Media Manipulation
by Anup Shah
The media is manipulated in all manners, for example through
professional public relations (PR), and covert and overt government
propaganda which disseminates propaganda as news. What are often
deemed as credible news sources can often knowingly or unknowingly be
pushing political agendas and propaganda.
Table of contents for this page
This web page has the following sub-sections:
* Media management and public relations is very professional
* Smear tactics are increasing in sophistication
* Fake News
* Fake News in the United States
* Government Propaganda through Prepackaged News?
* Illegal US Domestic Propaganda but Legal International Propaganda?
* Benefits for Broadcaster
* Fake news in the United Kingdom
* These issues are not new
* More Information
Media management and public relations is very professional
The impacts of public relations cannot be underestimated. In the
commercial world, marketing and advertising are typically needed to
make people aware of products. There are many issues in that area
alone (which is looked at in this site's section on corporate media.)
When it comes to propaganda for purposes of war, for example,
professional public relations firms can often be involved to help
sell a war. In cases where a war is questionable, the PR firms are
indirectly contributing to the eventual and therefore unavoidable
casualties. Media management may also be used to promote certain
political policies and ideologies. Where this is problematic for the
citizenry is when media reports on various issues do not attribute
their sources properly.
Some techniques used by governments and parties/people with hidden
agendas include:
* Paying journalists to promote certain issues without the journalist
acknowledging this, or without the media mentioning the sources;
* Governments and individuals contracting PR firms to sell a war, or
other important issues
* Disinformation or partial information reported as news or fact
without attributing sources that might be questionable
* PR firms feeding stories to the press without revealing the nature
of the information with the intention of creating a public opinion
(for example, to support a war, as the previous link highlights where
even human rights groups fell for some of the disinformation, thus
creating an even more effective propaganda campaign)
The Gulf War in Iraq, 1991, highlighted a lot of PR work in action.
Founder of the Washington PR firm, The Rendon Group, John Rendon told
cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996:
"I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician,"
Rendon said. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication
to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am
an information warrior and a perception manager." He reminded the Air
Force cadets that when victorious troops rolled into Kuwait City at
the end of the first war in the Persian Gulf, they were greeted by
hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. The scene, flashed
around the world on television screens, sent the message that U.S.
Marines were being welcomed in Kuwait as liberating heroes.
"Did you ever stop to wonder," Rendon asked, "how the people of
Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful
months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the
flags of other coalition countries?" He paused for effect. "Well, you
now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."
... Public relations firms often do their work behind the
scenes....But his description of himself as a "perception manager"
echoes the language of Pentagon planners, who define "perception
management" as "actions to convey and (or) deny selected information
and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions,
motives, and objective reasoning. ... In various ways, perception
management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and
deception, and psyops [psychological operations]."
- Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, How To Sell a War, In These
Times, 4 August, 2003
Such technical phrases like "truth projection" hide their true
meanings and intent: propaganda. One can understand how these have
been tactics of war. Churchill used such a technique to fool the
Nazis regarding the Normandy landings, for example. Yet, in the Iraq
example, PR is turned onto one's own citizens to convince them to
support a war or make it look more glorious and right, than could
otherwise have been.
The 2003 war on Iraq saw similar amounts of public relations and
media manipulation at work. A detailed account was given by Ahmed
Chalabi who seemed to boast how he helped influence major politicians
and countries into drumming the beats of war against Iraq. This is
discussed in further detail on this site's Iraq section.
Smear tactics are increasing in sophistication
Smear tactics are often used to discredit, stain or destroy the
reputation of someone. It is unfortunatley common-place and is an
age-old technique. It can either involve outright lies, or a
distortion of the truth.
With the increasing popularity of the Internet, and search engines
such as Google, smearing is taking on additional forms and
techniques. Juan Cole, a professor of history has described what he
has coined a "GoogleSmear" as a political tactic to discredit him.
His personal experience is quoted here:
It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of
his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent,
which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like
Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine
that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just
commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened
with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will
likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to
journalists and politicians as though they were actual information.
- Juan Cole, The GoogleSmear as Political Tactic, Informed Comment
Blog, March 27, 2005
Fake News
March 2005 has seen some revelations in the mainstream about fake
news whereby organizations and journalists working for public
relations firms or a government department have produced news
reports. The problem arises where these reports are either presented
as factual news by journalists, or have been rebroadcast by news
stations without revealing that the segment is from an organization
or the government, thus giving it the appearance of genuine news.
David Miller, of Spin Watch, in the UK has noted in a commentary that
there is a lot of fake news, and it has been going on for a long time:
This is the age of the fake. We live in an era where the gap between
how the world is and how powerful interests try to portray it has
grown dramatically wider. Virtually nothing in public debate these
days is free of the virus of fakery....
Today distortions [such as the famous Stalinist airbrushing of
Trotsky from photographs of the Russian revolutionary period] are
much more easily contrived. The advent of the digital camera has made
it easier, cheaper and quicker to take and distribute photographs -
and to manipulate them. In the last couple of years there have been
several examples of photos produced to artificially inflate the size
of crowds listening to a speech by George Bush for example. An LA
Times journalist was sacked in 2003 for manipulating a photograph of
a British soldier in Basra.
The problem with fakes is that the images do not need to be false to
mislead. The photos showed by Colin Powell in his presentation to the
UN on Iraq were genuine. They just did not show the things that he
said they did....
But it is not only photographs which are susceptible to fake
treatment. While governments have a long and invidious record, the
cutting edge of innovation is in the corporate sector, particularly
in the PR industry. Monsanto and other GM interests have been to the
forefront of creating fake demonstrations, fake scientific
institutes, fake pressure groups with all the paraphernalia of fake
leaflets, tee shirts, websites and the rest....
In recent years the fakes have become more sophisticated, so that the
distinction between fake and real is less easy to discern.
- David Miller, The age of the fake, Spin Watch, March 14, 2005
Fake News in the United States
In March 2005, the New York Times revealed that there has been a
large amount of fake and prepackaged news created by US government
departments, such as the Pentagon, the State Department and others,
and disseminated through the mainstream media. The New York Times
noted a number of important issues including:
* The US Bush administration has "aggressively" used public relations
to prepackage news. Issues with this have included that:
* A number of these government-made news segments are made to look
like local news (either by the government department or by the
receiving broadcaster);
* Sometimes these reports have fake reporters such as when a
"'reporter' covering airport safety was actually a public relations
professional working under a false name for the Transportation
Security Administration";
* Other times, there is no mention that a video segment is produced
by the government;
* Where there is some attribution, news stations simply rebroadcast
them but sometimes without attributing the source.
* These segments have reached millions;
* This benefits both the government and the broadcaster;
* This could amount to propaganda within the United States as well as
internationally.
Effectively, American tax payers have paid to be subjected to
propaganda disseminated through these massaged messaged.
Please note that the following includes citations for the New York
Times article, which is linked to. Their site may require
registration before viewing. In addition, I try to link to their
on-line version which is split into multple pages. Alternatively you
can see the full article: Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV
News, March 13, 2005 (registration still required).
Citing at length:
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has
aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the
prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have
long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache
remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies,
including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and
distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four
years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast
on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of
the government's role in their production.
... the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage
have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the
same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or
negligence by television stations...
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most
cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare
reform. Others focused on less prominent matters... They often
feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which
questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are
excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest
television markets... prepackaged segments [include] "suggested"
lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where
government-produced reports disappear into a maze of [news
programming, feeds, web sites, etc.] only to emerge cleansed on the
other side as "independent" journalism.
- David Barstow and Robin Stein, Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged
TV News, New York Times, March 13, 2005 [Emphasis Added]
(This all actually started with the Clinton administration, and has
increased tremendously in breadth and scope with the Bush
administration. "The Bush administration spent $254 million in its
first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last
Clinton administration spent," the Time also notes.)
Government Propaganda through Prepackaged News?
When some government officials were confronted about this problem by
the Times a common response was that they didn't believe it was
propaganda or there was nothing wrong. When it was the case that the
news stations didn't source the segment correctly, this can be
understood. But, when the segment itself has been used to pursue
ideological or political agendas, then this response is more
questionable. Furthermore, the Times also noted, that
the [US] Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of
Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures,
has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper
"covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the
television stations.
- David Barstow and Robin Stein, Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged
TV News, New York Times, March 13, 2005 [Emphasis Added]
When some station news directors were confronted with this,
Their stations, they insisted, would never allow their news programs
to be co-opted by segments fed from any outside party, let alone the
government.
"They're inherently one-sided, and they don't offer the possibility
for follow-up questions - or any questions at all," said Kathy
Lehmann Francis, until recently the news director at WDRB, the Fox
affiliate in Louisville, Ky.
...
"It amounts to propaganda, doesn't it?" [Mike Stutz, news director at
KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego] said.
...Confronted with evidence [that despite their statements, they had
actually broadcast a number of government segments], most news
directors were at a loss to explain how the segments made it on the
air. Some said they were unable to find archive tapes that would help
answer the question. Others promised to look into it, then stopped
returning telephone messages. A few removed the segments from their
Web sites, promised greater vigilance in the future or pleaded
ignorance.
- David Barstow and Robin Stein, Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged
TV News, New York Times, March 13, 2005
In an example, to mark the one year anniversary of the September 11
2001 attacks on America, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis had an
uplifting report about Afghanistan and the improving situation for
women. The report "seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a central
argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American
intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and
winning friends."
Furthermore, what both the people of Memphis and the actual reporter
from WHBQ herself were not told was that "interviews used by WHBQ
were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The
contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and
shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the
narration, much of which [the reporter] repeated with only minor
changes."
As another example, the Pentagon offers free satellite feeds. "The
Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last
year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in
the United States." A "good news" and positive image is being
portrayed. "50 stories it filed last year were broadcast 236 times in
all, reaching 41 million households in the United States." Reporters,
for example, are never identified by their military titles making it
easier for local stations to run reports unedited. Few stations
acknowledge the military's role in the segments. Stories are also
tailored for local broadcast by highlighting local soldiers to help
increase positive feelings.
Much of this sort of thing, the Time noted comes straight from the White House:
The explanation [of the extent to which government-produced news
accounts have seeped into the broader new media landscape] begins
inside the White House, where the president's communications advisers
devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to encourage supportive news
coverage of the fight against terrorism. The idea, they explained to
reporters at the time, was to counter charges of American imperialism
by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate
and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.
- David Barstow and Robin Stein, Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged
TV News, New York Times, March 13, 2005
Illegal US Domestic Propaganda but Legal International Propaganda?
The above-mentioned strategy by the Bush administration to emphasize
positive views of American efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq reveals
some deeper issues hinted to, but not explored by the Times article:
United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the
domestic dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt
Act, for example, allows Voice of America to broadcast pro-government
news to foreign audiences, but not at home.
- David Barstow and Robin Stein, Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged
TV News, New York Times, March 13, 2005
While further above it was noted that domestic propaganda may be a
problem here, so too is the admission that propaganda to foreign
audiences is ok.
In the past the US has (rightly) criticized other governments for
interfering with democratic processes in other countries (such as
warning Russia about interfering in recent Ukraine elections.) Yet,
the Voice of America is also disseminating US government views into
other countries.
Benefits for Broadcaster
As the Times also noted, "'Many local stations are expanding their
hours of news coverage without adding reporters.' A video news
release company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential
clients, '90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news
releases.'"
The pressure and desire to output more with less is increasing.
Budgets and staff at news networks are shrinking, while there is
continuing demand for news. "Ready-to-run segments" have at least two
effects:
* Broadcasters benefit as they get more reports without additional costs.
* Propaganda is potentially allowed through, with less checks, and
harder traceability as segments are fed through a vast network of
broadcasters and redistributers.
The Times also noted that
A definitive accounting is nearly impossible. There is no
comprehensive archive of local television news reports, as there is
in print journalism, so there is no easy way to determine what has
been broadcast, and when and where.
Still, several large agencies, including the Defense Department, the
State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services,
acknowledge expanded efforts to produce news segments. Many members
of Mr. Bush's first-term cabinet appeared in such segments.
- David Barstow and Robin Stein, Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged
TV News, New York Times, March 13, 2005
In addition, "The State Department typically distributes its segments
via satellite to international news organizations like Reuters and
Associated Press Television News, which in turn distribute them to
the major United States networks, which then transmit them to local
affiliates." In this way, a large audience is reached.
Fake news in the United Kingdom
Spin Watch reveals that the British media is also has fake news.
An investigation by them revealed for example, that "fake
journalists" have been providing news reports to the BBC. "The BBC
has been using these reports as if they were genuine news" when in
fact some of the journalists were working for an organization
"entirely funded by the British Ministry of Defence as a propaganda
operation."
The UK is awash with fake news, of which the examples here are only a
taste, it is just that we don't pay much attention to it. The
American scandals over fake news are played out against the
background of some pretty clear laws forbidding propaganda with a
disguised source within the borders of the US. There are no laws
forbidding fake news in the UK. Perhaps we needs some.
- David Miller, BBC broadcast fake news reports, Spin Watch, March 15, 2005
These issues are not new
An interview with John Stauber from prwatch.org notes that issues
such as "fake news" have been around for years and the mainstream has
hardly ever covered it, until the recent New York Times article:
I was absolutely elated to see The New York Times front page coverage
with the inside spread.... In the more than 10 years that I have been
investigating and reporting on the widespread use of public relations
as news, there's never, ever been a story like this. This widespread
use of fake news, we're talking thousands of stories a year. This is
a billion dollar sub-industry of the P.R. industry has been going on
for 20 years, and this is the first mainstream media expose of any
length and depth about it.
... There's so much money to be made or saved, if you will, by
replacing real news on TV with fake news, that this will continue to
be a widespread problem unless there's a mobilization of outraged
news viewers [for better standards, because] TV news directors and
producers' [are] not going to want to give this up. This - we're
talking billions of dollars here in producing these and in airing
them instead of going out and producing real news.
... the University of Amherst study ... and there have been other
studies that have corroborated this ... that the American public, who
watched the most TV coverage of that Gulf War, thought they knew the
most, actually knew less than most people who were getting their news
through newspapers, for instance, and yet were the strongest
supporters of the war. So, the bottom line here is that if you are
watching war on television, with all of the propaganda and video news
releases that go along with it, you are actually being misinformed,
and yet you're more likely to support the war. Television is the
number one source of so-called news for most Americans, and a huge
proportion of that is fake news.
- State Propaganda: How Government Agencies Produce Hundreds of
Pre-Packaged TV Segments the Media Runs as News, Democracy Now! Radio
Broadcast, March 14, 2005
And as former CIA agent mentions in an interview, the US has been
doing it since the 1950s and 1960s at least:
When I was in the agency from the late 1950s on through to the late
1960s, the agency had operations going internationally, regionally,
and nationally, attempting to penetrate and manipulate the
institutions of power in countries around the world, and these were
things that I did in the CIA-the penetration and manipulation of
political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements,
intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups
and women's groups and especially of the public information media.
We, for example, paid journalists to publish our information as if it
were the journalists' own information. The propaganda operations were
continuous. We also spent large amounts of money intervening in
elections to favor our candidates over others.
- Philip Agee, The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela,
Interviewed by Jonah Gindin, Venezuelanalysis.com, March 22, 2005
More Information
The above only scratches the surface of a deep issue. The following,
by no means exhaustive, can provide some additional information as
starting points to find out more:
* Full article: Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News, New
York Times, March 13, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html?pagewanted=print
* PR Watch, published by the Center for Media and Democracy
http://www.prwatch.org/
* The White House Fakes It, Alternet, March 14, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21485/
* Stop Fake News campaign site
http://www.stopfakenews.org/
* Media Channel looks into media issues in general
http://www.mediachannel.org/
* Administration Rejects Ruling on PR Videos, Washington Post, March
15, 2005, Page A21. This article is about how the GOP claiming fake
news from the government amounts to propaganda, and how the Bush
administration rejects that.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35010-2005Mar14.html
* From FreePress, a campaign to stop news fraud:
* Stop News Fraud petition
http://www.freepress.net/action/fakenews
* Stop News Fraud Report looks at the systematic effort by the Bush
administration to manipulate journalists and the American public.
http://www.freepress.net/propaganda/
* Spin Watch researches and reports on corporate and government
public relations and propaganda.
http://www.spinwatch.org
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