Censored 2014 (40 page)

^21.
Erich Fromm,
The Sane Society
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990).

^22.
Ibid., 152–153.

^23.
Ibid., 153–154.

^24.
Clifford, “Ethics of Belief.”

^25.
David Barstow, “Beyond TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand,”
New York Times,
April 20, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?pagewanted=all
. For another recent piece examining how corporate media advocate the public to “believe only credible authorities, “ see Russ Baker, “New York Times Warning: Trust Authorities on Boston Bombing, or You're Nuts, “
WhoWhatWhy.com
, May 31, 2013.
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/05/31/new-york-times-warning-trust-authorities-on-boston-bombing-or-you're-nuts
.

^26.
Plato,
The Republic,
Book VIII, trans. Benjamin Jowett,
http://classics.mit.edi/Plato/republic.9.v11.html
.

^27.
Luke Johnson, “Sue Everhart, Georgia GOP Chairwoman, Warns Of ‘Free Ride' Gay Marriage Fraud,”
Huffington Post,
April 1, 2013,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/01/sue-ever-hart-gay-marriage_n_2991860.html
.

^28.
Ben Dimiero and Eric Hananoki, “Ben Carson: Marriage Equality Could Destroy America Like The ‘Fall Of The Roman Empire,'” Media Matters, March 29, 2013,
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/29/ben-carson-marriage-equality-could-destory-amer/193345
.

^29.
Anomaly, “Pat Robertson: God Will Destroy America Because of Gay Marriage,” FreakOutNation, June 28, 2011,
http://freakoutnation.com/2011/06/28/pat-robertson-god-will-destory-america-because-of-gay-marriage/
.

^30.
Cohen,
Critical Thinking Unleashed,
163.

^31.
See, for example, Deepa Kumar,
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 152.

^32.
Cohen,
Critical Thinking Unleashed.

^33.
Kumar,
Islamophobia.
See also
http://arabface.us/
. For further background, see the film,
Reel Bad Arabs
as it addresses the rise of Arab stereotypes in the US,
http://www.reelbadarabs.com/
. Rob Williams further addresses the issue of Islamophobia in “Screening the Homeland: How Hollywood Fantasy Mediates State Fascism in the US of Empire,” ch. 8 in this volume.

^34.
Elliot D. Cohen,
Caution: Faulty Thinking Can Be Harmful to Your Happiness
(Fort Pierce, FL: Trace-Wilco, Inc., 2004).

James F. Tracy

INTRODUCTION

Several years ago Project Censored's former and current directors Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff identified and explained the “truth emergency” that is among the greatest threats to human existence. This crisis of civil society is manifest in flawed (or nonexistent) investigations into 9/11 and other potential false-flag terrorism, fraudulent elections, and illegal wars, all of which are perpetuated by a corporate-controlled news media that fail to adequately inform the public on such matters.
²

While obscuring inquiry into such events and phenomena, big media go a step further by disparaging independent journalists and researchers as “conspiracy theorists” or, more revealingly, “truthers.”

As the truth emergency becomes more serious, social engineers, taking their cue from deeply antidemocratic minds such as Edward Bernays, have long understood the significance of undermining the use of reason, for it is only through reason that truth may be ascertained and evaluated. “Propaganda,” on the other hand, must be
unabashedly employed to guide the masses toward certain predetermined ends. Aided through the burgeoning field of mass psychology, Bernays wrote in 1928 how propaganda “is now scientific in the sense that it seeks to base its operations upon definite knowledge drawn from direct observation of the group mind, and upon the application of principles which have been demonstrated to be consistent and relatively constant.”
³

Today, a far greater technological sophistication involving the Internet, social media, and “smart” devices has brought about the conflation of propaganda with advertising and mass consumption. The preoccupation with, and ubiquity of, such media and message-making give the false impression of personal autonomy and free will, while actual political and economic power remains largely unchallenged. “We are no longer appealed to as thinking citizens,” a commentary in the
Guardian
observed:

In the years leading up to this microcosmic effort to harness reason, individuals and institutions achieving legitimacy in the public mind have long been recognized as holding a monopoly on the capacity to reason and are thus perceived as the foremost bearers of truth and knowledge. Through the endorsement of “experts”—figures perceived as authoritative in their field—the public is still easily persuaded on many matters, from genetically modified foods and water fluoridation, to terrorist attacks at home and military intervention abroad.

THE PUBLIC USES OF REASON

To a significant degree, reason is defined one-dimensionally, its relationship to truth largely taken-for-granted. Yet, as Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz observed, reason marks our humanity, suggesting a portion of the soul capable of
a priori
recognition of truth. “Only reason can complete the happiness of the other virtues,” political philosopher J. S. McClelland similarly remarked, “and reason does this partly through its relationship with the other faculties and partly through the pursuit of the true knowledge which is its own.”
⁵

With this in mind, the modern individual in the mass has been rendered at least partially soulless—devoid of self-knowledge—through her everyday deferral to the powerfully persuasive notion and representation of expertise that now extends to the subtle and voluntary dynamic of new media “interactivity.” However narrowly focused, under the guise of objectivity, the institutionally affiliated journalist, academic, bureaucrat, and corporate spokesperson have in many instances become the portals of reason through which the public is summoned to observe “truth.”

The human capacity to exercise reason and seek truth is further sidetracked and rerouted through a routine parade of news stories that are almost entirely divorced from political processes bearing upon the human condition and its historical trajectory. For example, the extensive media coverage afforded the trials of Jodi Arias or O. J. Simpson are platforms for applying human reason to events that have little bearing on truly critical affairs of the day. The news media's censorial tendency may be illustrated along these lines by noting how comparatively little news centers on significant trials that may allow the public to fathom the plausible cloak-and-dagger tactics of the US military–industrial–intelligence complex—specifically the legal proceedings for apparent Tucson Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner, alleged Aurora Colorado assassin James Holmes, the would-be Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or especially Pfc. Bradley Manning in the case of WikiLeaks. The fallout from such momentous and highly questionable public events are repeatedly deemed unworthy for public consideration, while the myths fabricated to
define their official meaning and significance are uniformly accepted through corporate media's carefully coordinated repetition and omission of select facts.

The understanding and application of reason is also crucial not only as a basis for assessing facts and recognizing these from the narrative and visual forms presenting themselves as news, but also to distinguish human reason from the surface rationality of bureaucratic and technological systems imposed on human activity. This is a fundamental problem of modern social relations that finds its firmament in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theories of the press, continuing through to the present as new media technologies further strengthen the social and political myths invented for the masses.
⁶

The prevailing myth of terrorism as an existential threat to the Western world suggests the continued abandonment of reason and moves toward what Erich Fromm called the automaton, what C. Wright Mills referred to as “cheerful robots,” and what David Riesman termed the “other-directed” impulse. Dissent—the desire to exert one's humanity and freedom through the application of reason to available facts—is often an unacceptable violation of the prevailing political rationality where fear and terror are prime motivators.
⁷

The pressures to conform and restrain the use of reason are today often reinforced through a turn to scientific inquiry—particularly psychiatry and psychology—to rationalize and defend official accounts of public events. For example, some psychologists contend that “a conspiracy theory isn't so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview,” a
New York Times
opinion piece argued. “While psychologists can't know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief.”
⁸

Such social science seeks to deny the individual's inherent possibility for apprehending truth and exercising intellectual agency by locating the causes of unorthodox thought and expression in presumed biological aberrations. This is readily apparent in the news media's quest to label forbidden political thought not conforming with official accounts as “conspiracy theory,” with the attendant suggestion that
consideration of unofficial accounts of important public events may indicate mental illness.
⁹

This is an explicit move to not only augment the perceived rationality of corporate and state institutions that undergird civil society, but also to short circuit the effort to apprehend reality and assert the very human impulse toward the exercise of reason that affirms one's own freedom and being.
¹⁰
As Erich Fromm noted, in terms of evolutionary advances humanity has traveled a long biological road to arrive at
objectivity
—“that is, to acquire the faculty to see the world, nature, other persons and oneself as they are, and not distorted by desires and fears. The more man develops this objectivity, the more he is in touch with reality, the more he matures, the better can he create a human world in which he is at home.”

For Fromm, the underlying element to apprehend in the rediscovery and expansion of a truly sane society has much more to do with the cultivation and exercise of reason than intelligence since the former distinguishes the human being's inclination toward truth. Fromm continued,

Along these lines, Immanuel Kant infers how, aside from property ownership the ability to publicly exercise one's reason is a cornerstone of citizenship. In a well-known political essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” he argues that human beings can overcome their intellectual immaturity only through the “public use of reason” whereby they may reach further insight through the guidance of other reasoning minds. Without the public display of ideas the truth will likely remain obscure.
¹²

Indeed, at no point in modern Western society is there a greater need for the public application of reason to current affairs than today,
although the ability to publicly exercise reason is often confused with the notion of doing as one wishes or deciding between a preset array of options. C. Wright Mills argued:

With this in mind, corporate news media's de facto safeguarding of the public sphere against nonconformist thought and expression seeks to demarcate the nature and style of acceptable deliberation, and in so doing shape and define the trajectory of history itself. Along these lines, journalists and academics—civil society's ostensible representatives and guardians of reason—are often complicit in reason's negation.

As instruments of state-sanctioned rationality, such agents are largely bereft of emotion, moderate in temperament, and speak or write in predictably formulaic tones. The narratives they relate and play out present tragedy and strife with the expectation of certain closure. And with a century of commercial media programming, the mass mind has come to not only accept but anticipate such regulation and control under the regime of institutionally sanctioned expertise.

This preservation of what passes for reason and truth cannot be sustained without a frequent dialectical struggle with unreason and falsity. Since many individuals have unconsciously placed their true reasoning faculties in abeyance and often lack a valid knowledge of politics and history, their unspoken faith in government and the broader political economy to protect and further their interests is unjustified. Against this milieu, those genuinely capable of utilizing
their reasoning capacities in the pursuit of truth are often held up as heretical for their failure to accept what is presented as reality inside existing sociohistorical horizons, with the requisite “conspiracy theory” label wielded in Orwellian fashion to denote such nonconforming intellectual activity.

When lacking the autonomous use of reason to recognize truth, as well as a historical consciousness to render existing phenomena meaningful, form often trumps substance. For example, a seemingly obscure news website with unconventional graphics or an emotional news presenter purporting to discuss the day's affairs is typically perceived as untrustworthy and illegitimate by a public conditioned to accept forms of news and information where the appearance of objectivity and professionalism often camouflage disinformation.

CONSPIRACY PANICS: REASON VERSUS
POLITICAL RATIONALITY

An important way of understanding the corporate media's broad domination of the public's sociopolitical consciousness and enforcement of established political rationalities is the invocation of conspiracy and what cultural historian Jack Bratich terms “conspiracy panics.” Based on the sociocultural phenomenon of “moral panics,” the conspiracy panic model suggests how the public use of reason is disallowed from examining deep events, such as how the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or 9/11 are downplayed, manipulated, or wholly suppressed by mainstream channels of communication and culture.
¹⁴

Potentially fostered by the coordinated actions of government officials or agencies and major news organs to generate public suspicion and uncertainty,
¹⁵
a conspiracy panic is a demonstrable immediate or long-term reactive thrust against rational queries toward unusual and poorly understood events. To be sure, they are also intertwined with how the given society acknowledges and preserves its own identity—through “the management and expulsion of deviance.” Along these lines, the concept further suggests how the public use of reason typically succumbs to the prevailing political rationality, thereby upholding the myths and beliefs that perpetuate the given political status quo.