Why misinformation and propaganda are seldom simply false (I)
The anatomy of sophisticated propaganda: From simple facts to norms and relevance
Often, when we think of misinformation or propaganda, images of right-wing populism spring to mind, with Donald Trump frequently cited as a prime example. Common belief suggests that propaganda mainly involves straightforward lies, like Sean Spicer’s exaggerated claims about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration.
However, this understanding is incomplete. Effective propaganda and misinformation extend beyond mere falsities and are not exclusive to right-wing populism. To the contrary, if you have grown up like me in the early 1980s in Europe or the United States, the most pervasive propaganda that you will have suffered from is that of neoliberalism.
In this article, I explore how sophisticated propaganda works. This usually does not consist in stating simple falsehoods, but it rather operates at the level of norms and relevance. Instead of following the trend to focus on right-wing populism, I follow the Chomskian tradition and focus on the neoliberal media machine.
Simple lies about simple facts: Stupid propaganda
Sophisticated propaganda and misinformation are seldom about simple facts and falsehoods. Simple facts are facts that can be stated usually in one sentence, and which are often easily verifiable or falsifiable.
Take Sean Spicer’s claim about Donald Trump’s inauguration: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe." Here we have a clear fact that we can falsify—or in liberal news-speak, “check”. It can be checked “easily” in the sense that we can evaluate, for instance, photographic evidence.
This kind of propaganda is what I like to call “stupid propaganda”. Stupid propaganda is all about simple facts and simple lies. In our case, its purpose is personally petty; here, it is Donald Trump’s ego, and it is easily falsifiable.
Sophisticated varieties of propaganda usually do not refer to such primitive methods. They operate on a more complex level, often on the level of norms and relevance.
Norms
In the simplest sense, norms are any kind of rules or guidelines. Yet, what I mean by norms are ethical principles that can be justified through reasoning. Examples are Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” or Mill’s “act in a way that produces the greatest good for the greatest number.” Ideally, we do not make such norms up but test their universalizability through reasoning. This works as follows:
For example, say, you find a lost wallet. Then, if you want to act ethically, you could apply the universality principle used in ethical reasoning. You ask yourself whether it would be acceptable for everyone, in all similar situations, to keep any found wallet. Here, you consider if such an action could be universally applied without leading to ethical contradictions or societal breakdown. Reasoning that a rule that would allow everyone to keep wallets in such a situation would be untenable because it would legitimize asocial, self-serving behavior that borders on theft, you might conclude that the ethical action is to return the wallet to its owner.
Media coverage is full of normative statements that would require such, though not necessarily this, reasoning process. Statements like “our current taxation system is fair (or unfair)”, “migration controls are good (or bad)”, “eating meat is justified (or unjustified)” are normative statements that are ideally justified by normative reasoning.[1]
Ethical reasoning in public discourse
Such disclaimers about norms, let alone ethical reasoning for such norms, are what we do not see in basically all media outlets. Instead, people claim “X is wrong” or “Y is right”.
When liberal and conservative media push their agenda, for instance, that it is just to give unemployed people only scraps instead of a satisfactory unemployment insurance system, then they do not argue for this normatively. When they claim that recent generations are lazy because they want to work less, they make claims about ethical virtue and working ethics, of course, without fair assessment.
Norms are basically not discussed in the media nor in public discourse, which mainly occurs in the media. Instead, we are constantly fed the opinions of the owners or managers of media outlets via their employees as norms. Yet, this ethical relativism is deeply troublesome. It is the breeding ground for (ethical) misinformation.
Relevance
Relevance is another dimension of propaganda, which is closely connected to norms. Relevance is about which topics media present to us, which every time involves a normative judgment. If media outlets report constantly about issues such as the war in Ukraine or the conflict in the middle east, they make a decision about what is important to us.
So, if, for the 500th time, you put a headline on the conflict in the Middle East center stage, you make the normative decision, knowingly or not, that this issue is more important than, say, child poverty or world hunger.
If you constantly feed people with, which I call for the lack of better words, factual “one-timers” (bridge X collided, airplane Y crashed) or political storytelling (prime minister X met president Y to talk about strengthening trade; minister X resigned from party Y, coalition talks between parties X and Y), then you make the decision that these topics are more important than, say, mass alienation among the general public.
Power, self-worth, and apathy: The essence of neoliberal propaganda
Not only that. And this is where it becomes particularly perfidious: the more you report on and give relevance to foreign conflicts, factual “one-timers” or political storytelling, the more you focus on topics on which people have very little to no political agency.
Now, if you do not live, for instance, in Switzerland, where you have constantly plebiscites and a compromise-oriented approach to political power-sharing, or in a few other countries with a more engaging political process, your political influence equals nearly zero. When you live in a country with 300 million people and are allowed to vote every four years for a candidate and a party you do not like, you live in a very rudimentary democracy.
That is, you have to make rather coarse-grained decisions about wholesale economic policy packages, interior policies and so on by voting for a party. Yet even this very rudimentary form of political power is taken from you when media discourse is constantly about issues over which you have no control because of obvious information constraints. You are forced to make a political decision, usually based on media information.
When reports are about factual one-timers (crimes, accidents, etc.), you have seldom, if ever, something to politically contribute. If things are constantly about foreign events, say a war in another country, your political power is completely gone.
You cannot vote for a peace treaty or a particular wartime policy because you are not part of the political system of the war-waging countries. And, since most countries simply do not have the military or economic power to change the course of a foreign war, it is not clear what the media consumers of such countries are to do with an overload of information about such events.
Compare that to a media discourse that would focus on issues such as working hours, income stagnation, or taxation justice. While, admittedly, most of us have not remotely as much power over these issues as we should have, here we have at least a bit of voting power.
And from a left-wing perspective, way more importantly, we hold the political power in our own countries if only we wanted or would know how to: that is, if we politically organize to gain power. This, of course, is a normative topic of utmost relevance for left-wing discourse, yet it is not even really discussed by most left-wing media.
That is, the more media report about things that are potentially and really outside of our control, the more we are fed irrelevant information. That is, of course, the basic idea behind Noam Chomsky’s critique of spectator democracy, as discussed in his “Media Control” - an extremely short and worthwhile book that you can read in a few hours. And it well aligns with the neoliberal strategy to create political apathy in the general population through feelings of powerlessness.
If you are constantly presented with issues about which you have no power and that have little bearing on your own well-being, you feel powerless, marginalized, and worthless, and you have the feeling that your own interests are not relevant; in short, you become depressed and apathetic.
And that, of course, is the essence of neoliberal propaganda. Yet, this meshwork of using norms and relevance for its interests is far from all that neoliberal propaganda has to offer. At least one more important issue pertains to complex or theoretical facts, as we will see in another article.
[1] Importantly, norms, unlike facts, are not true or false; rather, they are about good or bad, right or wrong and so on. The principle “thou shall not kill” is not a fact. It is not measurable, it is not observable, you cannot touch it, and so forth. Rather, the principle derives from the human ability to reason ethically, as described above.