The New Power Elite: Charles Wright Mills's Work Still Relevant Today as Ever
Charles Wright Mills, author of the seminal work The Power Elite
When a handful of rich bankers crashed the world economy in 2008, they seemed to launch a domino effect that would send other elite groups tumbling. Discontent was already simmering over the unevenness of gains from economic growth, which had moved the richest much further ahead while denying real pay increases to those who most needed them. The resultant pressure on ordinary families (even in rich countries) to borrow for everyday expenses – to the point of default on mortgages, car loans or credit card debt – seemed to highlight the dead end to which ‘expert’ social and financial engineering had ultimately led.
Financial crisis was widely perceived as a consequence of globalization, privatization and deregulation ‘projects’ devised and imposed by small, unaccountable elites - which gained disproportionately, then got rescued at public expense. The prospect of years of austerity for lower-paid households, to repay government debts run up in preserving bankers’ bonuses, raised this silent-majority anger to boiling point. An international Occupy movement demanded radical curbs on financial activity whose own ex-regulators confessed to be “socially useless”.
The ensuing Great Recession lengthened the charge-sheet against elite rule. It exposed unseen flaws in the Eurozone, designed by a multinational clique who seemed to have left out key features of a functioning monetary union. A concomitant worsening of terror threats in Europe and the US could be traced to chaotic ‘regime changes’ by misguided political and military elites - which then cynically profited from their error by restricting civil liberties in the name of national security. Post-crash downturns and welfare cuts played a major role in persuading the English to opt for Brexit, and Americans to vote for Donald Trump. Where voting was less effective, mass demonstrations challenged autocratic rulers in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and the former Soviet Union.
Rebounding Still Higher
Ten years on, the elites that once seemed threatened by these developments have capitalised on it, emerging stronger than ever around the world. Dictatorships ringed by financial oligarchies are as prevalent as ever, while a growing number of democracies conceal similar aligned concentrations of political and economic power, or use these to justify illiberalism. Political choices, from combating poverty and gun crime to resolving tensions in Korea and the Middle East, are presented as so complex as to be soluble only by small informed groups, under cursory democratic control. The political ‘pyramid’ seems to be stretched further skywards by technological change, enriching and empowering those who amass and mine the ‘big’ data which billions willingly submit to their control.
Yet the idea that small groups shape our politics and society, by concentrating decisions that affect millions of lives, is as unpopular now as when C Wright Mills asserted it (in the context of the US) over sixty years ago. Mills’s (1956) The Power Elite was condemned by liberal opinion, which believed that the market economy and wide, small-scale private property ownership guaranteed a ‘pluralism’ in which many small decisions shaped collective outcomes. It was equally vehemently dismissed but conservatives, who were more inclined to agree that power lay with a small circle at the top, but believed this was a good thing – investing power in those best placed to use it, for the benefit of all.
Most disappointingly (for Mills and for the progressive cause he promoted), the claim was widely condemned on the left, which still wished to present social classes as the driving force of change. Elites were viewed as a distraction, composed largely of figureheads whose decisions were shaped by the conflict of more numerous groups below them. The idea of a small, nameable elite ‘ruling the world’ is quickly dismissed as conspiracy theory, even by chroniclers who acknowledge and condemn uneven distributions of power.
Radical commentators since Mills have consequently deflected their attack towards privileged groups who fall outside the elites he identified. For example, they attack libertarian and free-market pressure groups (such as the American Enterprise Institute and Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs) that are mainly sponsored by (and push the laissez-faire interests of) small businesses, lumping them with large corporations that are friendlier to state-led regulation. They tend also to conflate the political and commercial elites with the ‘1%’ of economically richest - glossing a more complex interconnection among the three, both in composition and interests.
This scattergun attack on privilege has allowed its real beneficiaries to commandeer the anti-elitist banner, with disturbing success. The UK’s Brexit campaigners successfully painted the leaders of all the main political parties – left, centre, right and nationalist – as creatures of a Europeanised elite which no longer cared about people doing ordinary jobs on ordinary wages. They can now invoke the ‘will of the people’ to justify a new push for domestic deregulation and international free trade, precisely the opposite of what most Leave voters seem to have wanted.
A Brexit deal that will profoundly affect millions can thus be shaped by a huddle of powerful negotiators, behind the scenes and with little accountability. And if it does not meet Leave voters’ expectations, Brexiteers will blame an elite on the opposing side for maliciously thwarting their grand plans. Across the Atlantic, Trump’s signature first-year achievements were to bolster his own commercial empire and finance a tax-cut for the rich partly paid for by axing healthcare for the most vulnerable. This doesn’t dampen his campaign claims to be reviving the rustbelt and draining the swamp.
The New Power Elite
In The New Power Elite (a title we co-opted because no-one else had directly revisited Mills’s concerns) we show how, historically and now, seemingly grass-roots rebellions are stoked and managed by members of the elite. These are sometimes people in the ‘inner circle’ who are losing an argument around the top table, and opt to rally dissent from the masses outside the palace in order to change opinions within it. They may also be ambitious outsiders on the edge of the ruling group, excluded from the big decisions, who foment unrest in groups below them to advance their case for admission.
A ‘middle class’, when economic progress creates one, is sometimes the force that elite fractions try to unleash when their differences cannot be settled internally. But when conservative forces within the elite have brought the middle class onside, it is the working class or the even more deprived ‘precariat’ that the elite’s dissenting voices seek to mobilise in pursuit of reform. The long-noted circulation of elites is made inevitable because their success is self-destabilising. Long periods of public order and rising prosperity entrap the ruling group in outmoded strategies and vested interests while allowing them to achieve social closure, blocking the peaceful entry of new members with fresh ideas.
Such tensions are often resolved by a ‘palace coup’ that shifts elite policy and composition without any outside involvement. Bigger threats to elites’ power arise when one fraction reaches out to rebellious groups beyond the palace gates. Usually, the fractions who unleash such street or ballot-box protests quickly suppress them again once safely installed. But occasionally, mass protest orchestrated from the top goes further than its elite sponsors wanted.
In the case of Trump, wrong-footed Republicans soon reined in their maverick candidate and his unlikely working-class supporters, steering his presidency towards a deregulation and corporate welfare strategy that in many ways continues the unfinished Reagan neoliberal revolution. The chances of Brexit being steered towards an outcome that suits the present political and economic elite are less clearcut. But desperate measures to do so can be expected – from all political sides – in the remaining months to 29 March 2019.
Elite studies have too long remained a sideline in the social sciences, with more attention still focused on the role of classes (and class conflict) or identity politics in keeping societies stable and in making them change. By re-visiting Mills, in the light of six more decades of global and intellectual development, we aim to give those at the top of the decision-tree a similar place on the research agenda.
Alan Shipman: Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Open University
June Edmunds: School of Law, Politics & Sociology, University of Sussex
Bryan S. Turner: Graduate Center, City University of New York; Institute for Religion, Politics & Society, Australian Catholic University
Financial crisis was widely perceived as a consequence of globalization, privatization and deregulation ‘projects’ devised and imposed by small, unaccountable elites - which gained disproportionately, then got rescued at public expense. The prospect of years of austerity for lower-paid households, to repay government debts run up in preserving bankers’ bonuses, raised this silent-majority anger to boiling point. An international Occupy movement demanded radical curbs on financial activity whose own ex-regulators confessed to be “socially useless”.
The ensuing Great Recession lengthened the charge-sheet against elite rule. It exposed unseen flaws in the Eurozone, designed by a multinational clique who seemed to have left out key features of a functioning monetary union. A concomitant worsening of terror threats in Europe and the US could be traced to chaotic ‘regime changes’ by misguided political and military elites - which then cynically profited from their error by restricting civil liberties in the name of national security. Post-crash downturns and welfare cuts played a major role in persuading the English to opt for Brexit, and Americans to vote for Donald Trump. Where voting was less effective, mass demonstrations challenged autocratic rulers in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and the former Soviet Union.
Rebounding Still Higher
Ten years on, the elites that once seemed threatened by these developments have capitalised on it, emerging stronger than ever around the world. Dictatorships ringed by financial oligarchies are as prevalent as ever, while a growing number of democracies conceal similar aligned concentrations of political and economic power, or use these to justify illiberalism. Political choices, from combating poverty and gun crime to resolving tensions in Korea and the Middle East, are presented as so complex as to be soluble only by small informed groups, under cursory democratic control. The political ‘pyramid’ seems to be stretched further skywards by technological change, enriching and empowering those who amass and mine the ‘big’ data which billions willingly submit to their control.
Yet the idea that small groups shape our politics and society, by concentrating decisions that affect millions of lives, is as unpopular now as when C Wright Mills asserted it (in the context of the US) over sixty years ago. Mills’s (1956) The Power Elite was condemned by liberal opinion, which believed that the market economy and wide, small-scale private property ownership guaranteed a ‘pluralism’ in which many small decisions shaped collective outcomes. It was equally vehemently dismissed but conservatives, who were more inclined to agree that power lay with a small circle at the top, but believed this was a good thing – investing power in those best placed to use it, for the benefit of all.
Most disappointingly (for Mills and for the progressive cause he promoted), the claim was widely condemned on the left, which still wished to present social classes as the driving force of change. Elites were viewed as a distraction, composed largely of figureheads whose decisions were shaped by the conflict of more numerous groups below them. The idea of a small, nameable elite ‘ruling the world’ is quickly dismissed as conspiracy theory, even by chroniclers who acknowledge and condemn uneven distributions of power.
Radical commentators since Mills have consequently deflected their attack towards privileged groups who fall outside the elites he identified. For example, they attack libertarian and free-market pressure groups (such as the American Enterprise Institute and Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs) that are mainly sponsored by (and push the laissez-faire interests of) small businesses, lumping them with large corporations that are friendlier to state-led regulation. They tend also to conflate the political and commercial elites with the ‘1%’ of economically richest - glossing a more complex interconnection among the three, both in composition and interests.
This scattergun attack on privilege has allowed its real beneficiaries to commandeer the anti-elitist banner, with disturbing success. The UK’s Brexit campaigners successfully painted the leaders of all the main political parties – left, centre, right and nationalist – as creatures of a Europeanised elite which no longer cared about people doing ordinary jobs on ordinary wages. They can now invoke the ‘will of the people’ to justify a new push for domestic deregulation and international free trade, precisely the opposite of what most Leave voters seem to have wanted.
A Brexit deal that will profoundly affect millions can thus be shaped by a huddle of powerful negotiators, behind the scenes and with little accountability. And if it does not meet Leave voters’ expectations, Brexiteers will blame an elite on the opposing side for maliciously thwarting their grand plans. Across the Atlantic, Trump’s signature first-year achievements were to bolster his own commercial empire and finance a tax-cut for the rich partly paid for by axing healthcare for the most vulnerable. This doesn’t dampen his campaign claims to be reviving the rustbelt and draining the swamp.
The New Power Elite
In The New Power Elite (a title we co-opted because no-one else had directly revisited Mills’s concerns) we show how, historically and now, seemingly grass-roots rebellions are stoked and managed by members of the elite. These are sometimes people in the ‘inner circle’ who are losing an argument around the top table, and opt to rally dissent from the masses outside the palace in order to change opinions within it. They may also be ambitious outsiders on the edge of the ruling group, excluded from the big decisions, who foment unrest in groups below them to advance their case for admission.
A ‘middle class’, when economic progress creates one, is sometimes the force that elite fractions try to unleash when their differences cannot be settled internally. But when conservative forces within the elite have brought the middle class onside, it is the working class or the even more deprived ‘precariat’ that the elite’s dissenting voices seek to mobilise in pursuit of reform. The long-noted circulation of elites is made inevitable because their success is self-destabilising. Long periods of public order and rising prosperity entrap the ruling group in outmoded strategies and vested interests while allowing them to achieve social closure, blocking the peaceful entry of new members with fresh ideas.
Such tensions are often resolved by a ‘palace coup’ that shifts elite policy and composition without any outside involvement. Bigger threats to elites’ power arise when one fraction reaches out to rebellious groups beyond the palace gates. Usually, the fractions who unleash such street or ballot-box protests quickly suppress them again once safely installed. But occasionally, mass protest orchestrated from the top goes further than its elite sponsors wanted.
In the case of Trump, wrong-footed Republicans soon reined in their maverick candidate and his unlikely working-class supporters, steering his presidency towards a deregulation and corporate welfare strategy that in many ways continues the unfinished Reagan neoliberal revolution. The chances of Brexit being steered towards an outcome that suits the present political and economic elite are less clearcut. But desperate measures to do so can be expected – from all political sides – in the remaining months to 29 March 2019.
Elite studies have too long remained a sideline in the social sciences, with more attention still focused on the role of classes (and class conflict) or identity politics in keeping societies stable and in making them change. By re-visiting Mills, in the light of six more decades of global and intellectual development, we aim to give those at the top of the decision-tree a similar place on the research agenda.
Alan Shipman: Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Open University
June Edmunds: School of Law, Politics & Sociology, University of Sussex
Bryan S. Turner: Graduate Center, City University of New York; Institute for Religion, Politics & Society, Australian Catholic University
Propaganda and Elite Power
Propaganda Architect & Prominent Member of the US Establishment, Edward Bernays
Propaganda and manipulative forms of Organised Persuasive Communication (OPC) are central to the exercise of political and economic power and yet, over time, our awareness of these activities has been significantly blunted.
This has not always been the case and, historically, early theorists of propaganda such as Harold Lasswell[1] and Walter Lippman[2] openly advocated the intelligent manipulation of public opinion and, indeed, saw this as essential to democracy. However, as Edward Bernays revealingly noted, ‘propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans ... using it [during WW1].[3] So what I did was to ... find some other words. So we found the words Counsel on Public Relations.’ Since then, a plethora of terms have come to be used to denote activities which, although not always, involve systematic and coordinated strategies to manipulate opinions and behaviours. In addition to public relations, terms such as strategic communication, perception management, political communication, political marketing, advertising, public diplomacy have all helped to obfuscate the manipulative and frequently deceptive communication strategies that powerful actors employ. As Carey wryly notes, ‘the success of business propaganda in persuading us ... that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant achievements of the twentieth century’.[4] For some, such as the late British historian Professor Phil Taylor, these deceptions and self deceptions were profoundly unproductive: he observed that ‘an entire euphemism industry has developed to deflect attention away from the realities of’ propaganda, and that ‘despite the euphemism game, democracies have grown ever more sophisticated at conducting propaganda, however labeled, which only they deny to be propaganda in the first place.’[5]
The consequences of our failure to fully recognise these realities are deleterious for democracy, accountability and, arguably, good decision making. For example, the recent Chilcot Inquiry has, whilst offering a damning indictment of the Blair government and how it took Britain to war in Iraq, also provided surprisingly revealing information regarding the origins of the Iraq War and the centrality of propaganda to the West’s ‘war on terror’. Indeed, perhaps the most damning information emerging from the 7 year long Chilcot Inquiry relates to the origins of UK involvement in this ill-fated enterprise. As the early parts of the report makes clear, the genesis of British involvement in the Iraq War lay in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when elements within the US administration sought to take advantage of the event in order to pursue a long standing objective of toppling Saddam Hussein. The report quotes a British embassy report dated 15 September 2001 which states that ‘The “regime-change hawks” in Washington were arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose (against international terrorism) could be used to clear up other problems in the region.’ (Section 3.1, p.324). The report then cites Blair’s considerations with respect to the emerging ‘war on terror’ strategy:
"… in order to give ourselves space [it is important] that we say: “Phase 1 is the military action focused on Afghanistan because it’s there that the perpetrators of 11 September hide.
“Phase 2 is the medium and longer term campaign against terrorism in all its forms. Of course we will discuss that … This kicks it away for the moment but leaves all options open. We just don’t need it debated freely in public until we know what exactly we want to do; and how we can do it.”
Mr Blair concluded that a “dedicated tightly knit propaganda unit” was required, and suggested that he and President Bush should “talk soon”. In this context, Chilcot also makes clear Blair’s preferred tactic with respect to how to promote the war, and presumably a central output of his suggested ‘tightly knit propaganda unit’, was to effectively exaggerate and mislead with respect to the alleged WMD threat posed by Iraq: ‘The tactics chosen by Mr Blair were to emphasise the threat which Iraq might pose, rather than a more balanced consideration of both Iraq’s capabilities and intent … That remained Mr Blair’s approach in the months that followed”. In a nutshell, this appears to be support from an official source for the thesis that the ‘war on terror’ has been exploited in order to pursue wars to ‘clear up other problems’ and that, as a part of this, Western publics have been manipulated and deceived via propaganda, ‘clever’ strategies and threat exaggeration. Needless to say these findings decidedly open up the need for a full investigation by mainstream academics with regard to the strategic backdrop to the ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq war and its connection with neoconservative aspirations regarding power and influence in the Middle east and the question of resources and oil.
The events surrounding the ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq invasion, of course, are not unique and need to be understood as indicative of a broader systematic problem in democracies whereby power is exercised via manipulation of information and in ways which are frequently corrosive to good governance, justice and democracy. Further examples abound: for example, public awareness of the plight of the Palestinian peoples in the West Bank and Gaza strip, after a few years of optimism following the 1993 Oslo Accords, would appear to have been clouded by robust propaganda aimed at presenting the conflict as one of Israel’s defence against ideological extremists and terrorists, rather than the occupation and progressive take over of land that is allocated, by international law and the United Nations, to the Palestinians. The possibility of anything approaching a reasonable or just settlement for the Palestinians is rapidly slipping away as the living situation in the Gaza strip worsens and more land is taken from Palestinians in the West Bank.[6] Away from the realm of conflict and war, the role of propaganda and persuasion with respect to the tobacco industry, which worked tirelessly for decades to help obscure the health risks of smoking, and also more recently the fossil fuel industry which has sought to sow seeds of doubt regarding human impact on global warming, highlight the role of propaganda (they call it ‘PR’) in the service of big business.[7] In short, propaganda and the ‘intelligent manipulation of the mind’ play a central role in defining issues of our time, are central to the exercise of power, and have profound implications for how we understand governance and the state of our democracy.
Engagement with manipulative propaganda is essential if we are to tackle the major issues of our time. War, climate change, diminishing resources and acute poverty are matters of profound importance now confronting humanity and, if we are to have any hope of grappling with these issues, then people need to be able to learn how to become better informed and to defend themselves against strategies of manipulation and deception. Part of this process involves becoming more aware of the fact that manipulative communication, propaganda, is a key part of the way in which powerful actors wield power in the world. Starting to recognize and to see through these strategies is an essential first step. But much more is needed. Mainstream academia has been surprisingly reluctant toward full on engagement with theorizing and researching manipulative communication and many researchers tend to fall back on the euphemisms of the powerful such as ‘strategic communication’ and ‘perception management’ or ‘PR’. Academics need to start to study more closely the doctrines, practices and institutions that lie behind these activities as well as produce more empirical evidence and case study material in order to help reveal major examples of manipulation and deception. Also, journalists and their professional autonomy are an essential part of any democratic system and should be a vital part of challenging and counteracting the kinds of manipulations described above. The institution of journalism needs as much strengthening as possible in order to improve levels of journalistic professional autonomy. Finally, given the scale of the problem, and the need for the public, academics and journalists to all be involved in holding power to account, it is perhaps time to give a rebirth to the Institute for Propaganda Analysis which might serve to coordinate the activities and multiple engagements needed across the academy, the public and media professionals.
These are challenging times and there is urgent work to be done. But the stakes are very high and, in an era of multiple global crises, our future depends upon it.
Piers Robinson is Professor of Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield. Follow him on Twitter.
Further Reading
Emma Briant (2015) Propaganda and Counterterrorism: Strategies for Global Change, Manchester University Press.
David Miller and Willliam Dinan (2008). A Century of Spin. London: Pluto Press.
Christopher Simpson. (1994). Science of Coercion: communication research and psychological warfare 1945-1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Philip M. Taylor (2002) War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
[1] Lasswell, H., Casey, R. and Smith, B. L. (1935). Propaganda and Promotional Activities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[2] Lippman, W. (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
[3] Miller, D. and Dinan, W. (2008). A Century of Spin. London: Pluto Press.
[4] Carey, A. (1997). Taking the Risk out of Democracy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. pp: 20-21.
[5] Taylor, P.M. (2002), ‘Perception Management and the ‘War’ Against Terrorism’, Journal of Information Warfare, 1(3): 16-29: 20.
[6] Philo, Greg and Mike Berry (2011) More Bad News from Israel (Pluto Books) and The Occupation of the American Mind, (2016) The Media Education Foundation.
[7] Oreskes, Naomi and Eric M. Conway Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, (Bloomsbury).
This has not always been the case and, historically, early theorists of propaganda such as Harold Lasswell[1] and Walter Lippman[2] openly advocated the intelligent manipulation of public opinion and, indeed, saw this as essential to democracy. However, as Edward Bernays revealingly noted, ‘propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans ... using it [during WW1].[3] So what I did was to ... find some other words. So we found the words Counsel on Public Relations.’ Since then, a plethora of terms have come to be used to denote activities which, although not always, involve systematic and coordinated strategies to manipulate opinions and behaviours. In addition to public relations, terms such as strategic communication, perception management, political communication, political marketing, advertising, public diplomacy have all helped to obfuscate the manipulative and frequently deceptive communication strategies that powerful actors employ. As Carey wryly notes, ‘the success of business propaganda in persuading us ... that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant achievements of the twentieth century’.[4] For some, such as the late British historian Professor Phil Taylor, these deceptions and self deceptions were profoundly unproductive: he observed that ‘an entire euphemism industry has developed to deflect attention away from the realities of’ propaganda, and that ‘despite the euphemism game, democracies have grown ever more sophisticated at conducting propaganda, however labeled, which only they deny to be propaganda in the first place.’[5]
The consequences of our failure to fully recognise these realities are deleterious for democracy, accountability and, arguably, good decision making. For example, the recent Chilcot Inquiry has, whilst offering a damning indictment of the Blair government and how it took Britain to war in Iraq, also provided surprisingly revealing information regarding the origins of the Iraq War and the centrality of propaganda to the West’s ‘war on terror’. Indeed, perhaps the most damning information emerging from the 7 year long Chilcot Inquiry relates to the origins of UK involvement in this ill-fated enterprise. As the early parts of the report makes clear, the genesis of British involvement in the Iraq War lay in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when elements within the US administration sought to take advantage of the event in order to pursue a long standing objective of toppling Saddam Hussein. The report quotes a British embassy report dated 15 September 2001 which states that ‘The “regime-change hawks” in Washington were arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose (against international terrorism) could be used to clear up other problems in the region.’ (Section 3.1, p.324). The report then cites Blair’s considerations with respect to the emerging ‘war on terror’ strategy:
"… in order to give ourselves space [it is important] that we say: “Phase 1 is the military action focused on Afghanistan because it’s there that the perpetrators of 11 September hide.
“Phase 2 is the medium and longer term campaign against terrorism in all its forms. Of course we will discuss that … This kicks it away for the moment but leaves all options open. We just don’t need it debated freely in public until we know what exactly we want to do; and how we can do it.”
Mr Blair concluded that a “dedicated tightly knit propaganda unit” was required, and suggested that he and President Bush should “talk soon”. In this context, Chilcot also makes clear Blair’s preferred tactic with respect to how to promote the war, and presumably a central output of his suggested ‘tightly knit propaganda unit’, was to effectively exaggerate and mislead with respect to the alleged WMD threat posed by Iraq: ‘The tactics chosen by Mr Blair were to emphasise the threat which Iraq might pose, rather than a more balanced consideration of both Iraq’s capabilities and intent … That remained Mr Blair’s approach in the months that followed”. In a nutshell, this appears to be support from an official source for the thesis that the ‘war on terror’ has been exploited in order to pursue wars to ‘clear up other problems’ and that, as a part of this, Western publics have been manipulated and deceived via propaganda, ‘clever’ strategies and threat exaggeration. Needless to say these findings decidedly open up the need for a full investigation by mainstream academics with regard to the strategic backdrop to the ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq war and its connection with neoconservative aspirations regarding power and influence in the Middle east and the question of resources and oil.
The events surrounding the ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq invasion, of course, are not unique and need to be understood as indicative of a broader systematic problem in democracies whereby power is exercised via manipulation of information and in ways which are frequently corrosive to good governance, justice and democracy. Further examples abound: for example, public awareness of the plight of the Palestinian peoples in the West Bank and Gaza strip, after a few years of optimism following the 1993 Oslo Accords, would appear to have been clouded by robust propaganda aimed at presenting the conflict as one of Israel’s defence against ideological extremists and terrorists, rather than the occupation and progressive take over of land that is allocated, by international law and the United Nations, to the Palestinians. The possibility of anything approaching a reasonable or just settlement for the Palestinians is rapidly slipping away as the living situation in the Gaza strip worsens and more land is taken from Palestinians in the West Bank.[6] Away from the realm of conflict and war, the role of propaganda and persuasion with respect to the tobacco industry, which worked tirelessly for decades to help obscure the health risks of smoking, and also more recently the fossil fuel industry which has sought to sow seeds of doubt regarding human impact on global warming, highlight the role of propaganda (they call it ‘PR’) in the service of big business.[7] In short, propaganda and the ‘intelligent manipulation of the mind’ play a central role in defining issues of our time, are central to the exercise of power, and have profound implications for how we understand governance and the state of our democracy.
Engagement with manipulative propaganda is essential if we are to tackle the major issues of our time. War, climate change, diminishing resources and acute poverty are matters of profound importance now confronting humanity and, if we are to have any hope of grappling with these issues, then people need to be able to learn how to become better informed and to defend themselves against strategies of manipulation and deception. Part of this process involves becoming more aware of the fact that manipulative communication, propaganda, is a key part of the way in which powerful actors wield power in the world. Starting to recognize and to see through these strategies is an essential first step. But much more is needed. Mainstream academia has been surprisingly reluctant toward full on engagement with theorizing and researching manipulative communication and many researchers tend to fall back on the euphemisms of the powerful such as ‘strategic communication’ and ‘perception management’ or ‘PR’. Academics need to start to study more closely the doctrines, practices and institutions that lie behind these activities as well as produce more empirical evidence and case study material in order to help reveal major examples of manipulation and deception. Also, journalists and their professional autonomy are an essential part of any democratic system and should be a vital part of challenging and counteracting the kinds of manipulations described above. The institution of journalism needs as much strengthening as possible in order to improve levels of journalistic professional autonomy. Finally, given the scale of the problem, and the need for the public, academics and journalists to all be involved in holding power to account, it is perhaps time to give a rebirth to the Institute for Propaganda Analysis which might serve to coordinate the activities and multiple engagements needed across the academy, the public and media professionals.
These are challenging times and there is urgent work to be done. But the stakes are very high and, in an era of multiple global crises, our future depends upon it.
Piers Robinson is Professor of Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield. Follow him on Twitter.
Further Reading
Emma Briant (2015) Propaganda and Counterterrorism: Strategies for Global Change, Manchester University Press.
David Miller and Willliam Dinan (2008). A Century of Spin. London: Pluto Press.
Christopher Simpson. (1994). Science of Coercion: communication research and psychological warfare 1945-1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Philip M. Taylor (2002) War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
[1] Lasswell, H., Casey, R. and Smith, B. L. (1935). Propaganda and Promotional Activities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[2] Lippman, W. (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
[3] Miller, D. and Dinan, W. (2008). A Century of Spin. London: Pluto Press.
[4] Carey, A. (1997). Taking the Risk out of Democracy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. pp: 20-21.
[5] Taylor, P.M. (2002), ‘Perception Management and the ‘War’ Against Terrorism’, Journal of Information Warfare, 1(3): 16-29: 20.
[6] Philo, Greg and Mike Berry (2011) More Bad News from Israel (Pluto Books) and The Occupation of the American Mind, (2016) The Media Education Foundation.
[7] Oreskes, Naomi and Eric M. Conway Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, (Bloomsbury).