On The Fast Track to Negativland
Or what we learned about the media in 1988, and promptly forgot
The history of the traditional media in the United States is rife with bad examples. We have made an art form out of ignoring, mocking or devaluing traditional concepts like fairness, accuracy and honesty in reporting while at the same time, pretending to hold those values very highly.
Many people get outraged, upset and angry when time and time again, the traditional media fails to deliver important information, or more commonly, delivers inaccurate information without any substantiation whatsoever.
It befuddles me how this can come as a shock to anyone.
It has been the modus operandi of the American media since the days of Tammany Hall. It is neither new, nor surprising nor even particularly unexpected.
In 1988 a punk/noise rock band from California called "Negativland" taught America a critical lesson in media consciousness. Which, by the time the 1988 November election season rolled around, was nearly completely forgotten and we learned how painfully, how easily, this system could be manipulated. Many on the left feign shock and outrage that this works. But there are three people who never ever forgot how this worked: Karl Rove, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes.
If you doubt I’m wrong, ask them. They know the story. And they know what it means. Most of us have long forgotten, but this story is part of the Republican strategic unconsciousness.
Negativland had a few musical releases, but amidst the cacophony of fantastic punk bands all over the country during the Reagan-Bush years they had achieved some notice, but little success. In 1988 they were faced with the grim reality of having to cancel their tour due to financial difficulties. They were also presented with an opportunity, in the form of a particularly grizzly murder of a family by their son & brother, David Brom.
"the band issued a press release claiming that they had been "advised by Federal Official Dick Jordan not to leave town pending an investigation into the Brom murders." The press release implied that Brom had listened to Negativland's song "Christianity Is Stupid" before the fatal quarrel with his religious parents.
In reality, there was no official named "Dick Jordan", and Brom did not possess any Negativland music. The murder investigation later discovered that he was on SST's mailing lists, but he only owned "Zen Arcade" by SST band Hüsker Dü. Nevertheless, pundits and journalists took the press release at face value, and the hoax received widespread media coverage. Negativland encouraged the spread of the story by steadfastly refusing further comment, supposedly on the advice of their attorney "Hal Stakke", another fictional person invented by the band. "
The scope and style of this rather twisted prank are nearly unmistakable in a modern context. They took a simple fact (the gruesome murder was a real and heinous act) and added some non-facts (their was absolutely no relationship between their music and the murder). In fact just about any self-respecting teenager had at least one SST record in 1988, and Husker Du appears pretty far down on the dangerous-to-listen-rock-music-list!
The coverage that this story received based on a phony press release was (for 1988) somewhat astonishing. It was covered by local TV stations who reported it as fact, including several far away from Minneapolis. National print media (Pulse!, Bam, the Village Voice) covered the story without so much as a call to verify. As a young college radio DJ, I recall ever so dimly, a Kurt Loder MTV news segment mentioning this invented story.
In fairness, MTV News probably did not have a great deal of investigative capability in their "news" department in 1988, but the idea is important:
Major news media outlets ran the story with little or no regard for it’s truth.
The band Negativland was able to (briefly) capitalize on the attention this saga brought them. Their follow-up album "Helter Stupid" made extensive use of the media coverage therein. The band and the story faded quickly in the haze of 1988.
Another major media fraud was perpetrated in 1988. One in which the modestly likeable, reasonably competent, governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis was turned into the poster boy for evil criminals nationwide. It had the absolute mark of total media fraud on it, and it bore the signature of Roger Ailes.
They took a fact (the parole of a murderer, Willie Horton, and his subsequent multi-state crime spree) and then added the non-facts (Dukakis did not create or strongly support the furlough program: he followed the legislature in changing the program in the Spring of 1988; but the Republicans presented as if he had invented the program).
Factually, Governor Dukakis had no real relationship to the Willie Horton case beyond his continuation of a program begun by Republican Governor Francis W. Sargent in 1972 and his subsequent change of the law to prevent convicted murderers from being eligible, all of which was supported by the Massachusetts legislature.
But we now know enough not to let little things like the facts stand in our way.
Ailes & Atwater, determined to turn the pursuit of the presidency into a "trivial pursuit", pushed hard to make this story part of a narrative – Governor Dukakis becomes "Negativland" (the cause) and Willie Horton becomes David Brom (the effect) and the media through failure to refute the claims becomes the microphone through which Ailes & Atwater are able to tell this fiction. Said Roger Ailes: ""the only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."
And so, therein, lies the lesson of 1988, writ large for those of us with long enough memories to see it. What did we learn?
- the media does little if any fact checking on stories they circulate, largely because there is no incentive to do so.
- the media narrative on a given topic is controlled by the frequency of repetition. The accuracy of facts presented or issues dicussed is not salient – only their repetition is important for the creation of a narrative.
- Successful narratives combine facts (John McCain was one of the Keating 5) with non-facts (John McCain took piles of cash from Charles Keating during romantic candlelight dinner cruises on the Keating yacht.)
- While the medium is the message, the messenger’s credibility is rarely, if ever, reviewed. Negativland used bogus press releases referring to people who did not exist. Ailes & Atwater used paid actors in their commercials (notably African-American or Hispanic) to represent fictional criminals who existed at best metaphorically. You don't have to have a true message or a credible messenger to create a narrative.
So none of this, the "Rovian" tactics or modern media manipulation should be particularly surprising. One interesting aspect of the "blogosphere" has been its role in discrediting these tactics. Jeff Gannon worked for a made-up media company and had no credibility – but he was consistently presented as credible until someone forced the issue. Gannon was in no way different than the invented press release.
The fingerprints of the "Negativland" episode are all over the "Swift Boat Veterans" attacks as well.
A simple fact (John Kerry was an officer who served on Swift Boats during Viet Nam) is merged with some non-facts (John Kerry was somehow less honorable than other officers?) and some half-truths (some Swift Boat vets did not like John Kerry which somehow meant all vets don’t like him?) and a completely bogus-but-effective narrative is created:
"Because some Swift Boat vets don’t like John Kerry, John Kerry’s service must have been dishonorable."
This is absolutely, 100% a lie and obviously illogical.
There is no truth to such a statement whatsoever, but because of it’s presentation as a NARRATIVE by repetition of the non-truth part, the Republicans are able use it because they know that neither the media, nor their core voters, have any intention of looking at the obvious logical gaps nor the bald-faced lies that they are perpetrating.
You can point out that Barack Obama is not a muslim until you are blue in the face, hell, you could sit them down next to Barack in church -- they are still not going to believe you because they are willingly choosing to believe the narrative, regarless of it's truth or fiction.
I am concerned that attempts to change the medias behavior continue to be fruitless -- as long as we keep watching, they keep doing the same stuff over and over again. I don't think we can change what they do unless we as a society radically change our behavior (i.e. stop watching TV?)
What those of us who DO value logic & truth must do is decide. We need to decide how to fight smears that use this kind of bogus narrative. If you doubt me, McCain’s campaign director has said as much, i.e. "it’s not about the issues". Yeah, well we can all GUESS what it's going to be about, can't we. It's not going to be about who has the better ideas for our country, I can tell you that much.
Do we fight the smears with continual attempts to get the traditional media to do their jobs? Or do we create smear narratives of our own?
I can’t answer that last question myself, but I’ll tell you this much, if you think for a moment that the McCain campaign isn’t ready to head quickly to Negativland, you are sadly mistaken.