Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
Weapons of Mass Deception by Sheldon Rampton 
PR Watch, No 1, Vol 10, 2003 Weapons of Mass Deception by Sheldon Rampton excerpted from Disinfopedia Led into war by President George W. Bush, more than 300,000 US soldiers are in the Persian Gulf. Many of them no doubt sincerely believe that they are helping to make the world a better, safer place for themselves and their loved ones. Outside the United States, however, only a minority would agree. Most of Europe, the majority of the Arab world, and indeed most nations on earth have been warning that a US invasion of Iraq will increase the likelihood of domestic and international terrorism. Remarkably, in the face of these warnings, few international viewpoints penetrate the major US media or other institutions that hold themselves responsible for informing public opinion. Ensuring Consistency In January 2003, the Bush administration signed an executive order creating an Office of Global Communications (OGC), whose mission is to "ensure consistency in messages that will promote the interests of the United States abroad, prevent misunderstanding, build support for and among coalition partners of the United States, and inform international audiences." To achieve this goal, the OGC is sponsors a "Global Messenger" email of talking points sent daily to administration officials, US embassies, Congress and others. It is also organizing daily telephone conference calls to coordinate foreign policy messages among US government agencies and representatives of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. These activities may sound innocuous. The idea of "ensuring consistency" is a cardinal rule of PR crisis communications, whose practitioners try whenever possible to make sure that all messages flow through a single, controlling channel. In practice, however, ensuring consistency leads to a concerted effort to enforce a "party line" on all messages emanating from the US government, effectively silencing officials whose point of view contradicts the official institutional message. The administration's obsession with "staying on message" is also reflected in its reluctance to hold press conferences and its insistence on tightly scripting those few conferences it does allow. Journalist Russell Mokhiber, who attended Bush's March 6, 2003 news conference, says it "might have been the most controlled Presidential news conference in recent memory. Even the President admitted during the press conference that 'this is a scripted' press conference. The President had a list of 17 reporters who he was going to call on. He didn't take any questions from reporters raising their hands." White House communications director Dan Bartlett explained, "If you have a message you're trying to deliver, a news conference can go in a different direction." However, "In this case, we know what the questions are going to be, and those are the ones we want to answer." All of these plans fall within the framework of a "propaganda model" of communication, whose strategies and assumptions are fundamentally contrary to a democratic model. Some scholars refer to propaganda as a "hypodermic approach" to communication, in which the communicator's objective is to "inject" his ideas into the minds of a "target population." This is quite different from the democratic model, which views communications as a dialogue between presumed equals. The goal of the propaganda model is simply to achieve efficient indoctrination, and it therefore tends to regard the assumptions of the democratic model as inconvenient obstacles to efficient communication. In reality, it is impossible to "ensure consistency" and control the channels of communications on an international scale, and glaring contradictions are already evident in the Bush administration's message strategy. The World's Biggest Focus Group The first contradiction comes when the Bush administration tries to counter the growing worldwide perception of the United States as an arrogant nation while simultaneously refusing to listen to its critics. Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal of France and Germany as "old Europe" is only one recent example. The same pattern was also evident following February 15, 2003, when more than 11 million people protested in cities throughout the world to oppose an invasion of Iraq. Bush airily dismissed the protests, saying that he doesn't "decide policy based upon a focus group." Bush's statement speaks volumes about his inability to think outside the framework of a propaganda model of communication. There is a world of difference between a focus group and a mass citizen protest (which attracted 500,000 people in New York alone, and more than a million in London). The claim that Bush doesn't rely on focus groups is also spin. Writing in the Washington Monthly in April 2002, Joshua Green noted that "the Bush administration is a frequent consumer of polls, though it takes extraordinary measures to appear that it isn't." In 2001, the administration spent close to $1 million for polling, using political advisors like Jan van Lohuizen and his focus-group guru, Fred Steeper. "Policies are chosen beforehand, polls used to spin them," Green wrote. "Because many of Bush's policies aren't necessarily popular with a majority of voters, Steeper and van Lohuizen's job essentially consists of finding words to sell them to the public." Polling is also being used to sell the US abroad. In May 2002, Franklin Foer reported in The New Republic that the Rendon Group, one of the Pentagon's PR firms, "monitors Muslim opinion with polls and focus groups, and then it generates plans for influencing it." Charlotte Beers, the former advertising executive who recently resigned her position as US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, also used focus groups. Testifying before Congress in April 2002, Beers promised to "increase polling . . . in Muslim countries and communities to provide policymakers with information on foreign publics' attitudes, perceptions, and opinions so public diplomacy messages can be more effectively targeted. . . . These surveys will include regular polls in Afghanistan and in Muslim-majority countries to track public opinion over time." She went on to enumerate plans to conduct polling in Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Latin America, Europe and Russia. The real problem with the Bush administration is that it doesn't listen to anything but focus groups. It never thinks of public opinion as worth considering in its own right, and instead merely uses it to refine the message points that go out each day in its "Global Messenger" emails. The Power of Propaganda PR Watch has frequently reported on manipulative propaganda practices of governments and corporations. One of propaganda's dirtiest secrets, however, is that it often fails to influence the "hearts and minds" of its "target audiences." The Bush administration has failed at persuading the Arab world to support its policies toward Iraq. It has failed also in Europe and throughout the rest of the world, and its hold on public opinion in the United States is shaky at best. Propaganda is often more successful at indoctrinating the propagandists themselves than it is at influencing the thinking of others. The discipline of "ensuring message consistency" cannot hope to succeed at controlling the world's perceptions of something as broad, sprawling, and contradictory as the Bush administration's foreign policy. However, it may be successful at enabling people like George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to ignore the warnings coming from Europe and other quarters. As our leaders lose their ability to listen to critics, we face the danger that they will underestimate the risks and costs involved in going to war. © Center for Media & Democracy, 520 University Ave., Suite 310, Madison, WI 53703; phone (608) 260-9713; email editor@prwatch.org |