria that do the job for it.[21]
Those bacteria have no concept of what a termitary is or why it should be built but, because they help Mixotricha paradoxa to produce the enzyme that digests the cellulose that the termite eats, they play a key role in the construction of a structure larger than they could possibly imagine.
In the same way movie stars, sports heroes, working news reporters and even press barons may be totally oblivious of the propaganda machine that they, together, constitute.
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