Penetrating the Information Curtain

Editor's note: This March 2002 piece from Mark Sommer of Mainstream Media Project, highlights the need for us to challenge mental manipulations and consider a global environment of ideas and discussion.

The Bush administration has abruptly backpedaled on plans to open a Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence. The agency’s function was to feed an artful blend of fact and fallacy to the world's media and thus persuade the global public to embrace U.S. policies often inimical to their interests. Embarrassed by the vociferous response from both allies and stateside critics, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed genuinely mystified by the outcry.

But the damage has already been done. Who will now trust the word of a government that not only routinely lies but announces the formation of a Department of Deceit – and then announces that it won’t lie after all? Which statement are we to believe?

Governments lie and have always lied. Politics is largely a dance of duplicity where only the observing publics believe the lofty rhetoric. What we are seeing in the Bush administration, however, is a new dedication to deceit as a primary tool of governance and weapon of choice in a war against all perceived enemies foreign and domestic. In “information warfare,” the perpetrators become so entangled in their pathological lying to enemies, allies, their own publics and one another that ultimately they deceive even themselves about their own true purposes. Flying blind, they speed towards self-inflicted disaster.

Bad information produces bad decisions. Inflated poll numbers, sychophantic media and unheeded warning signs yield near-term advantages over the ponderous progress of a government of checks and balances. But in the longer term, the gap between fact and fabrication widens into an abyss and the entire enterprise implodes in a catastrophic collapse of credibility.

The Bush administration is rapidly moving to construct an impenetrable Information Curtain between the American public and the rest of the world. Removing the last regulatory limits on ownership of media outlets, intimidating networks and journalists into concealing unfavorable information, denying press access to the battlefield, distracting the public with gladiatorial sports spectacles laced with programmed patriotism, and keeping its populace paranoid with the prospect of further attacks: through a well-orchestrated manipulation of the mainstream media, Bush administration operatives hope to seal off Americans from the rising chorus of criticism emanating from outside the Information Curtain.

In the realm of information and awareness, the United States and the rest of the world now occupy two parallel universes, separate and largely non-intersecting. This is a still more effective system of thought and speech repression than the ham-fisted state censorship of communist apparatchiks because it is wholly internalized -- a see-no-evil system of self-censorship where citizens avert their eyes to avoid unpleasant truths and journalists swallow their tongues to avoid losing their jobs; a money-driven system where media (commercial and public) consistently choose distraction and reaction over analysis and reflection.  It is the direct outcome of 75 years of professional research and practice in the dark arts of propaganda, public relations and advertising.

Despite considerable diversity of perspective at the margins where few are watching, listening or reading, the U.S. mainstream media have become an airless echo chamber. Their insulation and isolation create a growing dissonance between the way Americans view their country’s role in the world and the way friends and foes alike view those policies. In a recent poll of opinion leaders in 24 countries, the International Herald Tribune found that all but Americans believe U.S. foreign policies post-911 are largely self-interested and often contrary to the interests of the rest of the world.

Yet in an Information Age, can American political and corporate elites successfully seal off the world’s best-wired nation from the voices and ideas of everyone else on the planet? There is good reason to think not. Despite the conglomeration of global media into ever larger entertainment empires, a cacophony of voices and perspectives crowds the planet’s airwaves and newspapers. Now that the Bush administration has signaled its intention to pollute the global information stream with selective lying, these “foreign sources” will be still less inclined to accept the U.S. version of events. As the Pentagon launches six wars at once, it will become increasingly difficult for its information warfare specialists to control all sources of news filtering back from the fronts.

Independent sources abound. The Internet is becoming a rich source of information for Americans seeking a broader global view – and for others seeking a clearer view of America.. Flashes of integrity still appear in the best mainstream U.S. journalism, though few breach the narrowing parameters of acceptable discourse.

The world beyond the U.S. represents 94 percent of humanity. Many millions of Americans share the convictions of this global majority that fundamental change is imperative. One of the essential keys to unlocking our latent strength is to devise innovative low-cost, high-impact strategies to make contact with one another and project our unheard voices onto the world stage. We must reconceive media not as a one-way messaging service from the few to the many but as a free-flowing conversation between equals, many to many.

We need to initiate a truly global conversation about global issues, where Americans participate but do not dominate, drawing on the collective wisdom of participants from many backgrounds and perspectives, not just policy elites. Even without detailed knowledge of issues and events, ordinary citizens are capable of asking the right questions to break open the closed club that now passes for democratic debate. In so doing, they may create a conversation that better serves us all.

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Mark Sommer is an author and internationally syndicated columnist who directs the Mainstream Media Project, a U.S.-based effort to bring new voices and innovative ideas to the broadcast media.