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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
The Threat And The State Part 3: Juicing It Up
One of retired tennis star Andre Agassi's commercials for some camera company or other featured the tag line "Image is everything." Well, maybe not everything, but it does have an important role in the political dynamics of our time.
I speak here not of the engineered images of political figures, but of the images they contrive to present us, of our own condition. In this undertaking, the collaboration of allies in the Old Media, which still possess a preponderance of the channels of information and opinion distribution, is essential. Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, the medium isn't entirely the message, but it does have a disproportionate power to impose filters and differential emphases. So enlisting the support of the right parties in the media is essential to any politician or interest group spokesman who wants to shape popular perceptions to his advantage.
Not long ago, in fulminating over a particularly heinous crime, I oriented a screed around the thesis that word gets around. Of course, given the nature of that crime, its perpetrators, and its victims, I was immediately castigated as a racist Neanderthal -- by persons so eager to show preferential treatment to one race, including automatic exculpation for the most horrible crimes, that the insult becomes a supreme irony. Every last one of those attackers missed the central point. In so doing, they strengthened my thesis beyond my own power to do so.
Word gets around. Really and truly. "Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) But the ways in which it gets around, the width of dissemination and the rates of transmission those ways offer, are as important as "the word" itself. They carry a message of their own, which sometimes eclipses the overt message they purport to transmit.
Political forces often channel a particular report into particular media, in the hope that it will conduce to the attainment of their agendas. For example, a politician might contrive to disclose information damaging to him personally, perhaps admission of an affair or a dubious association, through a minor print organ or a Web news service rather than allow it to appear first in a major national daily. If and when the story does reach the larger and more prestigious media, he has a chance to mitigate its impact by saying it's "old news." We saw an example of this in the Monica Lewinsky affair, which broke through Matt Drudge's Website and in the pages of the National Enquirer. I have little doubt that President Clinton's media allies hoped to contain the damage in this fashion; they knew that word would get around, but channeling the disclosure through two minor organs offered the possibility of dampening its long-term effects.
But when a story appears to support the priorities of a political force, we will see the reverse: minor matters and developments of ambiguous import will be played up beyond their significance, given front-page treatment by the most prestigious organs and thundered about on their editorial pages. The New York Times is particularly susceptible to this sort of perceptual engineering. The flap about the hole in the Arctic icecap a few summers ago is a case in point. The Times's editorial staff is unreservedly on board with the left-environmentalist agenda, and the "hole at the Pole" could be reported in a fashion suitable to the promotion of the "global warming" canard. The decision about treatment followed naturally. Its impact, despite the Times's subsequent qualification of the implications of the report -- it developed that the icecap hole is a seasonal, regularly observable occurrence -- was considerable.
Students of journalistic practice are taught early on about "framing." A story must be placed in a specific context -- the word "narrative" often appears here -- for it to make sense to the reader. An old chestnut I've used to good effect makes this plain:
Smith: "I was walking home today, and I saw a teenager rush at an old woman, knock her down, roll her along the street and slap her from head to toe."Jones: "Horrible! That sort of thing should get him life in prison."
Smith: "Wait, did I mention that her clothes were on fire?"
That last sentence makes quite a difference to the "narrative," doesn't it? Without it, we've got the standard teenager-thug atrocity report that makes one want to see a policeman stationed on every corner. With it, we've got a mildly heroic story in which a young man comes to the aid of an accident victim. Had Smith wanted Jones to adopt the former "narrative," he would have omitted the last sentence completely...or delayed it for a few days, as the Times did with its admission that the hole in the Arctic icecap is a seasonal occurrence that's been observed for several decades.
When a threat appears useful to a political force, whether that force is inside or outside the State, it will attempt to engineer popular perceptions in a way that maximizes the threat. When data becomes available that mitigates the threat, the force will strive to marginalize that data, whether by controlling the style in which it's reported or by channeling the reportage through an organ of little influence or dubious reputation.
This need not be the result of conscious decisions on anyone's part. The barons of the news business are subject to "narratives" quite as much as the rest of us. Howell Raines's downfall over the Jayson Blair scandal illustrated that quite neatly. Raines had sold himself on the proposition that any doubts of Blair's integrity were the fruits of residual racism, and had to be resisted. When the truth became too obvious to shrug aside, it cost Raines his job. Similarly, various journalists have sold themselves so thoroughly on the irrefutability of some Cause that processes that operate below the conscious level dictate their approach to any story that bears on that Cause, whether positively or negatively.
This is in no regard so important as in the matter of the public's perception of threats.
Every threat possesses certain characteristics, which we probe with a series of questions:
- Who is threatened?
- To what extent?
- Who or what is doing the threatening?
- What's the time frame involved -- that is, if everything remains as it currently is, when will the threat eventuate in damage to the threatened party?
- What can be done to avert or mitigate it?
- By whom?
- What would the costs of the proposed action be?
- Can we foresee any unintended consequences?
If we can get trustworthy answers to those questions, we can classify and prioritize threats, and assign the responsibility for responding to them to the appropriate persons and institutions. Most germane to this essay is the set of answers that would legitimately classify a threat as belonging to the political sphere:
- Who is threatened? A large enough subset of the polity to justify a political response; preferably, everyone.
- To what extent? The threatened population could suffer severe, possibly lethal harm, if what's threatened were to come to pass.
- Who or what is doing the threatening? Either a nation, a sizable armed "non-state actor," or an impersonal natural force too large for a unit smaller than a government to address.
- What's the time frame involved -- that is, if everything remains as it currently is, when will the threat eventuate in damage to the threatened party? Soon; far too soon for individuals and private organizations responding to market incentives to fashion their own defenses.
- What can be done to avert or mitigate it? An effective response will require marshaling the resources of the polity.
- By whom? The government, of course.
- What would the costs of the proposed action be? Far less than the costs of "burying our heads in the sand."
- Can we foresee any unintended consequences? None of comparable importance, as long as the government is permitted to do its job.
When media organs contrive to force that set of answers on us through framing, filtering, or otherwise fitting the threat to a particular "narrative," they are engaged not in honest, objective reporting but in perceptual engineering. Its impact will be to expand State power at the expense of individual freedom. The conscious motives of the perceptual engineers might be largely wholesome. Even their subconscious motives might not be reprehensible; conviction penetrates the mind to an unknowable degree. But the thrust of their machinations cannot be denied: their work will enlarge the State and intensify its incursions into our lives and property.
Very rarely will anyone with a seat in the halls of power object to such treatment of the news. Some officials and aspirants to office will view it with delight; they're either already aligned with the Cause, or are willing to swarm aboard and ride it as high as it can take them. There's an obvious positive-feedback effect, as well: journalists and media organs that have proved helpful to some political force in the recent past will get favorable treatment from that force in the foreseeable future. At a time when most "investigative journalism" consists of waiting for a leak or a press release from some government bureaucracy, this effect is of considerable importance.
There is one category of threats whose promotion the State will frown upon: threats that arise from State expansion and encroachment. If the State is to profit from perceptual engineering, it must contrive always to be seen as the defense against threats, never as a source of them. So the positive-feedback effect on journalists acts in two ways: the mutual back-scratching one described immediately above, and the inverse discouragement and shutting-out of journalists and organs that seek to report on harms inflicted on private persons, private organizations, and the nation by the State itself.
More anon.
Comments
It is no mystery to me why there always seems to be the “boogey man” du jour. I’ve recognized, from the time that I was a child, that a populace kept in a perpetual state of fear will be more easily controlled and manipulated.
There has always been something, from the “yellow scare” to Nazis to Soviets to terrorists. Granted, many of these things, conveniently enough, were really something that NEEDED to be feared. However, our current fears revolve around a group of backwater, 4th century thugs that have succeeded in hitting us a paltry handful of times in the last 30 years, resulting in less casualty in three decades than a single DAY on Iwo Jima, yet as a result of the fear-mongering, Americans are gladly signing over their essential rights to the government, in the hopes that this will keep them safe. They do so in complete ignorance of the fact that by giving up their rights to keep themselves safe from one boogey man, they are creating one much more horrible, much more powerful, and much harder to evade.
The promise that the USAPA will only be used for terrorist activities has already been broken. How long before “sneak and peek” warrantless searches begin to be used on non-terrorist criminal investigations…What? You mean, THEY ALREADY HAVE???
We’ve created a monster, for the hollow promise of a bit of temporary safety from a group that you have statistically less chance of encountering than you do Bigfoot. The risk of commuting to work on any given day is THOUSANDS of times more real, yet I doubt seriously that people would give up their God-given essential liberties for the promise that they would be safe on the highways.
They will continue to work to keep you in a state of perpetual fear, as much out of job-security as out of a desire to control, and it will continue to happen until we, as a nation, stop it.
Posted by on 05/07/2008 at 06:57 PMDear Goober,
I agree; if it isn’t one thing it’s another. Few people realize that we went to war with Japan after fewer people were killed than on 9/11. As a consequence, we were treated to the “Yellow Peril” and the racist descriptions of our Japanese brothers.
In the US, the death toll in WW 2 was 0.32%. Why you had a greater chance of dying of a heart attack. All to keep one man in office for 4 terms!
Global warming (oops ... have to learn the new term) CLIMATE CHANGE, That’s a real problem that must be dealt with NOW. By the way, my carbon footprint is a negative number: planted lots of trees: personally.
Posted by Moneyrunner on 05/11/2008 at 05:00 PM
