George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and their Republican cronies have built a massive propaganda machine to shape public opinion (See
Jeff Gannon,
Armstrong Williams,
Maggie Gallagher,
fake "town hall" style meetings,
fake news,
Fox News, etc.).
And, as the LA Times reports today, Arnold Schwarzenegger has now taken a page from their playbook:
Using taxpayer money, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has sent television stations statewide a mock news story extolling a proposal that would benefit political boosters in the business community by ending mandatory lunch breaks for many hourly workers.
More below.
The tape looks like a news report and is narrated by a former television reporter who now works for the state. But unlike an actual news report, it does not provide views critical of the proposed changes. Democrats have denounced it as propaganda. Snippets aired on as many as 18 stations earlier this month, the administration said.
Now, I could just stop this diary right here and let this stand as another example of Bush's corruption/the Republican Party's growing fondness for Fascism/the mainstream media's complicity in sending us straight to hell in a hand-basket. But I'd like to take it one step further and discuss narrative dysfunction.
"Narrative dysfunction" is what the poet C.K Williams described as "the process by which we lose track of ourselves, the story that tells us who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act." Novelist Charles Baxter argues in his essay "Dysfunctional Narratives, or `Mistakes Were Made'," that Richard Nixon was the inventor of the concept of "deniability...the almost complete disavowal of intention and relation to bad consequences." Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were early pioneers of the technique, using various excuses to obscure their roles in the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.
Those who use narrative dysfunction, as Baxter details, create "a climate in which social narratives are designed to be deliberately incoherent and misleading."
Such narratives humiliate the act of storytelling. You can argue that only a coherent narrative can manage to explain public events, and you can reconstruct a story if someone says, "I made a mistake," or "We did that." You can't reconstruct a story - you can't even know what the story is - if everyone is saying, "Mistakes were made." Who made them? Everybody made them, and no one did, and it's history anyway, so let's forget about it.
Sound familiar? This administration, more than any other in history, has employed narrative dysfunction to further its aims and conceal its mistakes. And the media has played along by allowing the Right Wing Noise Machine to muddle the narrative until the past becomes an "unreadable mess." "When there is no comprehensible story," Baxter writes, "there is no history."
The propaganda efforts I mentioned at the top of my post are just another facet of the Republican's larger narrative dysfunction strategy.
"Fake news," in all its incarnations, seeks to subvert the idea of relying on facts, and facts are necessary to assign responsibility and ascertain reality. But with its shouts of "liberal bias," the Right has tamed the media into submission, trained it to stop investigating and relying on facts. Journalists no longer look to the facts and assign responsibility when a scandal arises; they only look for partisan commentary. By turning the MSM into just another venue for dueling press releases and talking heads, the GOP has made government propaganda acceptable. If every shred of news you see on TV and hear on the radio is biased anyway, the reasoning goes, then who can really get outraged over a little "propaganda" from the government? A telling quote from the LA Times article:
Rob Stutzman, Schwarzenegger's communications director, defended the so-called video news release, saying it is "just like any other press release, only it's on video."
He noted that lawmakers who are criticizing the tape "also issue press releases."
In other words, you should know better than to believe what you hear purporting to be news because, really, there is no such thing. There are no "facts" to speak of, just differing "press releases." Nothing to see here, move along...
And in the meantime, a war over WMDs that never existed keeps raging, and the buck just keeps rolling on, never stopping with anyone anywhere.