The Scandal of Anti-Intellectualism and Elites

by Gary Berg-Cross

Like a civil society, secular humanism and its kindred freethinking cousins require a certain base mixture of tolerance, curiosity, sophisticated of thinking, respect for truth and an intellectual environment. The hard truth of contemporary America is that we swim in a tide that seems less tolerant and appreciative of sophisticated thinking, such as required to understand systems of things.

I recently wrote about Transparency into Conservative Media Influence and the soft corruption of its methods. These combine threats, bribes, distractions and plain-out lying. It's unbalanced too. I expressed the hope that a larger group of people would take the opportunity to see how things work among the real power elite. For decades, Murdoch and his empire has cultivated the ability to influence elections on both sides of the ocean. As the dominatrix of News Corp, he ruled a layered suite of British papers. He could use the daily tabloid Sun to set the tone of electoral debate and echo it with a higher-minded Times, which was then backed by more aggressive voices coming from other parts of his empire. You get the tone from the way the American Propsect described the 1992 election:

"It was The Sun Wot Won It" declared the tabloid the day after the Labour party's fourth successive General Election defeat in 1992. The surprise result followed a sustained campaign of character assassination against its leader, Neil Kinnock. Pages and days of "Nightmare on Kinnock Street" propaganda culminated in an election day front page with his head on a lightbulb: "If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights?" The British public decided that Kinnock wasn't prime-minister material.

Clearly, subsequent candidates and party leaders got the threatening message. On this side of the Atlantic the Clintons didn't need to think too hard about this, since it came at them at the speed a multiple scandals backed by conservative money. In Britain later pols pragmatically sought Murdock's support or at least a pass from his active opposition. And in a democracy this all comes at a chilling price, which should get our attention for the upcoming American election.

So maybe we can learn something from the unfolding scandal and take steps to change the environment through what Jefferson stressed - learning, which is essential in a Democracy. The media hasn't been helping to provide 2 things people need - knowledge of the facts but also an historical perspective so they can understand how things have developed and who did what and why. Both are necessary to hold politicians accountable for their past acts and current plans.

After the failures of the conservative policies leading to unnecessary wars, loss of rights, inequity and a financial meltdown at the end of 8 years, have we learned too little? The 2010 election suggests that Americans remain too receptive and unskeptial about well packaged, conservative messages. All too often we are lulled into passive acceptance of lies and manufactured explanations. A convenient history is invented and packed into a tale. If that is not enough to lull us, then pop culture & distracting video images fills up the cognitive space leaving little room for reflection.

Now a scandal has our attention. For a while get to peak behind the curtain and see some of those ugly power elites relations, but also some of the techniques that influence the populace.

I've previously mentioned the use of Framing of issues and the masking role of false dichotomies. One may add that unfactual facts used on both sides of the Atlantic, but another technique is to appeal of the common man. Tabloids and Fox appeal to the common man and identify various enemy to what they call the American Way of Business, I mean Life.

For conservartive convenience the enemy is an amalgamation of liberals, gays, secularists, intellectuals etc. These are the parts of society that are out of touch with the common person as well as common sense. You can hear it from Fox & newsreaders that lip sink the party line. It opines that traditional news organizations are out of touch with the real America. Rupert Murdoch provided this talking point, when he bought the Boston Herald in 1982, complaining that other media (not his) had too much "allegiance to the upper class" which has a liberal attitude. It's a bogus claim that a healthy dose of skepticism can challenge, but mainstream media seems unable to knock intellectual elitism claims down and point to the real troubling network of allegiances. Indeed the current scandal shows a bit of what really goes on with what Janine R. Wedel calls the Shadow Elite (Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market ).

These elite are a new breed of flexible political operators ("flexions") who may serve the roles of lobbyist, government insider or elected official but who converge into a single network such as seems to be the case with Murdock's network. Wedel sees them: "snaking through official and private organizations, creating a loop that is closed to democratic processes." We saw this during the Bush administration where a a core group of flexions provided a witch's brew of power to advance several cultural transformations that favored their networks:

1. government outsourcing
2. privatization
3. deregulation, and
4. "the embrace of 'truthiness.'"

By wearing several hats simultaneously (think tanker, retired military or government official, corporate representative, "objective" expert) flexions can gain extraordinary insider knowledge and influence in order to custom-tailor a version of the "truth" benefiting the highest bidder. Some bidders are media tycoons like Murdock, but there are many others. Versions of truth can then passed as memes to a media network like Fox. In this way, they not only "co-opt public policy agendas" but "craft policy with their benefactors' purposes in mind." We end up saying, "What's the matter with Kansas, and Wisconsin etc."




Rational analysis, skepticism and critical thinking are all means of challenging shadow elite gambits and for that reason they and the intellectual power they represent are enemies that must be marginalized by the Sharow Elite.

This enemies list of intellectuals becomes a convenient whipping boy for the failings of society and its anti-intellectual message has been a long time coming. You could hear a proto-version of this enemy story in the 50s when the John Birch Society equated intellectualism with disparate philosophies like atheism and communism. Both were undermining American/Christian values. Intellectualism and intellectuals had to be defeated. To some degree they have succeeded in shoving progressives and progressive policy off to the side.

In The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby tells the story of the advance of anti-intellectual in the past 4+ decades. It has resulted in a flight from reason by way of a right-turn descent into a realm that combines intellectual laziness, a lack or curiosity and reflexive skepticism. Jacoby also singles out a lack of knowledge and memory that allows an outlet like Fox to fabricate an alternate, bubble world. Together these created the current anti-rational landscape, personified by the rise of the ultra right wing and its sometime creature the Tea Party. They can get away with crazy claims (like birtherism) because rational challenges are discounted. It's an environment that enables the shadow elite with its power through connections and self serving agenda to rise and thrive.



But slowing and solving this sorry state may not be as simple as identifying a dues paying member of the elite like Rupert Murdock or Larry Summers. As Jacoby notes, the anti or non-rationality seen in our governance is not a simple result of a Machiavellian plot by current politicians. They are opportunists leveraging anti-intellectual tendencies now realized and embodied in a pretty passive populace. Too many of our ordinary citizens, like their elected representatives, live without the basic set intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making.

We need to work on this steadily. It's not just rationality at elections that matter. It's an entire life of balanced life that is needed. An respect for a richly interlinked world of ideas, truth and facts that makes for an intellectual.

Some Transparency into Conservative Media Influence and Methods

by Gary Berg-Cross

As I’ve said before, our tribe of Secular Humanists, atheists, freethinker etc. are (by and large) a skeptical and critical-thinking lot. We like to know how things work and what’s behind it. We don’t like a superficial story and learn from experience and we like to pass on insights that come from that experience. We don’t like people who bend the facts or hype things into hot button stories. We like the Greek and Enlightenment constructions of fairness and balance more than what comes from ideological media. We are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to alternative views but are willing to adopt hypotheses based in evidence. But even for us living in a torrent of “information” sometimes it takes a scandalous crisis to provide transparency to expose how things really work and confirm lingering suspicions. For a brief time scandal raises attention enough to get the news media to pierce through the din of what seems like distracted coverage of important topics. In such circumstances non-main stream analysis gets presented and events sometimes confirm minority-view hypotheses. We see the uncomfortable reality of how things like power and ideology weave together to make business as usual.

Examples of post-crisis illuminations include the eventual exposure of how the Iraq war was sold to us by the Bush Administration’s with a mix of co-opted news media, the relations people financial interests and politicians or financial institutions and rating agencies that precipitated an economic crash and rolling unemployment as far as the political eye can see. In each case bad policy and politics had disastrous consequences and we many of us got the story from the 4th estate too late. Maybe these should have been obvious to us, and it was to some, but skeptical voices were generally muted in the larger conversation while the megaphone was turned up for official policy. Sadly our largely corporate media largely reflected an inside elite view with a fine tuned skepticism that was largely reserved for non-conformist voices (see my Thoughtful and Shallow Skepticism more more on this aspect of skepticism. Afterwards we get closer to the real story leading to a feeling of frustration and new questions. Matt Taibbi framed the new post-Wall Street meltdown question in the title of his Rolling Stone article - Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? He is not the only one to observe that no top banker (or bank) has faced serious consequences for their actions in the financial crisis:

Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Yet inside the institutions and media many knew that there would be an eventual problem. They were just afraid to be the first to blow the whistle. There can be consequences for bucking the consensus of powerful people before it is fashionable. There is all that opposition that can be thrown at a skeptical voice. You can be sued, for example - Analyst Was Punished For Blowing The Whistle On Wall Street . Indeed when powerful people escape responsibility for their actions it is a message to future whistle blowers and allies. The message is "don’t bother; we punish the messenger of bad news". This is sometimes describe as “no good deed goes unpunished”. At the least groups with power can drag it out so that many can’t sustain the effort. In 2004, a Wall Street banker blew the whistle on abusive tax shelters used by Enron and other big companies. He testified about his experience before Congress (anonymously as “Mr. ABC”) noting that a big problem with whistle blowing is that even federal agency’s seem intimidated about battle giant companies. After all, the big guys have networks of friends in high places, loud lobby voices and the ear of the Media (think Fox and the Wall Street Journal). There is “resistance to take seriously outside information from knowledgeable insiders.” This side of Wikileaks not everyone yields to the threat, but it is likely that many are chilled. In the 2010 election we lost many progressive voices including a very ethical Russ Feingold, who opposed against FISA, and a vigorous Alan Grayson, who was outspoken against things like Too Big to Fail banks. Neither endeared them to various lobby groups backed by enormous financial power of multinational/national corporations and out of state interests. There are host of organized interests that can go after people. Some are targeted by religious groups, others by the NRA gun lobby, anti-government groups or financial interests. The message is to not speak up on issues of the dogs will come out. That was the case with Feingold & Grayson and earlier with Cynthia McKinney who was targeted by AIPAC for calling for a degree of fairness and balance in our Middle East policy. For all of these reasons important topics go without serious discussion.

I was reminded of this complex of reporting, intimidation, political connections and punishment when I read about the scandal around Murdock’s British News of the World (NOW), a rough and tumble tabloid, famous for manufacturing the wrong kind of news, but also part of a news group pushing a political ideology.

Here in the States we have seen the propaganda techniques used to influence the American public. Now one (and probably more than one) British component of the News Corp empire seems to have slipped from the merely sleazy, indecent and immoral to the illegal. Phone hacking of private voice mail which apparently has been going on six years since the London bombings, which saw 52 people murdered and 700 injured. Reluctantly it seems after being pressed to stop earlier investigations, the police are investigating whether the mobile phones of several of those who lost family members in those attacks were hacked by private investigators hired by the News of the World. Getting the inside scoop never seemed so sleazy and we are now hear that as many as 4000 people may have had their phone messages listened to. The British accepted a loss or privacy for celebrities, but finally the scope of invasion has exceeded the public taste and the dam has broken. For a discussion of various privacy issues involved see What price privacy now?).

Among employees NOW is infamous for relentless pressure for attention gathering “results” (aka News) including paying police officers for information. But it may be part of a much larger cultural picture of how powerful interests operate and have compromised if not corrupted society at several levels. According to a government report the younger James Murdoch approved a 700,000-pound payment to a phone-hacking victim that was accompanied by a non-disclosure agreement. This smells of an organize a "cover-up." Consistent with this, there are claims that NOW paid off police officers investigating this and that police backed off of investigations and cooperated with NOW for favorable news NOW coverage. There are reports that this was partly due to bribes, but also to avoid being the target of unfavorable press and/or to avoid political pressure. Why political pressure? Well Murdock's empire can apply so much pressure that candidates don't even temp crossing him. Prime Minster Cameron's has links with former Murdoch executives most notably Andy Coulson, deputy editor of NOW in 2000. In 2007, Coulson was hired by David Cameron as the Conservative Party's director of communication. He was tasked with the Foxian idea of bringing a bit of tabloid liveliness to Cameron's staid party. Or you could say make it more like the contemporary Republican Party. Andy Coulson became a key adviser in Cameron’s campaign. Cameron needed a press person and as a Labor party leader put it:

"Coulson is ruthless and will go to any lengths to serve his master. I will be his master and he my attack dog" It worked and Cameron is now a PM. Coulson knew how to get the message out to the people, but also how to make the opposition look bad.

Pols need to avoid such negative coverage (based in oppositional analysis) and thus we have see even liberal politicians courting Murdock’s media. For decades British pols have had to had to develop some working (if not close) relations with Murdock if only to avoid being tarred in the tabloids. Labor’s Tony Blair flew to Australia to address a meeting of News Corp executive in the mid-1990s as he sought to woo Mr. Murdoch for his up eventual campaign. Hillary Clinton seemed to have a similar “understanding” with Murdock during her campaign:

"They have a respectful and cordial relationship. He has respect for the work she has done on behalf of New York. I wouldn't say it was illustrative of a close ongoing relationship.” See Rupert Murdoch Loves Hillary Clinton.

It's a forms of soft corruption and acceptance of a dubious practice. I personally saw some changed atmosphere when in 2008 I had conservative friends of mine smilingly tell me that I would be surprised of who they liked in the Democratic primary. Like Murdock they were switching from all those negative things they said and believed about Hillary in the 90s. That’s when conservatives marshaled supporters and paid consultants to investigate the Clinton’s. People look into all aspects of a target's life including legal or criminal, medical, educational, financial, public, private and military service and voting records, as well as prior media coverage. Now it's emails and voice mail too. For Hillary that opposition research and propaganda was then. Now she is RELATIVELY OK.

But the message is chilling to other candidates who on the liberal side risk being knocked out over things that don’t seem to trouble Newt G or others.

So it is a good thing to be getting a bit of transparency into how power media and politics works. Hopefully people will pay attention and assimilate the message. Be skeptical and consider the sources.

For a time the public is being informed about the way things work. Hopefully we won’t be distracted by the next Big News Thing such as politician’s bus trips or the details of a big religious breakfast meeting. There are more important things to understand in these times and we can't afford to lose fair, and on balance, quality people like a Feingold or a Grayson.