Category: Media & Marketing Matters

Once we have established an individual or event as an American myth, marketers, the news media, politicians and others slowly hollow out the person or event of its content, so that it can come to represent anything—and everything.

I analyzed how the hollowed-out myth can be used as a symbol of anything when the new Robin Hood movie came out about six months ago.   The original Robin Hood was a kind of medieval version of an autocratic socialist, with the King replacing the state.  Hollowed out by frequent mutation, the Robin Hood myth bends to the will of the makers of the new movie, who reform Robin into a proto-Tea partier. 

But how do we hollow out the myth in the first place?  Let’s take the example of Martin Luther King, certainly our greatest civil rights leader, although those who make a claim for Malcolm X are entitled to their opinions.  We currently celebrate his day without really knowing what he stood for.  We know that he stands for civil rights, but civil rights means different things to different people. If you check out what politicians and writers have said about King these past few days, you’ll see most refer to his legend without defining it or attempt to morph that legend into the beliefs of the speaker or writer.  That’s the great thing about big empty words such as civil rights.  They can contain so many ideas!

This expatiation on myth-making leads to my encounter with the mainstream news media celebration of MLK Day this year: a short quiz titled “Martin Luther King Day: How much do you know about MLK? Take our quiz.”

This Christian Science Monitor online quiz comes one question at a time online and each question is immediately answered, which means that to learn what all 10 questions are or complete the multiple-choice survey you have to click through 20 screens, which gives you 20 chances to see (and click-through to) all of the advertising on each of these 20 pages. Very irritating, but hey, without the ads, there wouldn’t be a survey!  And then we wouldn’t know how much we do and do not know about Dr. King.

We’ll be more user-friendly and give you all 10 questions, sometimes with the wording slightly different.  Each question comes with four possible answers:

1. Where was he raised?
2. Why did Attorney general Robert Kennedy order MLK’s phones tapped in 1963?
3. What early event established MLK as an important civil rights leader?
4. MLK earned his doctorate from Boston University in what field?
5. What action by MLK angered President Johnson?
6. MLK served as leader of what organization?
7. Which of the four listed awards did MLK not receive?
8. The name of MLK’s final speech?
9. True or False: Malcolm X teamed up with MLK to organize the March on Washington in 1963?
10. When was MLK Day declared a federal holiday?

Even with the answer to these questions, one knows very little about what MLK believed in, except that it had to do with civil rights. The last question, “When was MLK Day declared a federal holiday?,” is merely the most extreme example of the irrelevance of all the questions and their one-fact answers to who Dr. King was and what he believed in.

We can infer a little extraneous information from the answers, e.g., that King may have been in contact with communists (question 2) and that it was under President Ronald Reagan that his birthday became a federal holiday (question 10).  In other words, while we learn nothing of his beliefs, we do get subtle reinforcement of right-wing cant.

In our minds, the factoids that Christian Science Monitor presents as knowledge about Dr. King come to replace the ideas that made MLK one of the greatest of 20th-century Americans.  Let’s recall some of them:

• A complete belief in non-violence as the most appropriate way to change society; Dr. King was profoundly Gandhi’s most important disciple.
• An understanding that overcoming the great divide between rich and poor (which shrank in the 60s and early 70s and has been increasing ever since) is at least as important as overcoming racism; the two in fact are closely intertwined as social objectives.
• A belief that the government should intervene to improve social ills, to equitably distribute wealth and to manage the economy.
• An opposition to all warfare.
• A belief that it was a central mission of organized religions to advocate and work to end the illnesses and inequities of the world.

We do come away from the survey knowing that Dr. King was important and deserves to be honored.  But the price tag for allowing Dr.  King into the pantheon of Great Americans is to homogenize his beliefs. 

Making MLK a day for volunteering also distorts the good Dr. King’s views.  While spending the day collecting for the poor, performing a charity show, reading to the elderly, cleaning up city parks and doing all the other things that people did yesterday are all admirable, this volunteering relates only in the most nebulous of ways to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers whom King enraptured and engaged 50 and 60 years ago.  Those volunteers did two things and two things only: Walk for peace and justice and sit for peace and justice.  Just as the news and marketing media transform King the social revolutionary into a nebulous civil rights leader, so volunteering for social action morphs into volunteering in ways that attend to social ills without addressing how to cure them.  King becomes a fatherly figure who reminds us to help out others, a kind of Smokey the Bear of volunteerism.

It seems as if no matter what time of day it is, whenever I turn on my local ESPN AM radio station, I hear an ad from the American Legion chiding us about the dangers illegal immigration poses to our economy and society.  The stern announcer imbues each word with ominous notes of fear, as he lists the supposed ills caused by undocumented immigrants.  The call to action, issued with an authoritarian sense of urgency, sends us online to an American Legion report which details its plan for curtailing illegal immigration. 

There is a back story to the report touted by the radio ad.  The report originally appeared in 2004 containing a number of truly scurrilous assertions about immigrants and immigration, such as “non-citizens make up 30% of the American prison population” and “more Americans are killed by undocumented aliens than die in the Iraq War.”  Several people noted these factual misstatements, in particular Sonia Scherr of the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Thankfully, the American Legion has sanitized the version of the report mentioned in the ad and currently available online.  The result, of course, is that its case against undocumented immigrants is now very weak, built mostly on unbacked assertions, old statistics and irrelevant tidbits of information. 

The economic assertions in the American Legion report are nothing more than myths and falsehoods.  Take it’s claim that our economy suffers from illegal immigration. A few months back, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a study that uses advanced statistical analysis to measure the short and long-term impact of immigration, both undocumented and legal, on jobs, wages, productivity and business investment in the United States over the past few decades.  The results of this extensive quantitative analysis support the contention that immigrants are good for the economy:

• Immigration has no impact on the employment of U.S.-born workers.  In other words, immigrants do not take jobs away from “real Americans.”
• When immigration increases, the wages of the average U.S. worker increases a little; in fact the study estimates that the gain in wages from additional immigration between 1990 and 2007 was about 20-25% of the total real increase in average annual income per worker.
• The productivity of the entire economy also improves as a result of increased immigration.

In reading the sanitized American Legion report, my view of the American Legion shifted a little.  I have always thought of the group as similar to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been hijacked by its right-wing to support causes that either don’t matter to its members or are not in the best interests of a majority of its members. 

But right there on the first of more than 20 pages of harsh recommendations to stem the flow of undocumented aliens into the country and make life miserable for those undocumented aliens now in the country, right there in the first bullet of Step One, the American Legion inserts a shill for jobs for its members: “Hire and train a sufficient number of U.S. Border Patrol agents to meet assigned objectives.  It is the American Legion position that employment preference be afforded former members of the U.S. Armed Forces.”    How’s that for tying a political agenda to an economic one!

My own view of immigration and undocumented immigrants is diametrically opposed to that of the American Legion.  I would propose amnesty for current undocumenteds (and their families) who hold jobs and pay taxes into our system and I would increase opportunities for legal immigration at all levels, especially from Mexico.  Additionally, I would tax foreign imports from countries that do not hew to our labor rates and environmental standards.  My assumption is that these countries would much rather give the money to their workers and their companies than to the U.S. government, and so gradually wage rates from exporting countries would equalize at our higher level and there would be less incentive for the workers to immigrate to the U.S.  As with most of my views, the net effect would be to transfer money down the economic ladder, from the wealthy and very wealthy to the middle and working classes of several countries, including our own.

Apart from the difference of opinion I have with the organization, I dislike the American Legion’s manipulative use of fear tactics in the ads.  Fear is a great motivator, but to instill it in a population without reason is a frequent tool of demagogues and authoritarian regimes.

The American Legion evidently has the money to mount a full-fledged national radio advertising campaign to express uninformed opinions about immigration.  I’m thinking that it would serve its members better if that money went to further enlightening the public and Congress on post-traumatic stress disorder, the need for job training programs for vets and the challenges facing caregivers of disabled vets.    

Legal immigrants in upstate New York taking a class to help them prepare for the test to become U.S. citizens…

Senior citizens in rural North Carolina in the middle of an exercise class at a rehab center…  

A loving extended family celebrating a housewarming in Santa Clara, California…

32 students at a major university in Virginia…

What do all these people have in common with Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords plus U.S. District Judge John Roll and the five other innocent people slaughtered this past weekend in Tucson?

All have been gunned down in mass murders by mentally unstable individuals over the past few years. And that’s just a partial list.

And how do the news media  and politicians react to this latest demonstration that it’s too easy for nuts to get guns in America nowadays?

Most media and many politicians are blaming the overheated rhetoric in the political environment today.  Some media that have blamed violent words for this violent deed include CNN, CBS, The Washington Post,  The New York Times and the Associated Press. Now while it’s true that Sarah Palin, Carl Paladino and others have used inherently violent weapons analogies in their speeches and comments, I believe that by focusing on “words” instead of “actions” our politicians and columnists are silent about the real problem. 

Words did not shoot and kill these people and the many more victims of mass murders over the past few years.  Nuts with easy access to guns killed them.   And while most reporters seem to assiduously refrain from telling if the shooters got their guns legally, we know that many of them did. 

And even if they did not get the guns legally, they had them because of the ease with which anyone can buy a gun in the United States.  Over the past 10 years, many state legislatures have loosened guns laws, always the most permissive in the industrialized world (which goes a long way to explaining why the rate of violent crime is so much higher in the U.S. than virtually all other democratic industrialized nations).

Make no mistake about it: our gun laws are too liberal in every area: requirements and testing for gun ownership; identification needed to purchase a gun; waiting period before purchase; number of guns allowed; number of ways that guns can be purchased; types of guns permitted to be owned; places where guns can be carried; recertification requirements.  In all these areas, we should add new restrictions.  The result would be fewer guns in the street and fewer guns in the hands of irresponsible and mentally unstable people.

Those who spout the hoary and false adage that “when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns” ignore the large number of deaths from friendly fire that occur each year.  One study reveals that a gun in the home is four times more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense.

The millions of responsible hunters, some of them friends of mine, should willingly submit to the hassle of greater regulations and limits to protect society, just as all of us submit to the hassle of greater airport security and the requirement to get and renew a driver’s license and hold automobile insurance.

Focusing on the violence of language as the cause for the latest mass shooting is a convenient way to ignore the real problem, to be sure.  Toning down language is also an implicit part of any “healing process,” and after a mass murder, especially of prominent people, society in general wants to heal.  For these reasons, it’s understandable why so many are connecting this latest mass violence to heightened political rhetoric.

But if, in addition to or instead of healing, you want to prevent more mass murders by nuts with guns, you’ll start clamoring for stronger gun control laws.  You’ll write all your elected officials supporting gun control.  You’ll donate to organizations and associations fighting to strengthen gun controls.  And you’ll support candidates vocally in favor of more control and vote against candidates who want to loosen controls even more.

This latest mass murder really shook up our household because, as usual, it was so senseless.  It made me think of Yoshimatsu’s “While an Angel Falls into a Doze…,” a wonderfully moving musical evocation of a momentary rent in the fabric of existence that makes everyone and everything seem to drip with sorrow.  A poem I wrote more than 25 years ago that appeared in the last issue of Yawp! in 2003 tried to express that idea, too.  Here it is:

AN ANGEL PASSES OVER

Villains and heroes die often, in many ways,

in text, in song, in film and theatre.

 

On monuments to war, innocents and soldiers

die together, their causes dying with them.

 

Presidents and martyrs die one time each year,

while every night the news displays the incoherent death

 

of many, some by name, some by implication,

all dying twice, once at six, once in recap.

 

A friend may die on several days each week,

another every time a certain song is heard.

 

A favorite aunt will die in prayer.

A brother dies in every mirror.

 

A father’s death occurs in boozy dream,

while in a trembling moment after sleep,

 

a mother dies, again and again.  A wife, a child,

who can count the times they die each day?

 

in shrieking brake, in distant slam,

with every ringing phone, on every turning page.

 

The rain falls twice upon this pall of earth,

once so hard, droplets bounce

 

from bricks, from cars, from glass,

flicker candle-like, and fall a second time.

About six months ago, I defined 15 specific propaganda techniques routinely used by the mainstream news media to distort the coverage of news.  Staring in my face—or perhaps hiding in plain sight is a more appropriate phrase—all this time has been a 16th technique. 

The newly identified technique is the complete disregard of a fact, incident, study or opinion. 

We’ve discussed instances of the news media ignoring studies or events with some frequency over the past 18 months. Here’s the latest example:  On Monday, January 3, “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair released the results of a survey they conducted together that revealed that 61% of all Americans think that we should solve our budget deficit problem by taxing the wealthy.  Cutting military spending was the next most popular solution for closing the gap between how much our government spends and how much it collects, but it clocked in with a mere 20% support among Americans.

A Google News search reveals that as of today a mere 36 news media and blogs had covered the survey, although it was 44 when I checked yesterday.  Among those who did not cover this story are The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Let’s take a look at how this compares to Google News numbers on the Internet media, including newspapers, broadcast news and blogs, coverage of other feature news today.   By feature news, I mean stories that the news media are under no obligation to carry.  They are obligated to cover hard news, which would include election results or a marriage involving British royalty. 

I’ll let my dear readers serve as judges as to how many of these stories are more important than knowing that most people want to address a pressing economic problem by taxing the wealthy.  In considering your response, remember that most of the publicity and talk of closing the deficit involves cutting programs and benefits.  Also remember that what the media discusses extensively in stories and blogs typically is a key determinant in the decision-making process in Congress and the Executive branch of government:

• 1,711 stories on the winning of a lottery.
• 1,566 stories on a trade fair for computer manufacturers.
• 2,395 stories on a college football bowl game.
• 2,277 stories on the pretrial hearing of Michael Jackson’s physician.
• 244 stories on Kellie Pickler (who???) getting married.

Maybe those who control the mass media think that if they ignore the study and hammer us with right-wing cant that the opinions of the American people will change…or perhaps just go away.

They give us fast food and circuses.  And after a while, we see so many circuses that we think that only the clowns and acrobats matter. 

 

I thought I was done raging about the fact that so many liberal commentators are holding the Comedy Central rally up as the one mass initiative on the liberal side of the aisle during the last election season, especially when comparing liberal mass actions to the Glen Beck rally and other Tea party confabulations.  These liberal writers forget about the other liberal Washington, D.C. rally on October 2nd, which represented a coalition of progressive and labor groups (and not the predilections of TV personalities).  As I have stated before, all three rallies attracted about the same size crowd.

Yes, I thought I had spewed all my angry words about this issue.

But now comes Thomas Frank, the armchair liberal who wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas and The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. Mr. Frank has held up Comedy Central rally as the symbolic liberal act of the 2010 election cycle in his essay titled “The Fatal Center” in this month’s Harper’s. 

Frank’s point, which has real merit, is that the Democrats rushed to the center in the election, instead of remaining true to their liberal-left heartstrings.  Then he introduces Jon Stewart’s rally (I added the bold):

“I was thinking about all this as I watched the last act of the 2010 election cycle, comedian Jon Stewart’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity,’ jokingly known as the ‘million moderate march…Here at last was the liberal counterpart to the Tea Party movement.”

Wrong, Mr. Frank: The liberal counterpoint to the Tea Party movement was the progressive-liberal rally, which the mainstream news media practically ignored and which everyone including liberals immediately forgot about.

Frank goes on to say that the Stewart rally was really a centrist move, which proves his point about liberals moving towards the center.  If he had selected the October 2nd  progressive rally as his example, he would not have made his case, since that rally stayed true to long-time progressive and liberal ideals.

I can understand why the mainstream media and the right-wing Foxites would want to replace a progressive initiative symbolically with the actions of pranksters.  But why has the liberal media formulated this inaccurate and in a way offensive conflation?

My only explanation is that it is another in a series of moves by so-called progressives to distance themselves from the labor movement, which was a major organizer of the progressive-labor Washington rally, similar to President Obama’s misguided embrace of union-busting charter schools.   

In Shakespeare’s version of the Julius Caesar story, Caesar struggles against his assassins in the Senate chambers until he sees his good friend and protégé Brutus draw his knife, at which point Caesar whimpers, “Et tu, Brute, so fall Caesar.” “Et tu” is Latin for “You, too?!”

The “Et tu, Brutus” moment for a true rendering of what happened in the last election season—the suppression of progressive voices in the mainstream news media—may have come yesterday in Frank Rich’s column in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times. 

Just as The New York Review of Books did in its most recent issue, Rich juxtaposes the Comedy Central Washington rally with the one held by Glen Beck.  And just as the NY Review did, Rich forgets to mention the rally for progressives, which also took place in Washington, D.C. during the election season and drew approximately as many people as these other two rallies.  It seems as if our most consistently liberal voices over the past decades of regression are using the imagery of right-wing rhetoric. 

Details define reality, and over time, those details get frozen into history.  Over time, certain details are always in the histories and media descriptions of an epoch, incident or nation, and some are always forgotten.  For example, Lincoln made a number of speeches during the Civil War, but we always remember the one he gave after the Battle of Gettysburg because that’s the one that journalists, pundits, historians and history professors decided was important.

By deleting the progressives rally from the narrative, Rich and everyone else drives the dialogue rightward in these ways:

• Trivializes the left, by making as its symbol a TV network dedicated to amusing people (and which also broadcasts the Reaganistic “South Park”).
• Cooks the numbers, since two left-looking rallies with from 75,000-100,000 participants beats one rightwing rally with from 75,000-100,000 participants.
• Leaves unions completely out of the media image of the left coalition, since unions were a central focal point of the now-forgotten progressives rally but were not highly visible at the Comedy Central rally.

As I have stated a number of times in OpEdge over the past year, the real story of this year’s election is the mainstream news media helping the Republicans, for example, by:

• Framing the healthcare debate in Republican terms
• Overestimating the importance of the Tea Party early on
• Focusing all attention on Republican primary races and none on Democratic primary races
• Ignoring signs of progressive political activity or shows of strength, such as the progressives’ rally.

One central theme in the continuing post-election autopsy is the idea that the Obama Administration could not articulate strong messages.  I disagree: the messages were strong enough, but in the contemporary world, between most message givers and their audience is a messenger ruthlessly selecting what it will deliver and often distorting the message.