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PROJECT ZIPPER
We Make Threats Not
Promises
(actual American military badge)
"Once a
perception is
created by
misinformation, it is tough to correct
the wrongs." - Susanne M. Reyto
"When the mass media in
some foreign countries serve as megaphones for the
rhetoric of their government, the
result is ludicrous propaganda. When the mass media
in our country serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of the U.S. government, the
result is responsible journalism."
– Norman Solomon
"During a war, news should be given out for
instruction rather than information. It
would not be impossible to prove, with
sufficient repetition and a psychological
understanding of the
individuals concerned, that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere
words, and words can be molded until they clothe
ideas in disguise." -Herman Hesse
"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the
power to make you commit injustices." -
Voltaire
"A
principle familiar to propagandists is
that the doctrine to be instilled in the
target
audience should not be
articulated: that would only expose them to
reflection, inquiry, and,
very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly
presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse." -
Noam Chomsky
America is the most media saturated country on Earth. Americans are bombarded daily with thousands
upon thousands of images and sounds
designed to get our
and 'inform' us of everything from shoes to
political ideology. The average
American is exposed to more than 3000
advertisements every day.
"The corporate mainstream
media is not going to rock the boat. Why do real
journalism when you can ensure
advertising dollars to please your
shareholders through shallow, infotainment pieces?
Real investigative
reporting could threaten the bottom line if you penetrate the corrosive
corporatocracy of
government and business these days. The media's AWOL performance in the lead-up to George W.
Bush's illegal and imperial invasion of
Iraq, for example, is a clear
window into the current mind-set of our Fourth
Estate. Freedom will wither in
America if the mainstream press continues to act as a propaganda arm
of the government." - Bob Teigan
A great deal of time, effort, and wealth is spent to guide
American popular
opinion in a predefined direction down
particular avenues to the 'correct'
opinion.
To guide popular opinion is to practice the
art of propaganda."Propaganda is most
effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don't
know is that
American propaganda is hidden. In a closed
society, propaganda is obvious and reluctantly
tolerated for fear of the negative consequences. In an open
society, such as in
America, the hidden and integrated
characteristics of propaganda best
convinces people that they are not being manipulated. This is why the
concept of propaganda in
America is so problematic and painted in a
strictly negative light.
Propaganda is supposed to be something
that Adolf Hitler mastered and that his film maker
Leni Riefenstahl made into a perverse art form.
It is not supposed to be part of an open society. What could be more
propagandistic than
George W. Bush's message that
Americans are do-gooders in a
global battle against evil?" - Nancy
Snow
Euphemisms such as misinformation,
disinformation, image consulting,
political consulting,
news consulting,
advertising, infomercials,
public relations, damage
control, and the art of spin have taken the place of the
word propaganda in the English lexicon.
The mass media
industrial concerns in both the
commercial and
governmental sectors that deal with
information control spend hundreds of
millions of dollars annually practicing the art
of propaganda.
Corporations as
well as the federal government of
America have spent many decades and
hundreds of billions of dollars
researching how best to effect the opinions
of the American people. Most of this
information is kept secret from
the public and what is known has only
recently come to light because of
work done by scholars –
research that is dramatically
under funded in comparison.
The information available to the ordinary
common American – including the
aforementioned academic scholars – is radically less than that which is
available to the producers of mass media or
'information' campaigns which use
advertising agencies, public
relations firms and
political consultants.
It is
known that the
human brain processes different
sensory mediums in different
ways.Written and spoken
words are put through a
symbol decoding process where the brain
deciphers the words and the sentence
structure in order to properly
interpret what the
mind is
reading or
hearing. In this process, both the
conscious and unconscious
mind go through an internal debate comparing
and interpreting
new information with what is already known
to be true.
With a
graphic image the brain instantly processes the
graphic image as truth.
Information presented in a visual format has a much greater impact on the
subconscious. Over long periods of time,
recurring imagery has a built up effect
on the viewer which allows for unconsciously conceived notions of
truth to manifest. (See
thought image)
In studies subjects claimed that
television was a means of relaxation.
This has been confirmed by electroencephalograph (EEG)
readings of brain waves, skin
resistance and heart rates of
subjects watching television.
Part of the human
attraction to
movies and
television has to do with our
biological orienting response. First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927,
humans instinctivly respond to any
sudden or novel visual or auditory stimulus. The biological orienting response
is a part of humans
evolutionary heritage, biological
sensitivity to movement and
potential predatory threats.
Typical
orienting response reactions include dilation of the
blood vessels to the brain,
slowing of the heart, and
constriction of blood vessels to
major muscle groups. The brain focuses attention on gathering more information
while the rest of the body relaxes.
In 1986 Byron Reeves of
Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the
University of Missouri and their
colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of
television – cuts, edits, zooms,
pans, sudden noises – activate the orienting response, thereby keeping
attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were affected by cuts,
edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises they concluded that stylistic tricks can
indeed trigger involuntary responses through the
evolutionary significance of detecting
movement. Their findings help explain the never ending action of broadcast
advertisements.
"A
democratic civilization will
save itself only if it makes the
language of the
image into a stimulus for critical reflection
– not an invitation for hypnosis." - Umberto Eco
"Much of our media now
are so image-rich and content-poor that they
just serve to capture the eye,
manipulate our
emotions, and short-circuit our
reason. The propaganda and
advertising
industries therefore function
increasingly like adult obedience
industries. They instruct their
audiences in how to feel and what to
think, and increasing numbers of people
follow and accept the cues without question."
- Nancy Snow Research has also shown that
passivity and a lowered level of alertness also correlate. Once the
television is turned off, the
sense of relaxation dissipates rather quickly,
but the passivity and lowered alertness remain for a considerable
time.
The
relaxation occurs quickly, so humans
are conditioned to associate viewing of television with rest and lack of tension.
The association is positively reinforced as viewers remain relaxed throughout
viewing, and it is negatively reinforced via the
stress and dysphoric rumination that
occurs once the television screen goes
blank again.
Habit forming drugs
work in similar ways. A tranquilizer that
leaves the body rapidly is much more likely to cause dependence than one that
leaves the body slowly, precisely because the user is more aware that the
effects of the drug are wearing off.
Just as many theorists
develop a
working
hypothesis before collecting the data, many
journalists are used to formulating
the frame of a story before they
interview anyone, read a document, or
collect any other facts.
Traditional journalistic
news room
culture determines the basic
nature of a
story before the facts are assembled.
"A young reporter writes an expose, but the editor says, "I
don't think we're going to run that."
The second time the reporter goes to her editor, the editor says, " I
don't think that's a good
idea."
She doesn't research and
write the story.
The third time
the reporter has an idea. But she doesn't
go to her editor.
The fourth time she doesn't get the
idea." - Nicholas Johnson, formerly FCC
commissioner
The changing
economic
structure of the
television networks has eroded newsroom
values. Where once a
culture committed to great
journalism flourished, a
culture dominated by MBAs and financial
accountability has taken its place.
Accountability to shareholders has
replaced accountability to democracy and the
citizens it serves.
"The realities of
journalism don't involve just facts, for
if they did, computers would replace journalists.
Journalism always involves choices –
choices among subjects, treatment, words. As a
result, the claim of objective reporting functions simply to camouflage what is
in fact a value laden activity. It is
not only the readers who are misled by
the claim. The journalists too can
be blinded by their own cover."
- Vladimir Pozner, president of the Russian Academy of
Television and one of the Soviet
Union's leading interpreters of
Glasnost and Perestroika
"Freedom of the
press is guaranteed only to
those who own one." - A. J. Liebling As
America prepared in 1976 to celebrate the
bicentennial of the Declaration of
Independence, a group of intellectuals and
political
leaders from Japan,
America, and Western Europe, organized into
'The Trilateral Commission', issued a report entitled 'The
Governability of Democracies.'
Samuel Huntington, a
political
science professor at Harvard University
and a long time consultant to the White
House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with
America. Samuel Huntington identified the
problem he was about to discuss: 'The 1960's witnessed a
democratic upsurge of
democratic fervor in
America.'
In
the sixties, Samuel Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of
citizen participation 'in the forms of
marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and cause organizations,' 'markedly
higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks,
Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women', 'marked expansion of
white-collar unionism,' and all this added up to 'a reassertion of
equality as a
goal in
social, economic and political life.'
Samuel Huntington was troubled by what he
percieved: 'The essence of the
democratic surge of the 1960's was a general
challenge to existing
systems of authority, public and
private. In one form or
another, this challenge manifested itself in
the family, the university, business, public
and private associations,
politics, the
governmental bureaucracy, and the
military
services. People no longer
felt the same obligation to
obey those whom they had previously
considered superior to themselves
in age, rank, status, expertise,
character, or talents.'
Samuel Huntington's attitude explodes the
myth of the classless society!!!
Samuel Huntington further said
that the president, to win the election,
needed the support of a broad coalition. However: 'the
day after his election, the size of his
majority is almost – if not
entirely – irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. What counts
then is the president's ability to mobilize support from the
leaders of key
institutions in a
society and government. This coalition must include key
individuals in Congress, the executive
branch, mass media and the
corporate
industrial sector.
At the forefront of White
House thinking is the
command and direction of the
global economy
through information manipulation and
control.
American
films,
television programs, recorded music,
theme parks, advertising and
news programs offer
American
perspectives.
News consultants, a major part of
American
news programs, have spread their
particular brand of program
structure to
television stations all over the
Earth, resulting in an
Americanized style which include shorter
news segments, a de-emphasis on
government and
politics, fewer talking
heads, more
graphic material, "warm and fuzzy"
stories and more
American content.
American mass media
and political establishments prefer not to
acknowledge American popular
cultural imagery domination of the
global marketplace.
A skillful combination of information instrumentation with
philosophic
principle is in the mix that fuels the
push toward concentrated monocultural
power. Strategic planning underlies this
development. It has
succeeded well beyond the initial
expectations of its formulators.
One of the many by
products of
news consultancy on the
news
industry has been the decreased
time spent by
news programs on each
story.
This emphasis on
concision is a very subtle, but very real form of
censorship in that only
accepted truths may be told.
When dissenters from the mainstream appear on 'news programs', they often appear as
radicals, because they aren't given the time
necessary to adequately establish their claims.
"Ripped
from the headlines!" Although millions of Americans watch the evening
news, even more watch the
entertainment programming
that surrounds it.
The most popular programs are
fictionalized accounts of
real events. Reality is tainted with a blurring of fact and
fiction. Hollywood has been skimming
stories from headlines for decades and
television has followed suit.
"People see the headline, see what the
story is supposedly about, and there's
already a built-in set of expectations from
the audience that when we write
the stories we can
play off of and play against those expectations." -
Rene Balcer,
executive producer of Law &
Order: Criminal Intent television
series.
After editing weeks of footage to fit the forty-five minute
remainder – after advertisements – of a sixty
minute time-slot, what the viewer ultimately gets is a highly
sensationalized version of
reality.
On average,
individuals in
industrialized nations spend three
hours a day watching
television – roughly half their
leisure time; only to
work and sleep is more
time devoted.
To
assume that television is
free also assumes that the viewers'
time is not valuable.
For every
forty-five minutes of program, viewers 'see'
fifteen minutes of advertisements.
The Federal Communications Commission was
created by the Communications Act of 1934 to
regulate interstate communications that run over radio, television, wire, satellite, or
cable.
The Federal Communications
Commission was created for the
purpose of regulating
interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and
radio so as to make available to all the
people of America world-wide wire and
radio communication
service, for the
purpose of the national
defense, for the purpose
of promoting safety of life and property
through the use of wire and radio
communication.
It is the
purpose of the
Communications Act of 1934 to maintain government control over all the channels of
radio transmission; and to provide for the use
of such channels, but not the ownership thereof, by
individuals for limited periods of
time, under licenses granted by Federal
authority, and no such license shall be construed to
create any right, beyond the terms,
conditions, and periods of the license.
The
Communications Act of 1934 was designed to
spread mass media ownership over many competing
business entites to assure service, to
create
competition in the
marketplace and to support
democracy by insuring that many
points of view would be
heard.
In 1996, Congress passed the
Telecommunications Reform Act, which amended the Communications Act of 1934 and
drastically reduced the restrictions placed upon mass
media ownership.
The 1996 Telecom Act
was the product of the largest
corporate lobbies - the
National Association of Broadcasters,
News Corp and
Viacom(now
CBS Corporation). The public played
no role in its passage and it received virtually no
news coverage, except in the business
and trade papers where it was covered as an
issue of importance to owners and
investors, not citizens in a
democracy.
In 2002 a
federal appeals court demanded that the Federal
Communications Commission provide compelling and even
overwhelming evidence to
justify keeping current
mass media ownership rules intact.
The
Federal Communications Commission had conducted
biennial reviews of the mass media ownership rules
in 1998 and 2000, and determined the ownership rules should remain in place.The
Federal Communications Commission then
developed justification for
relaxing mass media ownership
rules and classified those justifications
as official
secrets.
As of May 8, 2003, nine thousand and sixty
five (9,065) statements on mass media ownership were
submitted to the Federal Communications
Commission by citizens
unaffiliated with a self-interested corporation or trade organization.
Eleven (11) of them supported the proposed changes. A little over one
thousandth of a percent supported the changes.
On June 2, 2003,
the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2
to relax the rules on
mass media ownership. The changes were:
1.
revised the local television multiple
ownership rule;
2. modified the local
radio ownership
rule by revising the local
radio marketplace definition;
3. raised the
national television ownership limit
from 35% to 45%;
4. retained the dual network
rule; and
5.
developed a single set of cross
media limits to replace both the radio /
television cross-ownership
rule and the
newspaper /
broadcast cross-ownership
rule.
These new
rules are specifically
designed to concentrate
mass media ownership under the
control of a handful of
corporations!!!
On September
4, 2003 federal judges blocked FCC media ownership rules.
On June 24,
2004 a US federal appeals court blocked the implementation of new FCC rules
that would have allowed for greater media consolidation.
October 22,
2007 FCC Chair Kevin Martin proposed new rules to allow for greater media
consolidation.
On December 18, 2007 the Federal Communications
Commission adopted proposals by Kevin Martin to loosen a 32-year-old
restriction that has prevented a corporation from owning both a newspaper and a
television or radio station in the same city - from monopolizing
news.
In the 1950's, the
majority of the
American mass
media (i.e. television stations,
radio stations,
film studios,
magazine
publishers,
newspaper
publishers,
book publishers,
advertising agencies, etc.) were
owned by more than 1,500 corporations.
By 1981, media
outlets were owned by less then fifty corporations. At this time six media
conglomerates control over 90 % of the media
outles in America.
"The continuously consolidated
mainstream media have long since opted out of any
adversarial role with the powers that be and have become little more than
caricatures and buffoons. What was a reliable source of for information and a
valuable educational resource has degenerated into a
display of sycophants on parade parroting the party line so as not to offend
their sources of disinformation." - Michael Hagerty
"Time-Warner,
Disney, Viacom-CBS, News Corporation and Universal rule the entertainment world
in a way that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of. And, after all
the deals and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we
started, bigger than ever."- Jewish Week 1999
"The release of a few more
of Nixon's tapes reveals that the late president believed that Jews dominated
the media. Well, if an ethnic group owns the New York Times, which owns over
thirty papers, including the Boston Globe. If that same group had great
influence on the Washington Post, which owns NewsWeek. Again, If that same
ethnic group also owns Time magazine along with CNN, The Warner Studios and
AOL. If Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations, owns the third largest weekly
magazine, US World and News Report and the New York Daily News.
If Michael Eisner owns Walt Disney which owns ABC. Then if Nixon was wrong in
1972, he is certainly not wrong today. So why the fuss? Because the
mass media domination by
Ashkenazi, many of them avowed
Yiddish supremacists, is
something no one is supposed to notice." - Ahmed Amr, March 2, 2002
Viacom was originally created by CBS Broadcasting Inc., formerly the
Columbia Broadcasting System, in 1971 to get around a FCC ruling that
prohibited television networks from owning cable systems and TV stations in the
same market. Viacom then began buying cable systems around the United States.
In 1978 it formed Showtime and in 1981 an all music station called Music
Television. In 1987 it was acquired by Sumner Murray Redstone's (Rothstein)
National Amusements Inc, one of the larger cinema operators with
theatres in the US, Canada, South America and the EU. Viacom then bought
Paramount, a conglomerate based on one of Hollywood's original movie studios
which included the Simon & Schuster publishing group, and Blockbuster
Video. In 1999 Viacom ate its parent, CBS.
"Centralization of the means of communication." - Point 6
Communist Manifesto,
Karl Heinrich Marx aka
Karl Heinrich Mordechai
In our
current electoral process reaching audiences has become the substitute for what
used to be called garnering constituencies. Just as
advertisers sell
products to audiences,
political consultants
market candidates to those same
audiences. In contemporary
mass media driven elections, programming,
advertising, and film
audiences become
targeted markets of voters.
Citizens are
transformed into
consumers,
emotionally connecting with a mass
media product instead of a
political platform.
According to
The Alliance for Better Campaigns, a non-profit co-chaired by
Walter Cronkite,
television
broadcasters earned around $771
million from political
advertising in
2000.
After World
War II, Allied forces restricted
media concentration in
occupied Germany and Japan because
Allied forces recognized that such
concentration promoted anti-democratic, fascist, political cultures.
"Most people in
America have no
idea what is happening even though our very
democracy is at stake."-
Federal Communications Commission commissioner
Jonathan Adelstein.
"A confluence of government policy and
corporate strategy is poisoning the television business. In 1995 the Federal
Communications Commission allowed networks for the first time to own the
programs they broadcast. In the mid 1990s there were 40 independent production
companies. By 2007 were no independent production companies. Your television
may receive 200 channels, but virtually every one is owned by one of the six
conglomerates - NBC Universal, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom/Paramount, Sony and
News Corp." - Marshall Herskovitz 11/07
CopyrightWithin the original
body of the Constitution of the United
States of America individuals were
given all rights, for a limited time, to their
creations.
Creative works originally held an intial
copyright period of 28 years from the date publication; a copyright could be
renewed for another 28 years for a total of 56 years.
The 1976 Copyright Act changed existing copyright. After January 1, 1978,
the copyright period was changed to life of the
author plus fifty years after the author's demise.
In June 26, 1992, the
1976 Copyright Act was amended to extend all copyrights still in existence to a
term of 75 years.
For works created after January 1, 1978, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act, signed into law on October 27, 1998,
amends the copyright protection term to
endure for the life of the author plus an
additional 70 years. For anonymous and pseudonymous works and works made for
hire, the term will be 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years
from the year of creation. For pre-1978 works
still in their original or renewal term of copyright, the total term is
extended to 95 years.
"It was under Eisner's watch that Walt Disney was
the driving force behind the Sonny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Much of Walt Disney's success was
due to its widespread use of stories and concepts from the public domain." - by
Mike Masnick
Copyright periods have been more than
doubled recently.
This benefits the
corporate
elites in three ways:
first,
corporate
elites retain a revenue stream;
second, information known only by
the corporate
elite is retained by the
corporate
elite;
third,
important broad health knowledge,
economic and statistical
trend
knowledge,
psychological operations
knowledge, ecological and
environmental
knowledge and
other general
knowledge that concerns every
individual citizen is not available to
the general public because it lies deeply buried in a mass of separately
packaged and largely insignificant knowledge that must be purchased
separately, the accumulative cost of which is
exhorbinant to the individual but not to
the corporate
elites interests.
(Aside: This is
one of the reasons that America is no
longer competitive in the
global marketplace. If you keep the information
from those who could use it to create new
business models and methodologies you reduce the ability of the cutting edge
American entrepreneur to compete against
global corporate
elite
conglomerates.)
"We all know that our State Department, the
Pentagon, and the White House have brazenly proclaimed that they have the right
and the power to manage the
news, to tell us not the
truth but what they want us to
believe." - Myron Fagan Although Americans have
a tremendous number of magazines,
newspapers, cable channels and
web sites available, most of them originate from 'highly centralized outlets' that
proffer a remarkably homogenized news.
News
services for dailies throughout
America are provided by the Associated
Press, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the
Washington Post wire services, and several foreign wire
services like Reuters. The
ideological viewpoint of these 'news' conduits are the same.
Fear is a powerful means
for establishing social control over a population.
Regular viewers of violent
films and/or
television programming often look upon
the Earth as being more
frightening, dangerous, and violent than those who view the same
mass media products in much less quantities or not at
all.
Psychiatrist Robert Coles writes that
children in some parts of
America are more
frightened than
children in Lebanon or Northern Ireland;
this may very well have to do with the fact that some of the most
violent programming on
television are cartoons aimed at very
young children.
The potential consequences to
this are staggering. A generation brought up on
fear may be willing to back the
commision of immoral acts in order to protect themselves from
imagined threats that do not
exist in reality.
The radio, the computer, and the
internet are all products
of the military.
The
radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in the
mid-1890's and his first sale was to the British
war office in 1896 during the Boer
war. Three years later, Guglielmo Marconi
made sales to the American
navy. During
World War I,
America put all
commercial, amateur, and
military (except for the
army's) radio equipment under the
control of the
navy, a
monopoly pursued immediately after
the war, as well. (Guglielmo Marconi was a
staunch supporter of the fascism which
dominated Italy beginning in the 1920's
and Benito Mussolini was the best
man at Guglielmo Marconi's 1927
wedding.)
The first operational electronic computer, Colossus, was
built as a part of the ULTRA project for the British department of
communication in the foreign office to
assist in the decoding of intercepted nazi transmissions encoded with the
German electromechanical devices known as the Enigma and the Geheimscheiber.
The first code-breaking machine, Colossus
or Mark I, was built at Bletchley Park, a government research center north of London,
and was operational, cracking German codes, by December 1943. It employed
approximately 1,800 vacuum tubes for computations.
The first electronic
computer designed to be capable of being
reprogrammed by rewiring to solve a full range of computing problems was
ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer came out of a
relationship between the Moore School of
Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and the
Ballistics Research Lab operated
by the army ordinance department at the
Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. It was
designed expressly for the
solution of ballistics problems and for the
printing of range tables.
The grandparent of the internet is the
ARPAnet, which came about in 1969. The Defense Agency Research Projects
Administrations (DARPA) of the Department of Defense wished to
create a communications infrastructure for the
American
military that could
survive a
nuclear attack. "Many of the
best attributes of the internet – including its architecture,
technology, and gestalt – are
the children of this military
prototype.
With
World War I dragging on in Europe
Bernard Baruch and Edward Mandell House suggested to
Woodrow Wilson that there needed to be
a way to convince the American public to go to war.
The Committee of Public
Information(Creel
Commission) primed and greased the propaganda machine.
"The
conscious and intelligent
manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important
element in a democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of
society constitute
an invisible government
which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds
are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a
logical result of the way in which our
democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of
human
beings must
cooperate in this manner if they
are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily
lives, whether in the sphere of politics or
business, in our
social conduct or our
ethical thinking, we are dominated by the
relatively small number of
persons...who understand the
mental processes and
social patterns of the masses. It is
they who pull the wires which control the
public mind." - Edward Louis Bernays*
{Edward
Louis Bernays* combined the
ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter
on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. Edward Bernays felt it was necessary to
manipulate the public through propaganda to
dampen down the "herd instinct". Edward Bernays, author of Propaganda,
was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public
opinion using the psychology of the
subconscious.}
Walter Lippmann argued
propaganda was necessary to 'manufacture consent' and that 'the
common interests elude public
opinion entirely'. To this end
Walter Lippmann suggested
propaganda could only be understood and
managed by a 'specialized class' of 'responsible men' who are intelligent enough to
figure out what was best for Americans.
Edward Bernays*, the
father of the public relations industry, and
Walter Lippmann, the dean of
American
journalists, a major foreign and
domestic policy critic, and an important
theorist of
liberal
democracy were drafted along with a group of
cartoonists, writers, editors, publishers and
others whose profession was to
convey information to the populace.
As one of the most successful propaganda campaigns
within a year Edward Bernays,
Sigmund Freud's nephew, and
Walter Lippmann were able to
turn the Americans from a population
friendly to Germans into a fervent anti-German populace.
"In the days before
radio and television, public opinion was
controlled almost exclusively by
newspapers. There must have been
more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period
of the world's history." - Arthur
Ponsonby
"The Northcliffe (Jewish-owned) press did more before and
during the war to embitter and deliberately poison the English mind against
Germany than any other agency." - Clinton Hartley Grattan
The ease with
which the American public was
manipulated caught the attention of two
groups in particular.
One was the
intellectual community which
understood these new propaganda
techniques provided a general means to control
popular opinion on a regular basis.
The other group consisted
of corporate interests, who saw a window of
opportunity to increase sales by
turning the Americans into a
population of
consumers.
The lesson learned was that in order to adequately persuade a
population to do something
one needed to appeal to them on an emotional level of which they are unaware.
German television in the
early 1930's had been conceived as primarily
a tool of propaganda rather than a means
of entertainment. A limited
number of cinemas were equipped with 180-line projector receivers so that Nazi
Party propaganda could be disseminated
easily, and cinema television was used
throughout the war for troop
entertainment.
"Violence is to a dictatorship, what
propaganda is to a
democracy." The Nazis used both.
Joseph Goebbels, appointed Reich Minister for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda on March
14, 1933, combined the press,
radio, film, theater, and
propaganda into a single, large-scale
organization and considered the mass media as "a
piano…in the hands of the
government" on which the
government could
play.
Joseph Goebbels realized monotony may set in if all
types of mass media reported the same information,
so he developed a
theory that the mass
media should be "uniform in principle" but "polyform in
nuances."
Joseph Goebbels
concepts are used by
American mass
media today.
"If you were a kid in the late 1950's, there's a
good chance
your thinking was shaped by two
television programs, The Mickey
Mouse Club and Howdy Doody." -
Bill O'Reilly,The No Spin
Zone
"'Hey, kids, what time
is it?' some guy named Buffalo Bob yelled. A studio
audience packed with kids
screamed back, 'Howdy Doody time!' This gave me
such a headache, I can't tell you. I
can still hear Sis singing, 'M-I-C
– see you real soon – K-E-Y – why? Because we like you!'
I was outraged! However, you will notice that more than
forty years after first hearing these
lines, I still remember them. That's the
power of the
tube." - Bill O'Reilly,The No Spin
Zone
It is very difficult for
a human to kill another
human;
humans have to be
manipulated to do so. During
World War II, when left to their own
devices, only 15-20% of individual
riflemen would fire their weapon at an
exposed enemy
target.
This was blamed
primarily upon the training they received in which they would practice shooting
at a bull's-eye. Bull's-eyes don't appear on the battlefield and after the
war, the
military switched to
human shaped
targets. By the Vietnam war, 95% of the
riflemen fired their
weapons at an exposed
enemy target.
Today, the Marine Corps use a modified
version of the first individual action
game Doom (known as Marine
Doom) as a training device, along with the traditional live ammunition
range targets as a means of normalizing
killing among the soldiers. This has been so
successful that the Marine Corps Combat
and Development Command in Quantico, Virginia has evaluated more than
thirty commercially
available electronic games for their potential use as miltary training tools.
The American
military has acknowledged for decades
the success of using
human likeness
targets to enhance
killing ability. Is the effect of similar video
games the same on kids?
With this in mind, the rise of
school shootings should come as no
surprise.
Upon America's entry into
World War II, Hollywood
film makers,
John Huston,
John Ford,
Howard Hawks, and
Frank Capra, were hired by the
American government to make
propaganda
films for home and abroad.
(John Ford received Presidential Medal of
Freedom.)
In England three of
Alfred Hitchcock's classics
Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat were made as
propaganda films. After the
World War II,
Alfred Hitchcock directed
two short documentaries in England, filmed in French and shown in France after
the Liberation. Akira Kurosawa did the same for Japan with his film The Most Beautiful.
Laurence Olivier was a major
Hollywood presence when he made
the propaganda
films while enlisted, That Hamilton Woman, 49th Parallel, and The Demi-Paradise.
That Hamilton Woman
was made to gather pro-British support from the American people and was
Winston Churchill's favorite film.
In 1942, Alec
Guinness, an accomplished actor and enlisted man was given special leave to
make his New York stage debut in a propaganda play.
Alec Guinness had roles in Oliver Twist, The Bridge on the River Kwai,
Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago and as Obi-Wan "Ben"
Kenobi in Star
Wars.
During World War II,
Jimmy Stewart flew 20 missions
over Germany as a bomber
pilot, rising from a private to a
full colonel.
Jimmy Stewart retired in 1968 from
the Air Force Reserves as a brigadier general.
Jimmy Stewart was the
highest-ranking entertainer
in the American
military.
Jimmy Stewart received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Neville Brand was discharged in
1946, after 10 years in the American army,
as the 4th most decorated soldier of World
War II .
Neville Brand had roles in the
television show Combat and the
movies, Stalag 17, Birdman of Alcatraz, That Darn Cat!, and Tora! Tora! Tora!.
Lee Marvin is
buried at Arlington National Cemetery alongside some of the highest ranking
soldiers in the
history of the
American armed
forces.
Lee Marvin's career spanned
more than forty years and included The Wild One, The Killers, The Dirty Dozen, The Iceman Cometh, The Big Red One, Gorky Park, and Delta Force.
Lee Marvin was awarded a
purple heart for being shot in
the ass.
In the 1940's,
John F. Kennedy hung out with
Spencer Tracy,
Clark Gable,
Lana Turner,
Gary Cooper,
Walter Huston,
Sonja Hennie,
Gene Tierney,
Peggy Cummins, and
Sam Spiegel.
At
this time Joseph P. Kennedy,
John F. Kennedy's father, was an
American ambassador, a confidant of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a
friend of Winston Churchill.
(Note: Joseph P. Kennedy made his fortune importing liquor during prohibition.
John F. Kennedy was the son of
illegal drug smuggler!)
Robert Montgomery served as
president Dwight Eisenhower's
speech writer and advisor who later appointed him as a special consultant to
the president on television and public
communications.
In 1947,
Robert Montgomery headed the
Hollywood Republican Committee to elect
Thomas E. Dewey president and in the 1960's, served as a
communication consultant to
John D. Rockefeller, III.
Robert Montgomery was best
known for the
movies Riptide, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, They Were Expendable, The Gallant Hours
In April 1953, Cecil B.
DeMille, Paramount Studios, was appointed as a special consultant to the
government on cinema
propaganda.
Cecil B. DeMille
believed that the most effective use of
American
films was not to
design an entire
image to cope with a certain problem, but
rather to see to it that in a regular
film, the right line, aside,
inflection, or eyebrow movement was introduced to reflect
government
desired
American attitudes to whatever subject was
at hand.
Cecil B. DeMille once said to C.D.
Jackson, of Dwight Eisenhower's
Committee of International Information Activities - who also had ties to
the Central Intelligence Agency - that,
"anytime I could give him [Luigi Luraschi, a longtime senior
executive at Paramount Studios] a
simple problem for a country or an area, he would find a way of dealing with it
in a movie."
In 1956, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met
with John Ford,
John Wayne, and
Merian Cooper, to discuss how
Hollywood could promulgate the concept of
"militant liberty".
They agreed on the
imperative to produce films which
would "explain the 'true'
conditions existing under
communism … and to explain the
principles upon which the 'free world'
way of life is based.
Kirk Douglas was a Goodwill
Ambassador for the State Department and the United
States Information Agency beginning in 1963. In 1981,
Kirk Douglas was the recipient
of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, "the highest
honor bestowed on a
private
citizen."
George L. Murphy was a
Republican U.S. Senator for the State of
California from 1965-1971. George L.
Murphy films include The Navy
Comes Through, Battleground, and Border G-Man.
Audie L. Murphy was the most
decorated American combat soldier of World
War II. Audie L. Murphy
received every decoration for valor that this country had to offer, thirty
three awards and the Medal of Honor, plus 5 decorations presented to him by
France and Belgium.
Audie L.
Murphy suffered from
post traumatic stress disorder.
His first wife, Wanda Hendrix often talked of his struggle with his condition,
claiming he had at one time held her at gun point.
Audie L. Murphy was plagued by
insomnia and
depression. During the mid-1960s
he became dependent for a time on doctor prescribed sleeping
pills called Placidyl.
Audie L. Murphy
movies include Battle
at Bloody Beach, The Quiet
American, To Hell and
Back and Beyond
Glory
Don
Knotts, best known as the character
Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show, served in the Pacific in
World War II receiving the Victory
Medal, among other decorations.
(Andy Griffith was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of
Freedom.)
The Pentagon has always understood that the
film
industry as an important part of public
relations; according to a recently released memo, "military depictions have become more of an
advertisement for us,'" which
explains the Air Force's eagerness to be a part of the
short lived 2002 CBS 'reality' television series, American Fighter Pilots, which followed
three men as they trained to fly F-15s, and was
executive produced by
Tony Scott (director of Top Gun) and his
brother
Ridley Scott (director of Black Hawk Down).
Upon the release of Top
Gun, the American
navy set up recruiting booths in theaters
where the film was being shown to
capitalize on the pro-military fervor
the film encapsulated.
Due to the enormous expense of
military equipment, it makes financial
sense for a film
maker to get
military
cooperation. However, this often
entails the altering of scripts to fit the
desires of the
Pentagon (i.e.
military and
government personnel are to be depicted
in more positive and heroic ways, 'American' ideologies are reinforced and not criticized,
etc.).
For example:
In Goldeneye (1995), the original
script had a American
navy admiral betraying
state secrets, but this was
changed to make the traitor a member of the French
navy.
The Jackal (1997) received help
after the marines were given a better role. Major Nancy LaLuntas had objected that the
helicopter pilots had no "integral part in the action – they are
effectively taxi drivers." A letter from the film's director, Michael
Caton-Jones, stated: "I am certain that we can address the points that you
raised … and effect the appropriate changes in the screenplay that you
requested."
Cooperation had
been given to the production of Top Gun after the character
portrayed by Kelly McGillis had been changed from an enlisted
individual to someone outside the
military, as
relationships between
officers and enlisted personnel are
against the Uniform Code of Military
Justice.
Although Hearts in Atlantis had no
military in the
plot, the
film makers wanted to use land
belonging to the army. The
Pentagon suggested that the
film could include a shot of an
army recruiting booth in a carnival scene.
Despite having made changes to characters in Independence Day, the
Department of Defense refused help because, "the
military appears impotent and/or inept;
all advances in stopping alien
invaders are the result of actions by civilians."
Movies that receive assistance from
the Pentagon show the
military in a
glorious
light of mythic proportions and include Air Force One, A Few Good Men, Armageddon, The Hunt for Red October, Pearl Harbor, Patriot Games, Windtalkers, Hamburger Hill, The
American president, Behind
Enemy Lines, Apollo
13, Tomorrow Never
Dies, and A Time to
Kill.
Movies that
were denied assistance from the Pentagon portray
the reality of war and include Apocalypse Now, Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, The Last Detail, Lone Star, Platoon, and The Thin Red Line.
In August of 1999, the American
Army signed a five-year, $45 million deal
with the University of Southern
California, chosen because of its close proximity to Hollywood, to have the
school's
movie, special-effects and
other
technology
experts help with
troop training, including battle
scenarios, virtual-reality
combat, and large-scale simulations
creating settings similar to Operation Desert
Storm.
Jack Valenti said of the this partnership,
known as the Institute for Creative
Technologies, "The digital world, the world of
virtual reality … is going to
be part of the embrace of this great, new cooperative venture."
According to James Der
Derian, professor of international relations at
Brown University, "What we're witnessing
here today is perhaps not only the
announcement of a new sort of technological center, but the
creation of a
military-industrial-media-entertainment
complex."
In the early 1980's, the
American Army asked Atari to
create a special version of the game
Battle Zone as a training tool for drivers of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
J.W. "Wild Bill" Stealy, the chairman of
Interactive Magic, a North Carolina software company, is an
Air Force Academy graduate and retired
Air Force officer. His company produced Carrier
Strike Fighter, a flight and combat simulator of the iF/A-18E, a fighter
jet that had yet to be put into general operation.
MAK Technologies won
a 1997 Department of Defense contract to make
Marine Exed Unit 2000, an amphibious assault game intended for both
military and
commercial
markets.
Every year, the
American government hosts the Connections
Conference, which is intended to unite members of the
Department of Defense and video game makers.
Attendees include personnel of the Defense
Intelligence Agency and game companies like GT Interactive. Conference
agendas have included such topics as 'Wargaming
Design
Fundamentals' and 'Department
of Defense Wargaming 101'.
Col. Kenneth "Crash" Konwin, head of the
Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, and Larry Tuch, a writer and
designer with Paramount Digital
Entertainment detailed how their
organizations have adapted Hollywood multimedia
technology and blockbuster
movie
storytelling skills to
create realistic simulations that teach
military
officers how to make better decisions
during international crises."
In early 2003, ABC
aired a short lived 'reality' series entitled Profiles from the
Front Line executive produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down) and Bertram van Munster (The
Amazing Race), it followed various members of the armed
forces as they took part in the
invasion of
Afghanistan during the summer of
2002.
It was made with the
cooperation with the
Pentagon which screened the series before it was
aired.
Vince Ogilvie, who was
the Pentagon's project
officer for the series, said the
interactions of the film crews and military personnel provided 'a prelude to
the process of embedding'
media representatives in
military units for
war coverage.
In February of 2000,
the Dutch newspaper Trouw and France's Intelligence Newsletter reported that
the American Army's Fourth Psychological
Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg, NC, worked in
news at CNN's Atlanta headquarters
during the end of the 1999 Kosovo war. "In
the 1980's, officers from American Army's
Fourth Psychological Operations staffed the National
Security Council's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a
shadowy
government
propaganda agency that planted stories in
the American media supporting the
Ronald Reagan administration's Central
America policies.
A senior
American
official described National Security Council's Office of Public
Diplomacy as a 'vast psychological warfare operation of the
category the
military conducts to
influence a
population in
enemy territory.' An investigation by the
congressional General Accounting Office found that National Security Council's Office of Public
Diplomacy had engaged in 'prohibited, covert
propaganda activities'.
"The readiness with which the
mass media and
intellectuals adapt to and serve
their leaders surprises many who don't
grasp the extent to which the corporate media are a part of the imperial enterprise
structure, and how
naturally the
intellectual community accepts and
works within the parameters
fixed by imperial needs." - Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at
the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, had a special liking for
celebrities and most of
'friends' were movie
stars;
Dorothy Lamour,
Greer Garson,
Ginger Rogers,
Shirley Temple and
Judy Garland.
J. Edgar Hoover's special correspondents
list included radio and
television network presidents William
S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC/RCA; celebrities
Lawrence Welk,
Billy Graham,
Norman Vincent Peale, as well as
executives of Ford, Sears, The United
States Chamber of Commerce, and Warner Brothers.
From
time to time during the 1920's to the 1950's, Walter Winchell, one of the most
influential newsmen in the country both in print and on the
radio, would be asked by
J. Edgar Hoover to withhold the release
of news
stories for a myriad of reasons.
When the Federal Bureau of
Investigation made an arrest in the Linbergh baby kidnapping Walter
Winchell learned of Bruno Richard Hauptmann's capture less than an hour after
it had occurred. J. Edgar Hoover
requested that he sit on the story for 24 hours and Walter Winchell agreed.
J. Edgar Hoover reciprocated the
favor by providing Walter Winchell with
information as to evidence the Federal Bureau of
Investigation had amassed against Hauptmann.
Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and
Louella Parsons provided
J. Edgar Hoover with thousands of
confidential reports, from which he learned which
stars supposedly had marital,
drug or alcohol problems, venereal diseases, were
homosexual, or involved with under aged girls.
The
first known reference of
Ronald Reagan's name in an Federal Bureau of Investigation file is on
September 17, 1941, written by Hugh Clegg, the assistant special agent in
charge of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's Los Angeles Bureau.
Ronald Reagan was given the code name of
T-10. Louis B. Mayer selected
Ronald Reagan as a member of a
committee - also headed by Louis B.
Mayer - whose purpose
was to "purge" the movie industry of
Communist party members.
Ronald Reagan and
Louis B. Mayer , along with
Dick Powell,
Ray Milland and
Adolphe Menjou, were also
involved with the Hollywood Committee for the Re-Election of Joe
McCarthy.
From 1940 until his
death in 1966,
Walt Disney worked with the special agent
in charge of the Los Angles office of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and was known
as a "SAC contact".
On October 24, 1947,
Walt Disney testified before the
House Un-American Activities Committee that
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