The Influencing Machine

Laura Miller of the online magazine Salon has written a review of a book The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, who hosts National Public Radio's On The Media. This deserves comment.

Miller sums up the central premise of Gladstone's book.

The fundamental argument of "The Influencing Machine" is that the media and the public are far more intertwined and mutually implicated than the public chooses to acknowledge. The book's title comes from a delusion common in schizophrenics that some terrible outside entity is forcing shameful, unbidden thoughts into their heads when in fact those thoughts originate in their own minds.

"The media don't control you," Gladstone writes. "They pander to you." Until we're willing to fess up to our own complicity, and to wrestle with the "neural impulses that animate our lizard brains," we will go on getting nothing better than "the media we deserve."

This is complete nonsense. The media (here NPR and Salon) want you to believe that they are merely catering to your interests in what they report and how they report on it, that we're all in this together. That is their delusion, not yours. In particular, Gladstone is eager to dispel the notion that the media is designed to control your thoughts. Hence, the media serves no propaganda function whatsoever.

It is always hard to write about being inside the box versus being outside the box. First, you must know there is a box, and where its boundaries are. My latest attempt was Thinking Inside The Box — Part II, which references the original article. I am going to assume everything I said in those posts today. Read them if you haven't done so already.

Here's the bottom line: those at places like Salon or NPR, who think of themselves as the better half (the thinking liberal half) of the mainstream, live entirely inside the box. Virtually everything they serve up is propaganda. The problem is that those inside this particular part of the box don't know they live within a consensual reality everyone is supposed to accept without question. It won't be a fish that discovers the water it swims around in. Such unawareness gives rise to nonsense like Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine.

Thus NPR and Salon serve up endless reporting on our corrupt, dysfunctional politics, as if national politics matters to down and out Americans who lost faith in the 2-party system a long time ago. That's the real story. They are happy to report on Congress's dysfunction—it's all in good fun!—but never discuss the rampant corruption underlying it. Most of this reporting is "horse race" stuff—who's winning and who's losing. In May, 2011 there is more reporting (in all media) about the upcoming presidential race to be settled in November, 2012—which Republicans will run?—than there is reporting about our crashing housing market. Of course neither political party has a clue about how to fix that.

NPR constantly refers to "the economic recovery" as if it has concrete existence, and is not a self-serving figment of some politician's (or economist's) overactive imagination. When more bad news rolls in, NPR is always quick to ask: will this latest economic atrocity be a "setback" to the recovery? Will it "derail" the recovery? The majority of Americans think the recession never ended—for good reason. We do of course have a statistical recovery—the government numbers NPR feeds us daily prove it. The circle just goes 'round and 'round.

NPR, which broadcasts from within Washington D.C. and is part & parcel of Imperial society there, does far more reporting on the war on "Terrorism" than it does on the sad state of Mainstreet America. Thus on any given day we typically hear more about Afghanistan and Pakistan than we do about the goings on in the 50 states outside the Beltway. And we should all know by now that the war on "Terrorism" is issue #1 on the Imperial agenda for reasons too numerous and complex to go into here.

In fact, if you had gotten all your information on American society from NPR over the last 10 years, you would be quite amazed to learn that 1 in 6 Americans live in poverty, or that more than 43 million Americans receive food stamps. I know this because I've used NPR as my principal mainstream media source over those last 10 years. These are also stories those in the Imperial capital are not eager for you to hear.

So when Brooke Gladstone tells you that NPR is just giving you what want—"they pander to you"—remember that the primary function of public radio (and CBS, NBC, and so on) in 21st century America is to dispense propaganda. Gladstone wants to ridicule the idea that there is a "Ministry of Propaganda" telling those on Few All Things Considered and Katie Couric what to say, and of course there isn't one. Media influence is far subtler than that because those handing out "the news" have a vested interest in the status quo, and have internalized the values of the elites (political or economic) who own the news services and run this country.

Comments

[sharonsj]

If you were also bashing Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC, I might agree with some of your comments. But Fox is the worst offender when it comes to propaganda while the big three serve up entertainment instead of news.

Generally, all the TV and radio media are crappy. With a mandate to fill 24-hrs a day, TV news doesn't even bother to give us serious stories or follow-ups, or especially what used to be called muckraking (where real journalists find out the truth).

Radio is the worst offender. Right-wingers have gotten control of almost every station in the U.S. and give us never-ending lies from conservatives. Ann Coulter says radiation is good for you. Rush says oil spills are good for our waterways and that helping your fellow man is "a failed experiment." Savage is completely nuts.

It's all propaganda. And while a huge chunk of people now get their news from the internet, unless you go to many different sites with many different ideologies, and do some actual research, you still may not know what's going on.