by Mickey Huff
This is one reason why it is always preferable to rely on several independent authorities (where possible) rather than just one. Again, while this does not yield certainty, to the extent that credible experts agree, you have greater assurance that you have gotten hold of the truth.
5. Watch out for fearmongering and demagoguery.
This is an ancient admonition. As Plato observed, democracies are typically destroyed from within rather than from without when a self-aggrandizing demagogue stirs up the passions of a gullible populace by falsely promising to keep them safe. Blaming others for the woes of state, this self-styled “protector” brings the alleged culprits to justice, winning the trust of the people, and eventually seizing power and becoming a tyrant.26
Saddam Hussein appears to have been such a scapegoat used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. The underlying strategy was classic. Want to support the invasion of a sovereign nation that poses no threat to the homeland? Just get average citizens to think they might be the next victims of al-Qaeda if they fail to jump on the war bandwagon.
This mechanism of fearmongering typically works by exaggerating the consequences of something untoward happening. For example, Georgia Republican Chairperson Sue Everhart warned that allowing gay marriage would create serious potential for fraud. “You may be as straight as an arrow,” she warned, “and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow. Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married.”27
But the truth is that there is no evidence to support the claimed trend toward the commission of fraud within the nine states and the District of Columbia in which gay marriage has been legalized. Nor is there any evidence that gay parents turn their children gay or that married gays are destroying traditional marriage. Yet these are views popularly espoused in the media—most often by the fringe of the Republican Party—with little or no attempt to debunk them; in some cases, such as on Fox News, pundits defend the views.28
And it is not just gays who are the objects of groundless distortions of reality and fear mongering. “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women,” said televangelist Pat Robertson on the 700 Club television show. “It is about a socialist, antifamily political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”29
But it is just not clear how the “feminist agenda” (whatever exactly that is) is “socialist” and “antifamily,” much less that it will lead to witchcraft, capitalism’s destruction, or conversion of heterosexual women into lesbians. Frightening though such claims may sound to some, there is simply no evidence to support them. Such fear-and hatemongering works only if we are gullible and do not ask for evidence. Don’t be gullible. Ask for evidence before committing something to belief.
6. Beware of stereotypes.
Asking for evidence can also defuse dangerous stereotypes, which are the coin of demagogues and hatemongers like Robertson. These are half-baked generalizations that rate, often in very unflattering terms, a class of people—like a race or a gender—without regard to individual differences among class members.30
It is small wonder that the simplistic portrayals of reality offered by corporate media reinforce stereotypes. An instructive example is the TV show 24, which premiered on Fox in November 2001, just after 9/11, and aired through May 2010, during the height of the Iraq War. This show portrayed Arabs as terrorists, and encouraged dangerous, bandwagon thinking by depicting anti-American sentiments and hate crimes targeting Arabs.31
Of course, this is not a new trend. Indeed, the media have historically underwritten popular racial stereotypes. Consider, for example, the degrading portrayals of blacks and women in the popular 1950s CBS shows Amos ‘n’ Andy and Father Knows Best. Far from helping to liberate the socially oppressed, the corporate media have helped to legitimize such oppression in order to turn a profit.
Sadly, the price paid for this failure of media and culture to reject degrading stereotypes has been enormous, making it so much easier to exploit or even destroy them. Thus slavery was possible because slave owners told themselves that their slaves were not full-fledged human beings who were even capable of living freely. The oppressors of women thought the same of them. Unfortunately, though the victims of such exploitation have changed, the tendency to exploit is still very much alive.
Stereotypes rely on inadequate evidence; they are culturally transmitted, taught through the socialization we receive as children and through the popular images portrayed in the media.32 For example, when 9/11 occurred, many Americans already had a stereotype of Arabs as terrorists, which they could use to justify their hatred of all Arabs. In fact, the stereotype of Arabs as terrorists arose in the late twentieth century, and earlier, they were popularly portrayed as villains, seducers, hustlers, and thieves.33
Stereotypes are driven by mindsets—the tendency to believe something even in the face of evidence to the contrary.34 In an evidence-driven culture, stereotypes would not be accepted. Unfortunately, because all of us harbor stereotypes of one sort or another, it is important for us all to exercise willpower to resist pervasive, popular media images that support our preconceived, mindset-driven portrayals of human beings. Instead of acquiescing to belief in these images, we should make concerted efforts to be aware of our own stereotypes; to refute them by realizing that human beings need to be judged as individuals, as you yourself would wish to be judged; and to refuse to act on such simplistic, anti-empirical characterizations.
A NEW AGE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISTS
The corporate media treat news consumers as means to the end of maximizing profits. Its commitment is not to democratic principles, even though many reporters who work for the corporate media are committed to these principles. What is finally aired or published by these companies is sanitized and whitewashed to the beat of what is most conducive to its bottom line, which includes rolling over for government if it is profitable to do so.
The people cannot afford to be the puppets of the politico-corporate media establishment, for the cost is the evisceration of the most precious asset of all: our freedom. Fighting back is the only recourse we have; and this means arming ourselves with the most powerful weapon known to humankind: rational thinking. Presently, there is a sea of veridical information floating in cyberspace amid the sludge of false-to-fact claims. As consumers of knowledge and information we must surf this massive data sea, separating falsehoods from truths, testing the claims of corporate media against those of the cyber world. We must look for evidence and consistency, and we must challenge popular media images, stereotypes, and explanations, rather than believing things just because they are asserted by government officials or their media spokespersons. We must challenge what these “authorities” claim with the evidence gleaned from independent, creden-tialed authorities. Instead of allowing ourselves to be manipulated by anti-empirical fearmongering and demagoguery, we must defeat them with the facts.
In short, we must all be deputized as citizen investigative journalists, digging deeper beneath the surface of the corporate media facade. We must anchor our beliefs firmly in reality, not the myth. We must cease the outsourcing of our free press principles to private, for-profit entities and we must do more than attempt to hold journalistic institutions to account. We must also take on the responsibility of disseminating fact-based, people’s narratives ourselves—in our communities person to person, and using whatever broader reaching communications technologies we have—as the corporate media become increasingly irrelevant in terms of accurately and meaningfully informing the public.
This means meeting our duty to think for ourselves head on. Democracy without responsible, vigilant media is not possible:
We must be this media!
ELLIOT D. COHEN, PHD, is a freelance journalist, director of the Institute of Critical Thinking
: National Center for Logic-Based Therapy, and executive director of the National Philosophical Counseling Association (NPCA). He is also editor and founder of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy and the International Journal of Philo-sophical Practice, the ethics editor for Free Inquiry magazine, and a blogger for Psychology Today. His recent books include Mass Surveillance and State Control (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Critical Thinking Unleashed (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), and The Dutiful Worrier: How to Stop Compulsive Worry without Feeling Guilty (New Harbinger, 2011).
Notes
1. Riley Woodford, “Lemming Suicide Myth Disney Film Faked Bogus Suicide,” Alaska Department of Fish and Game, September 2003, http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm>adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56.
2. See, for example, Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez, “The U.S. Creation Myth and Its Premise Keepers,” in Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, ed. David Solnit (San Francisco: City Lights, 2004), 51–60.
3. Text of the original Downing Street memos, http://downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html.
4. W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” Contemporary Review, 1877, http://www.infidels.org/li-brary/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html.
5. Ibid.
6. See Downing Street memos, http://downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html.
7. “NDAA Signed Into Law By Obama Despite Guantanamo Veto Threat, Indefinite Detention Provisions,” Huffington Post, January 3, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/ndaa-obama-indefinite-detention_n_2402601.html. See also, Elliot D. Cohen, Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Act (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 200.
8. For a detailed account of reasoning processes that promote free and rational thought, see Elliot D. Cohen, Critical Thinking Unleashed (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
9. Michael Parenti, “Monopoly Media Manipulation,” May 2001, Michael Parenti Political Archive, http://www.michaelparenti.org/MonopolyMedia.html.
10. Ibid.
11. Project Censored, for example, publishes a list of reputable independent and foreign news organizations and the addresses of their websites. See http://www.projectcensored.org/news-sources.
12. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Obama 2013 Pakistan Drone Strikes,” January 3, 2013, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/01/03/obama-2013-pakistan-drone-strikes/. See also Mickey Huff et al., “Déja Vu: What Happened to Previous Censored Stories,” ch. 2 in this volume.
13. See, for example, Seamus Milne, “America’s murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror,” Guardian, May 29, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/29/americas-drone-campaign-terror.
14. For analysis of additional economic and bureaucratic factors that have limited corporate news coverage of the US drone campaign, see Andy Lee Roth, “Framing Al-Awlaki: How Government Officials and Corporate Media Legitimized a Targeted Killing,” Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 353–355, 364–367. For more on the general theme of the military-industrial complex and media, see Robert Jensen, “Thinking Critically about Mass Media,” in The Military Industrial Complex at 50, ed. David Swanson (Charlottesville, VA: MIC50.org, 2011), 152–160.
15. Saul Landau, “When Will the Media Ask Important Questions?” Progresso, April 10, 2013, http://progreso-weekly.com/ini/index.php/home/in-the-united-states/3876-when-will-the-media-ask-important-questions.
16. Downing Street memos.
17. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets US Spy on Callers without Courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
18. Ryan Singel, “Spying in the Death Star: The AT&T Whistle-Blower Tells His Story,” Wired, May 10, 2007, http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/05/kleininterview.
19. “Erin Burnett Out Front,” CNN, May 1, 2013, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/5/01/ebo.01.html. [Editor’s Note: After this chapter was written and submitted for publication, the NSA, PRISM, and Edward Snowden whistleblower story broke, confirming pervasive government surveillance and spying working with private sector communications companies like Verizon and others. See ch. 1 and ch. 2 in this volume for more details. See also Glenn Greenwald, “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily,” Guardian, June 5, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order.
20. Dennis Bernstein, “How FBI Monitored Occupy Movement,” Consortium News, December 31, 2012, http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/31/how-fbi-monitored-occupy-movement. See also Beau Hodai in “Media Democracy in Action,” ch. 4 in this volume, as well as the full report online, Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street (DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy, May 2013), http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/05/11924/operation-tripwire-fbi-private-sector-and-monitoring-occupy-wall-street.
21. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990).
22. Ibid., 152–153.
23. Ibid., 153–154.
24. Clifford, “Ethics of Belief.”
25. David Barstow, “Beyond TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” New York Times, April 20, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?pagewanted=all. For another recent piece examining how corporate media advocate the public to “believe only credible authorities, “ see Russ Baker, “New York Times Warning: Trust Authorities on Boston Bombing, or You’re Nuts, “ WhoWhatWhy.com, May 31, 2013. http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/05/31/new-york-times-warning-trust-authorities-on-boston-bombing-or-you’re-nuts.
26. Plato, The Republic, Book VIII, trans. Benjamin Jowett, http://classics.mit.edi/Plato/republic.9.v11.html.
27. Luke Johnson, “Sue Everhart, Georgia GOP Chairwoman, Warns Of ‘Free Ride’ Gay Marriage Fraud,” Huffington Post, April 1, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/01/sue-ever-hart-gay-marriage_n_2991860.html.
28. Ben Dimiero and Eric Hananoki, “Ben Carson: Marriage Equality Could Destroy America Like The ‘Fall Of The Roman Empire,’” Media Matters, March 29, 2013, http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/29/ben-carson-marriage-equality-could-destory-amer/193345.
29. Anomaly, “Pat Robertson: God Will Destroy America Because of Gay Marriage,” FreakOutNation, June 28, 2011, http://freakoutnation.com/2011/06/28/pat-robertson-god-will-destory-america-because-of-gay-marriage/.
30. Cohen, Critical Thinking Unleashed, 163.
31. See, for example, Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 152.
32. Cohen, Critical Thinking Unleashed.
33. Kumar, Islamophobia. See also http://arabface.us/. For further background, see the film, Reel Bad Arabs as it addresses the rise of Arab stereotypes in the US, http://www.reelbadarabs.com/. Rob Williams further addresses the issue of Islamophobia in “Screening the Homeland: How Hollywood Fantasy Mediates State Fascism in the US of Empire,” ch. 8 in this volume.
34. Elliot D. Cohen, Caution: Faulty Thinking Can Be Harmful to Your Happiness (Fort Pierce, FL: Trace-Wilco, Inc., 2004).
CHAPTER 6
Diffusing Conspiracy Panics
On the Public Use of Reason in the
Twenty-First Century Truth Emergency1
James F. Tracy
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
—Emma Goldman
INTRODUCTION
Several years ago Project Censored’s former and current directors Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff identified and explained the “truth emergency” that is among the greatest threats to human existence. This crisis of civil society is manifest in flawed (or nonexistent) investigations into 9/11 and other potential false-flag terrorism, fraudulent elections, and illegal wars, all of which are perpetuated by a corporate-c
ontrolled news media that fail to adequately inform the public on such matters.2
While obscuring inquiry into such events and phenomena, big media go a step further by disparaging independent journalists and researchers as “conspiracy theorists” or, more revealingly, “truthers.”
As the truth emergency becomes more serious, social engineers, taking their cue from deeply antidemocratic minds such as Edward Bernays, have long understood the significance of undermining the use of reason, for it is only through reason that truth may be ascertained and evaluated. “Propaganda,” on the other hand, must be unabashedly employed to guide the masses toward certain predetermined ends. Aided through the burgeoning field of mass psychology, Bernays wrote in 1928 how propaganda “is now scientific in the sense that it seeks to base its operations upon definite knowledge drawn from direct observation of the group mind, and upon the application of principles which have been demonstrated to be consistent and relatively constant.”3
Today, a far greater technological sophistication involving the Internet, social media, and “smart” devices has brought about the conflation of propaganda with advertising and mass consumption. The preoccupation with, and ubiquity of, such media and message-making give the false impression of personal autonomy and free will, while actual political and economic power remains largely unchallenged. “We are no longer appealed to as thinking citizens,” a commentary in the Guardian observed:
