| Number 431 | June 23, 2009 |
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This Week: The Summer 2009 Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive Begins!
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Greetings, For several years there have been two Nygaard Notes Pledge Drives every year. Last year there was only one, as I took some time off to work on the Nygaard Notes book. (It's still progressing, by the way; won't be long now.) Since that hiatus extended into 2009, I decided to put off the Spring Pledge Drive until summer. Now it is summer. Most of this issue of the Notes is devoted to the mechanics of, and rationale for, the Pledge Drive. But no Pledge Drive would be complete without a thoughtful, self-reflective essay on Nygaard Notes and what it is all about. In this issue that feature appears as my response to an often-asked question: Why Does Nygaard Notes Talk About Media So Much? If you already have made your Pledge, or know that you are going to, you may want to skip the first three essays and go straight to this one. (Which, by the way, is adapted from the preface to Part Two the Nygaard Notes book – sneak preview!) Thanks to ALL of you who have made a Pledge, and to all of you who are about to make your very first Pledge. Nygaard Notes is unique, and you are a part of it. I am humbled by your faith in me! Gratefully yours, Nygaard |
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There are two ways to do this: You can make out a check to "Nygaard Notes," and mail it to: Nygaard Notes OR, if you prefer online transactions, you can... Go to the Nygaard Notes homepage, look for "Donate to Nygaard Notes, and follow the instructions to donate online using the PayPal system. If you already have made a Pledge, or already know you want to, then there's nothing else to read in this issue except for essay # 4, "Why Does Nygaard Notes Talk About Media So Much?" For the rest of you, who may still be undecided, the next article explains what this is all about and why I think you should contribute. So please keep reading... |
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The Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive is similar to the pledge drives one usually hears on Public Radio. Both news and information services are "free," but everyone knows that it costs money to produce these "free" services. So we—Public Radio and me, that is—both come at you now and then asking for some of you to voluntarily contribute some money in the form of a pledge in order to pay the bills and allow us to continue to keep making our work available to anyone who "tunes in." The Public Radio equivalent of Nygaard Notes Pledges are the membership dues that the broadcasters ask you to pay during their frequent pledge drives. However, did you know that such direct member support makes up less than one percent of the budget for National Public Radio? Most of their funding comes from things like foundation grants, tax money, advertising (or, as they like to call it, "Corporate Underwriters"), money from investments, sales of coffee mugs, T-shirts, radios.... That's not the case with the newsletter you are reading. This year, as has been the case for the past ten years, every penny of support for Nygaard Notes comes directly from the readers of Nygaard Notes. Readers who look a lot like... YOU! Another big difference between Nygaard Notes and Public Broadcasting—radio or TV—is that Nygaard Notes has almost no overhead costs. I work out of my home. All I have, and all I really need, is a computer, a telephone, and a lot of energy and experience. Then what is the reason (you may ask) that I need Pledges? The answer is: Time. Every dollar that you pledge to Nygaard Notes allows me to spend more time doing the extensive research and painstaking construction of sentences and paragraphs that go into every issue I send out. If I didn't receive some money from you, the readers, I couldn't continue to produce a newsletter like Nygaard Notes. It's important to me to do it this way so that money is never a barrier to readers who have little money but who can nonetheless use the information and analysis that I publish in these pages. And I do it this way because, in principle, I think the kind of work I do should be public property. I don't agree with the whole notion of "intellectual property," copyright, and all of that. What I do believe is that people who are able to produce useful news and information that serves society should be supported for doing so. By asking for voluntary contributions I address the Two Big Issues: The newsletter remains available to the world free of charge, and I get to spend enough time on it to do it right. It's simple. It's straightforward. Please send in your Pledge TODAY! Remember the two methods: 1. By U.S. Mail (see address above)
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I've just sent out reminders to renew their Pledges to a bunch of Nygaard Notes Sustainers, and many, many thanks to those of you who have already sent in your 2009 Pledge! There are a number of people whose Pledge year ends right around now,
and so are due to receive their renewal letters, as well. If you want
to send in your renewal now and save Nygaard Notes some postage, please
do so. I would never give away your identities for any reason, so instead
of your identities, here is a list of initial of those of you whose
Pledge renewals are due this month or in July: If you see your initials here, but are not sure if they refer to you, feel free to email or write to me, and I'll tell you the status of your Pledge. If you don't see your initials here, it either means that your Pledge isn't up for renewal for a while OR that you have never made a Pledge to Nygaard Notes. If you have never made a Pledge to Nygaard Notes, NOW is the time! |
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The conventional understanding of Propaganda is that it is a deliberate system of indoctrination, or a conscious and widespread attempt to spread certain ideas throughout a large group. I suggest instead that our modern system of Propaganda—the effect, if not the intent, of which is to maintain a culture-wide ideological consensus—goes far beyond any willful or deliberate act or set of acts planned or carried out by any particular person or set of people. I maintain that Propaganda is best understood as a process that is shaped by the increasingly-corporate structure in which it is embedded and which it serves, consciously or unconsciously. This process is built upon a pre-existing foundation of basic, foundational ideas that I call The Propaganda ABCs, or Deep Propaganda. These deep ideas, held below the conscious level, serve to support more specific, conscious ideas, or what I call Overt Propaganda. The nature of the ideological institutions in the 21st-Century United States dictate that the deep ideas which survive and prosper in the public realm will be ones that reflect the values of the most powerful groups in the society. As a corollary, these favored ideas will tend to serve to preserve and promote the things valued by those groups. At the same time, ideas that might challenge existing power relations and corporate structures will be systematically suppressed. While all sorts of institutions promote certain ideas and the values they reflect, Nygaard Notes tends to focus on what I call "ideological institutions." These are the institutions that wouldn't exist in the absence of a social need for the promotion of values and ideas. Churches, schools, universities, families, and many parts of our various branches of government have an interest in producing and reinforcing certain sets of ideas, or ideologies. I tend to focus especially on The Media because it is unique among ideological institutions. It is unique in several ways. First of all, participation in and subjection to the messages of most ideological institutions is time-limited. That is, we are in school and then we are not; we join an advocacy group and then we leave it; we even change churches if we don't like the message. The media is different because it is all around us, twenty four hours a day for our entire lives. We do not, and cannot, choose to be "Media-free." So we'd do well to understand how it works. Secondly, we engage with most purveyors of ideology voluntarily. We choose to go to church or not; we join the groups of our choice; university attendance is voluntary. Even primary and secondary education, while mandatory, provides options for home-schooling or alternative schools. Media, in contrast, is an odd mix of voluntary and unavoidable. Certainly many people purposefully seek out media in order to get information and ideas. But even people who "don't read the newspaper" somehow get ideas about things that can only come through the media. ("Oh, yeah, I heard about that!") That's because. . . We drive cars that are all equipped with radios. And that's because. . . Commercials are plastered on every surface in our vicinity, visible to us no matter where we cast our gaze. And that's because. . . The average USAmerican now watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of television each day, and magazines occupy us in every waiting room and at every checkout counter. And that's because. . . Increasing numbers of people have access to the Internet. Ah! The Internet. No matter what we think we are looking for when we go online, all sorts of other ideas, commercial messages, headlines, and gossip seem to appear on our screens along with whatever it was that was the original object of our search. The trickiest way in which Media is different from other ideological institutions is that it is the only one in the group that denies that it is an ideological institution. It claims to be neutral! For the past hundred years or so journalists have increasingly chosen to see themselves as impartial observers of an objective reality, neutral scribes who report "just the facts." While this likely reflects a legitimate striving for balance and fairness, this neutral stance has come to obscure the role that values and, yes, ideology play in the production and presentation of "the news." The unfortunate result is that journalists have come to believe in the Myth of Objectivity, which insists that they can, and do, perform their function without playing a Propaganda role. While many non-journalists reject the Myth of Objectivity, they often replace it with an equally-inaccurate Myth of Conspiracy that conjures up things like "The Liberal Media" or "The Right-wing Media." For all of these reasons reader will notice that I frequently return in these pages to a focus on the role of The Media in the U.S. Propaganda system. I argue that The Media, while not monolithic, nonetheless functions as an institution in predictable and frequently propagandistic ways. That is, it functions in ways that result in its playing a unique and essential role in maintaining a national consensus around certain dominant ideas while suppressing other, more humane ideas. In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King said that "we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values." I think that this revolution of values depends on our being able to question some of the dominant ideas and to consider some of those "other" ideas that the media, along with the other ideological institutions, tend to suppress. That's why I talk about The Media so much. |
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You can make out a check to "Nygaard Notes," and mail it to: Nygaard Notes OR, if you prefer online transactions, you can Go to the Nygaard Notes homepage, look for "Donate to Nygaard Notes, and follow the instructions to donate online using the PayPal system. |
