by Mickey Huff
Here is yet another piece of the puzzle. As we mentioned, ocean acidity also kills plankton. Who cares? Well if you breathe oxygen, you care. Phytoplankton creates around two-thirds of our oxygen. We’re killing off roughly 1 percent a year. Between that and rapid deforestation, which is the other major contributor to our oxygen supply, we’re wiping out our oxygen supply. Not good.
In the last 200 to 250 years we’ve increased the acidity of the oceans roughly 30 percent. If you’re thinking “Yikes,” then you are comprehending this correctly.
How Long Do We Have?
You know in a horror/thriller movie where things are really bad, and then they get worse? This is that part.
As of May 2013, it is estimated that we have some eighteen months to turn this around before we hit a very undesirable tipping point on climate change. We can do it, but we need to act now. If not, it will be irreversible, and over the next ten to sixty years, things will start to really unravel.
Congratulations! You’ve made it through the yucky part. Now the fun part.
The Solutions!
First, an estimated 40 percent of greenhouse gas comes from industrialized farming and shipping products all over the world. So buying locally produced organic food and goods has a big impact. Plus, your health will improve by not eating food laced with pesticides. Simple!
On our site, we’ve listed simple ways to increase the efficiency of your driving by 20 to 25 percent, which saves you money and helps reduce carbon output.
Did you know that putting solar on your home—or even your apartment—is free, and you start saving money while helping reduce carbon output? These are just a few easy ways to address this major problem and there are far more on our site. Yes, we need our government to get moving on this too, and we cover that as well.
That Was Easy. See, that wasn’t so bad, and this is what our site is about. We want you to be part of the solution and make it easier to do. Please check out our site and share it. The more people understand the problems, and that they can be part of the solution, the more chance we have to make the world what it could be. Visit What-TheWorldCouldBe.com for more information about the challenges we face, what is already being done about them, and where you can plug in.18
Remember, you are the solution!
KEN WALDEN is the director and founder of What the World Could Be. He has an extensive background in audio and video production, and he has run his own business for over nine years. Ken feels strongly that the best possible application of those skills is to make the issues facing humanity more accessible for understanding and present solutions on which everyone can act.
Notes
1. The phrase Media Democracy in Action has been a tagline used by Project Censored for over a decade. Even though this theme runs throughout our books every year, since 2011 we have included a specific chapter highlighting activists, scholars, independent journalists, and others dedicated to issues of media democracy and media freedom. We continue that tradition here. See Mickey Huff and Project Censored, Censored 2012: Sourcebook for the Media Revolution (New York: Seven Stories Press), ch. 5; and Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth, and Project Censored, Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution (New York: Seven Stories Press), ch. 4. for previous installments, or visit our website at http://www.projectcensored.org.
2. Thoughts inspired by an interview with Project Censored’s Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips on KPFA, Pacifica Free Speech Radio, The Morning Mix: The Project Censored Show, February 15, 2013.
3. See “Open-space Technology,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-space_technology.
4. Find out more about Librotraficante’s work and strategies by visiting http://www.stoptxhb1938.org.
5. HB 2281, 49th legis., 2nd reg. sess. (2010), http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf.
6. Republican National Committee, Growth and Opportunity Project (2013), http://growthopp.gop.com/RNC_Growth_Opportunity_Book_2013.pdf.
7. Alison Sacriponte, “Federal judge upholds Arizona ethnic studies,” Jurist, March 13, 2013, prohibition http://jurist.org/paperchase/2013/03/federal-judge-upholds-arizona-ethnic-studies-prohibition.php; 2012 Republican Party of Texas, Report of Platform Committee (2012), http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Platform_Final.pdf. See also Tony Diaz, “Texas GOP Platform Would Discourage Multiculturalism,” July 11, 2012, http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Texas-GOP-platform-would-discourage-3700653.php.
8. Ibid., 8.
9. “Lawmakers Should Stop Micromanaging Classes,” San Antonio Express-News, March 15, 2013, http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/editorials/article/Lawmakers-should-stop-microman-aging-classes-4358374.php.
10. Tony Diaz, “Plan to Play Down Ethnic Studies Is Bad for Texas,” Houston Chronicle, April 5, 2013, http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Plan-to-play-down-ethnic-studies-is-bad-for-Texas-4412967.php.
11. Richard W. Fonte, Peter W. Wood, and Ashley Thorne, Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?, report, National Association of Scholars (January 2013), http://www.nas.org/images/documents/Recasting_History.pdf.
12. Ashley Thorne, “Texas Legislature Hears Arguments on Comprehensive Survey’ Bill,” National Association of Scholars, April 19, 2013, http://www.nas.org/articles/texas_legislature_hears_arguments_on_comprehensive_survey_bill.
13. “Reports of TUSD Book Ban Completely False and Misleading,” Tucson Unified School District, January 17, 2012, http://www.tusd.k12.az.us/contents/news/press1112/01-17-12.html.
14. Ibid.
15. Ashley Thorne, “Why ‘Comprehensive’ History is Controversial,” March 19, 2013, National Association of Scholars, http://www.nas.org/articles/why_comprehensive_history_is_controver-sial.
16. Beau Hodai, Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street, PR Watch, May 20, 2013, http://www.prwatch.org/files/Dissent%200r%20Terror%20FINAL_0.pdf. See also Beau Hodai, “Government Surveillance of Occupy Movement,” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Government_Sur-veillance_of_Occupy_Movement.
17. For more on Revcom, see http://revcom.us/avakian/index.html.
18. For a detailed list of sources used for this portion of the chapter, and for the series of films in the project What the World Could Be, see the website http://www.whattheworldcouldbe.com; for more sources on solutions in this section by Ken Walden, see http://www.whattheworld-couldbe.com/WWCB/Solutions.html. To read more on solutions-oriented journalism in this volume, see the foreword by Sarah van Gelder, and ch. 13 by Michael Nagler, “The New Story: Why We Need One and How to Create It.” Also see past Project Censored books Censored 2011, ch. 4; Censored 2012, ch. 4; and Censored 2013, ch. 10, for the work of Kenn Burrows. The Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored is a nonprofit fiscal sponsor of this project.
SECTION II
CRITICAL THINKING,
MEDIA LITERACY, AND
NARRATIVES OF POWER
Free speech is necessary to democracy; without it, the people cannot truly participate in government. For example, Ronald Dworkin has argued,
Free speech is a condition of legitimate government. Laws and policies are not legitimate unless they have been adopted through a democratic process, and a process is not democratic if government has prevented anyone from expressing his convictions about what those laws and policies should be.1
But by itself, free speech is not sufficient to guarantee legitimate democratic government. As Herbert Marcuse argued, if those who control the media have sufficiently indoctrinated the public and manipulated popular opinion, then free speech may actually serve the interests of those in power more effectively than censorship in a totalitarian society.2 As Foucault observed in his lectures on free speech, at least since Plato, anyone interested in promoting free speech must contend with the possibility that some will abuse their license to it by making unthinking or dangerous remarks that could weaken or demolish demo
cracy.3
Thus, though a necessary condition for democracy, free speech is a not sufficient for it. Free speech requires the support of critical thinking and, in our contemporary context, media literacy, or else the laws and policies that undergird democratic societies will lack legitimacy.
The chapters in Section II of Censored 2014 address the crucial skills of critical thinking and media literacy. More than that, they demonstrate these skills in action.
In Chapter 5, “Digging Deeper,” Elliot D. Cohen contrasts systematic forms of manipulation—including, for example, fear mongering, propagation of prejudice, and jingoistic appeals—with six specific critical thinking skills necessary to forestall the “human gullibility and unreason” on which the despotic exercise of power depends.
In Chapter 6, “Diffusing Conspiracy Panics,” James F. Tracy distinguishes “human reason from the surface rationality of bureaucratic and technological systems” and argues for the importance of the former in challenging “official accounts of public events” and embracing our “own intrinsic social and historical agency.”
In Chapter 7, “Censorship That Dares Not Speak Its Name,” John Pilger documents his experience in unwittingly overstepping what he describes as the “invisible boundaries” of American liberalism. His account is a cautionary tale for any who believe that censorship is absent from the liberal foundations that seemingly support progressive politics and free speech.
Finally, in Chapter 8, “Screening the Homeland,” Rob Williams addresses two recent and popular narratives of American power, the films Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. Employing the critical thinking skills and reason advocated in Cohen’s and Tracy’s chapters, Williams de-constructs each film’s narrative to expose them as propaganda on behalf of American empire.
Notes
1. Ronald Dworkin, “The Right to Ridicule,” New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/mar/23/the-right-to-ridicule/. Of course, in addition to government, the mass media and other institutions can act to prevent the public expression of convictions necessary to legitimate democratic government.
2. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, eds. Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 95–137; http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/marcuse/tolerance.pdf.
3. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 13–14. See also the editors’ introduction to this volume.
CHAPTER 5
Digging Deeper
Politico–Corporate Media Manipulation, Critical Thinking,
and Democracy
Elliot D. Cohen
THE MYTH OF THE LEMMINGS
In 1958, the Disney Corporation, which now owns ABC, produced a film, White Wilderness, as part of its “True Life Adventure” series. The film showed lemmings, small mouse-like rodents, supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the sea. According to Disney’s narrator, “a kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.” The Disney documentary is the source of the common belief that lemmings voluntarily march to their deaths.
Disney filmmakers faked the lemming scene, throwing them off the cliff. There is no evidence that blind compulsion ever moves lemmings in their natural habitats to commit suicide en masse.1
But we cannot blame the motion picture industry for such deceptions unless we are prepared to confront our own complicity in deceit. Mass deception by corporate media is possible because we, the “masses,” are deceivable. It is difficult but necessary to recognize our own collusion.
Democracy depends on an informed populace. The power of corporate media to propagate myth and present it as reality is a major factor in the evisceration of American democracy. American corporate media and government have done their utmost to propagate and sustain an image of America as a beacon of freedom, the world’s leading democracy and a majority of Americans have, in turn, embraced this comfortable, mythic view as their own. The truth about America—both its past and present—is less palatable and more inconvenient than the popular myth.2
It is important to note that the primary motivation of gigantic media conglomerates like Disney is the amassing of profit, not truth. As a general rule, only if truth pays will they report it. Likewise, a government seeking power and control over its citizens (which is what all governments do to one extent or another) is likely to censor and whitewash the information it provides to its citizens, and even worse, to propagate disinformation, especially when the facts get in the way of implementing its own agenda. For example, the latter was the case in the lead-up to the Iraq War when the George W. Bush administration attempted to “make the facts fit the policy” in order to justify the war.3
So it would be naive to expect a government that seeks power and control over its citizens not to use its influence over the corporate media in order to spread self-serving propaganda. Inasmuch as the corporate media need government to maximize their bottom line— through tax breaks, military contracts, relaxed media ownership rules, access to its officials and spokespersons, as well as other incentives and kickbacks—government has incredible power and leverage over the corporate media. Thus, instead of blaming the government for having lied to and deceived its citizens, better not to allow ourselves to be suckered into believing such propaganda in the first place. As this chapter argues, our liberties are most vulnerable to faulty thinking and best defended by sound logic.
AN ETHICS OF BELIEF FOR A FREE AMERICA
We Americans are not helpless victims of the politico-corporate media establishment. Victims, yes: helpless, no. We largely permit ourselves to be duped and manipulated. If you think otherwise, then you are subscribing to a view of human nature that makes lemmings of us all, for no rodent has the uniquely human ability of complex rational thought. This includes the ability to doubt that for which one lacks sufficient evidence, and to investigate a claim before believing it. As W. K. Clifford remarked in his famous essay of 1877, The Ethics of Belief, “It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.”4
In fact, Clifford maintained that each and every one of us (and not just politicians, lawyers, journalists, and others who bear a fiduciary relationship to us) has a duty to question things before we commit them to belief. “It is not only the leader of men, statesmen, philosopher, or poet that owes this bounden duty to mankind,” stated Clif-ford. “No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.”5
So, in the sociopolitical context of mass media manipulation, how can we manage to avoid being deceived? The short answer is the one that Clifford has given—namely, by executing our duty to believe only on sufficient evidence.
However, this assumes that we are able, in the first place, to distinguish fact from fiction, and sufficient evidence from pseudo-evidence. We must have a sense of what constitutes rational criteria for belief before we can even begin to determine if we have a good reason to commit something to belief. But this is possible only if we are privy to the sophistical mechanisms that the politico-corporate media establishment uses to manipulate and garner our support.
For example, the Downing Street memos document that, prior to the invasion of Iraq, Bush did not truly believe that Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat to national security.6 Nevertheless, the Bush administration sought public support for invading Iraq and rightly believed that we, the American people, were feeling insecure enough after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to support the invasion if we were told it was necessary to prevent another terrorist attack. So the Bush administration used our vulnerability to manipulate our support.
HOW POLITICO-CORPORATE MEDIA
MANIPULATION WORKS
Unfortun
ately, we based our commitment to Bush’s war on faulty thinking. The Bush administration dug the hole, exhorted us to jump in, and we listened. This same destructive pattern has repeated itself ad nauseam. The politico-corporate establishment has indeed attempted to manipulate Americans, but we have repeatedly permitted ourselves to be duped. This is because we have relied on faulty thinking rather than on sound logic.
Government and corporate media have encouraged the masses to engage in faulty thinking, in an effort to gain public support for self-serving agendas that typically cannot be justified rationally; the only way to get them through is by sophistical means. For example, the Bush administration resorted to the systematic use of manipulation including:
▸ fearmongering (raising and lowering the terrorism alert level),
▸ well-poisoning (calling people who oppose the war “un-American”),
▸ making threats (threatening to jail journalists who publish “classified” government leaks),
▸ propagation of prejudice (media stereotypes of Arabs as terrorists and suicide bombers),
▸ claiming a divine right (as Bush did in waging war in Iraq),
▸ jingoistic appeals (positioning the American flag behind news anchors on Fox News),
and a host of other manipulative devices aimed at short circuiting rational argument.
All such manipulation works by appealing to Americans’ interests and values. For example, many Americans were willing to surrender their right to privacy when government officials framed such compromises in civil liberties as a means to prevent another attack on the homeland. Similarly, the movement to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman gained support when presented as a way of preventing the desecration of what is holy. The attempt by right-wing Republicans to get women to relinquish their legal rights to birth control and abortion—such as during the 2012 Mitt Romney–Paul Ryan presidential campaign—has been orchestrated by systematic intimidation through use of such language as “baby killer,” “murderer,” and “slut,” even though birth control prevents the need for abortions, and even though there are rational arguments on both sides of the abortion controversy. Americans were intimidated against protesting the war in Iraq because media presented such dissent as a refusal to “support the troops.” Those who had the courage to stand up to the politico-corporate machine were branded “traitors” and were accused of sabotaging the effort to “win the war on terror.”
