10 Ways the Media Manipulate
Our Opinions Every Day
HITLER'S LEGACY
The power of the press can be used to deliberately lead
people astray, and to make them believe whatever propagandists want them to
believe. In honor of the first man to use them I call modern propaganda and
information-management techniques "Hitler's Legacy".
When Adolph Hitler took power in Germany he also took
over the media, and he used it to shape a modern, civilized country to his
ends. With full control of the national press his propaganda minister Paul
Josef Goebbels developed sophisticated and very effective tools of propaganda
to control public opinion in Germany, and even in other countries.
He proved that if you repeat a lie often enough in mass
media, most people will accept it as the truth.
That's powerful stuff, and propaganda may be the most
dangerous weapon developed in the Second World War. The atom bomb scared so
many people that we had mass movements trying to control it, but the general
public seems to have missed the significance of the power of propaganda.
While governments spent billions to improve nuclear weapons
and to test a very few of them in isolated areas, private companies in the
advertising industry spent even more money to develop new propaganda techniques
and they tested and used them on all of us.
Now some advertising agencies have bigger budgets and
more actual power than Goebbels did. Their power is not as naked as his but,
because they control the money, they control the media.
And while Goebbels controlled relatively few radio
stations, newspapers and billboards, the power of advertising is exerted over a
much more powerful and efficient net of media.
We like to pretend that advertising agencies use their
power only to sell commercial goods, but we know they also plan election
campaigns for politicians, and "manage" public perception of governments.
Politicians pretend that their advertising managers have no political power,
but it's obvious that the man who controls the election also controls the
politician.
There are some limitations on advertising -- it's
supposed to be illegal to use subliminal advertising on movies and TV, for
example -- but the limits are not enforceable.
When Vance Packard thought he saw subliminal imagery in
magazine advertisements, he wrote a book about them. {Hidden Persuaders} was a
best seller, but the images are still there.
Are there other techniques we don't know about? It sounds
paranoid, but we have to assume there are techniques that even some advertising
people don't know about. We are talking about a multi-billion dollar business
in which one agency's secret technique can give it an advantage over another.
The only thing we can be sure of is that they have millions of dollars a year
to fund research, and that they have good reason to keep their discoveries
secret.
But even without secret techniques, advertising in
general has effects the advertisers do not plan and may not understand. The
problem is that the best way to sell something is to make people unhappy with
what they already have.
If I want to sell you a new car my first move is to
convince you that your old car -- or whatever form of transportation you're
using now -- is no longer adequate for your needs.
It does me no good to prove that the Drof car I am trying
to sell is better than the Egdod that someone else offers unless I have already
convinced you that you need a new car.
So first I have to convince you that you need a new car,
and so do the people who sell Egdods, Kcuibs and other cars.
Meanwhile the people who sell appliances tell you that
your refrigerator is inadequate, and so-forth. The message is buried in each ad
but it's always there, and the effect is cumulative.
And because of that it's very powerful. With a dozen or
more other car makers making conflicting claims I may not be able to convince
you that a Drof car is better than the others, but between us all we can
probably convince you that your present form of transportation is not adequate.
Other advertisers' claims conflict too, but the one point
on which they all agree is that whatever you have now, you need more and will
not be happy until you get it. The message is buried as a secondary part of
each ad but it is there and, because the media is controlled by the
advertisers, it also pervades the supposedly non-advertising component of the
media.
Many salesmen will spend more to have some
"responsible" journalist spread a message than they will for
advertising. A "puff" article is a good investment because a reader
may be suspicious of advertising, but may accept the journalist's comments as
an honest judgment. That's why some advertisements are disguised to look like
news stories.
North American public relations agencies have more
employees than North American news media have reporters, and in 1990 a study
found that nearly 40% of the contents of American newspapers began with press
releases or other information from public relations agencies.
Most reporters would say that the media is not controlled
by advertisers and they would think they were telling the truth. When I worked
as a newspaper reporter, I wrote what I believed.
But as a reporter I have had some very pleasant vacations
in Europe, Mexico and resort areas of the U.S.A. and Canada, and dozens of
expensive meals, at the expense of advertisers. They didn't buy my opinions,
but they did spend a lot of money to make friends.
And I have seen deliberate manipulation of the news. In
the late 1960's I shot free-lance newsfilm for several TV stations in southern
Ontario. At that time a pressure group wanted the Canadian military to lend a
Hercules transport plane to a group that was trying to get aid to one side or
the other in the Nigerian civil war.
CFTO-TV assigned me to cover the group's
"demonstration" outside the Air Transport Command station at Trenton,
Ont. By the time I got there several other TV crews were waiting, but there
were no "demonstrators". On schedule, a car and a couple of small
vans arrived. A PR man from the car spoke to us, then to the guards outside the
station, then waved his people out of the vans.
For about five minutes about a dozen
"demonstrators" marched in circles, waved signs and chanted slogans
in front of the gate while we of the press took pictures, choosing our camera
angles to make the dozen people look like a mob. Then the PR man asked if we
had enough.
The others said okay but I pointed out that there was a
Hercules plane parked in the airfield across the road. If I used a long lens
and the "demonstrators" marched in exactly the right place, I could
get a shot of them marching with the plane in the background.
I did and they did, until I got the shot. Then they all
climbed into the vans and went home. The marchers didn't give a damn about the
planes or about Nigeria, all they cared about was that they had all been paid
to march in front of the cameras.
I told the news editor about this when I handed in my
film. He told me that he already knew about it, and that it had all been
properly "arranged". So much for the integrity of the press.
That was deliberate manipulation by a pressure group, but
the media is mostly controlled by the big advertisers who control it because
they control the money. And it's hard to fault them because they spend money
where they think it will do the most good, on media that appeals to people who
may buy their products. If I advertise cars, I will use media that I think will
appeal to people who might buy the kind of cars I want to sell.
If the media looks good to me that's because the
publisher shares my view of the world, and he hires editors and reporters who
share his view of the world. There is no need for an organized plot because the
advertisers hold the purse strings and they decide which media will prosper,
and therefore which view of the world will be disseminated.
The view of the world that advertisers like is the one
that says you can't be happy until you have bought every single thing they have
to sell. Obviously you will never succeed but that's no problem for the
advertisers, because you will keep trying.
And you can bet that you will not be content for long
with anything you buy, because most modern products have flaws built into them.
In earlier years skilled craftsmen built deliberate flaws into their work
because the gods might become jealous of perfect craftsmanship. Modern
designers do it to avoid the fate of Singer and Underwood.
For more than 100 years Singer made some of the best
sewing machines in the world and at one time it was probably the biggest maker
of sewing machines in the world. The hitch was that the original Singer sewing
machines were so good they almost never broke down or wore out, and after they
filled their market with sewing machines the business faded. Singer was taken
over and another company now operates under the Singer name. The original is
gone.
Until the arrival of computers in the late 1970's and
early 1980's newspaper reporters around the world used Underwood typewriters
made in the 1930's and 40's. The "number five", made in the 1940's
was a special favorite. Underwood typewriters dating back to the 1920's may
still be in use, but the company was taken over by Olivetti in the 1960's.
Tire makers did very well in the days when good tires for
cars and trucks lasted perhaps 30,000 miles each. Now car tires last 50,000 to
100,000 miles and with retreads some truck tires will last several hundred thousand
miles. One-time industry giant Firestone has been taken over by Bridgestone,
most small tire companies are dead or dying and some of the big ones are in
trouble.
Most manufacturers have learned the lesson and some
modern products will last very well, but they won't give satisfaction for long.
In some cases that takes careful design because car
makers, for example, can't afford basic flaws in their products. Cars with
serious flaws must be recalled, and recalls cost millions.
Car manufacturers can't afford to skimp on basic
durability either, because if they did some cars would fail within the warranty
period and be very expensive to maintain. In fact modern cars last so long that
car makers would have real problems if they didn't build in some petty flaws
and minor inconveniences to make their products less than perfect.
Your car may work perfectly well but as it ages some
unimportant function will fail and fail again. Petty inconveniences will add up
and media hype of the latest gizmos will make you look at the ads for new cars.
The classic example of hype and flaws is the fashion
industry. Designers know that almost any change can look good if it's presented
in a fashion show with media hype and they all offer completely "new"
lines every year. Some do better than others but most prosper, thanks partly to
a barrage of magazine articles and TV "news" items which in fact add
up to free advertising for the fashion industry.
Mass market clothes follow the same trends, with a bit of
a twist. Basic designs may not change much but some products have petty flaws
built into them to make sure they do not last, or do not give satisfaction for
too long.
Some products are just plain cheap, but modern
merchandising can sell them too. In mass-market stores many goods are
blister-packed, so you can't actually tell what you're buying. If it looks good
it will sell, and you won't find out what it's really like until too late.
These are all petty annoyances but they add up and they
help set the stage for another development of propaganda. In a country of happy
Germans Hitler might never have taken power but, thanks to economic problems
created by the Treaty of Versailles, most Germans were poor and desperate for a
change.
We have no Treaty of Versailles but the general low-level
malaise and discontent created by the advertising industry and by
"creative" merchandising makes us more vulnerable to manipulation.
This next bit is speculation, but it's speculation on the
level of "if I jump out of the window I may fall to the ground."
Through the late 1960's and most of the 1970's the US
fought a hot war in Vietnam and a cold war throughout the world. We know that
there was considerable opposition within the States to the Vietnam War, and we
know that Russian intelligence services had access to some very powerful
propaganda and persuasion techniques and a spy network that spread through most
of the free world.
I have no proof or even evidence that Russian undercover
agents taught propaganda techniques to activists at American universities, but
if they did not the Russian intelligence service did not do its job.
Idealistic professors also taught propaganda techniques
during this period and probably some semi-secret techniques leaked out of
advertising agencies. One way and another, the science of persuasion and
manipulation made a quantum leap in the years from 1960 to 1980.
And however they learned their techniques I also know
that since the 1970's some of the people who protested the Vietnam War have
done very well in the social action business. Organizations that began as
idealistic crusades for equal rights or to save the whales or the seals or
other animals now have budgets of tens of millions of dollars a year.
They're all non-profit, of course, but what does that
mean? A private company works for profit, and the management of the company
turns that profit over to its shareholders. A non profit organization has no
shareholders and is not allowed to make a profit -- so management is required
to spend all the income on wages, staff perks and other expenses.
One of the few politicians to worry about
propaganda-based businesses is Hamilton-Wentworth MP John Bryden, who published
one report on the funding of special-interest groups in 1993 and another on
charities in 1996.
The 1996 report says Canada has 73,000 registered
charities and another 66,000 non-profit organizations, with total revenues that
Bryden estimates at more than $100 billion. The report has to estimate the
total because financial information on the 66,000 non-profit organizations is
"confidential" -- bureaucratic for secret -- but numbers for the
73,000 "charities" are available.
Between them they share a total income of about $86
billion dollars -- about 13% of Canada's total economic activity -- they have
about $109 billion in assets and they employ about 1.3 million people, or about
12% of Canada's total work force. The numbers are not quite so mind-blowing
when you remember that hospitals and universities are "charities",
but they are still pretty big.
We expect governments to contribute to hospitals and
universities but most of the 73,000 registered Canadian charities are neither
universities nor hospitals, and some of them are open to serious question. By
definition a charity helps people in need but some Canadian charities confine
their activities to special groups.
In 1990 the Auditor General reported that one Canadian
corporation had donated $5 million to several foundations whose directors were
related to the corporation, and that the foundations had immediately loaned the
money back, plus interest charges. Because the money was given to registered
charities the gifts were deductible for tax purposes, and loans are not
taxable.
Financial records for most non profit organizations are a
closed book -- Revenue Canada sees them but the information is privileged --
but the salaries paid to top executives of Canadian charities are supposed to
be public information. Bryden reports that about 25% of Canadian charities --
more that 18,000 organizations -- do not report the salaries they pay to top
executives.
By law a public charity is supposed to devote 80% of the
money it receives in donations to charitable works, but most Canadian charities
get most of their money from the government or from business, rather from
donations, and there is no control on how they spend it.
Bryden reports that in 1994 The Standards Council of
Canada received $33,000 in donations, $6 million in funding and $3 million as
payment for services. Gross revenues were $8,877,974, management and
administration costs were $8,515,864 and the council spent $8,916 on
"charitable activities".
A non-profit organization can run on a lean budget and do
good work but it can also take very good care of the people who run it. Anyone
who understands propaganda techniques can make a very good living at good
works, and some do.
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