The media has struggled with what to do when a president tells frequent, egregious lies. The normal culture of gentle correction no longer fits the behavior — they have to look at the word “lie”.
They’ve been looking at that, but they need to start reporting propaganda as propaganda also.
Propaganda is a rather complicated topic and the media shies away from the word because it’s subjective — any opinion you disagree with can wrongly be called “propaganda”.
So for the media, the word doesn’t exist, unless they’re quoting someone saying it. There is no behavior a president can do the media will report as “propaganda” I’ve seen.
And that’s a mistake, because propaganda is not only real, it’s pervasive, it’s powerful, and it’s directly threatening the media’s mission of truth-telling.
They might notice they have a bit of a foundation of sand when just chanting “fake news” causes a large part of society to view them as lying, when Fox news became the #1 network.
There is a specific propaganda technique Republicans use the media would do well to report on.
It’s simply, taking one issue with appeal to voters, and framing their actions in terms of claims it’s to benefit that issue.
During the cold war, horrible and oppressive, murderous policies were presented as “anti-communism”, because that phrase was able to justify effectively anything.
Currently, Republicans especially like the frames of “jobs” and “America First” and the replacement for the cold war, anti-terrorism.
Almost any policy can be wrapped in these or a few other such ‘good causes’. And it doesn’t matter how false the connection is, only that it’s made.
Just asserting an absolutely false and absurd such claim is all that’s needed to ‘play the media game’ and ‘answer the question’ and turn it into a ‘there are just two sides to the issue’ framing.
The media is set up for two good-faith sides to each made their case and present them both for the reader to pick between, with some gentle reporting when one side stretches the truth.
They’re not set up for countering wholesale propaganda — Hitler’s “Big Lie”, told constantly.
That would require a re-framing of the reporting, and they’re not prepared to do that, making them the reluctant accomplices of spreading the propaganda.
Take a few examples of Republicans’ leading policies. Slashing taxes for the rich? The word “fairness” is easy to abuse and claim as a motive, as well as growth.
By including small tax cuts for the public, it’s easy to add claims it’s to benefit them.
Slashing healthcare for tens of millions and giving the money to the rich by cutting taxes with all of the money in question added to the public debt? Just deny the facts — and it’ll help growth.
Supporting the destruction of the climate to profit fossil fuel companies? Claiming one scientist in 500 who uses some cautious wording shows there is no scientific consensus at all.
And, it’ll help jobs and put America first.
When Republicans are feeling especially ornery, as Paul Ryan usually is, they’ll get downright perverse — arguing that cutting spending on the poor is to help the poor, that cutting spending on the environment is to help the environment, that programs for a good cause are actually damaging to that cause.
Really, I could go on with the long list of policy after policy, but they all fit this.
But the media does not report propaganda as propaganda. They only report it as good-faith arguments as ‘one side’ of an issue.
They have adopted some ‘fact checking’ followup somewhere as their solution. It’s not adequate.
They don’t report, in story after story after story, how one side is utterly serving the interests of donors, how much money they have received as part of the story.
If they were reporting on a story of whether a fire in a factory was caused by a lack of safety standards, they’d report the side of the owner under suspicion, but they’d present it with the clear conflict of interest, helping the reader use a large grain of salt in reading the owner’s statement about how good their safety standards were.
But for elected officials, they don’t follow the same standards, and treat them as good-faith spokespeople, when they’re not.
When trump says he’s exiting the Paris agreement on climate to protect American jobs (false), presents it as an ‘America First’ issue with claims of unlimited pollution by China (false), and so on, the media does not correctly identify the behavior as propaganda. They’ll include some challenge to the accuracy of the statements, but it’s gentle enough that people who lean toward supporting trump — nearly half the country — have more than enough to accept trump’s propaganda and ignore the media’s corrections as ‘liberal media lying’.
To help those readers understand their error in accepting the propaganda needs a clearer explanation of the fact it’s propaganda, of the interests and the money involved.
But it’s a lot easier for the media to just ‘print both sides’, put a fact check followup in the back, and say they did their reporting.
The challenge to the public is far larger than that media response addresses.
For a start, now that big money is not only a, but the, dominant issue in our political system, every story involving politics in which money plays a role — almost all — should have reporting include what money has been spent for each ‘side’ on the issue, as much a basic part of the reporting as spelling the names right and listing what organizations they represent.
Imagine in that fire story reporting a claim by ‘Bill Smith of the organization “Fire Safety for America”’ as saying the factory owner had very strong safety, without identifying that “Fire Safety for America” is a PR firm hired by factory owners to say positive things about them and that they were paid a $1 million fee by the owners. Yet that’s exactly how the media reports on political issues.
That ‘this is what this politician thinks’, without any information on how the party has aligned itself with an industry and how much money it’s received and how it’s issued “talking points” to repeat.
Propaganda is the dominant content of communication by Republicans on political issues, and the media needs to identify it as such when it is, and not falsely pretend it’s good-faith commentary.
The media’s role is to inform and to expose lies — and they’re falling short since faced with the pervasive corruption and propaganda of modern politics.
It’s not really an accident that the media is falling short. With nearly all media owned by a few large corporations, they’re not especially incented to fulfill any mission of journalistic principle. Only profit.
This makes it all the more important for media that IS trying to serve journalism to be all the clearer in criticizing the media that does not, and providing what’s missing to change the industry.
It both fills a journalistic and competitive need for ‘good’ media to provide the alternative that does identify propaganda as propaganda — as reporting, not political editorials.
We need the media to go to war for journalism, against the enemy of the pervasive propaganda machine of the monied interests — not just putting the propaganda up as ‘one side’.
Call propaganda propaganda. Alert the public to the motives of the speakers. We no longer have ‘two parties of the people’, and the media needs to report that accurately.
