Given our shellacking in the recent elections, it's clear we need to rethink our media policy. If the Republicans can get elected on hate and obstructionism, then we're obviously not getting our message across. This diary offers some suggestions (and Republican comparisons) towards that end.
There are two big problems with Democratic media strategy: 1) Democratic elites don't take their base seriously, or think of them as a viable force to be persuaded; and, 2) Democratic grassroots organizations have neither the resources nor the broad vision necessary to formulate an effective progressive (or even liberal) media policy.
The Republicans, on the other hand, have been on track about building a propaganda engine for the last 30 years. We're way behind in the information and entertainment war, and that hurts us badly. In fact, it lost us the House. The bottom line is that Republicans have a carefully crafted vertical media monopoly specially designed to formulate, spread, and perpetuate Big Lies, which includes local & national radio, billboards, newspapers, polling companies, publishing houses, book clubs, internet sites, cable stations, and concert venues, underpinned by an incredible conservative content-production machine -- right wing "institutes," think tanks, pet academics, and a whole raft of conservative pseudo-intellectuals whom they trot out as talking heads in all of the above venues.
In brief, the corporatists who run the Republican party can pick an issue about which they want to propagandize the American people, bring it to their think tanks, and expect their pet intellectuals to produce trumped up justifications or "studies" to support their views. Then they can pick (or start) a new "special interest group" with a name that means exactly the opposite of the organization's intent and start to sell their issue to the American public, using every conservative media outlet at their disposal. The constant repetition of the point, echoed from the valleys of right wing hate radio, to the pinnacles of Fox News, gives it credibility in the mind of those who hear it. The sheer volume of this production makes it "news" which is transferred to the screens of more moderate network outlets, and all of a sudden, fringe ideas become suitable subjects for national debate. This is how Republicans produce the "irreality" in which they are attempting to force all of us to live. And this is exactly what we have to fight.
We Democrats, and especially we progressives, love to claim we're "reality based." And we certainly are, especially compared to the Republican knuckle-draggers who want to destroy science because science makes the Baby Jesus cry. But I'd like to remind you of something Che Guevarra once said: "It's not my fault that reality is Marxist." He may have been right, but it's crucial to remember that he was deeply mistaken about the readiness of the Latin American masses to revolt against their oppressors -- both his elitism and his reliance on the power of "reality" tripped him up.
All of us -- intellectual elites included -- live mostly in our heads. As Gregory Bateson and Daniel Goleman have reminded us, and as many other scientists affirm, our brain is more occupied with filtering out data, than with letting it in. Even scientists don't live their daily, emotional lives based on empirical evidence and hard logic. (When they do, we make jokes about them.) Most people live in a world where feelings, intuition, metaphor, and a sense of belonging are far more important than "the truth," unless that truth is of some immediate and clear value in their daily lives. So we can't expect the truth to set us free -- instead, Democrats need to figure out how to convey the truth with as much power, immediacy, drama and effectiveness as the Republicans purvey their great lies.
It's not my purpose here to complain without suggesting an alternative, so here's my proposal. We need to work the grassroots, the local news, and the national media. Different democrats should pursue different strategies. Rich and powerful Democrats should use their resources to buy, build and support Democratic media venues. This is a no-brainer -- Soros would do us a helluva lot of good if he built us a Democratic version of Fox News, and Democratic foundations should be pouring money into local alternative media outlets. Free alternative City Papers used to be major sources of liberal and progressive local news, and then we let them all get bought up by the media-industrial complex. And don't say we can substitute the internet -- a lot of our base still isn't online, and everyone in town picks up the free weekly rag. We also need to be subsidizing Democratic radio talk show hosts. People listen to the radio, and we need to find and support Democratic talk show hosts who appeal to their local audiences.
Organizations like FAIR are out there doing incredible work, but we aren't supporting them like they need to be supported. Most importantly, there is no structural Democratic publicity network through which they can disseminate the important corrections they make. And we need more than corrections. We need news. We need to put fund-raising for our media organizations at the same level of priority that we put fund-raising for our best political candidates, because our candidates can't win unless we get our message across. I'd like to see Kos adopting its wonderful fund-raising model to support Democratic media outlets who, at the moment, simply can't afford to assign reporters to cover stories. Most people have no idea how terribly our ability to collect news is affected by the poverty of the print newspapers. Beat reporters have all but vanished as a breed, which is why those hollow-brained Republican memes echo so loudly through the largely empty halls of journalism.
The model of the "citizen reporter" is attractive, but the truth is we also need our professionals -- people whose job it is to get out there and get the story. We need, as Democrats, to support organizations that are dedicated to upholding journalistic standards, and we need not to rely on random (though often competent and well-intentioned) members of the public to fill the gap. Without reporting, there's no way we can let our base know what the Republicans are doing to screw America at the local, state and national levels.
We also need to quit joining in on the bashing of humanities and qualitative social sciences. One of the first efforts of the Republican "culture wars" was to go after the credibility of university professors in the humanities and social sciences, and to label them all crazy, self-indulgent closet Marxists. Democrats didn't stand up for those professions, and now they're on the ropes, suffering terribly from funding cuts. Whole departments are being closed, and what that does to us as a society is deprive us of advancing (or even holding on to) the knowledge we've attained in those fields. It's the Dark Ages for those disciplines.
When Reagan came into office, he went after the sociologists because sociologists were empirically demonstrating the inequalities inherent in U.S. society. Sociologists were the people who could prove, without a doubt, that his claims about "trickle down" economics were bunk. Sociologists were the people who could argue convincingly about the terrible inequality of political and economic representation of minorities, or about inequality in the justice system. And sociology had a large number of vocal black practitioners. So, Reagan defunded the entire profession, cutting off government grants and choking off their funding. Then, Republicans began selectively refunding sociology until it was remade in their own image, carefully building their irrealty.
Democrats also need to fund organizations that track statistics. Republicans have cut and cut the Bureau of Statistics because they know that the numbers simply aren't on their side. This is why they go after the Census, as well -- they simply don't want certain numbers to be available. Then they ridicule the whole field of statistics, claiming that one can say "anything" with them, and that they are all equally suspect. So we have to do something about that -- either we have to force our Democratic politicians to stand up and demand we be counted, or we have to start out own alternative statistical collection agencies. Without facts -- real employment numbers, gender pay inequity numbers, poverty line statistics, etc. -- we can't live by the logic we profess to love. And of course those statistics need to be powerfully presented via Democratic media.
And it's not just the social sciences. We need to support the humanities as well and not buy into the Republican canard that they are trivial, simply because they've expanded beyond the very white, very male, traditional Western canon. It's a Republican success that they've shut down the very disciplines that were at the forefront of embracing and incorporating American minority and women's literatures into the curriculum -- the disciplines that represent the very values that Democrats say they support. It's become so standard for everyone to diss the humanities that Democrats have become blind to the "counter-humanities" propaganda campaign still being waged by Republicans. It's not that Republicans don't believe in Literature, Philosophy, etc. It's that Republicans want to sidestep the entire academic peer review structure, and replace it with their own pseudo-intellectual gang of talking heads -- "experts" who are called up to discuss their work and to spew their hateful opinions about "American culture" to the masses who listen to Republican media. If Democrats want to get our messages across, we really do need to pay attention to the experts who know what a "trope" is.
But let's not get stuck in the elitist ivory-tower. I said this was a multi-pronged campaign. One of the amazing things about Republican media is that it's involved a segment of Americans that was previously largely excluded from public media -- the folks who feel disfranchised and powerless. We might not like the attitudes those base Republicans have, but we have to credit the savvy of a Republican Party that has learned how to court that expression. (Whether they can harness it will be a lesson they'll learn over the next two years.) Chomsky pointed this out in a recent essay -- that we need to take a lesson from the Tea Party and not just sneer and dismiss it.
We've done much more poorly by our base. Too often, Democrats rely on the votes of the poorest and most marginal populations, since they're overwhelming Democratic. Then we get shafted when our base isn't motivated to go to the polls. But why should they be motivated? Where is their voice? Democrats should be out there publicly advocating against felon disfranchisement, the War on Drugs, unequal justice, and for fair immigration reform, pay equity, a woman's right to choose, and so on. But we don't because we fear those causes are "unpopular." We're such pathetic wimps in these situations, because we feel at the mercy of the "the media" and public opinion. But it's our job to make public opinion. We need to dump a lot more money into the hands of successful groups like Rucker's Color of Change. We need to hire the best documentary filmmakers in the business and set them to explain why we're right on these issues and Republicans are wrong. We need to air those documentaries on Democratic networks and local affiliates, like Fox airs all their twisted, distorted documentaries. We need to distribute those videos on the internet, and figure out how to make them go viral on YouTube.
We need to caucus with the Hollywood directors and stars who think of themselves as liberals and progressives. We need to get those celebrities together with our best scholars of popular culture, and we need to do some consciousness-raising and teaching so that a movie with progressive intentions doesn't wind up unconsciously emulating the very stereotypes we need to eradicate if we're going to bring about progressive change. I'm not talking about setting up any sort of censorship body -- I'm talking about drawing progressive and liberal celebrities into Democratic strategy sessions in an effort to keep our message coherent and true to our beliefs and intentions.
Republicans are all about coordinated messages. This is because you can't propagandize lies unless they're seamless. This is why Republicans rely on their vertical media monopoly, and dissenting voices are banned, unless they're contained within a structure that allows them to be ridiculed. It's why they encourage their base to avoid all other news outlets.
Democrats, because they're purveying the truth, don't need to be in such tight lock-step -- the truth can bear scrutiny from a variety of vantage points. But this doesn't mean we don't need coordination and cooperation. What, in the end, does it matter that Stewart has such a huge audience, and can rally a hundred thousand people, if the right wingers win the election? What does it matter that Oprah's voice reaches hundreds of millions if it's not saying something that will help us reclaim the liberal heritage of America? We need to ask "our" celebrities to come together and think about what they can do, as a group, to effectively sway American opinion. Republican celebrities coordinate -- Democrats need to do that too.
And I don't mean that we should ask our film stars to talk about politics (unless they want to), or to be polemic, or spout canned lines. I mean that we should be talking to our Hollywood celeb allies about countering the deluge of stereotypes with which Americans are inundated. We need to demand that our entertainments fairly represent minority communities, and cease to over-represent black and brown minority Americans as drug-dealers, criminals and low-lifes. We need to understand that this unceasing deluge of negative stereotype reinforces Republican ideas, not Democratic ideas. We need to kick the ass of any so-called progressive who hands us a film or TV series featuring another Magical Negro who sacrifices him or herself to help white people solve their problems, or another black police chief whose token role as leader is supposed to offset his or her lack of character development, or the parade of black criminals across the screen. We need to advocate stongly against the production of yet another White Male Yuppie Redemption Film. We need to demand that "our" celebs deal with tough issues like abortion on-screen without caving to protect Republican sensibilities. For example, we've let the right dominate our discourse about women's right to choose to the point where I can't think of a single pop culture vehicle in decades that portrays a woman's decision to have an abortion as a positive life choice.
This focus on pop culture might seem trivial to you, but it only appears that way if you dismiss the power of repetition and the sheer number of hours that Americans spend watching television and viewing movies. It makes a huge difference whether pop culture carries Democratic or Republican messages, because the images that are echoed throughout pop culture are exactly the ones that 30-second political spots evoke, and that people carry with them to the polls. If Democrats had been on the ball in terms of pop culture, Republicans would never have been able to put forward the myth that the peace movement spat on Vietnam veterans, and we would have escaped the trap of the "support the troops" rhetoric imposed on us by pro-war Republicans -- rhetoric that has made the anti-war movement largely ineffective since Gulf War I. We should have been out there in the pop culture trenches telling it like it was -- that the peace movement was the only group out there "supporting veterans", that most veterans were anti-Vietnam War, and that it was the so-called patriots of the VFW who actually did spit at the vets marching against the war.
To get these messages across we need coordination between our political strategists, our media outlets, our content producers and our academics, and we need to appeal to the public. The Republicans do this, and if we can't manage it we'll be losing elections for a very long time to come.
There's a lot more I could write about this -- I'm working on a book. But I had to get this out there today, in the wake of these disastrous mid-terms. If anyone wants to hire me to be Democrat Communications Czar, I'd be happy to take the job.