Classic Articles: The Packaged Consciousness
From the annals of Cyrano’s Journal (1982)
Understanding the political grammar of the American media
Compiled and edited by Patrice Greanville
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Indispensable reading for the serious left
WITH WHAT IS PROBABLY the lowest political consciousness in the industrialized world, Americans live the paradox of being media-rich and information poor. Major clues to this bizarre situation can be found in the national mythologies and techniques of miscommunication favored by the U.S. media. While no nation can claim today to be fully exempt from the ravages of false political consciousness or sheer historical confusion, in some nations the publics are more deluded than in others, and the myths sustaining the whole edifice of lies far more difficult to detect and expose. Sad to say, such is the case in the United States.
As we write these lines, this deeply-ingrained popular ignorance, so often deliberately cultivated by those in power, has finally translated itself in the late-industrial period into a major engine for constant war, and a threat to all living things on this planet. How did such a grotesque situation arise in the United States? What are the major ideological pathways routinely utilized by the system for the dissemination of outrageous falsehoods, or, when the case recommends it, subtle distortions? How is this system maintained? Some of the answers may be found below.
—P. G. [1982]
HERE FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH HERBERT SCHILLER ON MULTINATIONAL MONITOR
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The Myth of Individualism and Personal Choice
The basis of freedom as it is perceived in the West is the existence of substantial individual choice. Personal choice has been emphasized as highly desirable and attainable in significant measure. The origin of this sentiment is not recent. The identification of personal choice with human freedom can be seen arising side-by-side with seventeenth -century individualism, both products of the emerging market economy and the expanding economic power of the new mercantilist entrepreneurial class, still largely stifled in its social ambitions by the dead weight of a declining but still contemptuous nobility. 1
In the newly-settled United States, few restraints impeded the imposition of an individualistic private enterprise system and its accompanying myths of personal choice and individual freedom. Both enterprise and myth found a hospitable setting. The growth of the former and consolidation of the latter were pretty inevitable. How far the process has been carried is evident today in the easy (though hardening) public acceptance of the giant multinational corporation as an example of individual endeavor worthy of awe and admiration.
PRIVATISM IN EVERY SPHERE OF LIFE is considered normal. 2 The American life style, from its most minor detail to its most deeply felt beliefs and practices, reflects an exclusively self- centered outlook, which is in turn an accurate image of the structure of the economy itself. The American dream includes a single-family home, the owner-operated business. Such other institutions as a health system based on fees for service, a business principle, and the view that medical care is essentially a privilege to be purchased as any other commodity according to private means, are obvious, if not natural, features of the privately organized economy.
Though individual freedom and personal choice are its most powerful mythic defenses, the system of private ownership and production requires and creates additional untruths, along with the techniques to transmit them. These notions either rationalize its existence or promise a great future, or divert attention from its searing inadequacies and conceal quite ably the possibilities of new departures for social organization. Some of these techniques are not exclusive to the privatistic industrial order, and can be applied in any social system intent on maintaining its dominion. Other myths, and the means of circulating them, are closely associated with what has come to be called the American Way of Life.
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The Myth of Neutrality
For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be non-existent. When the manipulated believe things are the way they are naturally and inevitably, manipulation is successful. In short, manipulation requires a false reality that is a continuous denial of its existence.
The chief executive, though the most important, is but one of the many governmental departments that seek to present themselves as neutral agents, embracing no objectives but the general welfare, and serving everyone impartially and disinterestedly. For half a century all the media joined in propagating the myth of the FBI as a nonpolitical and highly effective agency of law enforcement. In fact, as congressional hearings confirmed, the Bureau has been used continuously to intimidate and coerce social critics, and is itself a major lawbreaker.
Science, which more than any other intellectual activity has been integrated into the corporate economy, continues also to insist on its value-free neutrality. Unwilling to consider the implications of the sources of its funding, the directions of its research, the applications of its theories (just consider the idea of DNA for profit, recently sanctioned by the Supreme Court), and the character of the paradigms it creates, science promotes the notion of its insulation from the social forces that affect all other ongoing activities in the nation.
The Myth of Unchanging Human Nature
Daily TV programming, for example, with its quota of half a dozen murders and car crashes per hour, is rationalized easily by the media controllers as an effort to give the people what they want. Too bad, they shrug, if human nature demands eighteen hours daily of mayhem and slaughter.
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The Myth of the Absence of Social Conflict
An unwillingness to recognize and explain the deepest conflict situation in the social order is no recent development in the performance of the cultural-informational apparatus. It has been standard operating procedure from the beginning. Authentic cultural creation that recognizes this reality is rarely encountered in the mass of material that flows through the national informational circuitry.
The Myth of Media Diversity
Though it cannot be verified, the odds are that the illusion of informational choice is more pervasive in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The illusion is sustained by a willingness, deliberately maintained by information controllers, to mistake abundance of media for diversity of content. It is easy to believe that a nation that has more than 6.700 commercial radio stations [1975], in excess of 700 commercial TV stations, 1,500 daily newspapers, hundreds of periodicals, a film industry that produces a couple of hundred new features a year, and a billion-dollar private book-publishing industry provides a rich variety of information and entertainment to its people. The fact of the matter is that, except for a rather small and highly selective segment of the population who know what they are looking for and can therefore take advantage of the massive communications flow, most Americans are basically, though unconsciously, trapped in what amounts to a no-choice informational bind. True variety of opinion, as opposed to superficial differences, on foreign and domestic news or, for that matter, local community business, hardly exists in the media. This results essentially from the inherent identity of interests, material and, ideological, of property-holders (in this case, the private owners of the communications media), and from the monopolistic character of the communications industry in general.
Though no single program, performer, commentator, or informational bit is necessarily identical to its competitors, there is no significant qualitative difference. [On the other hand, the size of the audience regularly reached by progressive media is so miniscule as to be politically impotent to expand, in a meaningful way, the boundaries of the national debate.] Just as a supermarket offers six identical soaps in different colors and a drugstore sells a variety of brands of aspirin at different prices, disc jockeys play the same records, between personalized advertisements for different commodities.
The fundamental similarity of the informational material and cultural messages that each of the mass media independently transmits makes it necessary to view the communications systern as a totality. The media are mutually and continuously reinforcing. Since they operate according to commercial rules, rely on advertising, and are tied tightly to the corporate economy and its worldview, both in their own structure and in their relationships with sponsors, the media constitute an industry, not an aggregation of independent, freewheeling informational entrepreneurs, each offering a highly individualistic product. By need and by design, therefore, the images and messages they purvey, are, with few exceptions, constructed to achieve similar objectives, which are, simply put, profitability and the affirmation and maintenance of the private ownership consumerist society.
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access to a free flow of opinion.
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Notes
The lore of capitalism has given rise to many self-serving myths, and nowhere have they found a more hospitable soil than in the United States.
Fragmentation As a Form of Communication
The intrusions also trivialize highly dramatic moments, hindering emotional involvement in any given issue, and thereby indirectly dampening the potential for political protest.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that without advertising, or with a reduction in advertising, events would receive the holistic treatment that is required for understanding the complexities of modern social existence. Advertising, in seeking benefits for its sponsors, is serendipitous to the system in that its utilization heightens fragmentation.Immediacy of Information