So what are the free people of Media-ville to do with a media environment where militant Islamists are given as much respect and time and credibility as defenders of freedom? How is it that we have a self-appointed and entitled professional class of communicators, a vast entertainment industry, and a political class that exploits them both all feel it is their duty to 1) highlight the dysfunctions of our society and government, 2) crowd out, ridicule or discount all mention of its benefits, and 3) thoughtlessly give enemies of freedom fuel for more violence? Is this condition permanent? Is it tolerable? Can we keep our freedom when freedom’s enemies use our communications systems to spread their own propaganda and terror? Quillnews figures the answer – by definition – is that free people will figure out a way to keep their freedom. But free people are first going to have to acknowledge the dangers of today’s Media-ville and openly discuss ways to deal with this new reality. It also must be done in accordance with our principles as free people, and with keeping our commitment to open society intact. With that as a backdrop, where did this “new battlefield” come from? Like many aspects of modern life, development of new technologies had a lot to do with it. The period around World War One is a good starting point.
(Editor's aside: The Great War came to mind when I saw a discussion last week on C-Span’s Book TV of the new title, Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II by author Jim Powell, who made his argument at a luncheon at the Cato Institute, a free market libertarian think tank in DC, where he is a fellow. Powell took a telling insight perhaps a bit too far, blaming Wilson and the specific entry of the US in WWI for the subsequent ills, and not the age, the political culture and time in history Wilson was part of. Powell also ignored the incredible mix of contingencies and interactions with individual personalities that had to occur for each series of events to emerge. Often I’ve found that in looking back at history it can be just as fruitful to account the hand of Providence. This premise also encourages – requires – free people with options to choose their own paths to their continued freedom. Okay, that’s the end of a discussion of overriding philosophy).
It was around the time of World War One that the tools and techniques of modern communication emerged. Students of modern communications point to the era of the Great War as the beginnings and source of the Graphics Revolution in the 20th century: the advent of mass marketing, celebrity journalism, tabloids, movies, and later radio, television and 24-7 global media. Professionals in the disciplines of public communication, advertising and mass marketing have studied these phenomena. The rules and tools of what have emerged in Media-ville are well understood as a field of social science. Great books to illuminate this Graphics Revolution are:
- Public Opinion (1922) by Walter Lippman, who argued how modern political life could be understood only if political practitioners began to distinguish between the world outside and the pictures that are inside our heads. Lippman defined the word "stereotype" and explained that such oversimplified patterns help us find meaning in the world and satisfy people's needs to define our prejudices, preferences, desired, fears, wants. It is this process which defined branded marketing and the way we actually differentiate what we like and don't, which ideas we find appealing which aren't, which corporations we like and which we don't. In the context of democratic politics, such stereotyping was central to the activity of political campaigns – where candidates and their ideas would be reduced to short hand stereotypes so that voters could make choices of one rather than another.
- Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) by Edward Bernays. Known as the father of modern public relations, Bernays built his arguments on Lippman’s book and described how people, businesses, organizations could survive in this new world, and how the most successful at these techniques at crystallizing public opinion could even held shape reality in such a way to thrive. Bernays called this brand of work, public relations counsel and said the process was in effect the engineering of consent. This was the birth of PR, and the creation of events and activities solely for the purpose of effecting Public Opinion.
- Concept of the Corporation (1947) by Peter Drucker. Known as the father of the study of modern management as a social science, Drucker described the nature of the new organization – corporation – and his insights are central in understanding how a corporation must be managed in this wake of the Graphic Revolution. From a public opinion standpoint, the most critical mission of the modern corporations must be that it conform with the standards of its host community. To survive in a free society where the people are sovereign, the corporation can never remain apart or adverse to the community or the community will consider the corporation alien and prevent it from completing its business mission. There is a natural tension between the community and the corporation: the corporation is designed to earn as much for its shareholders as competition will allow, the community demands quality products at the lowest possible prices. To the extent these goals conflict, the corporation has trouble. The understanding of these links between a corporation’s public activities and its ability to fulfill its earnings mission for its shareholders are an essential management function and is the basis and rationale for all corporate public affairs programs today.
- The Image (1962) by Daniel Boorstin. The great historian, who would become the director of the Library of Congress, put his genius to analyzing the new world where John Kennedy, the handsome son of a politically wired-up liquor importer whose campaign, as father Joe said, "sold Jack like soap flakes," successfully exploited the new rules of Media-ville to achieve real political power. Boorstin argued that the US had undergone a Graphics Revolution; and that communications technology - high speed press, photo offset, news wire services, news syndicates, newsreels, wire transmission of photos, telephones, radio, film, birth of advertising, mass marketing, and later TV, cable, satellites instant information – were creating an age of pseudo-events. Boorstin in 1962 predicted that eventually this political culture would make an actor president, because a professional actor was trained in the arts and techniques of communicating in a world of pseudo-events. (Reagan was elected in 18 years later).
The age from 1920 to 1990 marked a revolution in the way we understand our world, conducted our political social and economic relationships, and entertained ourselves. It all combined to create a veritable communications revolution, and was a companion enabler to the political and social revolutions also underway. It was this new world the Graphics Revolution helped create that led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of worldwide communism as a viable governing model. And this was all before the advent of the internet, which would place into the hands of each individual with a laptop access to all the information in the world instantly all the time. Wow. Welcome to modern Media-ville.
Before World War One a good argument could be made that three grandchildren of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria ruled the western world. After the war, that world was gone. It would, as Powell’s book argues, shortly be replaced by popular democracies, republics and various forms of murderous dictatorships which are just now beginning to disappear. Today the world is wired together by TV, cable, satellite video and on-line news services and data bases into a 24-7 global electronic information circuit into which we are all plugged and from which we gain the information we need to make decisions about everything from ideas, music, sports, political policies, goods and services, and so on.
I’ve found it useful to see this entire process of communication as a kind of reality industry, where professional organizations exist to employ the technologies, techniques and arts of this social science to achieve their goals in commerce, politics and recreation endeavors. These professionals all strive to segment their target audiences (i.e. publics) into identifiable groups -- stereotyping -- around shared interests, values, beliefs, professions, race, neighborhoods, religious, and so forth. In the modern economy this is done by marketing organizations which study consumer segments and stereotypes and then sell their products by brands. In politics billions are spent by political organizations to elect candidates using these same segmenting and stereotyping techniques. This reality industry draws its professional talents and technology from the range of professional activities surrounding modern communications - journalism, advertising, entertainment business in the TV and film industry. These crafts crate images - in effect engineering a new reality that is communicated through this international communications system. Boorstin said this process to create these images is
- Planned, not spontaneous - and planned primarily for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced and seen by others.
- Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous, namely it is calculated for effects that aren't always direct obvious
- Such events or actions are intended to reinforce stereotypes and statements and therefore are self-fulfilling prophecies.
When I first came across these insights I was already working as an oil company soldier and had left the world of daily newspaper reporting. But these four books were like a Rosetta stone that enabled me to better understand the journalism profession I had loved but left, the nature of modern media coverage, and also helped me gain some insight on how my company could navigate this new political environment as it conducted its oil industry operations. It was no use fighting these facts of life. As Hyman Roth counseled Michael Corleone in Godfather II: “this is the business we have chosen.” But the danger in the world of engineered images was that that your image - not your reality nor performance alone - now determined whether the community accepted you as a member in good standing. Taking Drucker's admonition to heart, corporations had to recognize that they lived in a world where manufactured images formed the basis of a significantly larger proportion of society's ability to judge the company’s behavior and performance - and determine whether your corporation was a member in good standing within the community. It was manufactured images, those developed by you, by your competitors and your opponents that would be the basis for society’s ultimate consent. Said another way, society granted corporations the consent to exist based on engineered images. The implication of this on the corporate organizations was immense. Corporate entities were now required to help engineer the trust in the community on which their survival depended. We now live in a world that requires that its core organizations of economic development build their own images in order for them to survive as acceptable to society.
So in a free society at war with violent Islamists, who is charged with speaking for the free society at large and of helping engineer the images on which our freedom depends? Who manufactures the images of freedom that project to the community the correct mix of graphics, facts and sentiment? Based on the performance of the MSM after Sept 11, I think it is apparent that the current entertainment and communications corporations, today’s political party operations, and the traditional professions employed by corporate media companies aren’t up to the job. The lion’s share of the voices in today’s Media-ville are so focused on their narrow image creation tasks – either for commercial or political goals or even the goals of jihad – that the broader interests of free people are in peril. In the coming days, I’ll look at how employees of today’s MSM and who call themselves journalists have missed the story of their lives – the complete collapse of their profession and their employers as defenders of freedom. Stay tuned... Part 3
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