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Indybay Feature

Authors of United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America Discuss Book

by Leon Kunstenaar (Photo: Pat Kunstenaar)
Authors discuss their book at Berkeley's Hillside Club
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In a benefit for KPFA listener supported radio, Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff, authors of United States of Distraction, Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (And What We Can Do About It) provided further insight into their study of how America's mainstream media works and how it got us to where we are.

The appearance of this book, and the Bay Area media activism that helped create it is very much a part of the resistance to the madness that presumes to rule us.

Nolan Higdon began the evening’s presentation. He enumerated the factors that allows corporate interests to set the terms of discussion and manipulate public opinion to their benefit. He sees four components that make this possible:

1. Vulnerability - Serious discussion of public issues are avoided by the transformation of news into “infotainment.” Intellectual defenses against manipulation are lowered by making news part of a culture of pervasive entertainment. News is now made funny and entertaining with telegenic personalities like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah. Every year, less time is devoted to serious discussion and analysis of news on television, which is where most people still get their news.

2. Hyperpartisanship - The public is increasingly sliced into ideological segments. We have “Red” states and “Blue” states, extensive tribalization and “identity” politics. For example, in Alabama a child molester was still considered a serious candidate simply because he was running against a Democrat. This hyperpartisanship is reinforced by…

3. Media Fragmentation - We now have a media divided into segments of “conservative” news, “progressive” news, and extremes in all directions, each with its own networks, web sites and pundits. Algorithms keep users clicking on material that caters to and reinforces users’ views. Discussion of public issues appears in ideological silos that do not talk to each other.

4. Then there is the generalized dumbing down of the public’s ability to absorb information about common issues. The digital divide where people separated not only by geographical location but by income level. Instruction in critical thinking, the ability to detect bias and intent, has become a relic of the past. Civics classes no longer exist.

In the second half of their presentation, Mickey Huff talked about the validity of a question from one of his students: “What the hell is going on.”

Huff tell us that history provides some answers. He talked about the ascendancy of the neoliberal paradigm, engendered by an attack on the New Deal, labor unions, and social progress that began around 1970.

He blames much of this on Justice Lewis Powell, appointed to the Supreme Court by Nixon in 1971. The Powell Memorandum crystallized and set the blue print for the Right’s counterattack on FDR’s accomplishments.

The memorandum, created in reaction to Ralph Nader’s activism against corporate malfeasance, was a plan to undo the New Deal. It was responsible for corporate America’s funding of think tanks, endowment of professorships, sponsorship of “conservative” intellectuals, and media outreach. It has been active and pervasive ever since.

The enormous success of this counterattack, using many of the techniques developed by Edward Bernays, grandson of Sigmund Freud and patron saint of American advertising, had much to do with the Presidency of Bill Clinton and his vow to “end welfare as we know it.”

The Democratic Party now competed with the Republicans for corporate money. The changes in economic policies and their effect of working people were not hard to imagine.

The resulting economic difficulties and anxieties of much of the working class, combined with the factors noted by Higdon in the first half of the presentation, made the country ripe for someone like Trump.

We now see that Trump’s attacks on immigration are not just pure racism also but fit neatly into the exploitation the working class’ economic anxieties.

Huff quotes an apt description of Trump’s method by Noam Chomsky. In this method, while the daily, headline making, outrageous statements and behavior by Trump monopolizes our attention and distract us, corporate fanatics appointed throughout the functions of government, out of sight, demolish every rule and standard ever designed to benefit ordinary people.

The authors’ plea to “make America think again” would do much help us understand what “the hell is going on.”

The authors drew attention to their book’s extensive list of resources for “encouraging media literacy and civic engagement” listed in the appendix.

With the large mainstream book publishers also part of the media environment that we need to look at critically, Bay Area organizations listed in authors’ acknowledgments of those who helped make the book possible, such as publisher City Lights, the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored, are very much allies in the struggle for media literacy.

An Indybay review of this book is at https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/08/17/18825542.php

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