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Back in the '80s, I read a book called Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. It had a huge effect on how I thought about media. Essentially, it argued that the news media created the appearance of a vigorous debate within a wide range of ideas, while actually constraining the range of acceptable subjects to discuss to a very narrow slice of subjects and positions. The "consent' manufactured by the media was the consent to keep discussion of political issues within this narrow range. The ordinary citizen didn't notice the narrow range because of the appearance of wide differences.

Probably the only thing I have in common with journalist Matt Taibbi is that we were both similarly impressed by the book. After working as a journalist, Taibbi started a series of essays that he originally called "The Fairway." He intended it as a kind of update to Manufacturing Consent based on his own experiences in the media. He included a very interesting interview with Chomsky as a kind of prelude. (Hermann had passed away.)

Taibbi's thesis is that the media still set the margins of discourse, but they have adopted a new operating model driven by profit making. In the past, media sources maximized profit by trying to appeal to consumers all across the political spectrum. That model resulted in a lot of journalistic rules and practices, including attempting to portray a balance of views and considering at least the appearance of impartiality as important.

That model has changed. Taibbi identifies the change as being connected with 9/11. I think Chomsky identifies it with the rise of talk radio. But the change is a shift away from trying to appeal to all consumers of news and toward capturing specific demographics that advertisers can specifically target. That targeting is made much easier by the fact that many people get their news through the internet, where demographic information can be collected and sold to advertisers. Here is his description:

The technology underpinning the modern news business is sophisticated and works according to a two-step process. First, it creates content that reinforces your pre-existing opinions, and after analysis of your consumer habits, sends it to you.

Then it matches you to advertisers who have a product they’re trying to sell to your demographic. This is how companies like Facebook and Google make their money: telling advertisers where their likely customers are on the web.

The news, basically, is bait to lure you in to a pen where you can be sold sneakers or bath soaps or prostatitis cures or whatever else studies say people of your age, gender, race, class, and political bent tend to buy.

Imagine your Internet surfing habit as being like walking down a street. A man shouts: “Did you hear what those damned liberals did today? Come down this alley.”

You hate liberals, so you go down the alley. On your way to the story, there’s a storefront selling mart carts and gold investments (there’s a crash coming – this billionaire even says so!).

Maybe you buy the gold, maybe you don’t. But at the end of the alley, there’s a red-faced screamer telling a story that may even be true, about a college in Massachusetts where administrators took down a statue of John Adams because it made a Hispanic immigrant “uncomfortable.” Boy does that make you pissed!

They picked that story just for you to hear. It is like the parable of Kafka’s gatekeeper, guarding a door to the truth that was built just for you.

Across the street, down the MSNBC alley, there’s an opposite story, and set of storefronts, built specifically for someone else to hear.

People need to start understanding the news not as “the news,” but as just such an individualized consumer experience – anger just for you.

This is the second stage of the mass media deception originally described in Manufacturing Consent.

First, we’re taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we’re all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought.

Once safely captured, we’re trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest.

Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling both.

I looked back at thirty years of deceptive episodes – from Iraq to the financial crisis of 2008 to the 2016 election of Donald Trump – and found that we in the press have increasingly used intramural hatreds to obscure larger, more damning truths. Fake controversies of increasing absurdity have been deployed over and over to keep our audiences from seeing larger problems.

We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.

He uses the Iraq war as an example of how the media places the boundaries on political discourse. The final debate over the Iraq was limited to one of these two positions:

1. Saddam Hussein presents an imminent threat to the U.S. because he has WMDs he can give to terrorist groups. Take him out now.
2. Saddam Hussein doesn't present an imminent threat to the U.S., but he eventually will. So, with great regret, we need to remove him from power.

Serious consideration was not given to: Saddam Hussein is not a threat to the U.S. and destabilizing Iraq could be a disaster.

He uses recent history as another example. In the midst of the bitter conflict over impeachment, both parties managed to pass, with little fuss, and enormous defense increase. Little attention was paid to the size of the increase, what it would be spent for, its effect on the deficit, or whether the defense of America actually required a increase of that magnitude. Ukraine gate was in bounds. Defense spending was out of bounds.

Within this framework, he has a very interesting take on how Donald Trump became president, focussing on the past roll of media pundits of gatekeepers of past elections and Trump's strategy of attacking the press instead of playing by its rules.

Although I don't agree with everything Matt writes, I found his extension of Manufacturing Dissent interesting and thought provoking. In the past, when I read, say, Ajax and Icarus going after each other hammer and tongs, I would think "man, the system is really broken." Now I'm going to be tempted to think: "no, the system is working as intended." I also understand some of Dr. Exiled's positions a little better. The essays have been published as a book, Hate, Inc. You can also subscribe to Matt's Substack for $5.00/month and read the whole series, as well as anything else that catches your eye. Whether or not I continue the subscription, I found the Hate, Inc. series well worth the five bucks.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-a ... he-fairway

Res Ipsa wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 15, 2020 6:55 pm

He uses the Iraq war as an example of how the media places the boundaries on political discourse. The final debate over the Iraq was limited to one of these two positions:

1. Saddam Hussein presents an imminent threat to the U.S. because he has WMDs he can give to terrorist groups. Take him out now.
2. Saddam Hussein doesn't present an imminent threat to the U.S., but he eventually will. So, with great regret, we need to remove him from power.

Serious consideration was not given to: Saddam Hussein is not a threat to the U.S. and destabilizing Iraq could be a disaster.

How about a third option:

3. While we fear that Saddam Hussein may eventually pose a threat to the USA, we don't have the right to make war on a country and overthrow its government just because of what we fear it might do in the future. After all, once that starts, what hope is there for any peaceful international order? And that's in nobody's long-term interests.

An example, in more ways than one -
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/07/bbc-j10.html


In recent weeks, (July 2003) it has been commonplace for officials of the Blair government to echo the charge levelled by Campbell that the BBC sought to undermine the government by giving undue prominence to opponents of the war and running critical news items. The charge is not new. Most of the media were virulently pro-war and viewed any reporting that attempted even a semblance of balance, let alone opposition, as tantamount to treason. For this reason national newspapers such as the Times, the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph featured articles attacking the BBC as little more than a propaganda machine for the regime of Saddam Hussein.

One such article appeared in the Daily Telegraph on March 30 entitled “Listening to the World Service, I thought we were losing.” The author stated that, “Day after day, studio-based presenters and gloomy academics criticise every nuance of the coalition’s strategy. Determined resistance by Iraqi troops has been endlessly reported, alongside lengthy discussions about how the allies failed to anticipate that the enemy might fight back.

“Allied bombing raids on Baghdad are reported in the context of the civilian casualties that they may have caused. British and American troops are constantly described as being overwhelmed, unprepared and taken by surprise. Worst of all is the outraged reaction to the news that, shock, horror, the war might take longer than a few weeks.

“If Saddam Hussein listens to the BBC, he would be delighted. Any coalition soldier hearing the BBC’s coverage would probably want to go home. So it is hardly surprising that, according to the BBC, that’s exactly what many want to do.”

A more recent Telegraph article by right-wing columnist Barbara Amiel dated July 7 continued this theme and contained an unveiled threat to the BBC. It was entitled “Disinfect the BBC before it poisons a new generation.”

The opposition Conservative Party culture spokesman, John Whittingdale, said during the war, “People inside the BBC who are opposed to the conflict are imposing their own views. The BBC is our national broadcaster and it must make clear why we are asking British forces to risk their lives.”

The fever pitch of such commentary was so high that Rageh Omaar, a BBC reporter stationed in Baghdad throughout the invasion, felt obliged to write an article with the purpose of opposing “the allegations that we are being seduced by a slick Iraqi propaganda machine.”

Omaar will be remembered by many for his embarrassingly breathless and uncritical reporting of the staged toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in April by members of the Iraqi opposition recently flown in by the US. But during the war, he had reported from the city daily and of necessity had to cover events such as the devastating missile attack on the Al Sha’ab district in northern Baghdad on March 28 that killed and injured more than 50 people. Based upon what he was told by many immediate eyewitnesses and what he himself saw, Omaar reported that he believed the missiles had been fired by the US military. The attack was subsequently denied by the US and British military, and the journalist was subjected to a character assassination by sections of the media.

That the BBC’s reportage was labelled “anti-war” or “biased” indicates the debased state of much of what passes as news in Britain today. For it is the opposite of the truth.

The study conducted by Professor Justin Lewis, Dr. Rod Brookes and Kirsten Brander of the Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies department of Cardiff University finds that the BBC was in fact the least “anti-war” in its news reports—even when compared with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky.

The study reviewed the contents of prime-time evening news bulletins of the four broadcasters. These are the BBC1 news at 6:00 p.m., the ITV Evening News at 6:30 p.m., Channel 4 News at 7:00 p.m. and Sky News at 9:00 p.m.

Among its findings were:

* Over the three weeks of conflict, 11 percent of the sources quoted by the BBC were of coalition government or military origin. This was the highest proportion of all the main television broadcasters. The BBC used government sources twice as much as ITN and Channel 4 News.

* The BBC was the least likely to quote official Iraqi sources, and less likely than Sky, ITV or Channel 4 News to use independent sources of news such as the Red Cross. Channel 4 used these sources three times more often than the BBC, and Sky twice as often.

* The BBC placed least emphasis on Iraqi casualties, which were mentioned in 22 percent of its stories about the Iraqi people. Numbers of casualties received most prominence on Channel 4 News, figuring in 40 percent of its reports about Iraqis, compared with Sky at 30 percent and ITN at 24 percent.

* The BBC was least likely to report on the opposition of the Iraqi population to the invasion.

* Across all four broadcasters, the bulletins were three times more likely to present the Iraqi population as pro-invasion than anti-invasion. The exception to the ratio was Channel 4, where it was just less than two to one.