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  The notion that we live in an elaborate, technologically manufactured illusion has become a recurring theme in modern cinema. In Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger discovers that his own memories are government-manufactured implants. In The Net, Sandra Bullock’s identity is erased by a corporation that controls the world’s information databases. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey lives in a giant Potemkin village, unaware that his entire life is a made-for-TV fabrication. Virtual reality also figures prominently in later episodes of Star Trek, which feature a “holodeck” where people go to experience synthetic adventures in a room that can be programmed to realistically simulate a Parisian café, a lush rain forest, or any other pseudo-environment that the programmer requests. In The X-Files, agents Scully and Mulder spend their days exploring a vast, labyrinthine conspiracy, convinced that “the truth is out there” but never quite able to discover it or even identify the conspirators. “This, it seems, is a proliferating notion in today’s world of film—blending theology and technology into a weird, low-level paranoia about existence,” observes film critic Ted Anthony.35

  This paranoia reflects a growing public awareness of what journalist Walter Lippmann described in 1921 as “the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. . . . What is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.”36

  Lippmann served as a confidential assistant to the U.S. Secretary of War during the First World War and participated in drawing up the terms of the armistice. The experience left him disillusioned about the future prospects for democracy, and in a book titled Public Opinion he readily acknowledged that all sides in the war, his own included, had lied to their own citizens about matters ranging from battlefield losses to the real postwar objectives of the warring governments. “We have learned to call this propaganda,” he wrote. “A group of men, who can prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of it to suit their purpose.”37

  The “pseudo-environment” of fictions was inevitable and necessary, Lippmann argued, in part because of limitations in the speed with which information could be transmitted to the public at large. Even a skilled telegraph operator, he observed, could transmit no more than 1,500 words per day. As a result, foreign correspondents were forced to compress their firsthand accounts into a “few words,” which “must often stand for a whole succession of acts, thoughts, feelings and consequences. . . . It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the elements of truth that complete justice would demand into a hundred word account of what had happened.”38 Rather than informed consensus, therefore, public opinion was bound to be a hodgepodge of half-baked notions and stereotypes based on incomplete information and the personal biases of individuals.

  Given the impossibility of educating the public about the full complexities of the world, Lippmann argued that democracy was unworkable “unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.”39 The expert, he argued, would “exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the administrator. All governing agencies will tend to organize bodies of research and information, which will throw out tentacles and expand, as have the intelligence departments of all the armies in the world.”40 Lippmann thought this development would be a good thing and even recommended creating government-subsidized “bureaus of experts,” whose members would enjoy lifetime tenure.41 “The purpose,” he said, “is not to burden every citizen with expert opinions on all questions, but to push that burden away from him towards the responsible administrator.”42

  Complementing the rise of the expert, Lippmann also foresaw the rise of a specialized type of expert whose job would be to control and discipline the thinking of the masses. “As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner,” he stated. “Persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise.”43

  The world we live in today differs from Lippmann’s in ways that he could never have foreseen. His argument about the difficulties involved in transmitting information from place to place not only seems irrelevant but absurd in today’s world of the Internet, camcorders, cell phones, fiber-optic cables, and satellite dishes. The information bottleneck no longer exists. To the contrary, we are bombarded daily with more information than we can possibly absorb, and yet the modern information media have not eliminated the “pseudo-environment” of which Lippmann spoke. In fact, media noise has contributed greatly to its growth.

  The Disinfotainment Industry

  The creation of a media pseudo-environment is no easy task. It takes time, money, and advanced technology. No one knows exactly how much money is spent each year in the United States on corporate public relations, but $10 billion would be a conservative estimate. The PR industry has turned to the social sciences for help in developing techniques equal to the task. Psychologists, sociologists and opinion pollsters work in tandem with computer programmers to develop complex databases so refined that they can pinpoint the prevailing “psychographics” of individual city neighborhoods. Press agents used to rely on publicity stunts to attract attention for their clients. In today’s electronic age, the PR industry uses 800 numbers and telemarketing, interactive websites and simultaneous multilocation fax transmission. Today’s public relations industry has become so pervasive that part of its invisibility stems from the fact that it is, indeed, everywhere—from T-shirts bearing product brand names to movie product placements to various behind-the-scenes efforts at “issue management,” “perception management,” or “crisis management” (to use just a few of the currently fashionable buzzwords).

  Some companies, with names like Capital Speakers, Inc., or Celebrity Focus, specialize in recruiting celebrity and expert spokespersons for the PR industry. Capital Speakers boasts that it can provide “access to virtually any speaker or entertainer on earth.” Celebrity Focus says it allows clients “to focus on public relations, while entrusting the hiring of celebrities to seasoned professionals.”44 Other PR consultants specialize in coaching would-be experts and nervous corporate executives in how to present themselves before Congress or on television: what clothes to wear, what color tie, how to sit or stand (spread your feet so your head won’t seem to rock on camera), what words to use and how to pronounce them, and—when asked a question you don’t want to answer—how to say nothing while avoiding awkward phrases like “no comment.” The larger PR companies offer all of these services and more under a single roof—one-stop shopping for advertising, public relations, traditional lobbying, research, polling, direct-mail canvassing, and creating “grassroots” support for issues.

  The federal government is forbidden by law from spending money on public relations, but this has proved to be no barrier in practice, since the same activities go on under the rubric of “public affairs” and other euphemisms. In 1986, Senator William Proxmire asked the General Accounting Office how much money federal agencies spend on public affairs, and received an estimate of $2.3 billion—a figure that did not include the PR activities of Congress or the White House. This number has surely grown since, although there are no government statistics or even standards with which to track and measure its growth. During the Reagan administration’s military interventions in Central America in the 1980s, its Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean used the third party technique to orchestrate media coverage of the war. On March 11, 1985, for example, Professor John Guilmarten wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal alleging a dangerous arms buildup by the Nicaraguan government. “Professor Guilmarten has been a consultant to our office and collaborated with our staff in
the writing of this piece. . . . Officially, this office had no role in its preparation,” noted an internal White House memo that was uncovered during the Iran/Contra hearings. The memo also mentioned op-ed pieces that its consultants had drafted to be signed by contra leaders and submitted to the Washington Post and New York Times, and spoke of using a “cutout” (CIA-speak for “third party”) to set up interviews between the contras and various Washington news media. In its first year of operations alone, the program claimed credit for 1,500 speaking engagements and for sending material to 239 editorial writers in 150 cities—all the while concealing the fact that the White House was the source of the propaganda.

  Some PR campaigns are entertaining, some are merely frivolous, and some are undoubtedly beneficial to the public. The cumulative human cost of these experiments in thought control has nevertheless been profound. On repeated occasions in the twentieth century, experts in manipulating public opinion have led the United States and other nations into war. Washington, D.C., is home to prominent PR firms whose clients include dictatorships that murder and torture their own citizens and even spy on the United States, while simultaneously lobbying for foreign financial aid and special trade favors. The private health care industry has launched massive PR and lobby campaigns on repeated occasions to block health care reform, with the result that the United States remains the only major industrial power on earth with a large population of uninsured—ranking near the bottom in terms of the actual health of its citizens despite spending more per capita on health care than any other nation.45

  There is nothing wrong with many of the techniques used by the PR industry—lobbying, grassroots organizing, using the news media to put ideas before the public. As individuals, we not only have the right to engage in these activities, we have a responsibility to participate in the decisions that shape our society and our lives. Ordinary citizens have the right to organize for social change. But ordinary citizens cannot afford the multimillion-dollar campaigns that PR firms undertake on behalf of their special interest clients, usually large corporations, business associations, and governments. Raw money enables the PR industry to mobilize attorneys, broadcast faxes, satellite feeds, sophisticated information systems, and other expensive, high-tech resources to outmaneuver, overpower, and outlast true citizen reformers.

  That we live in a world of media manipulations is understood almost instinctively by the public. Whether we see through a particular propaganda campaign or not, we all know that we live in an age of half-truths, weasel words, and slick image campaigns. When someone says, “That’s a bunch of PR,” they rarely mean it in a positive sense. “PR has become a catchall phrase for what the public doesn’t trust,” observes Betty Keepin, the president of a trade association for women PR executives. In 1994, the Public Relations Society of America and the Rockefeller Foundation began a five-year survey aimed at determining which types of public figures were most trusted by the general public. Forty-five different types of public figures were assessed, using a “National Credibility Index” devised by the PRSA to measure “the degree to which an individual trusts the person advocating or espousing a position on an issue.” To the PRSA’s dismay, public relations professionals came almost at the bottom—number 43, just below “famous athletes” and barely squeaking past “famous entertainers” and “TV or radio talk show hosts.”46

  The PRSA’s study was completed in 1999 and released with little fanfare on Friday, June 18—“just before the Fourth of July vacation period and a favorite ‘burying ground’ for those trying to minimize publicity,” noted the PR trade publication O’Dwyer’s. The survey prompted a few expressions of concern from industry practitioners, some of whom suggested that perhaps they should launch a “PR for PR” campaign. Others resignedly admitted that any such campaign would probably be doomed to failure. But for Dave Siefert, president of the International Association of Business Communicators, the results were neither surprising nor particularly bad news. PR pros work “in the background,” he said, and people “see the results of our work, not our personal involvement.” The public relations industry itself may lack credibility, but PRSA’s survey showed that “national experts” were the third most trusted type of public figure in America (after Supreme Court justices and schoolteachers). And after all, Siefert said, “the national experts are often delivering messages developed by PR pros.”47

  The media stage on which much of modern public life is conducted has created two kinds of experts—the spin doctors behind the scenes, and the visible experts that they select, cultivate, and offer up for public consumption. The experts who work behind the scenes prefer to stay there, because invisibility is necessary to achieve their illusions. “Guys in my business hate becoming public figures . . . when we don’t control it,” says former Reagan aide Edward Rollins, now a vice president at Edelman.48 Today’s wizards of spin are rather like the Wizard of Oz. They have perfected the craft of speaking in a booming, magisterial voice that inspires admiration and awe, but they fear being unmasked for what they really are—showmen who have learned to use hidden wires, smoke, and mirrors to make little men and little ideas seem grand and convincing. There is a reason that the Wizard begged Dorothy to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” But she had to look, and understand the contrivance behind his magic, before she could find her way back home.

  2

  The Birth of Spin

  Few developments from the Civil War to the present stand out so vividly or account for so much of the shape of modern America as the growth of the professions and the steady retreat of the layman before the ever-expanding claims of professional expertise.

  —Thomas L. Haskell1

  Sitting atop a raised platform canopied in white, philanthropist Charles T. Yerkes sat blushing as eight hundred dignitaries greeted him with a standing ovation. William Rainey Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, praised his “sincerity and simplicity.” The head of the university board of trustees said that Yerkes had helped build a monument to spiritual values in a materialistic age, contributing “to the uplifting of men and upbuilding of character.”

  The occasion was the dedication of Chicago’s new astronomical observatory on October 21, 1897, to which Yerkes had made a substantial financial contribution. When Yerkes himself rose to speak, his modestly phrased remarks hinted discreetly at the altruistic nature of his gift. “One reason why the science of astronomy has not more helpers,” he said, “is on account of its being entirely uncommercial. There is nothing of moneyed value to be gained by the devotee of astronomy; there is nothing that he can sell.”2

  Nothing to sell, perhaps, but Yerkes was definitely trying to buy something—specifically, perfume for a bad reputation. Current flattery aside, he was one of the most hated men in the city, a robber baron who had spent time in prison for misappropriation of funds before developing a winning business strategy that he described as “buy old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it upon other fellows.” Yerkes had built an empire by controlling the city’s lucrative new electric streetcars, whose poorly strung power lines had killed or injured 382 people in 1895 alone. His crude attempts to bribe Illinois legislators had sparked a civic reform movement called the Citizens Independent Anti-Boodle League. The university officials and astronomers who courted his contribution understood full well, as did the rest of the city, that his investment in the observatory was a thinly disguised attempt to buy a new image. In retrospect, it is hard to say who was playing whom for a fool that day. After the day’s pageantry, the Chicago newspapers and the Anti-Boodle League returned to their attack. Yerkes was eventually driven from the city in disgrace and died a few years later in poverty and obscurity.

  From the perspective of today, the most striking thing about Yerkes and his charitable gesture was its almost quaint ineffectuality. He may have been a scoundrel, but he was no PR man. In 1897, in fact, the term “public relations” had not yet been invented.

  Contrary to Yerkes’s
comment about its lack of helpers, astronomy was actually the most popular object of scientific philanthropy in nineteenth-century America. Civic groups went door-to-door collecting subscriptions to finance the construction of telescopes, with different cities vying for the honor of owning the instrument with the largest lens. As Yerkes observed during his brief moment of public approval, astronomy was an “entirely uncommercial” subject of study—literally, stargazing—and its noncommercial nature was precisely what explained its appeal. People turned to it the way they turned to art museums or great literature. They gazed into the heavens, pondered the mysteries of creation, and philosophized about the nature of the universe. Science and technology in those days were still seen as two very different things. The electric motors that drove Yerkes’s streetcars were technology in action—machines of brute force, the ultimate expressions of industrial power and Yankee ingenuity. “Science” was something else, something both finer and less practical—the work of eccentric scholars who scribbled notes in makeshift labs, dug up dinosaur bones and rock samples in remote lands, hatched new theories and tested them with whatever scant resources they could scrape together. Their quaint explorations were appreciated but not particularly revered, nor were they particularly well-funded. “American indifference to science and scientists was . . . the perfectly natural consequence of the fact that neither science nor science-oriented technology was a particularly conspicuous feature of nineteenth-century American life,” observes historian Howard Miller. “Not until the twentieth century would industrial, agricultural, and military technology force public recognition that research was a national resource. Until then scientists would in general remain, as one of them termed it, ‘inoffensive but curious and useless members of the social order.’ ”3