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.I fervently hope he is right.He attacks the ideology of “objectivity and balance” that has corrupted news, saying that it falsely evokes the scales of justice.He describes the curriculum at most journalism schools as “poison.”“ ‘Balance and objectivity’ creates an idea where both sides are balanced,” he said when I spoke to him by phone:In certain ways it mirrors the two-party system, the notion that if you are going to have a Democrat speak you need to have a Republican speak.It offers the phantom of objectivity.It creates the notion that the universe of discourse is limited to two positions.Issues become black or white.They are not seen as complex with a multitude of factors.Ewen argues that the forces for social change—look at any lengthy and turgid human-rights report—have forgotten that rhetoric is as important as fact.Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions, rarely uses facts to sell its positions.And because progressives have lost the gift of rhetoric, once a staple of a university education, because they naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone can move people toward justice, they are largely helpless.“Effective communication requires not simply an understanding of the facts, but how those facts will take place in the public mind,” Ewen said.“When Gustave Le Bon says it is not the facts in and of themselves which make a point but the way in which the facts take place, the way in which they come to attention, he is right.”The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion, a manual for the power elite’s shaping of popular sentiments.Lippmann argued that the key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an “intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.” 10These corporate forces, schooled by Woodrow Wilson’s vast Committee for Public Information, which sold World War I to the public, learned how to skillfully mobilize and manipulate the emotional responses of the public.The control of the airwaves and domination through corporate advertising of most publications restricted news to reporting facts, to “objectivity and balance,” while the real power to persuade and dominate a public remained under corporate and governmental control.Ewen argues that pamphleteering, which played a major role in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in shaping the public mind, recognized that “the human mind is not left-brain or right-brain, that it is not divided by reason which is good and emotion which is bad.”He argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion.But this refusal to appeal to emotion means “we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason, and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you forward.This is not true.”The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel.Human-rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations, and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts.But facts alone, Ewen says, make little difference.And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis, we must also communicate in new forms.We must appeal to emotion as well as to reason.The power of this appeal to emotion is evidenced in the photographs of Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, who, with a team of assistants at the end of the nineteenth century, initiated urban-reform photography.His stark portraits of the filth and squalor of urban slums awakened the conscience of a nation.The photographer Lewis Hine at the turn of the twentieth century and Walker Evans during the Great Depression did the same thing for the working classes, along with writers such as Upton Sinclair and James Agee.It is a recovery of this style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh, one that is not afraid of emotion and passion, which will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda.We may know that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem.We may be able to cite the statistics.But the oil and natural gas industry continues its flagrant rape of the planet.It is able to do this because of the money it uses to control legislation and a massive advertising campaign that paints the oil and natural gas industry as part of the solution.A group called Energy Tomorrow, for example—an advocacy arm of the American Petroleum Institute—has been running a series of television ads.One ad features an attractive, middle-aged woman—an actor named Brooke Alexander, who once worked as the host of WorldBeat on CNN and for Fox News.Dressed in a black pantsuit, Alexander walks around a blue-screen studio that surrounds her with digital renditions of American life.She argues, before each image, that oil and natural gas are critical to providing not only energy needs but also health care and jobs [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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