Herding the Sheep
by ilene - October 22nd, 2009 6:05 pm
Herding the Sheep
Courtesy of George at Washington’s Blog
Financial insider and commentator Yves Smith wrote an essay last week entitled "MSM Reporting as Propaganda" arguing that the government has been using propaganda to make people think that things are getting better, no one is angry, and – therefore – no one should get upset:
The message, quite overtly, is: if you are pissed, you are in a minority. The country has moved on. Things are getting better, get with the program…
Per the social psychology research, this “you are in a minority, you are wrong” message DOES dissuade a lot of people. It is remarkably poisonous. And it discourages people from taking concrete action.
Is Smith right? And even if she is, isn’t "propaganda" too strong a word?
Think Positive
Sure, William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis – says that that the government’s entire strategy now – as during the S&L crisis – is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts").
Admittedly, 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980′s during the "Latin American Crisis", and the government’s response was to cover up their insolvency.
It’s true that Business Week wrote on May 23, 2006:
President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.
I can’t deny that the Tarp Inspector General said that Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy, when they were not.
Okay, the government and Wall Street have traditionally tried to dispense happy talk when there is an economic crash, and Arianna Huffington recently pointed out:
There is something in the current DC/NY culture that equates a lack of unthinking boosterism with a lack of patriotism. As if not being drunk on the latest Dow gains is somehow un-American.
And I’ll give you that a recent Pew Research Center study on the coverage of the crisis found that the media has largely…
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Move Along
by ilene - October 16th, 2009 11:37 am
Move Along
Courtesy of James Kwak at The Baseline Scenario
Yves Smith has a very good post on how hard much of the mainstream media has fallen for the “everything is OK, go on with your lives” theme. She cites the Pew Research Center to show that media coverage of the financial crisis and recession has focused primarily on political battles – stimulus, bailouts, etc. – rather than on problems in the real economy. What’s more, economic coverage in general has fallen off since the stock market rebound earlier this year and the Obama administration’s “all clear” signal. She also discusses psychological research that shows that people can be easily influenced to believe things that are not true, simply because people around them seem to believe those things.
Smith traces this phenomenon to two main sources: the steady evolution of journalism into a traditional profit-oriented business than can no longer afford to invest heavily in investigative journalism; and the increased ability of political leaders, following the lead of private corporations, to control the message that is transmitted via the media. The Bush administration was allegedly the master of the latter, although the fact that they were so obvious about it sort of undermines that claim. (Although probably their attitude was that they didn’t care if the “New York liberal elite” saw how they were manipulating press coverage.) But the Obama administration is no slouch either.
I had my first experience with modern PR during the Internet boom, when I was in marketing at Ariba. (Remember us? Market value of $40 billion at a time when our revenues were less than $100 million per quarter.) We would be planning an acquisition, and I would meet with these nice people from our PR firm who understood nothing about our technology, or our products, or our markets, or the company we were buying. And they would decide that our top-level messages needed to be X, Y, and Z, which were so devoid of content that they couldn’t even be accused of being false. And that’s what we would use in our press release and our analyst call, and a few hours later we would see it echoed in the news stories and the analyst comments.
Now, if you’re a company of only middling interest (even when we were the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, we were
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site