Independent Periodic News and Analysis
In September I decided to celebrate 25 years of the continuous publication of Nygaard Notes by re-publishing my “highlights” or “best of” essays from each of the 5-year periods starting in 1998, when the journey began.
What was I thinking?
I should have thought about how I would go about selecting the winners. I’ve already told you that I have published nearly two MILLION words in these pages. Do you know how long it would take me to simply read two million words? Let alone, decide which ones are “the best”? Too long, that’s how long.
That’s why this issue—Issue #708, Volume 4, for the years 2009-2013—contains only two essays. The first one, Why Study Media?, is my attempt to explain why I write about media so much. The question arises: Why did it take me 15 years to write this? Who knows, but it sort of sets up the second essay in this Volume 4, which is called Looking Back On Today: What are the Big Themes? And, despite appearing here as the second essay, Looking Back was actually published first. It appeared in NN #474 in March of 2011.
In fact, I’ve used this “Big Themes” idea several times over the past 14 years, with slightly different language each time. The different language reflects my evolving thinking in this area.
I’ve talked about the meaning of the old adage about journalism being the first rough draft of history, even publishing an essay in 2014 called The First Draft of History, which outlined the technique of casting oneself in the role of a historian of the future, trying to look back at the “big themes” of today.
In 2018 I began talking about what I call The Big Crisis of the 21st Century, which cast each of my “big themes” as simultaneously-occurring crises that together make up The Big Crisis in which we are now living.
Most recently, starting in July of 2020, I even published The Big Crisis Series. The series went on for four issues(!), and it all began with an essay entitled, simply, What Is Going On These Days? In which I said:
We are living in a time that I call The Big Crisis, a time in which long-established structures, institutions, and ways of thinking are weakening or failing. As The Big Crisis deepens and increasingly makes real change inevitable, the currently-dominant ideas and ways of thinking will yield to new ideas. Familiar structures and institutions will die and new ones will be born. The nature of the changes that The Big Crisis is breeding is not settled. Who gets to settle it? That’s what we are fighting about.
This whole train of thought, which I think is so important that I have repeated it in various ways over many years, all started in 2011 with the Big Themes essay that I offer in this Volume 4 of the Nygaard Notes Birthday Series. If you have any thoughts or questions on this or other essays in this series, I always love to hear them!
Nygaard
Over the years people have often asked me why I write about the media so much. On July 25th 2013, in Nygaard Notes #534, I finally explained. Here’s what I said:
When trying to understand the workings of the Propaganda system, much could be gained from looking at any of the various doctrinal institutions, such as our education system, our churches, or our families. Yet I choose to speak almost exclusively about one doctrinal institution, which I generally call The Media.
When I refer to The Media I am generally referring to the institution popularly known as The Media. I choose to focus on The Media for a variety of reasons, including the following five:
1. MEDIA IS OMNIPRESENT. Media is the most widespread of the doctrinal institutions, being continually encountered by every human being at every point of our daily travels, no matter where our travels take us.
Writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1947, the public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays summarized the power and reach of modern media in typically florid prose:
The tremendous expansion of communications in the United States has given this Nation the world’s most penetrating and effective apparatus for the transmission of ideas. Every resident is constantly exposed to the impact of our vast network of communications which reach every corner of the country, no matter how remote or isolated. Words hammer continually at the eyes and ears of America. The United States has become a small room in which a single whisper is magnified thousands of times.
2. Exposure to Media is LIFELONG AND INVOLUNTARY. We can graduate or drop out of school. We can stop attending church and/or religious training. We can, and do, move away from our families. But there is no dropping out of or graduating from The Media. We can’t disaffiliate, nor can we “stop attending” Media. If we were to wish to move away from Media, there’s nowhere we can go. Like it or not, choose it or not, in this culture we are exposed to constant propaganda via media from the moment we are born until the day we die.
3. EASE OF STUDY. Compared to other doctrinal institutions, Media is perhaps the easiest to study. New examples are pushed into our faces on a daily basis, now even more frequently in the age of The Internet. We don’t have to function as anthropologists, delving into the recesses of church, school, or family. We can gather our data simply by turning on the television, radio, or the computer, or opening the newspaper, or picking up a magazine in the dentist’s office, or examining the billboards along the road on the way to the grocery store.
4. THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY. Media is unique among doctrinal institutions in another way that makes life a little more difficult for those wishing to study how Media may perform a Propaganda function: It’s the only institution that denies that it performs such a function. Churches, schools, and families all acknowledge their socialization role, in fact see it as central to their respective existences. Media, in contrast, prefers to believe that it is in the business of reporting “the facts” in an objective manner (“We Report. You Decide.” “All The News That’s Fit to Print” etc) Since I analyze things using a Systems approach—central to which is a focus on outcomes over intentions—I see The Media’s denial of its role as a purveyor of ideology as a part of the system itself. The Myth of Objectivity that forms the basis for the denial actually plays a role in furthering the Propaganda function of the institution.
5. MEDIA AS MASS PHENOMENON. Exposure to media cuts across all boundaries of class, race, gender, and age, assuring that we all share a large number of political and cultural references. And those shared references, in turn, form a part of the intellectual/emotional foundation upon which effective propaganda rests. A 1995 article in the UK journal Marketing Week reported on a survey of 7,000 people in six countries conducted for the International Olympic Committee which found that 88 per cent of respondents were able to correctly identify the commercial trademarks of Shell Oil and McDonald’s, while only 54 per cent recognized the Christian cross. That’s an illustration of logo recognition (the cross is a logo?!), and that is the result of direct and overt advertising over many years. What I’m talking about—the indirect reinforcement of ideological foundations that is transmitted in the process of reporting the news of the day—is a little different, but it has a similar globalizing effect.
The Media, then, is a powerful doctrinal institution, like the others in many ways but unique in that:
∙ Exposure to The Media is universal, lifelong, and involuntary;
∙ Given the frequency of its news production and its ubiquity in the culture, The Media is the easiest of doctrinal institutions to study;
∙ The Media does not see itself as having a propaganda role, and;
∙ The Media crosses cultural boundaries.
And that’s why I talk about it so much.
It was back in 2011 that I first introduced the idea of stepping back from the daily news cycle and viewing the news from the perspective of a historian writing a history of the early 21st Century. Here’s what I said in Nygaard Notes Number 474, which appeared on March 12, 2011:
I’ve just suggested that the selection of The Year’s Top News Stories is largely determined by The Market. Such selections happen after the fact—that is, at the end of the year in which the stories appeared. But the before-the-fact decisions about what gets into the news cycle in the first place are also heavily influenced by The Market. This dynamic contributes to a high level of ignorance among U.S. news “consumers,” and for a simple reason: The news items that draw the largest numbers of viewers—and thus draw advertisers, and thus become eligible for “top story” status—are not necessarily the news items that best help us understand our world. This is hardly a controversial point, and the failure to address it says much about the priorities of those who run our media system. Or, rather, it says much about the system itself, and the priorities that it mindlessly enforces in the service of profit.
What if we were to choose our Top Stories—and not just after the fact, but also before we went out to cover them—by taking a different approach entirely? What if we were to project ourselves into the future and imagine that we were historians looking back on the media of today? What would historians of the future consider today’s Top Stories?
If I were such a historian, I would start by trying to see some major themes. Looked at in this way, I think that a story would be judged to be a “Top Story” to the degree that it illuminated the themes that a future historian of the United States might consider to be the major themes of the era. Imagine a history book about the early 21st Century. What Big Themes might merit their own chapters? A few chapters in the (well-written) histories of the future might include:
* Inequality and Resource Allocation
* The Decline of the U.S. Empire
* The State of U.S. Democracy
* Climate Change/Humans and the Environment
* The Evolving State of Capitalism
* Social Health
These “chapters” can also be thought of as the “beats” which reporters are assigned to cover in an ongoing way. Corporate news organizations typically have a “City Hall Beat,” and a “Sports Beat,” and a “Business Beat,” and a few others. What if we had an “Inequality Beat” and an “Empire Beat,” and a “Social Health Beat”? Which stories on each beat would our reporters best track down to compose the “first rough drafts of history,” the 2010 and 2011 versions?
1.
Inequality and Resource Allocation: An understanding of how a society divides up its wealth is fundamental to understanding that society. As we write this chapter of our future history, we would look for stories that tell us how the wealthiest country in the world is dividing up its wealth, and why. We would report on the winners and the losers, and how they got to be winners and losers. We would report on how the society’s leaders and institutions are responding to these issues.
How has current reporting been doing in this area? There have been numerous stories reported in the corporate media that have shed light on this issue, including reports on municipal, state, and federal budget deficits and the political responses to them. However, if we had a “Resource Allocation Beat” reporter, he or she would have been regularly reporting on the activities of labor unions and other ways that non-millionaires in this country have organized themselves to claim a fair share of the nation’s wealth. If such reporting were the norm, the recent uprising in Wisconsin would be much less surprising to people. [Ed. Note: On February 15, 2011, tens of thousands of protestors occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol for nearly a month to protest former Governor Scott Walker’s push to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights.] And, come to think of it, if such reporting were the norm, the general awareness of growing inequality would be more widely shared and the uprising might well be even bigger than it already is!
2.
The Decline of the U.S. Empire: The period that began after World War II has been called The American Century. That’s because the U.S. emerged after WWII as one of the world’s SuperPowers, and became The World’s Only Superpower—or what some have called a “Hyperpower”—after the fall of the other superpower, the USSR. Is The American Century ending? Our Empire Beat reporter would be looking to answer that question.
There has been scanty coverage of the decline of the Empire in the corporate press. The issue is more openly debated elsewhere.
The historian Alfred McCoy, in a December 5th article on the website TomDispatch, writes that “If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.” McCoy is hardly the only analyst who speaks of the decline of the American Empire. When framed in this way, are there stories in the mass media that help us understand a) whether there is an Empire; b) whether it is declining or not, and c) what might be coming next? I think there are.
As I wrote back in Nygaard Notes #444, “today’s Empire relies on a general acceptance of, if not the legitimacy of the Imperial Order, at least the inevitability of that order.” The decreasing acceptance of that legitimacy is revealed in many news stories, from the rise of rival economic powers, to the movement away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, to the increasing rejection of “The American Consensus” in Latin America. The declining importance of the nation-state and the increasing importance of a trans-national class of global elites can be seen, beneath layers of confusing misconceptions, in stories of the privatization and corporatization of traditionally-public spaces.
The March 14th issue of TIME Magazine featured a debate on its cover. On one side was “Yes, America Is in Decline.” On the other side was “No, America is Still No. 1.” Never mind that both could be true (that is, “America” could still be “No. 1” and could also be in decline). At least they’re considering that the era of the U.S. Hyperpower may be over. If only TIME had a reporter assigned to the Empire Beat…
3.
The State of U.S. Democracy: While the corporate media often focuses on democracy, it typically limits its investigations to elections and other “official” means of having input into the institutions of governance. The outrage that has marked the response to recent attempts to eliminate labor union bargaining and other powers is testament to the awareness among the general public that democracy is more than elections. A Democracy Beat reporter would look for stories that show the myriad ways in which democracy in this country is being strengthened, and the ways in which it is being weakened.
Some stories that illuminate this theme did appear on the AP “Top Stories” list, such as “U.S. Elections,” and the runner-up story about the Supreme Court rulings about corporate money in political campaigns. But there are other important stories in this realm that did not appear on the AP list, including stories about the erosion of, and attacks on, long-standing rights such as privacy rights and freedom of association. Current attacks on unions and organizing rights in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and elsewhere would also fall to the reporter on the “Democracy Beat.”
Other stories that deserve attention here, and that have been under-reported in the corporate press, would be stories having to do with secret surveillance, ongoing torture and abuse in Guantanamo and elsewhere, and the numerous developments in the Global War on Terror as it plays out domestically in policing and “security” policies.
I’m really dreaming now, but a Democracy Beat reporter in my newsroom would also be assigned to cover social and political trends like movement building, grassroots organizing initiatives, resistance and protest, and solidarity activities. Wisconsin, anyone?
4.
Climate Change/Humans and the Environment: Whether human-induced or part of the natural cycle of climate, things are changing, and changing fast. Climate change was mentioned in many news stories in 2010. But the fact that this was not a “Top Story” in 2010 is as damning an indictment of the corporate media as one could imagine.
5.
The Evolving State of Capitalism: Here’s another beat where we would find coverage of the uprising in Wisconsin. Actually, here is where we would have already found a lot of coverage of the various factors that explain what is happening in Wisconsin. Things like the decades-long decline in average wage levels, corporate bailouts, and the relationship between corporate profits and the loss of jobs. Longer-term trends, such as the increasing financialization of our economy and the increasing share of the economy that is made up of consumption (instead of production), are things that sometimes get mentioned in the media but are poorly explained. Yet these are the sorts of things that make a society unstable. Economic crisis… Egypt… Tunisia… The Capitalism Beat reporter is on it!
I would also assign to my Capitalism Beat reporter stories that illuminate the ongoing loss of The Commons, the subject of several recent Nygaard Notes issues. Stories about privatization and the de-funding of public services would be covered here, as well as developments in trademark and copyright law, and Internet Neutrality.
The State of Capitalism in the early 21st Century would no doubt be a long chapter in the histories of the future, so modern newsrooms should have a well-staffed Capitalism Beat.
6.
Social Health: While “the economy”—that is, the health and vibrancy of our economic lives—is a Top Story in the United States, our Social Health—the measures of health, well-being, happiness, and other non-economic parts of our lives—is not even discussed in an organized way. It’s not for lack of stories. Statistics, reports, and billions of anecdotes are available on a wide range of social indicators, such as teen suicide, incarceration rates, poverty, inequality, education, wage levels, infant mortality, life expectancy, drug use, crime, housing affordability, and countless others. The Social Health Beat would provide an ongoing look at “how we’re doing” as a nation, outside the realm of wealth and Gross Domestic Product.
I have discussed this idea on a number of occasions in these pages. A good place to start if you’re interested might be Nygaard Notes #85, September 8, 2000: “Toward a National Social Report: History and The Grassroots.”
**
In conclusion, I’ll just add that this “historical chapters” way of thinking about and organizing “the news” is useful not only to editors and reporters, but also to news “consumers.” I always counsel people to take a pro-active approach to the news, rather than letting corporate media set our mental agendas. That is, an empowered media-watcher will formulate his or her questions before reading the newspaper, then read (or watch) the news in order to find the answers to the important questions.
The “historical chapters” approach can serve as a practical technique to help you formulate your questions. What if you opened the newspaper looking for news on “Inequality and Resource Allocation”? You might well find numerous stories that illuminate this issue, although they will often be buried on the inside pages. Then you can put them on your mental “front page.” Sometimes you won’t find any stories of importance to you. That’s when you turn to Nygaard Notes (or other “alternative” news sources) that more closely reflect your values. The news system that I want to see is one that not only writes a “first rough draft of history,” but one that helps people more effectively participate in making that history.