Tag Archives: propaganda

Worse Than I Thought….

We’ve been onboard our ship for eight days, and it has been delightful; the sole complaint I have is that our only option for television news is Fox. (This may have something to do with the average age of the passengers, which looks to be somewhere around the mid-eighties, just barely older than the average age of Fox’s audience.)

At home, I almost never watch Fox. I see Jon Stewart’s clips and I read about some of the more outrageous and/or embarrassingly wrong reports that periodically become a topic of broader discussion, but this has been the first time I’ve been exposed to extended “real time” broadcasts.

It’s even worse than I thought.

Earlier today, during a discussion about the (genuine, troubling) IRS scandal, one blond “newscaster” turned to another and said the problem stemmed from the fact that President Obama has total power—“there are no mechanisms to keep him from doing whatever he wants. There has never been such a powerful chief executive.”

I am not making this up.

Blond bimbo evidently never heard of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, the Senate filibuster, Mitch McConnell, the Party of No….

Yesterday, there was a roundtable of some sort about Benghazi. I listened for a good ten minutes in an effort to figure out precisely what the participants believed the “scandal” was. What, exactly, do they think is being covered up? What misdeeds are suspected? What is it that they are insisting is “worse than Watergate?” Not a clue. But one of the hosts signed off the segment by saying “You’ll only hear about Benghazi on Fox, because all the other media are covering for the Obama Administration.”

Really?

Perhaps “all the other media” are hamstrung by that old-fashioned journalism practice called verification—the quaint notion that reporting requires demonstrable facts and that in the absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, responsible news organizations don’t manufacture and air stories, no matter how ideologically satisfying such stories might be.

A research project a year or so ago found that people who got most of their news from Fox knew less than people who didn’t follow the news at all.

I believe it.

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Politics and Pathology

There is a spectrum we all recognize in political debate: first is fact—verifiable, objective reality. Then there is spin—a partisan interpretation of that reality. And then there’s propaganda—flat out lying.

All politicians engage in spin that sometimes crosses the line into propaganda. The Romney campaign, however, seems constantly to operate in “propaganda” mode.

What are the differences?

Under “spin,” we might list things like Romney’s constant complaint that Obama hasn’t negotiated a “single trade agreement.” The President has revived agreements with Colombia, South Korea and Panama that had been stalled in Congress, but these aren’t technically new agreements. Romney promises to see the Keystone XL Pipeline built and implies that its construction would mean more oil for America, although pipeline owners have been clear that the oil is meant for Asian markets. Accusing the President of “apologizing for America” requires taking a lot of words out of context, but even this stretch probably falls within the typical political spin cycle.

Other pronouncements, however, are categorically, demonstrably untrue.

Perhaps the most egregious lie is that Obama has been a big spender—that under his administration, spending is “out of control.” Actually, as Rex Nutting reported in MarketWatch (a web site affiliated with that known liberal outfit The Wall Street Journal), you’d have to go back to the Eisenhower Administration to find a rate of federal spending growth lower than that of the Obama Administration. That conclusion holds even if you include the stimulus, which was passed by Bush but spent during Obama’s first year in office.

Romney repeatedly says the President “promised to bring unemployment below 8%,” but reporters have been unable to find a single instance of Obama making such a statement. He insists that repealing Obamacare will reduce the deficit, in the face of widely accepted Congressional Budget Office calculations demonstrating that repeal would vastly increase the deficit. Romney’s claims about job creation at Bain were so outsized he has had to walk them back.

There’s Romney’s widely criticized campaign ad featuring a recording of President Obama’s voice making a boneheaded remark about the economic meltdown—a recording conveniently “clipped” to remove the lead-in phrase: “Mr. McCain even said….” When confronted with this clear distortion, Romney admitted the President was quoting McCain, and laughed it off; worse,  he has continued to run the blatantly misleading spot.

More recently, Romney “quoted” The Escape Artist, a book about the Obama Administration, for assertions the book never made—the author has been making the rounds of political television rebutting Romney’s “quotes” (and happily suggesting that people buy the book to see for themselves).

There are plenty of other examples of persistent mendacity; so many, in fact, that there are a couple of websites cataloguing them. But the lies that mystify me are not those obviously motivated by political ambition and/or a calculation that a weakened media won’t notice. What mystifies me are the unforced, totally gratuitous lies.

Remember when Romney said he’d been a hunter in his youth? And then had to walk that assertion back when reporters could find no record of the permit he claimed to have held? Or his insistence that his father, George Romney (whom I greatly admired) had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King? His “memory” of that event was only corrected when photos surfaced placing the elder Romney somewhere else on the date of the supposed march.

Romney’s habitual, almost compulsive make-believe is provoking considerable comment. Time Magazine recently ran a pop-psychology article titled “The Root of Mitt Romney’s Comfort with Lying.”

Lying of this magnitude, I submit, is not political. It’s pathological.

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Losing Facts

I came to my computer keyboard this morning prepared to rant about the ever-growing dismissal of facts in favor of more useful spin–and increasingly, out-and-out lies. I was still annoyed by an email forwarded by a friend of mine, who sent it not because he agreed with it, but in order to demonstrate “what’s out there.” This particular message was full of anti-immigrant sentiment, and “facts” about how much undocumented immigrants supposedly cost the American taxpayers.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the economics of immigration, but I do know enough to recognize inaccurate propaganda, and the email was filled with it.

Before I began my post, however, I read this one at Daily Kos, and it made my point better than I could have. It’s a bit on the long side, but I hope you’ll read it to the end, because no matter what your politics, the extent to which we are ignoring reality and rewriting history in service of ideologies, left and right, is far and away the most dangerous threat we face.

What Ted Said

My upcoming IBJ column.

Right now, Americans are deeply involved in one of our periodic debates about government spending and the budget deficit. Important as that is, I am more concerned about our civic deficit—the widespread lack of basic constitutional literacy.

In these pages a couple of weeks ago, recently-retired Indiana Justice Ted Boehm made a strong case for the importance of civics education in a democracy. He focused especially on the need for an educated citizenry that appreciates the constitutional separation of powers: the assignment of different duties to different branches of government. His concerns are well-founded; barely 36% of Americans can even name the three branches, let alone explain the theory behind separation of powers and the role of the judiciary.

I agree with everything Justice Boehm said in that column—and then some.

The research is depressing. Fewer than half of 12th grade students can define federalism. Only 35% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Only five percent of high school seniors can define America’s system of checks and balances.

The consequences of this civic deficit are profound and alarming.

For one thing, when a country is very diverse, as in the United States, it is particularly important that citizens know the history and philosophy of their governing institutions; in the absence of other ties—race, religion, national origin—a common understanding of constitutional principles is critical to the formation of national identity.

A shared understanding of our most basic institutions is also necessary if we are to have productive—not to mention honest—political debates. When citizens are ignorant of the most elementary facts of our founding history, when they lack even the most rudimentary familiarity with the Founders’ philosophies (and yes, that’s plural, because the architects of our legal system were not a monolithic entity), they are easy prey for the propagandists, buffoons and conspiracy theorists that populate the airwaves and thrive on the internet.

Case in point: David Barton and his Wallbuilders have been around for a long time, offering a carefully edited—and inaccurate—“history” to those who find provisions of the actual Constitution inconvenient. He is a joke (or worse) among American historians and legal scholars. Recently, however, his revisionism has been embraced by Tea Party members of Congress, most notably Representative Michelle Bachmann. Among other things, Barton claims that state and local governments are not bound by the provisions of the Bill of Rights, because the Founders intended it to restrain only the federal government. He doesn’t mention that the 14th Amendment—adopted in 1868—changed that.

Students who have had even the most basic government course ought to know enough about the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment to reject this sort of nonsense out of hand. But clearly, they don’t. The result is that political discourse has become an exercise in which people occupying different realities talk past each other.

People who are civically literate can and do have good-faith differences of opinion about the application of constitutional principles to new “facts on the ground.” (Should the 4th Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable” searches prevent police from using information from your cell-phone provider without a warrant? What about NSA data-mining?)

I sometimes introduce discussions of original intent by asking my students what James Madison thought about porn on the internet. Madison could not have envisioned cyberspace, of course, but he had strong opinions about free expression. I don’t expect students to agree about what Madison’s position would be, but I do expect them to know who James Madison was.

Increasingly, they don’t.

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