Month: August 2010

After one-year of blogging, your humble blogger OpEdge presents some conclusions, trends and assertions.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

August 5 passed without my noticing that it was a year ago that day that I began writing OpEdge.

Over the year, I have posted a total of 177 entries.  I thought it might be fun to review what I covered in the first 52 weeks of OpEdge.  Interestingly enough, the common themes of a year’s worth of writing fall under four rubrics:

  1. Analysis of common propaganda techniques that the mass media, and in particular mainstream reporters, use to color the news with decidedly right-wing views.
  2. Identification of the core tenets of contemporary American ideology that serve as the assumptions and message points for virtually all the media we experience in all formats.
  3. Discussions of how specific news and news coverage reflect current and long-term social, media and entertainment trends.
  4. Presentation of my position on some of the pressing issues of the day.

Today we’ll look at the common propaganda techniques I analyzed over the past year.  Tomorrow, we’ll look at some of the core tenets of contemporary American ideology and discuss important news trends.  We’ll close this three-part series on Thursday with a review of my own political and cultural agenda.

Getting right to it, here is a list of the propaganda techniques that I analyzed over the past year.  For most of these I found and discussed multiple examples of reporters trying to color reporting through the use of these rhetorical devices.  In all cases, I named the rhetorical devices, although in some cases others may have previously used the same language to describe the same technique:

  • Argument by Anecdote: saying that one story proves a trend even if the statistics show that case, while dramatic, is exceptional or rare.
  • Conflation: Equating two events, objects, trends or facts that have nothing in common; for example, using fictional evidence to prove an historical trend or comparing Bush II’s spotty National Guard stint to the military record of war hero John Kerry.
  • Criteria Rigging: Selecting the criteria that will prove the point you want to make, for example, the studies that use criteria that exist in the suburbs to show that the top places to live are all in suburbs.
  • Expert Selection: Limiting the terms of the debate by the selection of experts; for example selecting an anti-labor professor to comment on an economic study or National Public Radio pitting David Brooks against E.J. Dionne and pretending its right versus left.
  • False Conclusions: Putting a false conclusion at the end of a paragraph or article that is factually based and logically reasoned.
  • False Labeling: Applying a false label to something, for example calling Obama a Socialist or saying that the cutting of hospital beds to meet reduced demand is rationing. 
  • Ideological Subtext: Having ideology guide the decisions you make in selection of details and points of view in your reporting or entertainment, especially when the presentation of these details treats the ideological assumption as a given or as already proved.   For example, in the new Robin Hood movie, Russell Crowe’s Robin is not taking from the rich to give to the poor, but instead fighting against unfair taxation.
  • Matt Drudge Gambit: Reporting that a disreputable reporter or media outlet, such as Matt Drudge or Glenn Beck, said something that you know probably is false.
  • Nazi Edit: Editing what someone has said to change his/her meaning, as Andrew Breitbart did to Shirley Sherrod.
  • Plain Old Lies: Knowingly publishing or saying something that isn’t true.
  • Question Rigging: Selecting the questions to get a better answer.  For example, instead of asking people if they believed global warming was occurring, research groups asked them if they thought the news media reported too much on global warming.  When asked the second way, many more people seem not to believe that global warming is occurring.
  • Speaking in Code: An old trick of racists everywhere, speaking in code means using euphemisms to refer to a group or its imagined collective failings; for example, when Reagan talked about “welfare queens” he spoke in code.
  • Trivialization: Reducing discussions of important decisions into trivialities, for example focusing on the personality differences between opponents while ignoring their substantive differences.
  • Wedging: Finding an area of common ground with a target group that will not agree with you on virtually any other issue.
  • Wrong Focus: Focusing on a minor part of a study or survey to support your position while ignoring the major finding, which undercuts your position. 

I’m starting to write a book on propaganda techniques and I just gave you my chapter titles.  For each technique, I intend to write a short essay filled with examples from the mainstream news media.  The hard part will be to select among the many daily examples of these cheap rhetorical tricks in main stream news reporting.

More tomorrow.

Times´ Ron Lieber’s “class warfare” is really an attempt to turn the middle class against itself.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In Saturday’s New York Times, Ron Lieber proposes that there is new class warfare in the United States.  Let’s allow Ron to do the talking:

“There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.

The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers.  Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.

The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions.”

In postulating a class war between public and private workers, Lieber follows very briskly in the footsteps of Tom Petruno of The Los Angeles Times, who made the very same point using virtually the same words two days earlier.

A class war is a war between classes or a war that one class makes against another.  Before World War I, class war often meant real fighting.  Nowadays, it’s waged solely economically.  The best example of class war in the contemporary world is the 30-year net transfer of income and wealth from the poor and middle classes up the ladder to the wealthy in the good ol’ US of A.   

Of course we’re taught in school that we live in a classless society, and most of the media we encounter assume that we are overwhelmingly a middle class society with aspirations to go higher.

A quick Google search revealed that before Petruno-Lieber, virtually all mention of class war assumes conflict between the rich and poor, or the rich and everyone else.  So, these guys really are breaking new ground in creating “new speak.”

The logic of both these writers is haywire.  Both public and private workers are part of the same class: the working middle class.  These two writers try to recreate the definition of class warfare by pitting two parts of a class against each other.  It’s the old divide-and-conquer strategy that wealthy ruling elites have used for centuries; usually it’s a matter of making the middle class afraid of the poor, or of making the poor of one color afraid or resentful of the poor of another color.

Just like virtually all other stories recently that have proposed or considered gutting the pensions of public workers, both Lieber and Petruno praise the courage of legislators who take on the public unions.  And I’m sure that their courage is amply rewarded with campaign contributions from those who want to destroy public unions and reduce the wages of all workers.

These two articles are representative of the latest tactic for moving money up the economic ladder: Instead of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for pension obligations, Republicans and many centrist politicians, think tanks and the mass media are proposing to screw the public workers.  I’ve written before about how this new war on public workers is another phase in the 30-year program to redistribute income upwards.

Iraq-Afghanistan wars show that our leaders and generals did not learn the lessons of the Revolutionary War.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I think that most people remember history as small packets of information: slogans such as, “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” events such as the Boston Tea Party, or dates such as 1779.

Hearing and reading about the final combat troops leaving Iraq made me think of how we remember history, because our leaders and generals seem to have ignored some big history lessons in prosecuting the Iraq-Afghanistan wars.

I confess that I’m using anecdotal evidence here, which means it’s just what I remember people talking about.  My assertion (and the premise of this blog entry) is that when people think about how we fought the Revolutionary War against England, its King and the belief that certain people are inherently better than others by virtue of birth, we remember two concepts, both hammered into us by elementary and high school history teachers and textbooks:

  1. It’s impossible to beat a foe thousands of miles from your home when it fights a war that grinds you down with retreats and evasion.  Washington played such a game until the British gave in, realizing it would take decades and an enormous expenditure of money and lives to win.
  2. You are at a disadvantage when you outsource your military functions to mercenaries such as the Hessians.

Leaders and generals on American soil have a long history of ignoring the first concept.  For example, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee choice to aggressively engage the troops of the United States of America in combat instead of playing hide-and-seek, ensuring not just defeat, but a particularly bloody one.  (FYI, Lee usually is considered one of the greatest generals of all time, but I think that’s just part of the mythologizing of the Old South, similar to the odious myth of the “happy plantation slave.”  I consider Lee to be the single most overrated figure in all of recorded history, and as a warrior for slavery also among the most despicable.)

And we all know what happened in Viet Nam, first to the French and then to us.

And yet, we began the war in Iraq (for dubious and ultimately unfounded reasons) and then continued to pursue it long after it became clear that there was not even a definition of winning, let alone a hope for it.  And still we persist in Afghanistan, which previously defeated the British, the Soviet Union and just about every other foreign invader.

On to the second concept that I believe that those who remember their history remember: that hiring mercenaries is a bad thing.  In the excitement about announcing the withdrawal of all combat forces from Iraq, the Obama Administration forgot to mention that 85,000 military contractors remain in Iraq.  In other words, we have more mercenaries in Iraq today than we have soldiers.  Remember that these mercenaries follow the policies and regulations of the companies for which they work.  Their fist loyalties are to these companies.  They are contract workers, doing a dirty job, not American soldiers dedicated to serving our country and trained (or indoctrinated, if you prefer) in the military’s version of our values virtually every day.  These mercenaries tend to make more money than American soldiers and the companies that hire them make profit, which significantly drives up the cost of what is turning out to be a very expensive set of wars.

Why does the Times do so much to keep the public from considering what to do to confront global warming?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

It’s befuddling to me why the New York Times is doing so much to keep the public from considering the issue of what to do to confront global warming. 

The way the Times keeps us from thinking about what we can do to stop global warming is by keeping in the news the bogus controversy, “Is global warming taking place.”  From a succession of warmest decades on record to a documented rise in temperatures over the past few centuries to the melting away of glaciers and snowcaps, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the theory that our globe is getting warmer at an alarmingly fast rate—fast when judged by the slow action of the Earth and Nature.

Yet the Times once again has focused on communication about global warming to keep alive the controversy, this time in the smarmy article by Tom Zeller Jr. titled “Is It Hot in Here? Must be Global Warming” in the Sunday “Week in Review” section. 

The premise of the article is that when it was cold this past winter, opponents of global warming cite the cold weather to say that it doesn’t exist, and now that we’re seeing record heat, proponents of global warming are saying that proves global warming exists. 

The problem is, Zeller never documents the premise, even though he says he does.  He spends the first third of the article citing one example of someone using the snow to make fun of the theory of global warming.  Somehow he ignores the explicit comments against global warming made last winter by right-wing propagandists Rush Limbaugh, Marc Shepard, Mark Finkelstein, Ralph Reiland and Yates Sealander (see my blog dated January 19, 2010), and instead selects the erection of an Igloo with the sign “Honk if you *HEART* global warming” as his one example of someone using the cold weather to deny global warming. 

But at least the example is an explicit statement asserting (wrongly) that the cold weather disproves global warming.  The only statement or action that Zeller can find of anyone using the hot weather to say that global warming is occurring is the following:

“As Washington, D.C., wilts in the global heat wave gripping the planet, the Democratic leadership in the Senate has abandoned the effort to cap global warming pollution for the foreseeable future,” wrote Brad Johnson of the progressive Wonk Room blog, part of the Center for American Progress.”

But read the sentence carefully: Johnson never says that the heat wave is evidence of global warming, he just points out the irony of the Senate abandoning its effort to pass legislation to address climate change during the hot weather.

Both one of my associates and I looked on Google for a real reference to someone saying this year’s hot weather proves global warming and could find but one article with a Russian source in which the claim is made.  We did find a number of articles in which various people say that this year’s hot weather does not prove global warming.

As far as I can tell, then, disbelievers used the cold weather again and again to make the false claim that global warming is not occurring, but Zeller is dead wrong to say that those who know global warming is occurring are citing a few sweltering hot days as additional proof.

With the premise unproved, there is no real need for the article.  But write on, Zeller does, quoting experts in psychology and communications to analyze the “why” behind his false premise that both sides use brief weather spells to prove trends that occur over decades, centuries and millennia. 

Zeller could have used much of the information he gathered in the story to write a piece on the psychology of why the weather of a few days or a few weeks will make people question scientific evidence.  In other words, he could have assumed what scientific evidence and virtually all scientists tell us is true and composed an interesting discussion on this one aspect of the problem of convincing people of its validity.  That would have been responsible journalism.  Instead he chose to keep the public discussion going on whether or not global warming exists long after the scientific evidence is in.

ADL turns it back on its antidiscrimination tradition to join forces with the right-wing in opposing a religious building.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has joined a legion of the usual right-wing suspects to oppose the building of a mosque two blocks north of ground zero, the location of the terrorist-propelled airplane crashes that toppled the former twin towers of the World Trade Center. 

Just in case the ADL, long a fighter against anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination, doesn’t know it yet, let me mention that its new bedmates include Sarah Palin, Newt Gringrich, both major Republican candidates for Governor in New York and an assortment of race-baiting, codeword-using Republican-Tea candidates from around the nation.

And why is the ADL, which calls itself “the nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency,” opposed to building a religious structure in the downtown of the biggest city of this land that is supposed to be dedicated to religious freedom?  The ADL’s answer, given in a New York Times article over the weekend:

“Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

 Huh?

To say that the family of victims in a terrorist attack may understandably confuse the terrorists with others of the same religion or national background displays an empathetic appreciation of the irrational way that people under stress sometimes think. 

But to impose the victim’s understandable irrationality on our open civil society makes no sense and makes a mockery of our most basic beliefs.  

As far as anyone can tell, no one associated with the proposed building of this mosque is or was a terrorist.  In fact, the number of terrorists or terrorist supporters among the approximately 1.5 billion believers of Islam is infinitesimally small.  For the most part, mainstream Islamists reject the concept of jihad as a holy war against the West as a perverse misreading of the Koran.  Doesn’t denying U.S. Moslems the right to build a mosque for no other reason than it’s an Islamic structure send the wrong message to the overwhelming majority of non-terrorist Moslems?  The only factor that should matter is the local zoning ordinance.  Zoning either permits such a structure to be erected in that lower Manhattan Neighborhood or it does not.  To let any other factor determine whether or not this building goes up runs counter to our traditions of free religious practice.

Those who have used 9/11 to renew a centuries-old holy war between Christians and Moslems are either misguided or racists.  As a Jew, I find it truly shameful that the ADL should be joining these forces of intolerance.