The Gupta Effect - Democratic Underground

Jackpine Radical

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Wed Jul-11-07 09:37 AM
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The Gupta Effect

So the Mainstream Media, wearing the face of Sanjay Gupta, were out telling lies and pushing the corporate propaganda line. That in itself is no big deal; happens all the time, right? As Michael Moore pointed out in his admirable rant to Wolf Blitzer, that's how we got misled into a stupid war--and, for that matter, it's how enough people got conned into voting for Bush to give him a marginally credible claim to have won the election. Twice.

In the old days, the media lied to us too, but they did it much more subtly, more often by simple omission than by outright fabrication. And finally, if things went too far, there was always an Edward R. Murrow or a Walter Cronkite to draw the line in the sand, and the public came to more clearly perceive the egregious wrongs of Joe McCarthy or of the Vietnam War. In effect, the media stayed honest enough to maintain public trust.

Since about the mid-90's, though, there has been a huge rapidly evolving change in the rules of the game. The manipulators of public opinion caught on that in the media world, Image is Everything. Thus they built the Whitewater story out of nothing, and sifted through everything imaginable until they came up with the Lewinsky affair, out of which they built an impeachment. Over time, the lies and manipulations have become more blatant. The Dean Scream--a total fabrication that involved trickery to totally distort reality. The Swiftboat attacks. I have come to see that one in a new light. I don't think there's anything Kerry could have done to head off that disaster. No matter what he said, the swiftboat ad was going to be run and re-run a million times for free, as a supposed news story. The attack is the big story, the rebuttal is boooooring, so it doesn't get heard.

The thing is, though. that the "Image is Everything" principle has its limitations. It is, in fact, a short-term tactic. It only works because the press has spent a couple of hundred years building up some degree of public trust. In the past, they took some care to maintain at least an illusion of credibility. They stayed moderately close to the truth. Oh, they might have played along with the Kennedy "Missile Gap" nonsense, and they certainly didn't look into J. Edgar Hoover's closet, and they fed us the government-approved line 'way too many times, but there was usually some substance underlying the stories they gave us. They at least had the good taste not to lie to us about things that they could easily be caught out on.

Every time the media tell a Big Lie, they expend a bit of precious capital, measured in the coin of credibility. Every time they do it, another bloc of viewers catch on to their lying ways, and stop believing them. And maybe go on to find more reliable sources of information, which pretty much means the Internet. Or a Michael Moore movie. Or some other outlet that is beyond the ultimate control of the corporations. It's all very reminiscent of the Bad Old Days in the Soviet Union when people read Pravda and Trud with a totally cynical eye and developed highly refined abilities to discern the real story from the omissions and fabrications in the official propaganda.

I think, in short, that the Corporate Media we all deplore will turn out to be a self-limiting problem as people simply stop believing the bullshit. That, my friends, is the Gupta Effect.