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CounterIntelligence
Propaganda Inc.:
Behind the curtain at the U.S.I.A.
As the United States and her allies buckle up for
the new war on terrorism, many representatives of the mainstream media
have begun to feel pressure to confine
their reporting and limit it to State Department and Pentagon press
releases. No doubt, this is standard procedure for a wartime news culture.
But how does the public then draw the line between information and
propaganda? And to what degree will the goverment, itself, manipulate the
media in order to create the most favorable public opinion of the war and
its new domestic policies during these critical times?
Dr. Nancy Snow spent two years working within the ranks
of America’s official propaganda organ, the United States Information
Agency, and then surgically exposed the inner workings of the organization
in her acclaimed publication, Propaganda Inc.. In this interview
with GNN, Dr. Snow breaks down the covert history of U.S. propaganda
efforts both inside and outside of the country’s borders. Tracing the
strategies employed by top propagandists like George Creel and Walter
Lippman, Dr. Snow elaborates an over-arching system of mass persuasion
that targets our most educated and influential citizens in order to shape
the construct of public opinion. As it turns out, the business of war
changes nothing when it comes to the marketing of U.S. interests in the
world theatre...
Stephen Marshall: Why don't we start by having
you introduce yourself and giving us a little background on your career
and what led you to write Propaganda,
Inc.
Dr. Nancy Snow: I'm Nancy Snow and I'm the
Associate Director of the Center
for Communications and Community at U.C.L.A. I'm formerly an
assistant professor of political science at New England College in
Henniker, New Hampshire and former Executive Director of Common
Cause in New Hampshire. Before that I was a propagandist for the U.S.
Information Agency in the early 90's, the first couple of years of the
Clinton administration. And I wrote a book, Propaganda, Inc., about
that experience as well as the entire history of the U.S. government's
propagandizing its message to an overseas audience..
You're one of these people who has seen the inner
workings of the U.S. foreign policy machine - most specifically in the
realm of propaganda. And you are also a Fulbright Scholar who has had
great access to the international organs most involved with promoting U.S.
interest in the global forum. But here you go and write a book exposing
all of the facts of that enterprise. Pulling back the curtain and exposing
the wizard. What was the catalyzing moment for you where you thought you
might want to report on what you were doing, you know, when you thought it
was worth public analysis?
Right, well, I didn't really know about the history of
public diplomacy and I should explain that public diplomacy is a euphemism
for propaganda. In the United States, we don't think of ourselves as a
country that propagandizes, even though to the rest of the world we are
seen as really the most propagandistic nation in terms of our advertising,
in terms of our global reach, our public
relations industry - we have more public relations professionals and
consultants in the United States than we do news reporters. So there's an
entire history of advertising, promoting, and getting across the message
of America both within and also outside of the United States.
Now, when I was a Fulbright student, I was in my early
twenties and I didn't know anything about the Fulbright
program. I certainly hadn't heard of the U.S. Information Agency and
there's a reason for not having heard of U.S.I.A. and that is because, as
a propaganda agency, it's prohibited from distributing its materials to a
U.S. audience. So even though the Fulbright program was an educational
program within the agency, it was attached to a private subsidiary known
as the Institute for
International Education (I.I.E.). So when I applied, I was actually
applying to I.I.E. which is located in New York City. It wasn't until I
went overseas as a Fulbright student that I began hearing questions about
‘well, who are you, who's sponsoring you?’ And that got me very
interested in thinking about sponsorship because when someone asks you
about sponsorship, they're really getting at the root and the origins of
who that person is or what a program is. And I began to think about
‘well, what is the Fulbright program?’ And I started reading about its
history.
I learned that it came about at the end of World War II
when the United States started to really get its program together in terms
of how it was going to win the world over from Communism. And so I began
to see that my function as an exchange student, being sponsored by the
U.S. government, in part, and also by the German government, since I was
studying in Germany, that I was there as a tool, as a mechanism to spread
that message of America to the world. Even though I still just thought of
myself as a graduate student, just doing my thing, learning about the
world, asking questions.
But you really have to understand that when you're
being sponsored, it's not just about you. It's also about an agency, it's
about an institution that's behind you. And so I began to peel back the
layers of the onion a bit and I thought–‘Well it's not just the
Fulbright program, there must have been a predecessor to the Fulbright
program, there must have been a precursor to the U.S. Information
Agency.’ And low and behold, I came across a fellow by the name of George
Creel.
Creel was an American journalist in the early 20th
century who was lobbying the U.S. government, right before the U.S.
entered World War I, he was asking Wilson to form a committee that became
known as the Creel Committee. And it was made up of prestigious
journalists like Walter
Lippmann, business people like Edward
Bernays, who is considered the grandfather of public relations, and
other prominent men of the day, to forge a message
to the American people. Wilson had just been re-elected under the slogan,
“He kept us out of the war,” and it was Creel who had the task of
turning around a population that was not oriented toward war and getting
involved in a war some four thousand miles away and turning around this
very pacifistic population into a very war-mongering, German-hating
population. And the Creel Committee, also known as the Committee
on Public Information (CPI), was established by executive order on
April 13, 1917, just days after President Wilson delivered his message
of war to the U.S. Congress. Keep in mind that there were some 40
different peace groups very active in the U.S., agitating against American
involvement in WWI. The British propaganda arm in the U.S.,
Wellington House, reported to London that apathy toward war in Europe was
pervasive. Creel’s task was tall and as we know, he was ultimately
successful. His “secret weapon” was an army of orators known as
the Four Minute Men (FMM), who gave their “Why We Are Fighting”
speeches before moviegoing audiences of the day. In order to become a FMM,
a man had to obtain letters of endorsement from three prominent citizens
in his hometown. It was a prestigious job of propagandizing for the
U.S. war effort. Then the Creel Committee was shut down in 1919 and
disappeared from America’s memory at war’s end.
George Creel resurrected his efforts when he wrote
about his experience in a fascinating book that really intrigued me
because of the length and bombasity of its title: How
We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the
Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to
Every Corner of the Globe. Harper and Brothers published this in 1920.
So George Creel wanted to tell the story of the success in spreading the
gospel of Americanism. About his war efforts, Creel wrote in his book that
he wanted to create “a passionate belief in the justice of America’s
cause that would weld the American people into one white hot mass instinct
with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.” The
Creel Committee is almost like the initial seed, in a propaganda sense,
that led to the formation of the U.S.-funded Institute
for Propaganda Analysis from 1937-1941, which was founded by Edward
Filene, the Boston merchant we now associate with Filene’s and
Filene’s Basement Department stores. IPA published a Propaganda
Analysis Bulletin, which including the writings of leading academics and
journalists, including Walter Lippmann and Harold
Laswell and other university faculty from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia,
and University of Chicago who were interested in mass persuasion, mind
control and psychological operations that could sway a population in favor
of the United States and U.S. policy. It’s from the IPA that we get the
so-called 7 “tricks of the trade” in propaganda campaigns: name
calling (bad label for an idea), glittering generalities (associating your
campaign with a virtuous concept like freedom or democracy), transference
(using authority and prestige to transfer message), testimonials
(celebrity endorsements), plain folks (“of the people” is always
good), card stacking (selection of facts or illustrations to prevent best
and worst case scenarios), and band wagon (everybody is doing it; “we
are of one mind”). This activity then sowed the seeds for the
establishment of the U.S. Information Agency in 1953 under President
Eisenhower, at the height of the Red
Scare.
How did that feel to you upon discovering this layer of
the onion and all of the implications it holds for us as a society? Why do
you think it's a dangerous thing for the United States to have such a
(relatively) unknown institution working on this level?
Well it's a concern, it's somewhat of a danger when you
think of yourself as a cog in a wheel in a larger institutional setting
for which you don't have control of the message. So when I was a Fulbright
student, I was somewhat naïve in just thinking that I was just an
educational exchange student, that my going to study in Germany was about
building mutual understanding, learning about another culture, learning a
different language-all good for my own personal development.
When you put it into the context of propaganda or
promoting U.S. economic interests, U.S. policy, U.S. foreign policy, in
particular, the danger there is that you're working on behalf of a
company, an institution, in this case, the U.S. government, that may or
may not represent your point of view. But because you're being sponsored -
which public diplomacy, public relations, advertising, is about,
sponsorship-- then you are being asked, really, to contribute, to support,
to reinforce, the ideology of that institution. And the danger is that
that takes away from free critical thinking, from really thinking for
yourself.
I've noted over my years of studying propaganda that
the reason the U.S. is good at this is because we're very much a
non-introspective culture. We are not really socialized to be a thinking
culture. We are socialized to be an action culture. And this manifests
itself in our foreign policy. Of course we're in 2001 now, and we see this
manifesting itself now in an attack, ‘America Attacks’ or ‘American
Fights Back’, as the U.S. media illustrate. Ever since September 11,
we’ve known that we're going to do something because the American people
require it. Well, the American people require it because they've been
conditioned to want a response and you will hear the government, the
administration say, "We must be of one mind, we must do something,
this will not stand" and it takes our attention away from,
"Well, let's look at the underlying causes, the historical precedents
that have led to this attack" - that requires a truly free people, a
truly critically conscious population which we are not encouraged to be
here.
OK - let me back track a bit and ask you what is the
United States Information Agency? And would people be surprised that it
even exists and that taxpayers contribute approximately $1 billion to its
annual budget?
The U.S. information Agency originated in the 1950's.
It was actually an independent agency that was established from the U.S. State
Department. It's somewhat of an offspring to several entities: the Office
of War Information (O.W.I.) and the Office
of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), which was responsible for so-called black
propaganda, that official government propaganda activity which, if the
source is publicly revealed, could threaten U.S. national security.
There were people in place and an understanding of
propaganda that grew from the Creel Committee and the Institute for
Propaganda Analysis. There was enough documentation, enough successes, and
associates within those programs that the Eisenhower administration saw
the need to establish a formal agency on the heels of WWII and it was
called the U.S. Information Agency. This was at the beginning of an
economic boom period in the United States, at the beginning of our
establishing our global military presence. There was an acknowledgement
that the U.S. really needed to get its official point of view out there.
Now, the U.S. government said that it was in direct response to the Soviet
Union and their ability to market the Communist message worldwide, but I
think as a government, our government was already quite aware of how good
it was at promoting the U.S. government position overseas. So the U.S.I.A.
has a 50-year history.
In 1999, in this age of convergence and concentration,
when the U.S. government was talking about downsizing, the U.S.I.A. was folded
into the U.S. State Department. But did the U.S.I.A. go away? No, it
almost went more undercover. We hear less about it now, we hear a little
of that Voice of America
(VoA), but it requires us as citizen activists to pay closer attention, to
look for those networks and footprints of U.S.I.A. that are now within the
U.S. State Department. There is a new committee, the International
Public Information (I.P.I.) Committee, which sounds a lot like the
CPI, Creel's Committee. It's been around for the last two years
since the U.S.I.A. was folded into the State Department. It was formed by
executive order under the Clinton administration, which was formed in
response to U.S. image problems during military actions in Kosovo and
Haiti. I'm sure it's been strengthened under the Bush administration
to coordinate public diplomacy across all government agencies, including
the National Security Council, State Department, Treasury, including the
Commerce Department. So it's really a way of making sure that the U.S.
government is on message with its propaganda program. If anything it's
being strengthened in the post-911 era. It will be further strengthened
because it's very clear that the U.S. officially is not ready to shift a
paradigm away from action and begin listening to the other paradigm which
I am suggesting… which is to listen more and learn more about what other
country’s impressions are of United States. So I think that I.P.I. will
be strengthened and we will see even further propaganda and psyops
programs in development.
Nancy, let me ask you: Is propaganda solely an export
product? I want to ask that because earlier you mentioned that the U.S.I.A.
is not allowed to have access to the American public. And yet there is
surely a profound level of public persuasion and opinion molding occurring
on the internal front. And let me take that a step further. Some writers
in the media are saying that perhaps the attack was a reaction to policy,
to a perception the United States has created of itself in minds of people
overseas. But isn't there a grand disconnect between how Americans see
themselves and the way the world sees them? Is propaganda also leveled
against the public internally to create that disconnect and does it
benefit the administration to engineer that reality?
There are different types of propaganda. There is
government-sponsored propaganda, but there is also propaganda that is
promoted through advertising, public relations, our commercial culture,
our pop culture, and our educational system as well… our socialization
process - what we learn about ourselves as a people.
What we have learned in the United States is to view
ourselves as a good people; that we do not engage in evil, that it's
really not in our natural way of being. That somehow we are an exceptional
people who have this wonderful democratic experiment and experience here,
that must be exported to the rest of the world, because we are about
goodness. And you will hear this, you will hear the top levels of
government and institutions, and corporations, private industry, really
speak to this - that we are a good people and therefore, we must act in
response to what bad people will do.
And the danger in that is that exceptionalism, that
American exceptionalism, leads to the rest of the world feeling that we
don't just quite get it. And, that is that we all are good and bad at the
same time. No human civilization has escaped entirely from bad deeds at
one time or another. So the world see us as we don't see ourselves -
that we do engage in bad policy, at least, the government will on our
behalf. But there's a disconnect between the population, the American
people and the foreign policy of the United States. We keep scratching our
heads saying "We're good, why doesn't the rest of the world like us?
We try to reason, "Hey look, we've been involved in the Marshall
Plan. We go and promote economic development. When we go in we don't
knock down buildings. We go in to try and improve the relations with
another country, we try to bring them up to a standard so that we can
engage in trade and so that people can earn enough to buy a home and have
a dream, not unlike the American dream of owning your own home and having
a certain level of financial independence."
Well, we need to listen more to what the rest of the
world is telling us - not just the official sources, even though sometimes
official sources will tell us quite honestly that this enmity towards the
United States is rooted in our history of thinking that we don't have to
ask questions. That we can just go in and operate under our own rules of
the game and that the rest of the world must listen to us and do our
bidding when it's in our interest. You can look at countless examples of
international peacekeeping missions and U.N.
engagements. Where, when it's convenient for us, we will get involved
in a multinational or international coalition, but, when it's no longer
convenient for us, when the going gets tough and maybe some of those
coalition partners say, "Hey by the way, you've got military forces
remaining here, you've got a presence that is really unsettling to our
domestic population, have you thought about maybe not having this global
military apparatus?"
Well again, you're talking about a different set of
rules under which we operate, and we have set up a military apparatus and
an economic footprint, which is global, and we expect the world then to
fall in line behind that. That global footprint steps on a lot of people.
There's something really magical about being a superpower, even if you try
to knock that term off its pedestal, it works well, and it’s very
intimidating. And, on September 11, that powerful pedestal was knocked
down and I'm not sure if the United States is ready to acknowledge that.
That when we say superpower, it has a blowback
effect - we've heard that term being used - it has consequences, it
has a way of, again, saying, "You've got to listen to me; I don't
have anything to learn from you."
Going back to our not being a thinking culture, in
terms of our socialization, that means that we don't have a sense of our
own history vis-à-vis the world. Nor do we have a sense of understanding
the history of generations and centuries into which other people are born.
Many people around the world talk about their lineage in terms of
centuries and thousands of years while we are really still in our
adolescent phase as a United States of America. We are still quite young,
we are still almost like in our teenage years, where we're not really
reflecting too much, we haven't lived long enough as a country, as the
United States of America, to really do much reflecting. And I think the
21st century will require that reflection for our own global survival.
OK. Now, let's get to some of the other definitions you
have elaborated in the book. For starters, what is the standard definition
of propaganda? And, also, what are the tools that are used for propaganda?
You use the term psychological warfare in describing one aspect of
propaganda, it sounds so harsh, but it is in fact a form of propaganda,
isn't it?
I’ve looked at a number of different sources. There
are different types of propaganda but I think the most important point to
make here is that it’s not a term to be feared.
There is one definition that I use in my book, which is
an encyclopedia definition for propaganda and it's in more of a war
context. It defines propaganda as "instruments of psychological
warfare aimed at influencing the actions of human beings in ways that are
compatible with the national interest objectives of the purveying
state.’ Now that’s an official form of propaganda. Propaganda really
is a mass persuasion campaign. An individual does not propagandize another
individual. It is a form of mass persuasion that is sponsored by an
institution, in this case, of that definition, a government institution.
In a private sense, it could be a sponsoring organization - like Disney or
A&E or CNN — can propagandize because they are vehicles for mass
persuasion. And there are some tenets, there are some attributes of
propaganda. One being that it is generally one-way, so it is designed to
be intentional communication that really favors the institution
propagating that message. By the way, historically… the first time we
come across the term ‘propaganda,’ it was used by the Roman Catholic
Church: to propagate, to spread, to disseminate… the gospel of
Catholicism worldwide.
So, whether you are propagating a message of your
organization, be it the United States government or you are propagating
the message of Eddie
Bauer or the Gap,
it is not something that people should fear, it is something that they
should understand because we are subjects of propaganda campaigns. And
when you think about the thousands of advertising messages that we are
subjected to on a daily basis, I would urge people to think of that in the
context of mass
persuasion: How are these advertising appeals really affecting
communities as a whole? So with propaganda, look at it as persuasion but
more in a holistic, in an environmental sense.
In many of the different literatures that I have looked
at related to propaganda, we think of propaganda as separate from
education because we think of the educational environment as two-way and
I’m not so sure about that. I think that’s part of the mythology
around education. I think that educational institutions, including our
elite institutions of education, are wonderful vehicles for propagandizing
people because they give people a sense of ‘who is in charge’ and
‘who you have to answer to’ and that hierarchy is involved and that,
again, you, as an individual, cannot do much to really affect that
overarching system. Mass persuasion, again, tends to stymie free exchange
and individual dissent. So it is the converse, really, of what I believe
education and the role of an educational institution is meant to be. But
as we know there is theory and practice… and educational institutions,
as Chomsky
has said, are, again, wonderful vehicles for propaganda.
Another point I would make is that when it comes to
propaganda… I know that at the U.S. Information Agency, the propaganda
programs we had in place were targeting the top level, the upper echelon
of our target country. So when I was working in my role as a propagandist,
it was to reach out to the top 10 — 20 % of the target population. Now
why would you do that? Because, generally speaking, the better educated,
those who are in academia, media and business, they are the ones you want
to reach because they are the elites of countries. And many of the
developing, so-called Third World countries, these are the countries that,
throughout the Cold War ear and now in the post-Cold War, if you want to
call it, hyper-Capitalist era, these were the people we wanted to
influence when I was working for the U.S. government. To get them to open
up their countries to U.S. marketing, U.S. business interests overseas.
So, what the masses thought was irrelevant. The masses, for the most part,
are distracted by sports and entertainment which, again, have their own
propaganda function. But these are not really the targeted individuals of
official propaganda — that being, official government programs.
Hmmm. That says a lot to me about the way that we can
begin to look at how those same 10 — 20 % of Americans have been
propagandized… and how those same masses have been so distracted by, as
you call it, sports and entertainment. It would seem that propaganda truly
works on all fronts. Let me ask you this — when you speak of propaganda
and, specifically, American propaganda, it makes me wonder to what extent
that is just the marketing of capitalism itself. I mean, for many people,
America is less of a cultural entity than a capitalist organ. And that
when we speak about propagandizing on behalf of the United States, on the
surface it would seem that it’s about America and national values but
really it’s more than that. It’s about pushing a whole way of life,
isn’t it?
Sure. When you hear terms like ‘democracy’,
‘peaceful co-existence’, and ‘diversity’ — these are coded terms
for, really, promoting commercial interests and a consumer-driven culture.
That should concern us a bit because the more that we are appealed to as
consumers, the less we are appealed to as citizens… the less sense of
knowledge and understanding we have as citizen agitators. And it’s
important, really, to be agitators within a free and open society.
If that’s what we are.
But when we hear about promoting the American way of
life, you need to understand that in a political-economic context. It’s
really more about promoting the notion that official sources have of
power… and promoting what the official sources of that economic power
say. Because economic power is private power. Economic power is also the
State, the government, working in concert, in a healthy marriage, with
private power. So the government really acts as a shadow to private power.
Now, what is private power? Private power would be the
very, very top levels of the multi-national corporations that are really
promoting, now, a commercial culture of people, not working truly
independently, but for conglomerates. That is, a way of life that is
really getting away from ownership at the grass-roots level and giving up
ownership, giving up power to incredibly concentrated avenues of power
that are really more totalitarian than they are democratic.
The conundrum for us in the United States is that we
are socialized to believe that we are truly free, that we are truly
democratic. And all I would say is: ‘Well, let’s look at how we
actually get elected officials into office. There is an incredible amount
of money that goes into that system where you really, practically, either
have to be a millionaire or have to have a whole list of millionaires to
even think about running for so-called public office. So we have a very,
very concentrated private source for our public officials. Which means
that it’s basically a farce. We don’t have a true democracy, we
don’t really have a truly representative form of government. We have
elites who showcase themselves as really representing the people but these
are very, very well-connected business people, for the most part,
lawyers… the elites whom the U.S government would target, in a
propaganda sense, in other countries. And they are always public officials
when they are running for office. But once they are in and they are doing
their fund-raising, it’s very clear that they are operating in a network
that is very limited and, really, is closed off to the rest of us out
here. And I’m referring to the 80% or so of the masses, the 3/4 of us
— if not more, maybe 90% - who are really not involved in the
decision-making process of our political economy, of our legislation and
government. Who are really, sort of, left to join a few very limited
public interest groups that have limited power, that are under-funded and
whose message is diluted and is not really disseminated, like a good
propaganda campaign, to the rest of country to really and truly empower
people at the grass roots.
Let me ask you this then: do you think that people in
other countries are aware of the farce — as you call it — of American
democracy? Of the reality… of the system and the way that it operates?
More so than the majority of the people here? And, secondly, do you think
that there is a cynicism developing outside of our borders… one that has
become so dispassionate that some foreign nationals may even feel a sense
of vindication for what happened on September 11? Because they have seen
how our total sense of political apathy has led to harm being inflicted on
their own people, as a result of U.S. foreign policy?
Well, I think that 9-11, as a point of reference, was,
to many Americans — I heard it often said - it was a loss of our
innocence. And I really thought, when I woke up to the news that day, that
it was chickens coming home to roost. It was a wake up call.
And that wake up call is that we need, again, to know
how the world understands us, views us. And I do believe that growing up
in countries that are on the receiving end of American business interests,
of American military interests, of American commercial interests… even
led by multi-nationals, which are nevertheless, perhaps, U.S.-based —
there is no question that when you are on the receiving end of that kind
of influence, that you are probably going to have a better understanding
of the incredible power that is concentrated in that country. And you’re
probably going to question, ‘how did that come about?’ And you may,
because of your geography, be surrounded by countries and citizens of
those countries who are questioning that, just as you are.
It is a position, again, for many countries in the
world who just don’t have the kind of concentrated power that the United
States has, that really forces people to begin to question that. It’s
amazing to me, when you think about the United States… if indeed we are
as we say we are, this superpower, then why is our international coverage
so limited and why are so many of our U.S.-based media nothing but
cheerleaders for the institutions of power — both government and private
power — of the United States? Why are they not — as our ‘perception
managers’, which, really, reporters are — why are they not questioning
and critiquing and really holding the government/private power marriage
accountable for its consequences in the world?
Well, they’re not doing that because the U.S. media
work in concert, they are the offspring of this government/private power
marriage. And so they act, really, more as official spokespeople for the
‘official’ sources of their information. Most of the talking heads on
television, the bulk of those people are really representing the interests
of the political establishment in Washington and the financial
establishment in New York. They are not representing, really, the concerns
and considerations of the majority of the American people. And there is
nothing conspiratorial about that. That’s the natural way of doing
business. That’s the way that it has always been for the United States.
And when you make the point about hypocrisy… you
know, on the one hand, we think of ourselves as a good country, as a good
people. But then on the other hand, many people in the world are also
saying, ‘Yes, but you also do a lot of harm.’
Isn’t that hypocrisy in our foreign policy?
Not really, because the way that the U.S. government
views it is that, ‘If our intentions are good, then if we harm… well,
it was all intended to be good because we are a good people.’ So we have
duped ourselves into believing that, if your intentions are good and the
result is otherwise, then the intentions overrule the result.
But the world is looking at the result, though.
The world is looking at the consequences. The world is
saying, ‘There’s something wrong here because your rhetoric is not
matching your consequences. And your consequences are causing a lot of
harm. Whether you want to look at Iraqi sanctions, whether you want to
look at our ‘going-it-alone’ approach to international agreements
limiting the proliferation of weapons, if you want to look at the U.S.
having a seat at the table of the United
Nations Human Rights Commission, where we are not seemingly governed
by its mandate. The U.S. needs to sit at the world table and listen to the
concerns and charges of other nations.
The United Nations really, again, is part of that
family I spoke of earlier — the private and state marriage, the
offspring being the U.S. media and the U.N., perhaps, being a close cousin
there. The United Nations, really, has been so weakened as an institution.
It’s not independent of the U.S. government. Look where it’s located.
Look where its headquarters
are located.
True. Too true. So, after all this — let me ask you,
what can people do?
Absolutely nothing. It’s hopeless. (laughs)
Right. No, but what tools can people use, deploy or
develop intuitively to cut through the propaganda?
Well, the first thing… I am a major advocate and
activist for — not just media reform, that’s just a sort of feel-good
term — I’m really an advocate for the type of work that you are doing
at the Guerrilla News Network. The type that Davey
D is doing with his Hip Hop newsletter. We have got to establish truly
independent media that are not alternative — because when we use the
word ‘alternative,’ that’s a marginalization term, that’s sort of
like: ‘There, there, go do your thing but just don’t upset the apple
cart.’ We need to have an entire network of independent media and build
a coalition around this and demand change and call on the elite media to
be more accountable.
And we need to not act so grateful when a member of the
elite media wants to interview us. Let’s remind that media that they
have a public interest obligation that involves two parts--to report news
fairly and completely and to act as a watchdog for the public (government)
and private (corporate) abuses of power. The corporate media are less
likely to monitor private abuses because they are owned by private
companies. Nevertheless, we can remind these private media that we
are here by increasing our numbers, establishing our independent media
websites, listserves. This so-called monster, enemy of the state, whether
it’s Osama bin Laden or these terrorist cells that we fear… a lot of
their power — and it’s often limited in a terrorist organization,
it’s here and there, it’s diffused — has come about through
technology and through the Internet. So, if you want to call that the
force of evil… well, the force of good and the force of change and the
force of dissemination of the truth and what is really going on, we can
use the Internet for that. I'm for positive social change using the
Internet as a tool. It's like the old saying, "here's to the
success of our hopeless endeavor." But we also really have to try to
preserve it and sites like yours, Media
Channel, Alternet,
and Commondreams are
excellent examples of the independent power of the press. The major
corporate mega media, it’s already going so commercial and becoming
dominated by advertising. It’s America Online/Time Warner/CNN. It’s
almost out of reach.
But I don’t want to sound like I am giving up because
to your last breath you have to fight and agitate and do it for your own
sense of well-being. And a sense of wanting to make change in the world.
We need a propaganda campaign of our own…
Yes. And I would also remind people that with any good
propaganda campaign - for good or for ill — you don’t reach everyone.
You only need a critical mass of people. People who are going to really
work over the long term to make positive change, to promote critical
thinking.
At times that means stepping outside of an institution
when your principles are compromised. At other times, it means building
bridges to elite media, to work with them. Because there are journalists
within these institutions who are sympathetic to and just as concerned as
we are about the conglomerization of the media. The dumbing down of the
media. The hyper-capitalism. The over-commercialization. The latest on
Britney Spears that is completely trivial and fluff…
Because we want to get back to the substance of our
being.
There are people there that we can reach out to. It’s
not useful, it’s not practical to say, ‘Hate the media, F*** CNN, we
don’t need them. You have to engage. But you can do it in such a way
that you make your point very clear and you say:
"I am an activist, I care about this and I am
calling on you to be more accountable."
And they will listen to you but we do need a critical
mass of people to do that. And to do our bidding in various parts… both
here, and in the rest of the world.
Beautiful Nancy. Thank you. I have one final question
which relates to a report I saw on CNN in which they featured Hafez al
Mirazi, Washington Bureau Chief for the Al
Jazeera Arab-language satellite television channel. The reason I
bring this up is that, in the report they also mentioned that he had
worked for Voice of America for some years before joining Al Jazeera.
What do you make of that?
I know that the New York Times reported that Hafez al
Mirazi "honed his interviewing skills" at VoA where he worked
for 13 years as a producer, correspondent and interpreter. He
interviewed Colin Powell just six days after the September 11 attacks and
days before Powell gave interviews to many leading U.S. publications.
Mr. Mirazi even interviewed Governor George W. Bush in 1988 during his
father's presidential campaign. Al Jazeera, despite the
criticism from the U.S. Government that it is at times anti-West and anti-U.S.,
is known as the Arab World's CNN. The network's staff consists of
many BBC alumni and its presence is worldwide with over 35 bureaus.
What do I make of the VoA/BBC/Al Jazeera
connection? The following:
Why does the U.S. need to rely on a VoA when
commercial television stations like CNN and now Al Jazeera can do such a
good job of promoting the administration position, but without the
government subsidies? This connection lies at the heart of propaganda
in the 21st Century. The rise of the corporate persuader - in the
form of global media conglomerates - should not suggest to us that
propaganda on an international or national scale is diminishing. In
fact, it seems to be just shifting public attention. Here
you've got the U.S. administration telling Al Jazeera to "tone
down" its coverage and not give so much coverage to anti-American
oratory or U.S.-style freewheeling phone-in shows. Think about it.
If you wanted to use a network like Al Jazeera as a propaganda
weapon, then the U.S. official position must continue to be that Al
Jazeera is acting apart and truly independent of any global media
influence, a media influence that is U.S.-led and U.S.-dominated. Al
Jazeera's independence was put in question when it raised the ire of
other U.S. broadcasting networks following an exclusive arrangement
with CNN to air the videotape of Osama Bin Laden after the October 7
attacks on Afghanistan. What I'm suggesting is that commercial media
are taking the place of government-sponsored media in propaganda wars
of the 21st Century.
Nice. Thanks.
Oh, you’re welcome. But don’t you want to hear my
favorite quote from the book?
Oh yeah, definitely.
OK. Here — actually there are three but they really
bring home the point. (reads)
As Senator William
J. Fulbright writes in his 1966 book, The
Arrogance of Power, "Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted
feature of the American national character." His words are echoed by
the Frenchman Alexis
de Tocqueville who wrote in Democracy
in America: "I know of no country in which there is so little
independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."
My point here is that guess what, you can be a patriot and a
dissenter, a patriot and a free thinker. They are not
mutually-exclusive.
And then this comes a little later:
In his book, The
Phantom Public, Lippman said that "the public must be put in its
place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps
even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and roar of a
bewildered herd. Only the insider can make decisions, not because he is
inherently a better man but because he is so placed that he can understand
and can act. The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant, and
often meddlesome."
So… there you have it. Let's have hope for the
bewildered herd in all of us.
Yes. Let's have hope. Thanks again.
---------------------------------------
Dr. Nancy Snow is the Associate Director Center
for Communications and Community University of California, Los
Angeles. Her book, Propaganda Inc., can be ordered at your local bookstore
or bought online through Seven
Stories Press, Media
Channel, Common
Courage Press or Amazon.
Check out her homepage
and shoot her an email regarding this interview and her work.
Transcription provided by Lisa Hsu.
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