Messing With Our Minds: The Ever Finer Line Between News and Advertising

Thursday, 24 May 2012 By Kingsley Dennis, Truthout 

The manufacturing of consent is endemic within modern societies. Throughout history, the need to "persuade and influence" has always been manipulated by those people in power as a means to maintain authority and legitimacy. In more recent years, the overall manipulation of the mass public mind has become less about making speeches and more about becoming a pervasive presence within the lives of each of individual.

Edward Bernays has often been called "the father of public relations," as it was his teachings and research that spurred the postwar years of propaganda. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, utilized psychological and psychoanalytical ideas to construct an informational system - propaganda - capable of manipulating public opinion. Bernays, apparently, considered that such a manipulative apparatus was necessary because society, in his regard, was composed of too many irrational elements - the people - which could be dangerous to the efficient mechanisms of power (or so-called "democracy"). Bernays wrote that, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."[1] Bearing in mind that Bernays was working in the early 1920s, we can expect the mechanisms of propaganda - mass manipulation - to have progressed to a very advanced degree since then. Within the context of our modern mass societies, propaganda has morphed into a mechanism for not only engineering public opinion, but also for consolidating social control.

Modern programs of social influence could not exist without the mass media. Today it exists as a combination of expertise and knowledge from technology, sociology, social behaviorism, psychology, communications and other scientific techniques. Almost every nation needs a controlled mainstream media if it is to regulate and influence its citizenry. By way of the mainstream media, a controlling authority is able to exert psychological influence upon people's perception of reality. This capacity works hand in hand with the more physical components, such as enforcing the legal system and national security laws (surveillance and monitoring). State control, acting as a "psychological machine," instigates specific psychological manipulations in order to achieve desired goals within its national borders (and often beyond). Examples of these psychological manipulations include the deliberate use of specific cultural symbols and embedded signifiers that catalyze conditioned reflexes in the populace. These triggers have included the words "red" and "communist" during the United States' 1950s McCarthyism, and "Muslim terrorist" during the currently constructed war on terror. Targeted reactions can thus be achieved, making the populace open to further manipulation in this state. This is a process of psychic re-formation that works repeatedly to soften up the people through continued and extensive exposure to particular stimuli. These are the symbols, artificial and human-made, that we live by in order to allow for the construction of a compliant society.

Today's media, which includes the dominant presence of advertising, extensively uses the notion of "attractors" and "attractor patterns" to target audience consciousness. This type of symbol manipulation is often referred to in the business as neuromarketing. Mainstream media corporations are using the huge growth in global communications to further shape their science of targeting human consciousness. In the case of neuromarketing, many advertisers first audience-test their commercials using brain-scanning techniques in order to know which part of a person's brain is being activated by the specific strong attractors. For example, it has been discovered that specific attractors can bypass the logical part of the brain and impact the emotional part. In such cases as the film industry, the advertisers place an award symbol (such as an Oscar or Golden Globe) which has proven to be an effective "strong attractor" which influences the emotional part of the brain. The philosophy here is to adjust the level of consciousness of an advertisement in relation to the measurable level of consciousness of the consumer.[2] Advertisers are aware that a person's consciousness passes on messages indirectly to the body in the form of galvanic skin response, pupil response, electrical nerve response, etcetera, and so every element of the screen promotion must elucidate the correct conscious reception. In order to achieve this correct set of attractor patterns, all elements of the advertising package are deliberately worked on: the music, the visuals, the script, the voice. Interesting, symbolic strong attractors that have the most impact to persuade the audience include visuals such as smiley faces and cute animals (dogs wagging their tails and kittens purring). In terms of voiced attractors, they include words such as "honesty," "integrity," "freedom," "hope and change," "friendship," etcetera. From here, it is clear how politicians use a great deal of these attractor patterns in their speeches and promotional material.[3]

Other methods of blatant propaganda include governing bodies using what can be called the "reality of truth" by releasing seemingly accurate statistics that tell of plausible situations. This is the expert-in-the-white-lab-coat tactic. For such propaganda/information to be effective, it cannot be too far from the truth; in other words, it must have the appearance of reality. Trade, employment and financial figures are an example of this. And which members of the general public have the knowledge and/or resources to check and confirm such figures? Those people who do know are usually those who have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion, such as traders and financiers. And when a nation releases its unemployment figures, do the numbers really include the many who are jobless but not signing on, or are dispossessed or immigrants? As a norm, statistics of a negative connotation are usually drawn from the smallest possible pile. Once a false or doctored claim is disseminated and accepted by the public, it becomes established and hard to deconstruct or invalidate, unless persuasive anti-propaganda is just as effective.

Modern societies are set up to accommodate both individualism and the mass collective. Yet the forms that the accepted individualism takes are often a sheath to hide the workings of a mass psyche. It is what might be called the "allowed liberty" that is provided to the modern person in pursuit of material gains, as long as there exists a contribution to the overall plan of the ruling authority. Liberty, then, is an expression of mobility within a pre-described system: it does not denote liberty external to the system. Examples are the rock star clichés that the mainstream media love to promote and publish to adorn their front pages. Notable examples are the raging antics of performers destroying hotel rooms and throwing televisions out of the window - behavior which later got morphed into copycat corporate rock PR. In essence, such hotel-trashing "rebels" are allowed, and even encouraged, because their antics sell records. Rebelliousness in these forms is thus another contribution to a consumerist society, albeit through a different lens.Today, there are many forms in which individualism is allowed to manifest.

The display of diversity in the information coming from the mainstream media gives the illusion of independent reportage and news. Yet the mainstream media of any given nation or nations is owned by only a small handful of corporate entities with high-level state relations. An individual is thus attracted to a particular newspaper, for example, relative to their views, beliefs, lifestyles, etcetera - all of these being "diversified patterned behavior" within the system. The mainstream media caters to these needs by operating a variety of newspapers that support these mythical standpoints, whether they be politically left, right, left/right of centre, liberal, independent, this, that, or any other of the positions available for the "diversity within the unity" of the mass mind. Yet the shift toward propagating banal reality lies at the heart of the ever-increasing centralized control of the media. It is somewhat worrying to learn that most Western media organizations are owned by only a handful of giant corporations: News Corp; Viacom; Time Warner; Disney; Vivendi Universal, and Bertelsmann.

For example, The Walt Disney Company is the largest entertainment and media multinational in the world. Disney owns the TV networks ABC, Disney Channel, ESPN, A&E and the History Channel, as well as publishing, merchandising and theatre subsidiaries. Disney also owns Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax, Dimension and Buena Vista International, as well as 11 theme parks around the world.  

News Corp comes in next as the world's second-largest media multinational, with an incredible range of TV and satellite channels, magazine and newspaper holdings, record companies and publishing companies based worldwide, with a strong presence in Asian markets.

Similarly, Time Warner owns more than 50 magazines, a film studio as well as various film distributers, more than 40 music labels (including Warner Bros Records, Atlantic and Elektra) and several TV networks (such as HBO, Cartoon Network, and CNN).  

Viacom owns TV networks CBS, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures and nearly 2,000 cinema screens, as part of their media empire.

Likewise, Vivendi Universal owns 27 percent of US music sales via labels such as Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Island, Def Jam, MCA, Mercury, Motown and Universal. They also own Universal Studios, Studio Canal, PolyGram Films, Canal+, and numerous Internet and mobile phone companies.

Then there is Bertelsmann, which, as a global media corporation, runs Europe's second-largest TV, radio and production company (the RTL Group) with 45 TV stations and 32 radio channels, Europe's largest printing and publishing firm (Gruner + Jahr), the world's largest English-language general trade book publisher (Random House), the world's largest book and music club group (Direct Group) and an international media and communications service provider (Arvato AG).

In our media-saturated environments, people are allowed to live out their fantasies in what is considered a less harmful way to help alleviate the so-called "drudgery of repetitive lives." This construct also provides people with a conversation space and stalking point among friends and work colleagues, or offers a buffer zone to cover up the embarrassment of a non-communicative family. And if all hell breaks lose at work, at least you have "True Blood" or "Friends" waiting for you on the home screen!

In terms of mainstream news reporting, it is always important to check the source when reading a news item; that is, is it from an independent source or is it, "according to a government source," etcetera. The mainstream media is largely fed via global news services, the two largest being Reuters (now Thomson Reuters) and Associated Press. This again constitutes a centralization of news information. While both organizations do much fine and accurate news reporting - which, valuable as it is, may unfortunately be taken by some as adequate proof that the news is not manipulated - when such sources (especially through PR offices) disseminate information as "truthful news," they are doing nothing more than was parodied in Orwell's "1984" as Newspeak. Independent media, such as is now coming of age and maturity on the Internet, has served to counterneutralize some of the overwhelming persuasive power of the mainstream media propaganda. For this reason, there are concerted efforts underway to curtail the supposedly "wild" and "uncensored" nature of the Internet. In other words, this means that there is considerable corporate and political will to rein in the Internet under the umbrella of corporate and governmental/state control, or at least, to surveil its use.

What has changed the game plan over the past two decades has been the rise of distributed and decentralized global communications between individuals. The Internet in particular, as well as other forms of social media, have spurred the growth of individuals seeking information between and among themselves, a process which is often external to the consensus of various nation-states. This has had the effect of shifting people away from conditioned patterns of propaganda and belief systems. This bottom-up intervention has seriously compromised the patterning techniques of ruling authorities. There are now efforts underway to censor information sites that are critical of the state. It is therefore imperative that our independent media be protected, our social networks of free speech preserved, and our right to seek and speak the truth defended. Messing with our minds has no place in a truly democratic and egalitarian future.

Endnotes
1. Bernays, E. L. (2004/1928) "Propaganda." New York: Ig Publishing.
2. This idea, as well as neuromarketing, was given to me in personal correspondence by Darryl Howard, who sent me his research, "Advertising in the New Paradigm" (Darryl Howard & Associates).
3. Anyone wishing to know more on this subject should investigate Neural-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

GE Unleashes Propaganda Campaign To Hide Its Tiny Tax Burden and Mass Layoffs

GE paid an average of 2.3% in taxes over the last ten years, while slashing its US workforce by 32,000 jobs. But its new ad campaign aims to whitewash all that.

By Roger Bybee, In These Times
March 25, 2012

 “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

—Alex Carey, author of Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.
No corporation has surpassed General Electric's mastery of profit-maximization, or its use of public-relations ("corporate propaganda") to mask its true aims behind the widely-supported goals of expanding scientific horizons, "bringing good things to life" and rebuilding America's industrial base.

But sometimes the profit-maximization skills of GE's top executives and tax lawyers surpass the ability of its PR staff to put an appealing gloss on the company's conduct. For example, the disclosure that GE racked up $14.2 billion in profits in 2010 while paying no federal income taxes was not well-received by the American public. GE not only avoided paying any taxes, but even managed to collect $3.2 billion in federal tax credits. This occurred against a backdrop of GE continuing to slash its U.S. workforce by 32,000 jobs, from 165,000 to 133,000 over the 2004-2010 period.

For millions of American facing a shrinking supply of middle-class jobs, falling wages, and disappearing benefits, revelations about GE have fed a renewed hostility to "free enterprise" and undoubtedly helped fuel the "Occupy" movement, now experiencing a spring resurgence.

"In my 25 years of dealing with GE, I have never seem them that embarrassed by any other issue, and so knocked off stride," said Chris Townsend, political director of the United Radio, Electrical and Machine workers (UE) union and a veteran of negotiations with GE over the past 25 years. "GE had so agitated even the mainstream media that the media sought us out," a rare occasion in the unionist's experience.

GE'S PROPAGANDA OFFENSIVE

But major corporations like GE do not remain passive targets for public outrage. Instead, they plan carefully and mobilize vast resources to re-brand themselves in the public eye. With numerous stories about corporate taxes certain to appear around April 15, GE is eager to divert attention away from its paltry tax burden and focus the spotlight on its supposed mission of providing U.S. jobs by turning out products needed by Americans.

Kicking off with the Super Bowl, GE has been filling the airwaves with ads aimed not at selling GE products to consumers, but at reassuring U.S. citizens that GE's driving mission is to meet human needs, provide deeply-satisfying work to its employees, and revitalize America's manufacturing base. The ads don't mention that the corporation paid an average of just 2.3% in tax on its income over the last 10 years, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

 "We're seeing signs that GE has started to develop and spread a pro-active message," said Townsend. "It looks like they're trying to build a new image. I think it's aimed at serving as a dump-truck to dump the tax issue."

On its website, GE says it has created 13,000 jobs in the United States since 2009. But it is unlikely that the figure represents a net gain, since it has closed 18 plants and made significant job cuts during the same period, as reported here.

The GE ads skillfully trigger a sense of warmth as they show GE workers expressing pride in their skilled work, satisfaction in assisting severely-ill patients, a profound sense of teamwork crossing racial and gender lines, and a deeply-felt mission based on the slogan: "GE Works." To highlight just a few elements of GE's public-relations offensive:

1) In one ad, GE workers at the Waukesha, Wis. Medical Equipment Division, which makes magnetic resonance imaging machines, X-ray machines and other cutting-edge medical devices, are shown getting their-much-cherished wish of meeting a busload of cancer patients whose recovery was aided by GE's medical products.

Unmentioned, however, is the fact that GE has transferred the headquarters of the Medical Equipment Divisiion to Beijing, China. "Waukesha will not be doing GE's innovations, which will now be centered in China," said Chris Townsend. "This doesn't mean that the Waukesha plant will close right away, but the company's advances will be taking place in China and Waukesha will be making more out-of-date products. GE will be bringing in the new machines from China," Townsend adds.

The shift of the division's HQ is part of GE's $2 billion plan fror new investment in China.

While GE has claimed that the shift of its Medical Equipment Division headquarters will not result in a net loss of jobs, employment in Waukesha has been cut by about 50 percent in recent years, Townsend estimates.

2) An ad aired during the Super Bowl this year (see above) is set at its Louisville Appliance Park: "See how GE employees in Louisville's Appliance Park are changing the way appliances are manufactured in the U.S., and how it's helping to create jobs."  The ad includes a memorable scene where an African-American woman recounts how fortunate she was to find work at GE, as it occurred after the plant where she worked closed after 33 years.

But GE conveniently avoids the big picture on jobs at Louisville. The Appliance Park has lost about 80 to 90 percent of its jobs over the last two decades, Townsend says.

To its credit, the company is expanding the Louisville plant by 400 jobs—but only after wage concessions by the union [IUE] and "up to $17 million in city and state incentives," according to Appliance Magazine. Furthermore, the company claims it will create 1,300 jobs in the U.S. after a $1 billion investment in its Appliance Division is completed.

3) GE's Schenectady, N.Y., steam-turbine plant is the focus of a third ad. "When you think about GE, do you you think about beer?" the GE website asks. " See how GE employees in Schenectady help power cities, schools, businesses... and even beer."

Working stiffs are supposed to value cold beer more than anything else, right? But some workers may be just a bit less taken by GE when they learn that GE eliminate abouty two-thirds to three-quarters of the jobs in the plant, according to Townsend.

We can expect that GE will keep up with its onslaught of TV ads depicting it as a company committed to manufacturing in America. GE also appears to be utilizing "third-party" voices—conservatives who show up repeatedly on TV talk shows—to defend the company's tax record, Townsend says.

He doesn't expect a thorough look at GE's overall record from the mainstream meida. "The major media never check on the discrepancy on GE's job forecasts and the actual number of jobs they produce," he says.

Moreover, GE can expect continued success with most mainstream reporters and pundits, ardent worshippers of "free trade," by claiming that opening more plants in Mexico and China will somehow generate more jobs in the U.S. because the company's consumer base has expanded.

"GE could open a plant on the moon, and a lot of the media would be saying, 'Oh, Jeez, now we can export to the moon," Townsend says.

Write what you're told!

BP's Big Ad Buys: At least $5.6 Million

— By Kate Sheppard| Wed Jul. 7, 2010

Anybody who's bought a national newspaper in the past two months has probably seen BP's full-page spreads pledging, "We will get it done. We will make this right." The ads have been prominently displayed in the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, among other outlets. Given the ad rates at these papers, it's clear that BP has been forking over plenty of money for the campaign.

Just how much? Greenpeace kept track of BP's ads throughout June and came up with a rundown of how much they likely cost. The company ran 12 ads in the Times, 15 in the Washington Post, and 11 in USA Today. Based on the ad rates for each paper, which vary by color, day of the week, and size (for example, according to their rate card, a full-page color at the Times on a weekday costs $230,266, while a black and white ad costs $194,166), Greenpeace calculated that BP spent at least $5.6 million on ads in these three papers alone in the month of June—no small chunk of change considering how bad the adversting market is for print media these days.

BP has bought enough ads at the Post, for example, to qualify for a bulk rate. It's not a special discount, Marc Rosenberg, senior advertising manager at the paper, explained to me last month. "Anybody who is buying 10 full pages of ads would get the discount," he said. Rosenberg also said that BP can state a preference on where an ad goes in the paper—meaning the company could request that its ads not be positioned immediately across from photos of oil-soaked birds, for example. "Any advertiser has the right to request preferences for placement," he said.

And BP of course has the right to shell out as much money as it wants on the ads—and, knowing full well the state of the print media, I wouldn't begrudge any paper for taking as much BP ad money as they can get their hands on. But how much control BP might have over where the ads are placed and whether the company gets discounts is an interesting subject. After all, these papers have done amazing and abundant work on the Gulf disaster, so it must raise at least a few questions about how to best deal with these giant ads about a controversial subject that is currently all over the news.

"That has obviously been a challenge at times," Rosenberg acknowledged. "There are days that there isn't much in the paper besides oil spill."

USA Today vice president of advertising Bruce Dewar said that it's standard industry practice to work with advertisers on placement, though he said that, to his knowledge, BP has not made any specific requests to avoid placing its ads near spill coverage. "We will work with an advertiser if there is going to be a clear direct conflict that is going to be embarrassing to both of us," said Dewar. He also said the BP is getting a bulk rate on ads there too. "BP is spending at a level that is definitely earning them some discount," he said. The Times didn't return requests for information about their policies.

Greenpeace's Kert Davies argues that perhaps BP shouldn't get a say when it comes to placement given the current situation, or in the very least should be forced to pay full-price. "This is part of a very clear national image washing campaign. It's damage control," he says. "They're clearly broadcasting to an audience of decision makers, thought leaders, and the public through these print outlets." But at the same time, he said, "It's good if this ad revenue supports ongoing, good reporting that the Times and Post are doing."

There's also another important question about just how much these ads are actually helping BP. Congressmen have lambasted the "make this right" line repeatedly, noting that it can never really be "right," given the scale of the disaster. And I've talked to more than one person who felt the ads were more off-putting than anything else. As Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, explained, "A lot of folks see those ads and think, give me a break. It's too little too late." The ads, he said, "really strike the wrong cord with a lot of folks."

It's also worth noting that the $5.6 million on print ads in major papers alone is probably only a tiny fraction of what the company has bought so far. They've also run ads in local Gulf papers, on television, and all over the internet, which isn't included in that figure.