From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Subject: Powers that Be in the Media (Was: Smearing I.F. Stone (AIM, ...)
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Keywords:  mass media, sociology
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 00:17:00 GMT

John McCarthy:
>It strikes me as presuming, on the basis of their being run by
>corporations, that the media executives want what Ron Balden thinks
>the capitalist class wants.  "The powers that be in the media" is
>one of the portentous and vague phrases that George Orwell criticized
>as designed to conceal meaning.

This is fair comment, although it happens not to be valid in my case.
It is obvious that one must use various shorthand phrases in 
discussions;  attempting to define at length every concept you use in 
argument would be impossible as well as deeply undesirable
("nothing can be explained to a stone", as I believe John McCarthy
himself once said in a different context).  
The question is whether, when challenged, one can ground the shorthand
phrases in reality ("Art and science exist in minutely organized
particulars; general good is the plea of the scoundrel" -- Blake) or
is one indeed  engaging in deliberate deception or avoiding thought
by means of mindless slogans -- "law and order", "family values",
"national security", etc.

On to the specifics.  I used the phrase "powers that be"
partly because I have just been reading G. William Domhoff's
"The Powers that Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domination
in America" (1978).  ("The Powers that Be" is also the title of
David Halberstam's circa 1979 book on the American mass media.)
BTW, for those who are no longer satisfied with the fairy tales
retailed in civics classes and want to know how power in the U.S. 
*really* works, the case studies of Domhoff ("Who really Rules?",
1967, "The Higher Circles", 1970, "Power Structure Research" 1980) 
and his colleagues -- following in the tradition of C. Wright Mills ("The
Power Elite", 1956) is a good place to start.  Also
Michael Parenti's "Democracy for the Few" (now in a 5th edition, 1987)

I ground my phrase "the powers that be in the media" in 
material found in the following books (among others -- I have
been reading fairly widely about this subject in the last few
years); I don't have the time to discuss all this in detail right now: 

Martin Lee and Norman Solomon's (of FAIR) "Unreliable Sources: A Guide to
Detecting Bias in the News Media"  (1990, Lyle Stuart) might be
the single most useful reference if you only wanted to read one.

Ben Bagdikian's "The Media Monopoly" (3rd edition, 1990 Beacon Press, 
Boston) discusses the corporate concentration of the mass media.
Bagdikian's discussion (often quite funny) of the fiction (and
its history) that advertisers have no influence on editorial content
is consistent with the editorial "Ms." magazine ran when it went
"ad-free" a year or two ago.

Herbert Gans, "Deciding What's News" (1979) is a valuable sociological
study of TIME, Newsweek, and CBS evening news.  Gans points out
that these newsrooms are very hierarchal organizations, not democratic
at all.  Gans has an informative discussion of "values in the news"
(e.g. "responsible capitalism", "small town pastoralism", and more).

Michael Parenti, "Inventing Reality" (1986).
His most recent is "Make-believe Media: the politics of entertainment" (1992)
which I have not yet seen, but is likely to be good.

Mansour Farhang and William Dorman, "The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign
Policy and the Journalism of Deference" (1987, University of 
California Press, Berkeley).

"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,
These authors discuss, in part, the implications of an interesting
book called "High Visibility":

"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. ..."


Mitroff and Bennis take the argument of Neil Postman in "Amusing
Ourselves to Death" a step further. (I guess Postman agrees, since he
praises the book on the jacket cover.) 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".
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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