Picking SCADs: The Dangers of Opening Wounds Covered by Corruption 

 

Abstract

The events of 9/11 and the subsequent Global War on Terror have revealed to careful observers deep systemic flaws in what had long been recognised as reliable and authoritative ‘mainstream media’. The rush to war in the wake of 9/11, the flouting of international laws, and later revelations of war for regime change have precipitated the development of a wide range of new sources of news, known as ‘alternative’ and/or ‘independent’. These relative newcomers to news-making, reporting, and analysis have created great upheaval in the mainstream system. This brief essay reflects on these new tensions, the efforts made in the mainstream to subdue and stifle alternative voices in the midst of their increasing power, and the effort dissident voices to speak truth in the face of harsh criticism. Enlisted in this effort to analyse these tensions are Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ and deHaven-Smith’s concept of the SCAD—state crimes against democracy.

Keywords

Propaganda Model, SCAD, Syria, fake news, conspiracy theory, bullshit

 

Introduction

In this present era of fake news pumped out by pliant producers in huge media corporations, language studies has proven to be an extremely rich and exciting field of scholarship. The surprising rise of businessman-entertainer Donald J. Trump as star of the Executive Branch of the American government has ploughed new subfields of study not merely in the politics of public vulgarity but also in its interplay with brute honesty. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt recognised the necessity, in the wake of 9/11, of categorising new strains of falsehood so that the public might discern the differences and motivations among them.

Indeed, the world today is awash with bullshit (BS), a certain variety of lie Frankfurt painstakingly deconstructed in his concise book of the same name – On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005). Those who produce and disseminate it, he notes,

… ignore [the] demands of [truth] altogether. [They do] not reject the authority of the truth, as [liars do], and oppose [themselves] to it. [They] pay no attention to [the truth] at all. By virtue of this [behavior], [BS] is the greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

While star politicians seek to stifle free speech and frustrate public efforts to parse features of the discourse Frankfurt had isolated, we must ask, as news consumers, how to locate remnants of truth in mainstream narratives and in the expanding range of alternative independent sources. Methods in the critical discourse analysis (CDA) tradition prove to be quite useful for researchers – indeed all concerned citizens – who want to understand the “social relations of power” that sway text production and discourse practices.

If we want to grasp why one perspective presented in public discourse on a certain pressing issue, for example, is promoted and another suppressed, methods in CDA can help us see how power works in the fabrication process of contemporary public relations (PR). Presented below is analysis of how researchers and journalists committed to revealing objective truth are often hamstrung by those obsessed with protecting the larger and more profitable PR system.

 

Some Background

Senator Hiram Johnson observed in 1918 that in war the first casualty is truth. The global war on terror – a perpetual war if there ever was one – necessitates a sustained PR campaign against objective truth. Since September 11, 2001, the GWoT has been the defining moment whose effects have, sadly, yet to pass. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident today than in the war for objective truth fought by journalist Vanessa Beeley and scholars of propaganda Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson among a tightly-knit community of other undaunted intellectuals in the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM).

Their tireless efforts aimed at exposing particular truths (and yet be hounded incessantly for doing so) are rooted in a series of events that grew out of the mid-1960s. Had CDA methods been available then, after release of John F. Kennedy’s autopsy and subsequent marginalisation of voices questioning the reliability of the Warren Commission Report, it is likely that the United States could have been rescued from sinking further into the grip of the so-called deep state. Peter Dale Scott plumbs the depths of these dark machinations in his seminal study, Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House.

In order to assist in the maintenance of a top-down social order, the CIA instructed field agents lodged in the State Department and in American news bureaus around the world to tar anyone who voiced suspicion of the official position on Kennedy’s death as a “conspiracy theorist.” Hence, the ever-growing popularity of the term in these times now managed largely by PR professionals serving elite power. The secret memorandum (Dispatch 1035-960), declassified in 1996 for full public release, outlines the state’s systematic approach in stifling dissident demands for honesty. The 1960s rhetorical technique, however, continues to be a powerful method of shutting down any critical discussion of government wrongdoing.

As it is, recent history has also enabled us to reflect on key moments when political institutions, in cahoots with their corporate backers, have unleashed massive PR storms on the public, such as the 2003 “weapons of mass destruction” narrative crafted at the United Nations for a preemptive invasion of Iraq. Or, the equally gripping fable of Private Jessica Lynch “captured and raped by the savage Iraqi forces” but later rescued by Special Ops.

Presaging the WMD fairytale were a series of psychological operations in 1990 that, most notably, also saw “pictures from the real world packaged as prime-time entertainment” during reported Scud missile attacks on Saudi Arabia, and a PR stunt that featured emotive claims of “babies in incubators left [by Saddam’s forces] to die on the floor” of a Kuwaiti hospital. These and other such wartime PR operations promoted in “prime-time entertainment” serve to mold public perception and manufacture consent.

What can be learned from these frauds (previous and ongoing) and from the social relations between elite power protecting itself from perceived attacks and the masses of people refusing to accept democratic processes poisoned by unceasing disinformation campaigns obsessively “limiting the spectrum of acceptable opinion”?

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky modeled these power relations in their 1988 study, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. They argue that the stories we consume as members of the public are the residue of a complex filtering process that, in effect, sifts raw news and selects only the details that square with the interests of power. Size and ownership of the media, funding, sourcing, flak, anti-communism (now adapted to the dominant ideology and fear), and the necessity of controlling system security all are part and parcel of the pressures acting upon the (re)production of narratives fit for public consumption.

If such a complex process has long been known to aid in engineering a world of mediated make-believe, then recent scholarship has also penetrated that world and derived from it new terms for conceptualising and naming the lies.

After all, it is vitally important for people not just to identify such threats to their freedom but also to label them. A shared understanding of those threats and a common currency is needed to dissect them. While Herman and Chomsky offered a model of how agenda-setting media perform their principal role, Lance deHaven-Smith offered a novel way of cutting through mainstream media performance. The counter to the “conspiracy theory” label is the SCAD – an acronym for “state crimes against democracy.” If the CIA-manufactured label heaps contempt upon the “theorist” speculating about buried crimes, deHaven-Smith’s SCAD disinters them and throws fresh light on their corpses.

To anyone concerned about perpetual regime-change wars, as Tulsi Gabbard consistently calls them, and noticing successive governments since 9/11 erase speech and press freedoms, the “conspiracy theory” label has made an auspicious return to the public discourse. Agents of power use it with impunity to smear the reputation of any person who questions official narratives. That is, the ad hominem attack is the only retort agents of power can muster.

Examples abound in various fields of inquiry, most notably with the recent mainstream media war waged against members of the WGSPM. They have in recent years endured routine attacks for drawing attention to mounting SCADS.

 

Regime-change: It’s a Thing

After the Twin Towers imploded in pyroclastic clouds on 9/11, viewers of BBC World saw the brute forces of foreign policy on full display as they watched former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak suggest that the US, UK, and Russia “deploy a globally concerted effort” to deal with “rogue states” such as “Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea …” The meaning of Barak’s sense of “concerted effort” became clearer with the US invasion of Iraq, but more explicitly so in General Wesley Clark’s puzzled response to a Pentagon plan “to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon ….”

What has unfolded since has been a steady mainstream PR campaign to agitate public fear and loathing of Syria and Assad (and the assorted nations and heads of state in the so-named Axis of Evil). As mainstream narratives stir emotions and arouse panic, the Propaganda Model predicts, generally, that “what enters the mainstream will support the needs of established power.” It predicts, also, that views challenging official narratives “will be ignored or bitterly condemned.” This is why it is entirely reasonable to see in Western mainstream media venomous attacks on Beeley, Hayward, Robinson, et al.

A sampling of the predictions that Herman and Chomsky had made reveals the extent to which condemnation of critical scholars pervades the mainstream discourse.

If Syria was a target (among the others) for Western regime-change operations in 2001 (as noted by General Clark), then this post-9/11 period has revealed serious breaches of law against aggression. The targets for change were not merely part of a theory but, rather, part of an elaborate conspiracy to topple foreign governments. The UK Government’s own Report of the Iraq Inquiry, published in 2016, appears to point directly to SCADs. Besides signaling unquestioning support (p. 15) for preemptive invasion eight months before Parliamentary approval; besides ignoring peaceful options for disarmament (just as W. Bush had done in rejecting Afghanistan’s offer to extradite Bin Laden), the Chilcot Report clarifies how the legal premise upon which the invasion commenced was deeply flawed.

Observable effects of the Chilcot Report have appeared in the incantations pronounced by mainstream media functionaries engaged in the business of cursing critical media scholars.

 

Name Calling in Framing Debate

One cannot possibly hope to govern a so-called democratic society that pays mere lip-service to the rule of law without managing public perception of its fundamentally undemocratic processes – especially when its leaders conspire to carry out illegal and ghastly acts of aggression abroad and trample civil rights at home. How are so many SCADs perpetrated today in the name of freedom and democracy?

When power elites exercise their authority in mainstream media to name things and people, they instantly create a conceptual frame for the wider public that serves as a primary means of defining those who fall in line and those who refuse to. The practice was elaborated by media theorist Herbert Schiller who referred to it as “definitional control.” In the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy honed this rhetorical technique during the Red Scare, well before the practice of “conspiracy theory” labelling appeared. He achieved widespread control over public perceptions of people deemed “communist” by effectively controlling the definition.

In 2018, The Times kicked off its own PR campaign in the UK on April 14 in both print and online attacks against senior British academics. The rhetorical techniques used in coverage of the WGSPM served both to agitate fear and loathing of the academics and to integrate public consent into the larger project of regime change operations.

Particularly interesting in this smear operation is the print version use of frames. Featured on the front page is the bold headline in the largest font “Apologists for Assad Working in Universities.” Readers are urged not to miss the subtext: apologists are, foremost, defenders of controversial issues, ideas, ideologies, or figures. These particular apologists are said to be “working” “for” Assad whilst working in institutions of higher learning. They are effectively tarred as double agents serving Russia from their Western ivory towers. Associated connotations of the “conspiracy theory” label appearing in the text are “deniers” and “truthers.”

The careful collocation of image and text added to selections of key colors says much about efforts to activate emotional responses to words in the accusatory headline. Appearing above it is a rhetorical question for readers to ponder: “Trainers and tiaras: Are you a Kate or a Meghan?” Juxtaposed to that is an announcement for the “Grand National.” The portrait of a mysterious pretty lady arrayed in a red dress, serving as momentary distraction and ambiguous reference to red Russian influence in Western affairs, occupies center space.

The front page attack on the WGSPM is, in effect, trickery. It works on the whole as rhetorical sleight-of-hand inviting attention to emotive language denouncing critical scholars whilst titillating the subconscious mind with suggestions to vacuous past-time activities. The message? feel enraged over the manufactured betrayal and then return to routine modes of mindless consumption.

Any invitation presented by scholars critical of the vast body of official lies and distortions since 9/11 still invites vicious responses from mainstream attack dogs. System performance effectively depends upon pliant squads of sycophantic cheerleaders for regime-change wars who will fill the airwaves and occupy news outlets across the major online media platforms. For today’s system, peace is not profitable.

 

Conclusion

In a classic clash of dissident and mainstream views on mass media performance, Chomsky once explained to the BBC’s Andrew Marr that “the system selects for obedience.” Marr could hardly believe that his superb performances as a “stroppy journalist” for the BBC could be seen as uncritically compliant with the dictates of power.

Chomsky’s reply to Marr’s protest is instructive: “I’m sure you believe everything you say; otherwise, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are.”

It isn’t that members of the WGSPM are “conspiracy theorists” or “truthers” but, rather, that they are morally incapable of adjusting the conclusions of their studies to fit the political narratives of the day. Their work – as well as the work of other critical scholars and journalists around the world – simply verifies the predictions made by the Propaganda Model. While the present media system exerts vast pressures upon people working within it to mold reality, the Propaganda Model can’t predict how the equally vast pressures of morality will work against the system.

Tim Hayward observes that

… there is an important part to be played by universities and intellectuals in general. For they are the social institutions and classes of individuals functionally entrusted by the wider society to enhance, protect and disseminate dependable knowledge and understanding about the world” (554).

I’m reminded of an old saying about truth and freedom (a seeming cliché): truth is liberating and can’t be bought, no matter the costs people pay for exposing it.

 

Daniel Broudy is a professor of rhetoric and applied linguistics at Okinawa Christian University and co-editor of The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness (UWP, 2018). He is a research associate with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 Global ‘War on Terror’ and an associate editor of Frontiers in Political Communication. His latest book is the co-authored Okinawa Under Occupation: McDonaldization and Resistance to Neoliberal Propaganda (Palgrave, 2017). As a veteran of combat operations in Panama, he works to examine the breeding grounds for perpetual war. He can be reached at editors.synaesthesia [at] gmail.com

He previously contributed to the Media Theory 2/2 (2018) special section on ‘Edward S. Herman and the Propaganda Model Today’, edited by Simon Dawes.