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(This is the 4th and final part of a series of posts on this topic)

Are there any institutions that reduce the ability of a relatively peaceful public majority to counter the influence of the relevant special interests?

I discuss three institutions here – lack of democratic accountability; the poor performance of the mass media; and government propaganda.

Some of the military and covert interventions occur with little oversight by Congress. In such cases, there is not even a formal democratic check on the policy through congressional representatives. The intelligence agencies, for example, conduct projects that are not properly identified on the budgets approved by Congress. Historically, projects by US intelligence agencies have included not merely spying, but also political intervention in other countries, arms exports, supporting of coups and political assassinations.

The poor performance of the mass media means that when a decision to militarily intervene is publicly aired, much of the voting public does not receive a balanced account of the issue. Academic analysis of the US mass media system notes various factors that contribute to the poor performance.

A factor that relates closely to mass media, but that nonetheless deserves independent mention is that of Defense Dept PSYOPS (psychological operations) programs. Even when these are theoretically aimed at an international audience rather than the domestic one, the nature of global news coverage in mass media is such that the psyops influence domestic audiences as well.

US voters other than an identified group of special interest (see Part 1) formally have the capacity to influence the government policy making and to temper the influence of their fellow constituents in the identified group. However, these are institutional reasons that reduce the likelihood and efficacy of the tempering.

Secrecy

Special Access Programs or SAPs are highly classified programs funded in a way to keep the budget secret. The budgets for such programs can be acquired through fake labels for projects or by channelling funds from other government agencies to the Defense Dept and the intelligence agencies. The Defense Dept began this practice with the Manhattan Project during WWII, which allowed the atomic bomb to be built without Congressional knowledge.

Such Special Access Programs (also known as black projects covered under a black budget) are extensively used and can be well funded. For some indication, in 1992, a Library of Congress report noted that the GAO (Government Accountability Office) had identified 185 such programs and that recent estimates (since authoritative indicators are unavailable) suggest secret military spending of $30 to $35 billion per year (Caldwell 1992). Since then, the black budget is thought to have expanded. In 2003, it was reported to be at its highest since 1988 (Morgan 2003). Much of the program involves research and development of expensive technology and weapons such as aircraft. However, the black budget also includes the budget for covert action by the many intelligence agencies.

Given the aim of plausible deniability for covert action, it is often difficult to establish where the authorization for a specific covert action was initiated (Church Committee 1975: 10).

Since the Watergate scandal, there has been a requirement that CIA covert activity (if not covert activity carried out by other intelligence services) be authorised by a Presidential finding. Moreover, a selected group of Congresspersons receive briefings on the Special Access Programs – the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence. However, even this reporting requirement may be waived at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense (Johnson 2004: 117-8; 2006: 103).

These provisions have not worked as intended. Congress forbade CIA funding of the Contras – an armed guerrilla group seeking to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua. The CIA got around the problem of inadequate funding for their support of the Contras by diverting funds raised through arms sales to Iran and by turning a blind eye as traffickers smuggled cocaine into the US and diverted some money to the Contras[1].

Moreover, in the absence of Presidential findings on a specific issue, the CIA has used ‘worldwide findings’ as authority to initiate certain types of covert action. Covert operations can also be funded by seeking funds from corporations or foreign governments either as political favours or when some interests of these agents coincide with relevant interests of the decision-makers in the US government (Johnson 2006: 103-4).

The 2005 US covert intervention in the Iraqi elections used retired CIA agents and other non-governmental personnel and funds not necessarily appropriated by Congress in the belief that it is only necessary to brief congressional intelligence committees if the CIA operation is an officially sanctioned one (Hersh 2005).

Mass media

At times, a decision to intervene abroad is debated publicly before the intervention. One possible check on a representative government’s power to intervene is the action of a majority of the population exercising their democratic power over governmental policy. The majority public opinion about the justice of, or need for, a proposed intervention depends partly on the factual information available to the public, and on its consequent ability to assess the reasons advanced for the intervention by the executive branch of the government. The institution with primary responsibility and capacity for the dissemination of such factual information is the domestic mass media[2].

In cases where the government view has been captured by special interests who seek intervention, it is to be hoped that the news media would thoroughly assess the proposal to intervene to present the public with the requisite information to judge the cogency of the case for intervention. However, institutional analysis of US mass media suggests reasons that the news media’s discussion of a proposed intervention may tend to be insufficiently critical of government pronouncements. Let me outline some of the relevant analysis.

In the US mass media system, the dominant news organizations operate as profit maximizers and thus seek to minimize cost. They earn an income largely from advertising and have costs that include paying reporters and journalists and paying for independent investigations. Profit maximization places certain sorts of pressures.

It is costly to maintain a large staff of reporters to assign to stories as they arise, and it is costly to ask them to research each story, interview relevant sources, and seek out dissenting opinions. Wealthy and well organised groups can afford to make press releases, publications, briefings, and video and audio news releases about issues that affect their interests. Such groups can disseminate the press releases free of charge to news media. The cost minimising imperative of news organisations means that they will tend to have a bias towards accepting and presenting such cheap sources of news, and if at all possible, avoid incurring the cost of researching the issue themselves.

The groups with the requisite wealth for making such free press releases are, overwhelmingly, the corporate sector and the government. Thus, simply by the cost minimising imperative, news media have a tendency to over-represent the views of the corporate sector and the government. The corporate sector has long pursued a strategy for influencing media coverage of corporate issues by funding think tanks that can act as a nominally independent (not explicitly representing a corporation) source for interviewees. A very substantial US government effort in this field has long been maintained by such bodies as the Department of Defence, the Air Force, and other armed forces (see the sources cited in Herman and Chomsky 2002: 20).

All this would not be so problematic if news outlets that were credulous and uncritical due to cost minimising pressures were balanced by other news outlets that are duly sceptical and that invest resources in independent research and scrutiny. We cannot hope to design a media institution that guarantees all and only the truth relevant to each important story. The best we can do is to design a system in which the poor performance of some news outlets is not too detrimental to the level of information available to the public, thanks to the better performance of competing news outlets. Informed by the diversity of voices, citizens can then make up their own minds as to what is best supported by evidence. This public good is undercut if a small number of voices dominates the relevant media and thus drowns out smaller voices. As a systematic consideration, it is desirable that the diversity of voices be relatively equal in power and reach in important respects, so that a more powerful competitor cannot drown out its rivals.

However, the mass media system in the US is highly concentrated. This is an important part of the explanation for the media’s poor performance. Even if critical voices exist that consistently expose relevant evidence that is mostly ignored by most media, the critical voices may not reach the majority of the public. The bulk of the mass media in the US is owned by about half a dozen giant conglomerates – Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, General Electric and Bertelsmann (Bagdikian 2004: 3ff). There are other large media corporations that round out the dominant companies but that do not match the overall dominance of the big six. There are also some companies with particular dominance in a given medium, such as Clear Channel in radio, or Gannett in newspapers.

The power of the major media outlets lies not only in the fact that they are the direct source of news for a massive proportion of the public, but also in the fact that they set the agenda for many minor media outlets. Small news outlets that are not owned by the large media conglomerates must minimise costs like their competitors. They too try to cut spending on reporters and on investigative resources. As a result, much of their international and national news and analysis is taken from the major outlets. This is one way in which, the major outlets are agenda-setters. What they choose to discuss, the facts they present in the discussion and the tenor of their coverage set the agenda for smaller outlets who do not have the resources to independently investigate stories while remaining competitive against the major companies.

Propaganda or PSYOPS

A related problem that bears distinct mention is that of government propaganda. The over-reliance on government sources and a failure to seek out critiques of these or to fact-check them is made even more problematic when the government sources engage in what is (euphemistically) called psychological operations or PSYOPS. In an article on 19th Feb 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence was “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations”, the goal being to “influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries” (Hart 2005). Amidst public outrage, the Pentagon closed the office, but Defence Secretary Rumsfeld quietly admitted that all of its tasks would simply be carried out by other agencies.

A relatively recent development in government news releases is the use of video and audio news releases (VNRs and ANRs). These are produced to resemble news segments on television and radio. These have long been in use by corporations to smuggle favourable coverage of their product (i.e., advertisement), into news broadcasts. The segment is intended to pass as news because it informs viewers of some technological or pharmaceutical innovation. While the PR firms producing these releases generally take care not to make false claims, they have an imperative to avoid dissenting views, downplay criticism, include paid testimonials and exaggerate effectiveness as much as possible short of a lie. US government departments, including the Defense Dept also use such releases. The releases often include reporting by former television news reporters and are in all other ways indistinguishable from news clips. Given the cost cutting imperatives of the media companies, they have an incentive to cut down on their staff of reporters or on their budget for independent news gathering, and to resort to such news releases as far as possible. Significant US government use of VNRs and ANRs has occurred at least under the Clinton and the most recent Bush administrations[3].

Often the government produced releases are distributed to international news organizations like Reuters and AP, from where they reach major US networks, and then feed through to local affiliates (Barstow and Stein 2005). While the government claims that it informs the recipient organisations about the producer of the segment, this information may get lost as it travels the chain from international news organizations, to local ones. Even if the information reaches the broadcasting agent, in the absence of a legal requirement to the contrary, the agent has an interest in neglecting to mention the source, to cast its news show in a favourable light by promoting the impression that the show’s own reporters created it.

The congressional Government Accountability Office has released at least three reports stating that the use of such releases in news may constitute “covert propaganda” on the part of the government, despite government pronouncements that the fault lay not with them but with the news broadcasters who failed to disclose the origin of the video and audio segments. The GAO has no enforcement abilities and the government has, for the most part, taken no note of the reports (Barstow and Stein 2005).

Another recent revelation about Defense Dept propaganda relates to retired military officials (Barstow 2008). Retired military officials are widely used by news stations as independent military experts (not tied to either the government or to defense companies) not merely on strategic decisions of troop movements, but also on broader policy for the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The assistant Secretary of Defense for public affairs in President George W. Bush’s first term, argued that in a spin-saturated news climate, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and independent. Retired military analysts were identified as such voices. Since news shows were increasingly using these analysts, they were targeted as particularly influential. The idea was to treat these analysts as ‘message force multipliers’ or ‘surrogates’ (to use Defense Dept terms) who could be counted on to deliver the administration’s themes and messages to the public in the form of their own opinions.

The analysts were not paid to echo the government view. However, the analysts collectively represent about 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. Such military contractors derive an advantage from inside information about the military’s needs that is unavailable to their competitors. Analysts are of greater use to the military contractors if they can boast inside access. The Defense Dept offered just such insider access. The analysts received hundreds of private briefings from senior military leaders, officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department. They were taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. Moreover, the Defense Dept maintained a close watch over the interviews and opinion pieces delivered by these analysts. Those who were critical of the administration’s policy were not invited back, thus losing their valuable inside access.