The ABCs of US and Israeli Propaganda

US and Israeli propaganda diverge according to circumstance, but they share basic characteristics (and modes of delivery).  It’s easy to get sucked into the fantasy that we can make reporting and commentary more even-handed, but the propaganda model precludes that possibility.  The model is dynamic; capitalism is the only ideology it absolutely preserves.  Everything else is contingent on the needs of power.  If at any point the economic and political elite need new narratives, corporate media will make the changes. 

There is some question as to whether columnists and journalists consciously deploy propaganda or whether they are oblivious, having been indoctrinated into the same mythologies they uphold.  An empirical approach gets us nowhere.  People of both varieties exist.  Plenty of writers and pundits are willing to say whatever earns a reward.  Others believe in the fundamental goodness of the United States and therefore find it honorable to provide stenography for the government.  In any case, questions of intent are less helpful than analyses of class.  Writers for major publications and the hosts and producers of cable news programming are invested in the system they cover.  They value powerful contacts and are beholden to advertisers.  Many are wealthy or were blessed with built-in advantages; many still acquired their positions through familial connections or the networks they joined at elite universities. 

The government doesn’t take a hands-off approach, either.  A huge PR industry dictates style and frequency of coverage.  State Department protocols are a kind of scripture.  The CIA has long involved itself in reportage. 

My sense is that most journalists are cognizant of the boundaries in which they operate.  Consider the question from your own point of view.  Are you unfamiliar with the discursive norms of your professional industry?  Do your bosses have to spell out everything for you or did you quickly get a sense of what is disallowed in the workplace, even if it’s not explicit?  I write for various sites and I’m perfectly aware of house cultures, funding sources, and potential sites of conflict.  I insist to myself that this knowledge doesn’t matter—my rule is that I don’t much care about managerial politics, but I refuse to contribute to any publication that tells me I’m not allowed to criticize a site of power.  In a way, the rule offers clarity.  Funding and ideology only matter insofar as they dictate compromise.  But knowledge of these phenomena matters in terms of how I select topics, imagine a readership, and anticipate conflict.  Writers for the New York Times know damn well what kind of reportage will get them demoted or fired.  Ditto for the liberal cognoscenti at MSNBC. 

Marx observed that “[t]he class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”  We are entrenched in structures of power that can appear overwhelming or incomprehensible.  They impose ruling class imperatives onto our need for sustenance.  Dissent, then, isn’t merely a pastime, but the foundation of existential clarity and economic relief. 

What, then, are the main features of US and Israeli propaganda?  It can be broken down into three categories (within which dozens of sub-categories exist):

Propaganda of Commission:  This category describes how information circulates.  News content can become propaganda even in a factual state based on the frequency with which it appears.  Conversely, propaganda can exist in the absence of certain information.  Why, for example, do news agencies spend so much time deploring human rights abuses in Iran and North Korea, but tolerate (or extol) wrongdoing in Israel and the United Arab Emirates?  Why do they accept (or applaud) Jair Bolsonaro’s fascism while decrying Nicolas Maduro’s supposed tyranny?  The answer is not that those news agencies are hypocritical.  Looking at selective coverage from this perspective doesn’t clarify how invention presupposes hypocrisy.  Selectivity is structured into mass media.  When I say “invention presupposes hypocrisy,” I mean that corporate media invent (and are always willing to reinvent) a world that doesn’t reflect a human capacity for empathy, but one that extrapolates compassion from the logic of power.  Propaganda of commission derives its informational algorithms from policy calculations, not moral probity. 

Propaganda of Deed: This category describes knowing obfuscation, though it extends to implicit support of unsavory states and political leaders.  Coverage of #BlackLivesMatter, for example, follows a deceptive pattern.  Anything that might be deemed “violent” at demonstrations with a Black majority becomes a subject of intense criticism or, among those who brand themselves anti-racist, an invitation to moralize about Martin Luther King, Jr.  Pretenses of sympathy for Black people never last long enough to override disquiet about their incivility.  Journalists can affirm state power without actually voicing chauvinism by covering the police as heroes.  During the counter-occupation of Standing Rock, a comparable pattern existed.  (I refer to it as a “counter-occupation” because the protestors are Indigenous; the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies are the occupiers.)  Corporate media, even in moments of apparent concern for Natives, rarely mentioned colonization and avoided describing the situation as Indigenous nations protecting their land from foreign exploitation.  Propaganda of deed produces only superficial interest in the wretched and downtrodden, usually to the extent that sympathy can shore up America’s democratic credentials. 

Propaganda of Economy:  Both institutional and individual profit drive the US propaganda model.  I’m less concerned with the money news organizations make for conglomerates than with the economies underlying production and dissemination of bourgeois ideals.  Access and information are commodities.  Those with power regulate the conditions of speaking in the United States.  Because they usually arise in context of livelihood, debates about free speech tend to reinforce the link between ideology and earning potential.  The debates illustrate how reportage, across the political spectrum, fuses self-interest with ideological mandates.  In corporate media, this reality doesn’t limit the ability to debate, but it does limit the boundaries in which debate can occur.  Access, the lifeblood of a media career, is contingent on public viability.  Debate is therefore conditioned by opportunism.  To best appreciate the propaganda of economy, it’s necessary to examine the incentivization of duplicity and obedience.

In movements devoted to the victims of US and Israeli propaganda, decisions about how to deal with hostile news outlets (if at all) are best addressed by local activists.  We can’t devise a universal rulebook for media strategy.  It’s important to be flexible—a mandate to refuse interviews might make less sense as conditions change than when it was originally issued.  Strategic decisions also depend on race, gender, economy, and geography, not to mention the purpose of whatever action is taking place.  Should we punch Nazis?  Do we tell the local rag we’re not interested?  Do we open protest to groups with whom we’re not aligned?  To answer these questions, consider the optimal outcome of the action and work backward to the inception of the strategy, being mindful not to recapitulate narratives the event purports to undermine. 

Edward Bernays opens his 1928 study on propaganda by declaring, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.  Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”  What Bernays calls “invisible governors”—and what I refer to as the ruling class or the elite (though the imperious-sounding “moneyed-classes” works, too)—are endowed with “qualities of natural leadership” and an indispensable “ability to supply needed ideas” by virtue of their “key position in the social structure.”  To Bernays, propaganda is necessary to a functional democracy.  Without it, the proletariat might get the wrong idea about its place in the world.  Bernays, like hundreds of intellectual descendants, is deeply pessimistic:  humanity is unsuited to freedom and must therefore be conditioned to accept simulations of democracy orchestrated by a wiser class of superiors.  Propaganda is manipulative, but its manipulations are performed for the good of the people, lest they nurture fantasies about wresting commerce from the expert hands of industrialists and politicians. 

It also illuminates duplicity otherwise concealed by self-congratulation.  In the United States, leadership—or, if you will, social responsibility—requires and rewards manipulation, individualism, and superficiality (people self-branded according to ideological need).  The political system and various activist industries are advantageous to sociopaths and self-promoters.  (There is room for good people, and many good people in fact partake of politics and activism, but those spaces aren’t structured to their advantage.)  Moreover, would-be leaders in the United States compete over finite resources; the limitations create rivalries that can supersede obligation to the rank and file.  As Bernays observes (approvingly), the ultimate goal isn’t to empower the marginal or the dispossessed, but to manage the diplomatic and informational economy according to the prerogatives of “invisible governors,” who, in one of history’s most laughable myths, will nourish the entire populace. 

Leadership has a different meaning in Indigenous communities, where it is contingent on fulfillment of the common good and must be earned through experience and trust.  Individual gratification certainly exists among Native activists, especially where Western norms predominate, but it’s alien to the philosophical calculus of Indigenous relationships.  Corporate media have always been hostile to the features of Native life that actually practice the notions of equality endemic to U.S. exceptionalism, treating them as a primitive form of communism.  When the US Congress debated the infamous Dawes (or Allotment) Act in the late 19^th century, many of the speakers were mortified that individual poverty or private property didn’t exist in Native societies.  Such collectivism was a problem to be immediately remedied.  Values of civility and progress, those reverent fantasies drenched in psychic and physical violence, are deep-seated in the American consciousness. 

We see exceptionalist discourses articulated through various motifs in corporate media.  They inform every aspect of the news economy.  Five motifs of note: 

1. The Heart of Darkness:  made famous by Chinua Achebe’s acrid critique of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, this motif is tricky because it presents as self-criticism.  In reality, it solicits absolution.  The narrative allows state actors to recuse themselves of accountability for deliberate belligerence by conceptualizing it as excess or miscalculation induced by the unthinkable barbarity of dark people across the globe.  Conrad’s famous antihero Kurtz succumbed to his psychological travails only after they emerged in darkest Africa, with the help of its savage inhabitants.  The idea is transferrable to the ghetto, the reservation, the refugee camp, and any other place where the wretched reside.  The heart of darkness motif permeates Israel’s culture industry and is a favorite of Hollywood blockbusters that delink racism from the exercise of power.  (Everybody, don’t you know, is at least a little bit racist.) 

2. Bumbling Empire:  this motif, feigning radicalism, bemoans US incompetence.  Many social media users refer to it as the bumbling empire theory.  US leaders and other purveyors of Empire, the story goes, deploy policies without proper appreciation of consequences or without adequate understanding of their adversaries, leading to blowback (unintended domestic violence or the creation of more terrorists in foreign territory).  I’m not prepared to argue that foreign and domestic policies always hit their mark.  There’s plenty of managerial and logistical ineptitude in the US government and the consulting industry that services it.  I do think it’s important to explore purpose, though, because, inept or not, most policies have predictably destructive results.  Arming religious extremists, bombing residential areas, supporting dictators, funding illicit activities—these aren’t good deeds gone bad.  They are policies enacted around the needs of the ruling class and in service to the transfer of equity and capital from the Global South.  Whatever terrible things befall people in the South may or may not result from incompetence.  Consider, though:  incompetence suggests a willingness to learn and evolve, yet the exact problems have reoccurred, on a massive scale, over the course of decades. 

3. Shock and Outrage:  here is probably the most annoying habit of corporate media, exemplified by cable pundits.  Whenever a public figure, particularly a politician, does something galling, fellow public figures pile on the sanctimony.  Definitions of galling usually don’t include killing civilians, poisoning water, or shooting Black children, but adultery, embezzlement, double-dealing, poor manners, or stupid tweets.  When pundits, whose main job is to whitewash state violence, are galled by a war crime (like Abu Ghraib or the Panjwai massacre), they prattle on about bad apples and reassure perturbed viewers that the horror is completely uncharacteristic, something never to be repeated.  Until, of course, the next time it happens. 

4. The Strong Hand:  liberal media love deriding Donald Trump, the buffoon, the idiot, the crybaby, the narcissist.  In April, 2017, however, a different view of Trump emerged.  He had just bombed Syria and was lauded as “presidential,” an adjective that locates dignity in destruction.  In fact, every time Trump promotes militarism the same media that subject him to ridicule suddenly find in him a rare and wonderful decisiveness.  He becomes a “man of action,” as it were.  According to the strong hand motif, America comes into being most exceptionally when it exerts power.  The best way to embarrass America is by dictating policy or refusing to submit (Israel excluded, naturally); the best way for America to recover its pride is by showing the world who’s really in charge.  It is inconceivable that another country would interfere in US elections.  America is the one who knocks. 

5. Grown-up Politics:  often articulated by deeming leftists and people of color purveyors of “purism,” the grown-up politics motif suggests that aggrieved communities don’t know how power works and are thus unrealistic, immature, or divisive.  The motif usually arises in response to rioting (or what pundits deem to be rioting), third-party voting, leftist insurgency, or general recalcitrance.  It is a mechanism to discipline people into compliance, with the Democratic Party serving as an entry point to capitalist politics.  The motif has a ready-made scapegoat in racial and ethnic groups who refuse to glorify the people who curate their dispossession.  In this sense, it is mostly a smug iteration of American exceptionalism. 

Other corporate media habits don’t necessarily rise to the level of motif, but are still prevalent:  using the word “terrorism” to describe violence by people of color, especially Muslims, while attributing comparable (or excessive) violence by whites to alienation or mental illness; referring to enemy governments as “regimes” and calling submissive potentates “leaders”; conceptualizing Black modes of survival as criminal while treating white profit schemes as industrious; glorifying billionaires and corporations; delinking Native poverty and political activity from settler colonization; lionizing democracy where it doesn’t actually exist; condemning actual democracy where it emerges. 

The main function of US and Israeli propaganda is to affirm the disposability of colonized people.  It reifies extraction and accumulation.  It transforms Indigenous dispossession into an inviolable force of Western personhood.  This propaganda isn’t merely discursive; it is a sanctified rite of the body politic, a never-ending liturgy of exculpation and exception.  Can it be accidental that, presented with conflict, the consumer’s first impulse is to vindicate the party with greater power, as if a sensual reflex, like sucking a burned finger?  Billion-dollar industries relentlessly sustain and reinvent the conditions that nurture socialization into instinctive surrender.  Try getting Americans and Israelis, at any point of the political spectrum, to finish (or begin) a conversation without substituting Palestinian needs and aspirations for majoritarian anxiety and you’ll see how goddamned effective those industries have been.  Try eradicating slavery in the national imagination and you’ll be overwhelmed by the ironclad culture of enrichment and prestige embedded in myths of whiteness. 

During my two years in Beirut, I got a close-up look at the reporters covering the Middle East for corporate Western media.  They had a line to the local elite and exemplified a cosmopolitan ideal of urbanity.  As a whole, though, they were a deeply unimpressive bunch, almost uniformly pompous, disrespectful, and arrogant.  Don’t be swayed by fantasies of merit.  And don’t confuse clerking for Empire with talent.