From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: rec.mag
Subject: The Media Monopoly (part 10)
Date: 6 Oct 92 00:17:46 GMT
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

/* Written  5:47 pm  Oct  1, 1992 by bfrg9732@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu in cdp:alt.activism */
/* ---------- "The Media Monopoly (part 10)" ---------- */

The Media Monopoly

by Ben H. Bagdikian

Part 10 -- Consumer Modification Technology



"Social science and psychological techniques have been added to 
television's arsenal for conditioning human behavior."
	     -- Ben H. Bagdikian, author of "The Media Monopoly"

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"To counter public resistance to television and advertising, the 
manipulation of emotions has become more sophisticated. Social 
science and psychological techniques have been added to 
television's arsenal for conditioning human behavior... Most TV 
ads appeal to the emotions. The manager of public opinion 
research for General Electric says that 'much of response to 
advertising is right-brain.'"

One firm uses "infrared eye scans to record rapid eye movement in 
response to test images in television commercials, advising 
clients on elements of ads like the most effective juxtaposition 
of sex objects, for example, a woman in a bikini and the brand 
name of the advertised product." Another firm uses "electrodes 
attached to the fingertips of human subjects to see what symbols 
in commercials... create the most arousal in connection with a 
product."

According to Chuck Blore, a partner in a well-known advertising 
firm, "Advertising is the art of arresting the human intelligence 
just long enough to get money from it."

"If that is true, it arrests a great deal of intelligence. It is 
estimated that the average American child has seen 350,000 
commercials by age seventeen and, in the words of Billie 
Wahlstrom of the University of Southern California, these 
commercials are 'the propaganda arm of the American culture.'"

"In order to maintain sanity and coherence in the midst of this 
clever and insistent bombardment [of advertising messages], each 
individual has to erect a sensory screen that instantly, often 
unconsciously, detects the incoming signal and rejects it... 
[But] the advertising creators know this, so to penetrate the 
screen that every human being erects to protect the senses, ad 
agencies need a constant supply of new symbols, images, and 
ideas."

"The sheep's clothing of sex, beauty, a trusted personality, or a 
semi-sacred symbol is needed to encase the wolf of the sales 
pitch... ['The target', i.e. the consumer] does not recognize a 
new image and, before it is recognized as the same old message in 
a new guise, the unidentified lying object has penetrated the 
protective screen and made a hit on the deceived mind."

"The reclothing of ads in ever-new symbols has contributed to the 
devastating attrition in the lifespan of symbols in modern 
culture... Contemporary society is filled with images, some in a 
constant state of change like television, or in continuously 
altered states, as in radio... Advertising is a source of symbol 
manipulation unknown to earlier generations. The advertising 
industry spends $1,000 per household in order to break through 
the resistance of human senses and sometimes of human 
intelligence... As viewers and readers get used to the massively 
displayed symbols, the symbols change to the latest idea or 
personality or national emotion until it, too, in days or weeks, 
becomes meaningless, part of the continuous and deliberate slag 
heap of mass communications."

"Perhaps the most easily measured damage of the media battle for 
consumers is inflicted on the American political system." 
The political process has molded itself so as to fit the form 
required by the mass media. "The insertion of emotional 
commercials into programs had become an accepted practice for a 
variety of products [e.g. perfumes, laxatives, deodorants, 
etc.]... A commercial for a political candidate could fall easily 
into the accepted brief interval in regular programs. A carefully 
taped, meticuously edited political presentation with all the 
immediacy and simulated sincerity of a commercial, but without 
serious content, could be projected into homes where viewers 
would be most vulnerable."

So, television electioneering "deals mostly with imagery and 
emotional manipulation engendered by the five-second and thirty- 
second commercial... [It has] almost eliminated coherent debate. 
A whole generation of voters has not heard serious content in 
election campaigns."

"The inappropriate fit between the country's major media and the 
country's political system has starved voters of relevant 
information, leaving them at the mercy of paid political 
propaganda that is close to meaningless and often worse. It has 
eroded the central requirement of a democracy that those who are 
governed give not only their consent but their informed consent."


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Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman
"Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well."
End part 10