From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Re: Rape After Rape After Rape
Date: 22 Dec 1992 19:17 PST
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: reg.triumf.ca
Summary: References that help understand advertising/propaganda in detail
Keywords: Propaganda, media manipulation, image making
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    

In article <1992Dec22.174953.17561@cbfsb.cb.att.com>, 
colten@cbnewsb.cb.att.com (marc.colten) writes...

> 
>What about the validity of the "original source".  I have no doubt
>that women are being violated in every war zone on the planet - that
>kind of thing never changes.  I just hope we are not subjected to another
>"eyewitness" source like that young women who testified about the
>murder of infants during the Kuwait invasion - and later turned out
>to be the ambassador's daughter, talking about events that hadn't happened
>at a place she hadn't been to - all orchestrated by lobbyists.
> 
> 
>marc colten
> 

As a followup to this comment, I note the existence of the TV documentary
(it apparently won an Emmy), "To Sell a War"  (This was re-broadcast
on the Canadian CTV public affairs program, "Fifth Estate" Dec. 20th,
with some additional comments by a reporter) which describes in some detail
(for a TV program) how the "incubator atrocity story" was sold to the American
public via the help of Washington-based PR firm Hill and Knowlton. 
Getting people excited about this was a necessary part of whipping
up the American public's support for the Gulf War.  
John R. MacArthur (publisher of Harper's) has written a book about the
subject, "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War"
(Hill and Wang, 1992. Library of Congress cataloguing  DS 79.739 M33).

The whole point of atrocity stories used as propaganda is to undercut your
intellect and make a direct appeal to your emotions.  
As a general reference and background to the individual human psychology
involved the book,
"Age of Propaganda: the Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion"
by A.R. Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson (W.H. Freeman, 1992 - published
in paperback, about 12 dollars) is useful  (although not, to my mind,
as sharp-edged as it could be).  Pratkanis has worked in advertising and
Aronson is a well-known social psychologist ("The Social Animal" is a 
standard text).

The making and manipulating of images can be studied in other contexts
as well; the following books are of interest in this regard:

"High Visibility:  
How Executives, Politicians, Entertainers, Athletes, and Other 
Professionals Create, Market, and Achieve Successful Images"

by Irving Rein, Philip Kotler, and Martin Stoller.
Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1987.

What makes this book particularly interesting is that it is
**not** an expose -- it is a straightforward **handbook**
for people who want to use these techniques, written by people
who give this kind of advice for a living.

To quote from the description on the inside book jacket:

"Using new techniques of transformation the "visibility industry"
helps people acquire images and personalities they need to achieve
their goals. ... "High Visibility" reveals the sophisticated
manufacturing and marketing techniques that increasingly separate
the powerful from the powerless. ..."

I picked this book up in a bookstore sale, but my attention
had previously been alerted by reading another book (which **is** a kind
of expose), which uses "High Visibility" as an exemplar of the
kind of thing we should be worried about.  This book is:

"The Unreality Industry:  
the deliberate manufacturing of falsehood and what it is 
doing to our lives."

by Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis, 1989, Carol Publishing Group,
New York.

These guys are worried about what is going on.  They take the argument
of Neil Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1986) a step further. 
Postman argues in his book that television may be intrinsically a
"Huxleyean medium" (as in Aldous Huxley's "soma" in "Brave New World"
-- where everyone is controlled by the society, but there is no
central controller) in which people's minds are lulled to sleep by the
intrinsic "surface epistemology" of TV without any central sinister
agency a la the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's "1984". 

Mitroff and Bennis have no quarrel with Postman's analysis of the
surface epistemology of TV, but point out that there is no intrinsic
contradiction between (as it were) an Orwellian conspiracy using
Huxleyean means -- thus, the "deliberate manufacture of falsehood".
(Postman presumably agrees, because he highly recommends the
book in a blurb on the paper jacket.)
Their analysis is quite useful, and follows fairly directly from the
assumption that people will use the techniques described (recommended)
in "High Visibility".

Ron Balden

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