Mark Crispin Miller 12-31-96

Video Transcript:

It's a pleasure to welcome Mark Crispin Miller to NYU. Applause Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks Todd and thank you Andre. I am going to help to realize the mission of this series as Andre described it because I am an academic student and I am also going to offer, I am going to testify. I was on TV and lived to tell about it. I want to show you a tape of my appearance on reliable sources. Did anyone see that already by any chance? I don't want to bore you. The nation came out last June with our chart of ownership. There really was an overwhelmingly positive response. We were all delighted and not a little surprised that so many mainstream media organs saw fit to call attention to this thing and not in a hospital spirit at all except for the Wall Street Journal. The Frank Rich devoted a column to it, Liz Smith devoted half a column to it which did not appear in the LA Times that day. Molly Ivans built powers in the post USA Today NPR. It was really terrific. So I wasn't really terribly surprised or suspicious as I suppose I should have been when I was asked to be on reliable sources. This was the first time that one of the parent companies on the chart indirectly requested my counsel. I think it was a very interesting experience as you'll see I was taken aback by it. I guess I'll be interested in your reactions. I didn't expect such hostility. I don't think I handled myself terribly well. But I want to use this experience as a way into the whole question of why it is that many people in the media among others, primarily people in the media think about the media the way that they do. It helps me to think about that encounter dispassionately and to try to examine it as a text, you see. So it's about eight minutes. There are a couple of commercials at first which I included in this excerpt just for the sake of the proper flavor. Before me, reliable sources are two people on each week. I was on Mike Murphy, who was a Republican media consultant. I don't know if any of you has seen a perfect candidate but he is in that. He worked for Olly North during the Senate campaign. Before I was talking very fast and saying the same thing over and over. The panel seemed to like him fine. So we'll start watching this and then I'll take up from there. I had to take penicillin for nine years. Probably saved my life. I made pharmaceutical company research. We're developing these compounds for treating grand positive infections that are multi drug resistant. My hopes really are that some days some kids will have the drugs available to save their life. He uncovered their secrets. We're in stock to not to come here so they barely get alive. Still breathing. A special encore presentation of the last guest. Tomorrow I get 10 on TNT. Welcome back topic number two of forecast of dual men. The national entertainment state that is the I tell us about prediction of what's ahead for the United States unless action is taken to avert what's called our contracting media cosmos. The June 3rd edition of the nation magazine carries a lengthy and controversial speculative article focusing on what it says could lead to the death of broadcast journalism. It talks about the four giant corporations that control the major TV news division NBC ABC CBS and if the feds allow it see and end and that's these descriptions. Two of these four corporations general electric and Westinghouse are defense contractors both involved in nuclear production. Well the other two time Warner and Disney cap cities are mannath manufacturers of fun and games. The nation charts it all out arguing that the technicals of corporate influence reach in all directions. The article goes in for some heavy speculation along these lines that Tom broke off of NBC which is owned by general electric might find it difficult to introduce stories critical of the power or that ABC news owned by Disney will never again do an expo say of Disney's practices and that CNN or any of the others does not touch the biggest story of the law the media monopoly itself. No proof operative just assertion after assertion. The nation magazine mocked first to the middle of the eternal one in seminars at Johns Hopkins University. I think there are plenty of examples in which you see that media cosmos shrinking. First of all I want to say that while I can come up with several impregnigious examples many of which have been in the press recently the most troubling consequence of this kind of the corporate controls in fact what you don't say and what you don't hear about that's the thing that's most worrying. So I've heard for example about the fact that day one ABC was forced to apologize to Philip Morris for broadcasting an entirely true report about the use of nicotine and Philip Morris cigarettes. But you can't prove really I don't need to just move up one but you kind of prove that ABC K then to Philip Morris and that they might have been one selector of the accuracy in its report. Well I've never heard anything to the contrary I suppose someone say you can't prove the cigarettes smoking causes cancer. Right. I think the point is they want to apologize for and it was a very narrow one was whether the company that's back with people themselves actually went out and bought nicotine to put it back in the cigarettes or whether they used the nicotine they themselves had taken out. That was the inaction use of the word spike. Let's go let's keep it up to media first. That's not what I said. I'm as concerned as anybody about the concentration of media power but it seems to me that you sort of blame these big media companies very much about the hard break of seriruses. The danger it seems to me is not that these companies Disney, Weston, and Southport will manipulate the news to their benefit but that they won't care very much about the news because it is such a relatively relative blip on their corporate balance and therefore the resources won't be there but you have a slightly darker view like I said. Well yeah I think that most people are aware of the fact that large corporate interests buy news organizations because it helps them make more money. Well all the free with that but it isn't necessarily will make more money simply selling news or selling that particular product they will often use these entities to help them make more money. In other of their fields let me give you an example. General Electric which bought NBC in 1986. Jack Welch, J.E. has been important to take a very active interest in how NBC reports on stories that will affect G.E. bottom line. And the question is did NBC then tailor its coverage because of those concerns or not? I'm glad you're on the case but I've never seen a poll before and I'd like to see it close. I think what we're talking about here is that we've had the golden age of so-called objectivity in America and we are unique around the world for the way we have divorced the corporate side to some extent to a long extent from the use of pages. This fact that businesses understand the way you make money in news is not by promoting directly your product but by having a credible news product and you make money that way. However the reason I am glad that you're reporting this although I do think you go too far and you close moves that can't be closed in some cases. So I think that we are seeing greater pressures and more of a slip in this area and I have to say on an point of ABC and Disney that Chris Wallace was on our national public radio this week acknowledging that one of his exposés and the Disney theme was on the show. He said he would be doing that again anytime soon now that Disney owns ABC. So you think it's like emphasis it might be something you decide not to look at. Let me talk to a couple of examples to not make you all uneasy because it has to do with broadcast journalism. You all read the stories about what happened with Premier Magazine recently which is called owned by Remlan which is owned by Ronald Proman and has chef Bill Taki a French-based media from Lamarack CEO David Pecker. And they frankly spiked a story about planet Hollywood and so that's just a long because Ronald Proman has business with that restaurant chain. The fact is they were quite straightforward in saying the reason they spiked the story was because it was just not the magazine's business to be public. But you're not going to make us feel uneasy about bringing a project. We criticize those very mergers on this show. In fact we were four or five years ago. You say something about it never being discussed here at CNN in fact on this very broadcast week doesn't that issue. Maybe CBCBS NBC basically ruled the broadcast world. You do have a lot more companies that we lot more cable outlets with the internet with talk radio allowing more points of view to get across. And that's one thing that works against the trend that we are all concerned about. If you can bet this is best that the hurricane hit for a moment will be back picking up this issue in a moment. Welcome to General Nutrition Centers. Gold card numbers from this Tuesday say 20% up everything. So drive down 20% discount savings at GNC. Want a gold card? Join at GNC. 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All you have to know is how. Network MCI, that's how. Turn right. It's an hour of Washington's friends and friends. First the capital gang gets together to look at the weekly Washington. That bin, get called across fire with wind chainy and Bob Eppel. Friends and foes back to back tonight on CNN. Tonight on CNN present at the 15th of the morning. Park won on May 1. The women's from the book, some have gone on a manual for domestic character. It is in doubt the man very simply coppaged. He will fix your money with the time that I assume. Was it a blueprint for the tragedy in Oklahoma City? And the government aimed to drive patriots and brothers. On the next CNN present tonight, 9 Easton. Welcome back. Mark, how do you take on this problem? How do you defeat what you see coming ahead? Do me a little. Yeah, I'm not the only one. And it isn't only leftists and progressives are concerned about the media, but it's the general public. People are generally fed up with what's on TV, what's in the movies. They're not stupid. And therefore what do you go over? I think that as we did 100 years ago, the American people ought to start thinking in terms of a broad base, anti-trust movement, to cut back the corporate power that we see not just over TV, and radio and saw on the movies, but book publishing and music business. You name it. Our entire culture has become a great corporate property. So what we need to do is to have media activists and progressives and saw on, become more receptive to the cultural concerns of a lot of average people. Or more, or ain't say, let's smudge and sex and violence, than they are about corporate censorship. Can I go back to what, how we talked about it, the very outside of this discussion? No argument on the issue being discussed. But do you get a feeling inside, too, that Mark has kind of overstated the case of the 50 or 50 runs? No, I think he's concerned. A little bit of me so about what might happen, just trying to do the things that I can't put forward on, is becoming more bold as in the case of Premiere magazine and trying to dictate news cuts. But I think that, you know, however much we might be uncomfortable about it, this era is here to stay. What consumers are going to do is not just rely solely on seeing an ad on the watch and post, or talk radio, but not to look at multiple sources of information to make up their lives. And I think it's terribly important, Mark, that we continue to look closely at this, that there being watchdogs, I can play sometimes that we bark at everything, and we lose our bite. But we must watch this, because let's keep having the standard that it's wrong to do this. I'm worried about slippage of the standard, isn't it? It's okay. Are we really at the case? That's the best service in your article. I know you love your words like all professors, but it's the fact that you said all these things are of the big corporations to the media and to the defense industries and so on. That's very valuable. Last word to our guest? Well, I suggest we start by thinking of the people as citizens and not as consumers, and I would suggest we, or you, I guess we in the media, realize that we only have so much power. The real power is above us. It's the power of the person, and it's just as important. And it's just as potentially oppressive as any kind of state power. People know that, and I think it's time for the people to act on that knowledge. Mark, thank you very much for joining us. Mark, thank you for joining us. Mark, thank you for joining us. Mark, thank you for joining us. Mark, thank you for joining us. Mark, thank you for joining us. Thanks. Thanks. That was quite an experience. But, you know, looking at it in retrospect, not really terribly surprising. I'm just going to read you a brief passage from the latest issue of Time Magazine. The cover story is called The News Wars. And the point of the piece, or series of pieces, basically, there's too much stuff out there. There's too much, just nonsense, fluff, hype, and people are getting numbed by it, which is, you know, true enough. There's this reference to the piece in The Nation. Another school of critics claims that growing media concentration has caused journalism to lose much of its aggressiveness and credibility. The Nation magazine last June devoted a special issue to media conglomerates, including a chart detailing the tentacles of four dominant companies. General Electric, owner of NBC, Walt Disney, ABC, Time Warner, CNN, Westinghouse, CBS. Though these corporate ownerships are becoming more apparent, good morning America travels to Disney World more often, the homogenizing factor may be the result of profit pressures and competition rather than some sprawling conglomerate conspiracy. It's basically the same dismissive response as if there's some absolute disjunction between a conglomerate conspiracy and pressure for profits and so-called competition. I mean, it really is kind of a non-sequitur. But what I want to do is talk a little bit about this kind of an attitude. I've been thinking about it quite a lot lately. Typically, what I mean is this tendency to identify the critique of media monopoly or oligopoly, to identify that critique with a certain kind of paranoid and extreme fantasy and thereby to dismiss it. Now, you could talk about what happened to me sociologically, I'm sure. And especially because of that crack about how professors love their words, you know. I mean, there was a kind of, I guess, professional envy or something. That isn't really that interesting to me. Rather than talk about it sociologically or in addition to talking about it sociologically, which is very important. I'd like to approach the question ideologically because I want to argue tonight that there are some important historical reasons why those people in the studio that day reacted as they did. I, they refused to conceive of the possibility that there might be more than a few examples of this phenomenon or trend. You'll notice that I mean, I didn't, it being TV, I didn't really get a chance to go into my examples. I only started to talk about one and I was nibble to death over that one. But I mean, there was an important reason for that interruption and that was that it's better to think of these instances, these flagrant instances of interference as aberrations, as odd events, as opposed to thinking of them systematically. Likewise, it's, it's better to think that we have an an an honorable range of choices, whereas we didn't use to. It's better to think that than to see what's in front of our our eyes, which is that we have very few choices. I mean, if you have closed those eyes, if you are so that things get very blurry, there are a lot of channels. It's true, a lot of covers of magazines at the newsstand, that's all true. But that's, that's an ostensible diversity in front of an actual uniformity, there are very few owners. And above all, it's, it's, it's, it's always preferable to accuse the critic of conspiracy mongering as if there's something secret. And nefarious and evil about rational business practices. I mean, we can argue about whether they're evil. But the fact of the matter is, if I were Jack Welch, and I, you know, I would want to buy NBC too. And I would want to control the spin of NBC's newscasts. If I were Rupert Murdock, I would be a hands-on owner as he is. You know, notwithstanding what Roger Ailes had to say about working for, I'm Rupert Murdock, is notorious for dictating the thrust of the coverage in his various properties. Oh, if I were Rupert Murdock, I'd do the same thing. If I wanted what he wants, I would do that too. But to say conspiracy, you see, at once invalidates the whole discussion. And what I want to suggest is that this set of assumptions, or let's call them defenses, that we saw exhibited here, we're not always in the minds of people like these. It's a fairly recent development. Basically, I'm arguing that it's a result of the Cold War. And now that the Cold War is over, I guess it's appropriate to try to sum it up in a way that's useful to us. What's really very surprising, I mean, it surprised me, and also struck me as a heartening discovery, was that there was a period in our history, I don't want to overstate this now. God forbid, you know, I'm going to go too far. There was a period in our modern history when there was a relative degree of sophistication about what propaganda was. And I think it's very important that we rediscover that moment from our past. Because as a matter of fact, people generally speaking were a lot more sophisticated about propaganda and ownership and medium and opley. And issues like that in the 20s and 30s, than these people were. Now, you know, it may be something of an unfair comparison because these people are employees of the companies we're discussing, and most people aren't. But I think that there's been a regression. There's been a move away from a certain moment of relative sophistication. And I'll describe exactly what I mean. During the Cold War, we were taught really systematically, although the people who taught us believed it. We were taught that propaganda was a communist invention. The propaganda was a communist device, that it was typical of communists, because communists are in their very marrow, deceptive, their liars, they always lie, they can't help but lie. They are inherently intrinsically false. They are devils, indeed, false. They lie brilliantly, poisonously, dangerously. They lie well enough and wickedly enough to damn the whole world, to cast us all into perdition. They lie. Therefore, propaganda is, well, by their fruits, you shall know them. Propaganda is an implement that they came up with, and we earnest, gullible, westerners have to struggle to catch up with them, you see. This is a very important element of Cold War ideology, probably the crucial element. During the Cold War, communist propaganda became a phrase like, you know, the elite Republican Guard or tax and spend liberals, you know, only much more enduring association than either of those two. It's worth, well worth, taking another look at this whole association, because I think it is one that the culture is still reeling from and trying to understand. The fact of the matter is that the word propaganda can no longer be used as it ought to be used because of that association with communism. We are drowning in propaganda. We are overwhelmed by propaganda, by which I don't mean lies. Propaganda can tell the truth. That issue of the nation was an example of propaganda. Propaganda is basically, and here I'm paraphrasing, much more nuanced and sophisticated definition by Jacques Ellou and his great study propaganda. It's basically an organized effort to induce great groups of people to take some action, even if that might include acquiescence in the status quo. But that's what propaganda is, commercials of propaganda, as is a political speech. Now, contrary to the great tenet of Cold War propaganda, that is that comes out of the east, comes out of the Kremlin, it was fathered by Karl Marx, on Lenin, you know. The first really successful exercise in state propaganda was, in World War One, many of you I'm sure know this, the governments of the United States and Britain especially, really did it up right. They used every medium of their disposal, they were ruthlessly well disciplined, well organized, and they managed to whip up their respective populations into a very effective war fever. I mean, I could go on and on describing to you the various devices that were used, the four minute men, it was a huge group of orators organized in this country who could at a moment's notice go off to any place, they were instructed to go and give a four minute speech to get people to buy bonds and so on. Boy Scouts were involved in pamphleting door to door, motion pictures were used, you know, the newspapers obviously were a great deal of this burden. In fact, so impressive was the Allied propaganda, particularly in Britain, that it made a lasting impression on Adolf Hitler. If you read mine, he talks about the lessons he learned from watching how the British did their stuff. Now, you know, time is short, so I can't do this subject, the justice that I should. But suffice to say that over the next decade or so after World War I ended, there was a gradual process of enlightenment as to what had actually happened in that conflict. Now, bear in mind that this was a short-lived conflict. I mean, the Germans ceased to be our enemy after the war was over. There were a few die-hard as there always are after episodes like that one. But for the most part, people had no reason to think that the Germans were particularly evil, nor was there any reason to protract that animosity. So the reason for the original drive was no longer. Slowly, through the 20s, the truth came out. Now, I mean, just as during the Gulf War, for example, there were people at the time who knew there was a lot of baloney being broadcast and spread around as truth. A quartet of great reporters, for example, followed the German troops in one company throughout Belgium and sent, I mean, this is futile and pathetic, but they sent dispatches back saying there is no truth to any of these stories. But babies being impaled on banettes or having their hands cut off or nuns crucified, disgusting stories. Indeed, I think that the atrocity campaign during Desert Shield was to a great extent based on the rape of Belgium, the rape of Kuwait, a lot to the rape of Belgium. There were atrocities committed by the Iraqis, but not any of the ones that we heard they were committed, you see. And any raid. Gradually, this kind of thing came clear to people. In 1925, for example, Brigadier General William Charteris, who had been chief of British intelligence during the war, was speaking at a dinner here in New York City. And afterwards, in a jocular vein, told the assembled diners about a great trick they'd pull during the war. They had two photographs. One was of a troop train, and one was a train full of horses, cadavers that was bound for the slaughterhouse. So they switched the captions on them and made up a story that the Germans were rendering their soldiers' bodies for glycerin or something like that. And they did this specifically to get the Chinese into the conflict on the Allied side because the Chinese are very big on ancestor worship and would be repelled by this story that the Germans were doing this. And in fact, it worked. And Charteris was very proud of himself. And in his cups, you know, told the story. And there were some reporters there. And, you know, there was a controversy over it. I mean, they made the headlines in this city. People were shocked. Shocked that that would have happened. Well, there were many such revelations. And then in 1928, there was a book called Lies in War Time published by Sir Arthur Ponson. It was published both here in Britain. And it's basically just a very blunt, no nonsense catalog of disproofs. You know, the crucified Canadian, the baby without hands, all these things. He went through every one of them pointed out they were all inventions. None of them had happened. The war was not the Germans fault. German war guilt was another product of Allied propaganda. Well, what I regard as encouraging about this gradual process of enlightenment is that it really seems to have had an impact on people and the way they thought about propaganda. Throughout the late 20s and throughout the 30s, especially as the Depression worsened. People were increasingly willing to recognize the fact that propaganda could come from our side. Now, I'm not making enormous claims for this. You know, people were not infinitely more sophisticated than they are now. Often they would become as absolutely cynical as they had been absolutely innocent. You see. And indeed, people still tended to accuse their enemies of using propaganda while remaining blind to their own partisans use of propaganda. This is just a fact of human nature. So I'm not committing the grievous sin of envisioning a golden age. God forbid we should ever do that. But I am saying that there was a relative difference between men and now. And it involved specifically an ability to recognize that propaganda could come from our side, could come from our businesses, could come from our government, could come from our own. You see. It may not seem to be a terribly important realization until you get a load of what happened starting in the late 40s. When the enormous pressure of Cold War propaganda made even this minimal realization almost impossible for people, as propaganda came to be understood as a fundamentally communist invention, a communist device, you couldn't use the word any longer in connection with the most adept practitioners anywhere. American filmmakers and American advertising men and so on. Politicians. You couldn't any longer use it. Now, to look back on this history, this this interwar history is really as I say a very exhilarating thing. There was an enormous government investigation of the power trust in this country from 1919 to 1934 the power trust the Edison companies and so on. Westinghouse they were involved in a massive propaganda drive to turn the American people against the notion of public ownership. And there was a huge FTC investigation. The published results something like 84 volumes that came out in the early 30s. Congressman, some congressman were outraged that these incredibly powerful firms would not only make propaganda, but would do so using the money that people spend on their electric bills. This was a big story. Naturally, not all newspapers carried it because this propaganda drive extended even to the creation of the coply chain of newspapers, for example, Colonel Ira Copley was an Illinois power baron. He bought up newspapers mainly in California precisely for the purpose of pushing the power trust line. NBC radio network was bolstered and grew to a great extent for the purpose of pushing the power trust line. The name of the group that conducted this great propaganda drive is called the National Electric Light Association and its publicity director in the late 20s, Merlin, Ailsworth, went on to become the president of NBC radio. So there was a very, very close relationship between these two things. That's just one example. There was a congressional outcry over the meat packing industry and its propaganda drive. And what's probably most pertinent for our purposes in this lecture series is the fact that the commercial broadcast industry undertook an enormous propaganda drive in the early 30s precisely so as to make the nature of US broadcasting commercial forever more. A book that I recommend heartily is Robert McChesney's telecommunications mass media and democracy and Oxford press book, which is which is the story of the great and various struggle by different groups that would now be dismissed as special interests, education groups, religious groups, labor unions to try to see to it that American broadcasting would not be commercial. It would be something more like the Canadian or British system. Well, the commercial broadcasting industry really went hog wild with propaganda and people like HL Menken would say this is propaganda, they're doing propaganda and they would complain about the commercial propaganda that was on commercial radio. Well, as I say, all good things must come to an end and this assumption that propaganda could come from our side disappeared. I'm going to give you a very eloquent example of this kind of thinking. This is from the testimony of Ayn Rand at the House of American Activities Committee hearings in 1947. She was being questioned by Robert Strypling, who was counsel to the committee about the movie Song of Russia because the committee was at that time as you probably know, out in Hollywood trying to prove that the motion picture business was controlled by reds because there had been some pro Russian films made during the war Song of Russia was one of them. Strypling asks Ayn Rand, would you give the committee a breakdown of your summary of Song of Russia relating to either propaganda or an untruthful account or distorted account of conditions in Russia? This is her answer and remember she's a philosopher. Yes, first of all, I would like to define what we mean by propaganda. We have all been talking about it but nobody has stated just what we mean by propaganda. Now, I use this term to mean that communist propaganda is anything which gives a good impression of communism as a way of life. Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be communist propaganda. Am I not correct? It is a little slate of hand here. She started out saying I'd like to define what we mean by propaganda and then she goes on to define what communist propaganda is. In other words, there's no difference between them. And I'm sure that all the members of the committee nodded. No one thought to say, well, you know, what about Nazi propaganda or what about non-communist propaganda. The point is that such a thing could not be after a while. Non-communist propaganda. What is that? There is no such thing. Now, this drive, this propaganda drive had a complicated effect. It had the effect basically of envisioning the makers of propaganda in a certain way. Propaganda was always centralized. It was always left. It was always left totalitarian. It was always prosaic. It was always strident and punishing verbose. Hurtful. Ugly. You see propaganda was always that set of things. George Orwell actually plays a role here, I mean, posthumously, because 1984, which, you know, really took off just to see what was on his deathbed, was adopted by a number of right-wing concerns. It was excerpted in both the Readers Digest and the Life magazine. It also served a similar purpose in West Germany. It was adopted by people like Duitt Wallace owner of Readers Digest and Henry Loose, precisely as a way to demonize the Soviet Union. But the point I'm trying to make here is that people came to think of propaganda as a kind of force, a kind of ugly, strident, punishing, repetitious, dogmatic, lessen, castor oil, you know. The teacher you hate the most. Propaganda came to be conceived as that kind of an experience, which of course raises a fundamental question about it. If propaganda is so hateful and hurtful and negative and dark and painful, why would anybody ever be taken in by it? I mean, this is a kind of a basic question. I'm going to read you a passage from a speech that Harry Truman gave in 1950. This is something called the Campaign of Truth. This was basically a way to get appropriations out of Congress for a massive upgrading of Central Intelligence, the CIA's propaganda apparatus and the creation of radio free Europe. Communist propaganda is so false, so crude, so blatant that we wonder how men can be swayed by it. We forget that most of the people to whom it is directed did not have free access to accurate information. We forget that they do not hear our broadcasts or read impartial newspapers. Now, you know, I mean, this is typical of propaganda. Exactly the same kind of thing would have been said on the other side. Our stuff is impartial, our stuff is truthful, there's stuff is a lie. But I'm not reading you this passage because I want to make that point. I'm trying to make clear that at a certain level, this realization that something so ugly and hateful couldn't really work was definitely, at least in Harry Truman. At least in Harry Truman's mind were in the mind of his speech writer to identify propaganda, something that must necessarily be imposed on you is a way to ex-culpate our kind of propaganda. It's a way to ex-culpate the kind of propaganda which we excel and at which we have always excelled. Now, it's not surprising, you see, that this propaganda drive, this cold war drive, which seems to have permanently identified propaganda with communism, necessarily accelerated the process of forgetting who had actually been the more, successful propagandist in our confrontation with fascism and it had been Hitler. The Nazis were infinitely more skilled at propaganda than Stalin. In fact, in Hitler's table talk, Hitler remarks about Stalin that he did not really have a good grasp of rhetoric. It's an interesting way he put it. Stalin didn't really operate through rhetoric, rather he was a kind of bureaucratic wire-puller who stayed inside his office and pulled strings, which is basically true. Hitler prided himself on a sense of theater, on his sense of timing, on a sense of drama, on a highly sexually charged kind of spectacle, which was completely beyond the grasp, or the means of the Soviets. Now, I'm not saying the Soviets did not do propaganda. I would never say anything absurd as that. I'd say some absurd things, but I wouldn't say that. The point I'm making is that the kind of propaganda that Stalin made was not likely to seduce large populations outside of the Soviet Union. His propaganda was static, as a book published by the press by Moche Lewin about the Soviet Union, and he talks about Stalin's quasi-religious cult of making his own image inescapable. It's the kind of thing you see in Iraq, for example. It's a kind of a luxurious, almost morbid cult of the leader, very different from the kind of thing that Hitler was up to in the late 30s, which was much more dynamic, much more exciting, a lot more like something Mick Jagger would give us, then I love Mick Jagger, don't get me wrong. But the point is this, it all comes back to the thing that I showed you here. I'm suggesting that this long episode, the Cold War, and the propaganda that suffused it, and that suffused us throughout that episode, made it virtually impossible for us to do it. So let's talk about propaganda at its most successful. Propaganda at its most successful is cinematic, lively, bright, exciting, absorbing, and thralling, enjoyable, all those things. Cheslaw Milosch talks about the kind of mind that an intelligent person must develop under Stalinism. It's a little bit like double think that the Orwellian notion, but there's a kind of substratum where you know what the truth is, and then there's a higher stratum, sort of imposed on top of it where you think what you have to think to get by. That's the kind of mentality that is necessitated by the experience of life in a totalitarian society. It's very different from life under Disney, you see, because it's not painful. I mean, it is, it can be painful. But it is, at least ostensibly enjoyable to distracting, it's diverting, it's fun, it's bright, it's a laugh a minute, and so on. There's a lot of music, a lot of close-ups, rock video stuff. I included the commercials that I included just to remind you of what propaganda at its best really is. Those things are masterpieces of propaganda, masterpieces of propaganda. Nothing like the blunt, clumsy, fifties-style, harang, that we were taught was the very essence of propaganda, you see. So really, the problem is extremely daunting. You say that TV advertising is propaganda, Disney world is propaganda, the ice cupades, whatever you want is propaganda. People look at you as if you're using America with a K, that kind of thing, it just seems so perverse, you know. It's so sifties. But the fact is that it is indeed propaganda. And just, I guess, just to close one of those circles that they accused me of not closing. Naturally, you were talking during the ads, but there was a commercial which showed it was sort of black and white and guys playing football in the mud. What were they selling? No, not the fart. No, that was the sentimental one, but the chemist who, well, anyway, it was a very, you know, in your face, a gritty representation of athletic display. I mean, you see this kind of thing all the time, obviously. Commercials for all sorts, you know, Nike, sports illustrated. A spectacle that almost gives you the feeling that you're there exerting yourself that tries to convey to you the subjective experience of being an athlete. Now, you know who first came up with this idea? You know, the first propaganda master was who decided that she would render the spectacle of athletic competition in this way? Yes, Lanny Reef-Hstahl. If you read her repellent autobiography, she talks there about how she decided to shoot Olympia, you know, which was her movie about the 1936 Olympics. And indeed, you know, there she saw eye to eye with Hitler because Hitler also recognized that this event would be a fantastic propaganda opportunity for Germany. It's the Olympics we're talking about, you see. If you say to somebody, Olympics is just a kind of propaganda, they'll look at you, you know, as if you were a communist or something. I'll end with one last anecdote speaking of the Olympics. I was visiting my wife's family last summer. This story doesn't make me look terribly good. I'm not such a bad guy though. And anyway, I was sitting with my son and my sister-in-law and her daughter. We were sitting, you know, a few feet back from the night. I didn't think I was bothering them. My son's 15 and this little girl's about eight. And I, he was asking me questions about the Olympics. So I was telling him about every Brundage, you know, and Hitler in 1936. I know it doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. I mean, I was, you know, I was speaking quietly. But I was saying, I was telling him, you see, the reason why I was going into this was because of that unbelievable opening ceremony of the Olympics. I just remember the four races of the Earth or whatever it is, the big masks and all the dancing. And I mean, I will send my own defense that I mean, nobody liked the coverage of the Olympics. It was completely horrible, you know. But my sister-in-law didn't feel that way. And she turned around and said to me, which I think is really very interesting. I don't want her listening to this propaganda. Now see what she meant. She meant me. You see, which I really, I think is terribly interesting. She meant me. She didn't mean that. You see, because in her mind, as in most people's minds, propaganda is a kind of subversive naysaying, you know. And verbal, a kind of subversive yammering, you know. Professors who love their words. Whereas that big, gorgeous, colorful spectacle certainly, it made me many things, but it's not propaganda. You see. So, thank you very much. I hope you will now propagate questions, but you should do so from these mics, because we are serving the greater intergalactic good of C-SPAN. Yes? I think there are a number of Americans who are not buying into this kind of corporate fantasy. I think the militiamen are a perfect example of that. But I'm wondering if you're dealing with an outdated philosophy and an outdated structural paradigm, because no longer we in the era of the nation state, we are in the era of the corporate state, and capital can move from country to country with rapid ease, and it's not just an American situation. This thing is global now, and I just don't know if we're thinking about this in the correct structural ways, because the problem is much deeper, much more insidious than it may appear on the surface. That's it. Let me say two things in response to that. First of all, you're quite right about the militias. They do represent a rejection of what you call the corporate fantasy. The problem with their response is that it is an entirely paranoid reading of the situation. I was pleased in a grim way to see that promo for the show about the Turner diaries, in the middle of that, because they are hyping and marketing this kind of terrorism and so on. By and large, the militia movement adopts the anti-Semitic reading of the problem that there is indeed a global force loose and doing us all harm, but they think that it's the international bankers, and we know who they are. Todd mentioned this piece I had an extra. I think one of the salutary byproducts of the demonstration of who really owns the media is that it demonstrates that it is indeed capital, as you say, and not any particular ethnic or religious group. Now, you talk about a dated paradigm. No, first of all, that there are media activists all over the world who are concerned about media monopoly. While it is indeed the case that the nation state is in many ways a dated paradigm, yes, we don't want to allow that fact to cause us to give up entirely on antitrust as a possible solution. The fact is, while the media is indeed all over the world and these corporations are indeed active everywhere, the most persuasive and powerful of them are based here in this country. And from my discussions with some of these activists I've mentioned, it seems unlikely that there could be such a thing as a global antitrust movement, but I do think that there could be a national antitrust movement. I know that sounds insanely utopian. On the other hand, I don't see any alternative to it. I don't see any alternative to it at all. So, while I think that you're right, I think that the solution may nevertheless lie in the direction of a kind of national approach to much concentrated power and ownership. Yes. It seems that media activists are caught in a bit of a catch-22 in that, and this was argued last week by Richard Cohen, who was a guest at this series. I claim that, and I agree with him, that the only way to correct the situation we're seeing today in television news is to regulate it again, to put in place more antitrust laws. I think you agree with the same thing. But then the defense or the comeback from the corporate America is that, well, if you're arguing for antitrust laws, you're arguing for regulation and you are, in fact, then the censor, who do you expect to decide how these ND should be owned and what should be said, what shouldn't say? And the argument that could turn around to that corporate America is claiming that the media activists are, in fact, anti-free speech and are the censors. I was wondering, if you have any suggestions for media activists to be able to defend themselves against that? Yes, absolutely. And what I say comes directly out of what I've said this evening. Another one of the destructive consequences of the long Cold War propaganda drive I was discussing tonight has been that people think of censorship as always and only a state affair. It is more often than not by a tremendous margin carried out by business entities. I mean, we could probably, if we wanted to have a congressional hearing, we could talk for hours and hours about corporate censorship. Now, legally speaking, that's not censorship. I mean, constitutional terms, that's not censorship because indeed the bill of rights not about Philip Morris, it's about the United States government. But you could argue that the United States government has been complicitous with those interests in creating a situation that has led to the censorship of various divergent points of view or censorship of information that might hurt the bottom line for rhetorical purposes. This is to answer your question more directly. For rhetorical purposes, I think we should be very aggressive in pointing out that these supposed defenders of spokesman on behalf of free speech don't believe in it at all. I mean, just use the example of the tobacco companies and what they, the kind of chill that they have effected throughout our mainstream magazines for years and years. That's just one example, but it's a very dramatic example. And as it becomes politically permissible to talk out against tobacco advertising, that would be a very compelling example. Really, not ever to allow those forces to take the enlightenment position. Don't allow them to claim that they aren't, they're speaking up on behalf of free speech and don't allow them to pretend that they're, they're a force on behalf of pleasure, that they are a hedonistic force, they're not. Now they sell unhappiness and anxiety, you know, and addiction. So I would, I would give them no, no ground at all. But it's very easy to be depicted as a blue nose and a prig and Mrs. Grundy and a professor who loves his words. That didn't bother me too much. Okay. He was actually next. First I want to thank you for your, your perspicacity and your wonderful writings, which have been inspiring for me and many of my media activists in the scholar, friends and compatriots. And I do think you are onto something with the idea about specifying the prevailing concept of propaganda here. I don't happen to share your, your bleakness about the success or its success in terms of creating a large public innocence or ignorance about it. To some extent, that's a matter of what we believe most people believe and I believe most people is a fiction. I've never met most people. I think he probably lives next door to the average American. But I think maybe that you can go into it by comparing or relating propaganda with cynicism, which I think is one of the big, big symptoms of the, you know, the pathology of our times in propaganda of different kinds certainly feeds it. I haven't used this word since I got my media ecology degree, a dialectic of cynicism by which people, powerful people act in ways which are obviously cynical and they feed cynicism in the population. I wonder if you want to spin a few words to relate propaganda and cynicism. Well, it would seem that the, how can I put this, people have been made cynical and blase by constant exposure to an ever more salacious, antitallating spectacle. That's a certain kind of jadedness that is definitely traceable to the great endless display of goods and, you know, that constant demonstration of a fictitious bliss that we see in advertising. People are made cynical by that hardened by that. They're also cynical, as I think you're suggesting, because they're used to being lied to and expect to be lied to so that they've lost the, they've lost the ability to be idealistic. I don't feel bleak about the situation. I wouldn't be here if I felt bleak or if I thought the situation was a bleak one. I think that I'm insanely optimistic. But I do think that we are probably going to benefit from emphasizing the idealistic element in this particular struggle. You go back and read McChesney's book. You read about the great fight went on in the late 20s and early 30s to try to prevent American broadcasting from becoming commercial. There was idealism, patriotic idealism at its finest. And that's the kind of impulse that we should call on today. The most cynical people of all are the Murdoch's and their various high paid minions, many of whom had extremely expensive educations. And then are busy foisting this garbage on everybody else. Murdoch likes to accuse his antagonists of a kind of elitism, snobbishness. They don't like what the common man likes. But in fact, what the common man, it's that's your average American, they live next door to each other. The common man, I mean all of us, let's just get these invidious distinctions out of the way. All of us will tend to put up with more and more as time goes on. All of us will tend to accept an ever more repulsive thing as routine, normal. OK. In other words, you all breathe the same air. The air has been heavily polluted by these entities, you see. The fact is that opera, Shakespeare, things like that as Lawrence Levine has pointed out, I mean they used to be mass culture items. In the 19th century, all kinds of audiences, what to see a fellow in the Bethany, New the Lines, they loved opera. We're talking now, not about really a class phenomenon any longer, but a culture industry that degrades, degrades. And the only way to speak out against that I think is to make some idealistic claims. OK. I'm surprised to hear that your analysis didn't deal with NSC 68, the document that Truman based his speech in 1950 on. It laid out a step by step plan, which was largely authored by the Dulles Brothers, as I recall, about how the business of America being business, we can voice down the American public a very real enemy, at least in the way the propaganda portrayed at the time of communism. And essentially the ogre that we had to keep away from the door from that point forward. And I believe it was in the late 50s or so up to a million dollars a week was being spent by corporations intending to train people to believe that corporations were their salvation. And we saw the rise of the parent corporation in the 30s and 40s after the labor unrests of the early part of this century. But in light of that, what I'm curious about is how you see the point that propaganda isn't really recognized by people. I'm curious to see how you arrive at an analysis that despite the vigorous socialist and labor press that existed in the country that pointed out that the word of the boss was law and we had to resist that we had the union eyes. I'm curious how you see that the mess or excuse me, the population today doesn't recognize propaganda for what it is because it seems to me in looking at the progressive media. And that virtually all of the important writings deal with this very issue that the common person doesn't have a voice and that's why the internet is such an exciting development. Okay now what exactly are you asking me? Again, I'm curious to see how your analysis of where mass media is today doesn't look at the overwhelming onslaught of corporate propaganda for the past say 45 years and acknowledge that it's a natural trend for people to essentially not come to grips with the fact that they don't have a way to speak their voice. I mean I think that I was just very, very briefly recapitulate. People don't think of this stuff as propaganda per se because the category propaganda has been rendered dysfunctional. It's been ruled out and it was ruled out by that propaganda drive that went on with great help with the dollars brothers as you say. But that doesn't mean people can't see that it's false but there's just no vocabulary for it. But let me give you an example. Talk about someone who connects with average people. I was on a panel with Ed Rollins at Hopkins and I was the pencil head. I was the academic and with Ed Rollins and some other guy a Democrat who was a spin doctor. I forget his name. When I turned to speak after these guys had talked about spin and communicating and being on message every synonym I should say euphemism you could imagine for propaganda. I mean all those euphemisms. Finally I said let's remember that we're talking about the business of propaganda and these guys are two expert propagandists. You could even see it in the way they answered every question. Somebody would ask a question and it would always end up being another harang to the effect that the Democrats or the Republicans were really doing the right thing and they'd start hammering the table. So I said this and Ed Rollins got really angry and he called me professor. You know what I mean? The way that Clarence Thomas said senator. And he wouldn't accept this. This is just not true. Then he started talking about Michael Ducakis' ride in the tank. Remember that? He said talk about propaganda. Now that's very interesting. I don't tell the story to ridicule him. It is typical of propaganda. Winning propaganda. Always to represent itself as truth and to talk about a failed version. The failed adversary version to talk about that as propaganda. So we constantly were talking about Soviet propaganda, the dangers of Soviet propaganda, the Soviet lie. It was far inferior to ours. Likewise during the Gulf War we were always talking about Saddam's propaganda machine. One of the most inept propagandists in modern times. We're always ramping and screaming about his propaganda skills. Well that's a crucial fiction for the making of propaganda. I don't expect most people even though I don't know them either. But I don't expect them to be any more astute about this than Ed Rollins is. It's a conceptual problem. There are so many euphemisms for it. People don't. It would be, well actually. Let me read you something. This is from 1939. This is from an article in the Journal of School and Society by Professor William H. Kielpatrick of Columbia University. The National Education Association was very, very concerned about the spread of propaganda. They wanted to find ways to use the educational establishment to make people resistant to it whatever its source. Whether it was Berlin or Moscow or Washington or the National Association of Manufacturers. I'm just going to read from the end. As Theodore Roosevelt said, the majority of the plain people of the United States will day in and day out make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any small class or body of men will in trying to govern them. And now Kielpatrick says, but the people can be helped. Must in fact be helped if they are to think best. And that is where the study of propaganda and propaganda methods can serve. If we have America can through our high schools and colleges bring up a generation able to see through even the grocer and more obvious efforts of propaganda, we shall raise the standard of American social and political thinking high above what it now is. And this is no vain hope. The signs and portents of vicious propaganda are not subtle, uncertain, hard to see. Just the contrary. They are there in plain sight, clear, bold, brazen. And once seen, they will not easily be forgot. In this matter democracy is at stake. There are threats to democracy from abroad. Yes, and we may have to fight for a decent world to live in. But the serious dangers to democracy are within. With ourselves that we should let designing men put their selfish aims above the common good. That's very powerful stuff. That's the national education association. It's not the socialist party. But that strikes me as a very, potentially a very subversive and effective kind of idealism. So anyway. Yes. Just to pick up right where you are now. Maybe you can say a few words about why propaganda works and why people believe in it. I think part of the answer is suggested even in that last quote, having written good propaganda for something I believed in or a political candidate I believed in. I know how easy it is to get into the kind of language you first described wherein the world is divided into two classes of people, we who tell the truth and they who unscrupulously lie. This has to be wrong, but you see this dynamic working in any political group. The tendency even to go into the language and label certain words is correct or incorrect and to redefine a very narrow meaning about what they refer to so that every single utterance can be cheered or booed. And the person who utters it, stereotype, but I think what actually happens is something that can happen to anyone, a kind of identification with a presser. Those two may be hackneyed words. It's the kind of thing wherein a reviewer on television for a station owned by Time Warner Turner, whoever reviewing a movie by Warner Brothers Studios owned by the same place from a book published by the same conglomerate is more likely. Maybe not to give the book a positive review, but to accept the total surround of the kind of culture from which it comes and to discuss it in terms of its own book jacket which after all is the language of his employer. And for that same reason, you might get the if you even get into an argument trying to defend one of the current candidates against the other, you might feel a little silly referring to these categories. I think the in so far as the battle is of good against evil, it's an eternal battle in every piece of writing and every institution, even one newspaper, let's say that isn't even owned by anything larger in which people try to please each other and try to develop the very natural idea that their group is better than another group. I don't know if it is. I'd like to read something. What? I'd like to, a professional who loves his words, I'd like to throw a few out. One question which is asked a time and again which was raised but not addressed at the speeding is the old what is to be done. Question and I think it's a question that kind of makes me wonder what it's going to take at what point will people who is a savvy and a sophisticated about the media as many of the people in this room who've studied it closely, analyzed it over the many many years. At what point will we find the means or a way of expressing our concerns politically so that these ideas will not simply be relegated to the margins of criticism and analysis but in the arena of political action. In today's New York Times, I think Todd made reference to but did not read for our pleasure and amusement of full page ad directed to Ted Turner and Time Warner and from the Fox News Channel Mr. Murdoch unsigned and Mr. Murdoch's people here say they should know that censorship and monopoly control are never a pretty picture. I'm sure we will stay tuned but I think the question that I like to bounce back at you Mark and maybe to the people in this room is to ask where are the organizations for democratic media, where are the students for democratic media, where are the organizations in our country who want change making media reform and anti monopoly part of their plank so that these issues can force a political response and that's what I'm saying. I think that's a concern that I have otherwise we're all just sort of moaning and whining about trends that people don't feel they can do anything about. In fact, we probably can do something about it if we try to figure out what and how. Yes, Danny, you know very well that I agree completely with what you're saying and you know one of the points I argued in that article in the nation was that it came up in the Lions den there was that it's going to be necessary to move beyond the usual purview of the nation. I think that's a very important point of view of the purview of progressivism in order for this to have any kind of political resonance. I mean I'm really serious when I say that I think we should make common cause with people who otherwise go with Terry Racolta and the Reverend Wildman. The only organized political groups that try to speak to people's hatred of the media are on the far right. They do that in the old scapegoating way. They do not believe in antitrust. In fact they want to run the monopoly themselves. Pat Robertson is you know a media tycoon, a big media tycoon, Rush Limbaugh is a big...well... Exactly, those are the words I was looking for. The point is that when Dan Quail talks about the culturally elite he obviously doesn't mean his own family's newspaper empire. So there's a lot of bad faith there on the right. I think that progressive media activists should be talking to other fundamentalist groups like Jim Wallace's, Sojourners, people like that who have a doctrinal basis for being uneasy about consumerism and the corporations and so on. But who won't necessarily come at it from the same direction as people on the left who I think also have tended to be too ready to laugh off the cultural concerns of suburbanites and so on. Too ready to sneer at that. And this is where being on the left gets into a kind of particular regional and cultural thing where we laugh at Hicks and people who end up as characters and a co-enbrothers movie. But that's just a kind of snobbism. The fact is that people in a group like Thayer have everything to gain from making common cause with people who are upset about smut on TV. The thing to argue is that censorship is not the answer it never could be. It's unconstitutional. It's impracticable anyway. But if the culture is dominant, it's not any longer dominated by a few Murdoch types, then there will at least be more diversity in the spectacle. If you believe in the market, there will be products for different audiences, smaller audiences, smaller publics, so that the spectacle will at least be somewhat variegated. And it won't be inundated by trash. That's the kind of political response I'd like to see. And there is no group such as Danny, plaintively asked for a moment ago, but that's the kind of group that should come into existence. I was thinking that maybe the next time you do this lecture it should be called the International Entertainment State. And as we know that now America's greatest export product is entertainment, television and films. And these programs have an enormous impact on indigenous people. I did a program on the BBAI radio earlier in the year, and where I explored the impact of satellite television on indigenous people and what is happening to their cultures as a result of this and how fast it is. It is the main, it is, it's, we don't have to invade countries with armies anymore to take them over. All you have to do is introduce television and it can do it a lot faster. And what rings in my mind is Professor George Gerberner had done in the University of Pennsylvania saying that it's not really the commercials that he's worried about. It's the lifestyle values of the programming, which the people in these other countries see, who all of a sudden see people running around in fast cars and all these affluent symbols that they think now is what they, the reality that they want to live in. I want to point out that one of the people that I did interview, who is an authority on the country of Ladakh, which is in the Tibetan Plateau, it is actually known as little Tibet, it was not invaded by the Chinese because the Indian government annexed it at the end of the last century. However, they've only had satellite television for about seven years. And what she's perceived is that she's seen already instances of people who, young girls who've come down with anorexia for the first time in the history of their culture, 2500 year culture. And all the television programs, by the way, is geared towards the children, it's geared towards children, the advertising and the programming, the children hate their culture, they hate being Tibetan, they want to be white. So there's a force out there that's tied in with this entertainment thing that is creating what we call a monoculture, a one-world culture where everybody's going to go to the gap and we're all going to wear the same clothes. People's cultures are being wiped out, just like species. And there's a tremendous spiritual price that we're going to pay for this because people are really losing who they are and addictions and all sorts of dysfunctional behavior go bananas in these societies where there's breakdowns are happening. So I think this aspect is also part of this enormous entertainment conglomerate because it's just bigger than what's going on here. I think you're absolutely right and it's not just a spiritual crisis but to speak more materially, it's also an ecological crisis in the making. But I would say that if we're going to try to discover politically the most effective way to mount this kind of a debate, it probably will make more sense to demonstrate the connection be