The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by Dori Smith of Talk Nation Radio and heard on WHUS Storrs in Connecticut. Yes, there is a connection, Talk Nation Radio came about in part because of this blog and is another avenue through which issues of the day can be presented. Dori Smith has been conducting interviews with important newsmakers for years (see her interview with Dahr Jamail here and here in this blog) and has now adopted Talk Nation Radio as her program title. She will be a regular contributor here and is a regular participant in our forums.

The interview:

Welcome to Talk Nation Radio produced in New England at WHUS Storrs.

I’m Dori Smith and you’re listening to the first Talk Nation Radio broadcast. Talk Nation.org “http://www.talknation.org” is your blog for discussion about breaking news, foreign and domestic policies, human rights, the environment, and more.

Media critic Sheldon Rampton joins us this time to talk about public relations and propaganda coming from the Bush Administration. Rampton is an award winning investigative journalist and author. He and long time co-author John Stauber have written such well known books as; “Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State,” –”Toxic Sledge is Good for You,” and “Weapons of Mass Deception, the Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq.” These and other Common Courage book titles by Rampton and Stauber are available at Amazon Books

I asked Sheldon Rampton to comment on remarks made by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman at a conference on media reform in Saint Louis.

AMY GOODMAN of Democracy Now:

“In a critical study right before the invasion of the two weeks around Colin Powell giving his push for war at the UN looking at the four major nightly newscasts, NBC, ABC, CBS Nightly News, and the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the 393 interviews done around war, only three with anti-war leaders or representatives. Three of almost four hundred. That is not a mainstream media that is an extreme media. It didn’t represent mainstream America when most people were opposed to the invasion at that time. (APPLAUSE) The voices that are excluded in this country are not a fringe minority, not a silent majority, but the silenced majority. –Silenced by the corporate media.”

SMITH: And we are talking with someone who informs that silenced majority, Sheldon Rampton. He’s Research Director for the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin.
Welcome to the program Sheldon.

RAMPTON: Thank you.

SMITH: There is so much energy right now in America about the issue of holding the Bush White House accountable and finally getting this information across to the general public that you and I know now about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and so many other policies. Let’s just start by talking a little bit about what Amy Goodman had to say about the networks. Just comment on her remarks.

RAMPTON: I think she is absolutely right, but one of the big problems in this country right now is that we have a very monolithic media that amplifies certain points of view and excludes others and this was very noticeable during the build up to the war in Iraq. Pro war voices were getting lots of play and anti-war voices were being systematically excluded.

I happen to know a woman who is actually working as a public relations person for peace groups and they were doing the things that public relations people do and systematically contacting the TV networks and trying to get their spokespeople included in public affairs discussions, during the build up to war, and they were being systematically excluded. And when I say systematically, I should say that there were certain voices that did get into the air that were anti-war voices but they represented a small subset of the total anti-war constituency. What you would get would be certain celebrities like Jeneane Garafalo or Sean Penn, and the implicit message of this is that opposition to the war is coming from these kinds of Hollywood liberals. It doesn’t come from mainstream America. Or, you would get a shot of demonstrators, and there were massive anti-war demonstrations, I think there were about half a million people in New York City alone in February, the month before we actually went to war. But what you would see then would be a crowd shot of a bunch of people waving banners. The sorts of things you didn’t have were, for example, scholars of Middle Eastern Studies, professors, policy experts, that sort of thing. You got plenty of those on the pro war side. You had expert after expert come on and repeat the concerns about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction and so forth and so on. But there are in fact scholars of Middle Eastern studies, in fact, most scholars of Middle Eastern studies were critical of the war before it happened and concerned about where it was going to lead us in the Middle East. And yet they were not ever consulted in the media and the reason for that is that they just were not wanted as guests. It’s not that they were not offered as guests. What the networks were saying consistently was we don’t want them on; we’re not interested in that particular guest.

SMITH: Let me turn to the Associated Press… (Cites three articles, the first, 6/16/05 on the Downing Street Memos, “Witness to Iraq War Forum says lack of debate led to war.” The second, “Pentagon officials vow to stay the course in Iraq despite problems,” quotes Lawrence De Rita, who blames 27 U.S. news channels for inundating the American people with “negative images” so that they would “inevitably start to question the military’s mission.” The third telegraphs plans for another PR blitz about the “positive” side of the Iraq war.)
Sheldon Rampton, you know what to expect right?

RAMPTON: Well, we’re going to see another White House dog and pony show, you know, to talk about the successes in Iraq and the need to stay the course. I think that Bush right now is running into a problem with diminishing returns though with regard to the war in Iraq. Contrary to some of those passages you quoted there has not been a drum beat of negative coverage about Iraq in the media. In fact, what we have gotten has been a very sanitized coverage of what’s actually going on in Iraq. It’s a country that is rapidly spinning out of control where US Troops are only safe within certain very confined zones within the country. And, of course, you have a steady trickle, and as a matter of fact an increasing pace of both US and Iraqi casualties. And that is not being well reported in the media and it has not been well reported in the media since the war began, in fact, it was something of a major breakthrough last year when for the first time there were actually photographs printed in a U.S. newspaper showing coffins, flag draped coffins being loaded into transport planes to be taken home. There has been that little coverage of the casualties and the cost of this war.

So it’s not true that you have a steady drum beat of negative imagery coming from all these different news outlets. What you do have, however, is growing influence of alternative media channels by which I mean everything from the Blogosphere on the internet to word of mouth through which people are getting information. And it’s apparent, and I think it’s actually rather reminiscent of what happened with the Vietnam War. The media coverage of the war in Vietnam was actually fairly sanitized until the last couple of years of the war. It was really through word of mouth coming back from soldiers and their families and mounting public concern that the media coverage and public policy ever changed. It was not the media that led that change and I think that’s what’s happening here as well. This was something that I by the way was saying since the war began, that the long term problem for the Bush Administration in Iraq was going to be the fact that once they got into Iraq they were going to have this steady attrition of casualties and getting into Iraq was going to be easy but getting back out of Iraq was going to be the hard part, and that was going to be the point at which the Bush Administration ran into trouble with it’s popularity and so forth, and that’s what indeed is happening. The public is increasingly war weary, and that’s happening in large part because of what soldiers themselves are saying when they come home and what family members are worrying about when they see the number of casualties.

And so what this tells us I think is something interesting about the nature of propaganda, which is the topic that we study at the Center for Media and Democracy. Propaganda can only take a country so far. It’s definitely possible as Abraham Lincoln said to fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, and sooner or later even when there is a very sophisticated communication strategy in place reality ends up trickling through and public opinion starts to shift and that’s what we are seeing now.

SMITH: I want to turn to some of the problems the Bush Administration has been having countering criticism across the board lately about their policies on global warming, prison abuses at Guantanamo, and ongoing criticism about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other prisons there. Just the overall military policy failures in Iraq. It seems we don’t get many straight answers from the White House or the President about the direct statements that are being made about these policies and how they are failing. What we get instead are diversions of the subject. Talk a little bit about how that works in a systematic way.

RAMPTON: OK, there is a guy that, he’s a public relations counselor that John and I have written about on a number of occasions, by the name of Jim Lukashefsky. He’s an advisor to major corporations, the U.S. Military, and other large institutions. A very intelligent guy, and one of the things he does is he trains them in how to respond to media crisis, criticisms in the media. And for example he trains people in how to be interviewed by reporters. And his standard training if someone is facing criticism is he says make a list of the top ten questions that you are most afraid someone will ask you during the interview. Then make another list of the ten questions you wish they would ask you. And then you come up with bridge language so that if they ask you one of the questions you are afraid of being asked you can actually answer as though you had been asked one of the questions you wish you had been asked. The bridging language might be something like, well here’s an even tougher question, and then you pose the question you wish you had been asked and you move onto it.

So what that whole strategy is, and it’s a very common public relations strategy and it’s certainly being used very consistently and effectively by the conservative movement in the United States, is if there is a question you don’t like to answer then just change the subject and respond to the question you wish you had been asked.

So for example with regard to prisoner abuses in Guantanamo what they are doing is changing the subject and they are talking about what the prisoners are eating in Guantanamo. They are eating rice pilaf and chicken. Well the question of whether they are eating rice pilaf and chicken doesn’t really have a lot of bearing on the question of whether they are being beaten. But if you can change the subject then you can reframe the debate and everyone says, well if they are eating rice pilaf and chicken then things
must be ok there.

SMITH: Yeah, and this of course just to let listeners know, none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been talking about the menu at Guantanamo, and that being echoed by Duncan Hunter who is the head of the House Armed Services
Committee. He’s been referring to the would be 20th 9/11 attacker a lot too, saying that you know this is a man in custody who has given important information to the interrogators about how terrorists cross borders. We have no way of knowing the extent to which this is true or real or what may ever come of it. But we can see how it works.

RAMPTON: Newsweek just this week actually had excerpt from a book that had just been written by someone who is a translator for the US Army in Guantanamo. It gives very graphic detail about prisoners being beaten, held for reasons that are not clear to them. Extensively interrogated, you know serious abuses of human rights directed against people for whom there is no evidence that they have actually committed any crime. And that’s a serious concern and it doesn’t go away if they happen to be eating lemon fish.

SMITH: Now this issue of the diet of prisoners at Guantanamo is sort of reminiscent of the whole French fries problem that the White House had with France. And in a way it just took the imagination of the media and that was what we heard. We heard about France and those pesky French fries, you know, or “freedom fries” as we saw people would prefer to call them. Not a lot about the real aspects of why the leader of French Jacque Chirac, was saying he didn’t approve of the administration’s plans for war.

Talk about how these little vignettes of commentary get amplified. There’s a term for it in your book. It has to do with an echo chamber right?

RAMPTON: Right this is a term that more and more people are starting to use to describe the way that the conservative movement has learned to very effectively use the media. It’s the concept of an echo chamber. It means basically that if you can get your message being repeated by multiple parties sooner or later enough people start repeating it and it begins to seem real, and there is a very systematic campaign on the part of the conservative movement to insert its messages into the media in this way. There is something called the Wednesday Meeting in fact, that’s held at the offices of Grover Norquist, one of the leading conservative activists in the United States today. The Wednesday Meeting is a place where White House representatives meet with representatives of conservative think tanks. Fox News usually has a representative there, you know, conservative talk radio people are there. Lobbyists are there. And they all sit down once a week and they talk about what’s our message of the week, what are the points we are going to all hit on and how are we going to make sure that we are all speaking in the same voice from the same page and saying the same thing.

And that’s how it’s done, it’s sort of one stop shopping for the conservative movement, they can all get together and frame their message that way. I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy it’s just very intelligent organizing on their part around the question of how do we achieve message discipline. So when you see something start to be repeated by all these different voices in the media often it will start on conservative web logs and talk radio and then move within a couple of days from there into television and things like that. It doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone is planning that.

SMITH: Two of the most serious charges that are being made right now about the Downing Street Memo, and they were talking about WMDs, Saddam Hussein being Hitler, and possibly using unconventional weapons, nuclear weapons to target America or Israel. They were talking about the fact that the 9/11 hijackers had something to do with Saddam Hussein or Iraq. Those were the two twin lies weren’t they, that were the vehicles to bring America and Great Britain to war?

RAMPTON: And that the Iraqi people would welcome this war as liberation. Of course, the claims about weapons of mass destruction have been thoroughly disproven by now although opinion polls still show that a substantial percentage of Americans to this day believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That’s a testament to the power of the publicity campaign that went into creating that idea in the minds of the public. –It’s incidentally something that sets us apart from the rest of the world. The rest of the world looks at the United States public opinion on this and is just kind of amazed and incredulous that so many people actually believe that because outside the United States no one seriously thought that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That aspect of it, although it’s been thoroughly disproven, is still believed by quite a few Americans. Quite a few people to this day, even though it’s been thoroughly disproven, still believe that Saddam Hussein had some sort of direct role in planning the terrorist attacks of September 11. But in terms of the type of proof that actually matters to policy analysts and scholars both of those claims have been thoroughly disproven.

The third one is a little more complicated I think, the claim that Iraqis would view the war as liberation from Saddam Hussein. There is a certain aspect of truth to that one. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator and there were many Iraqis who welcomed his downfall. But as the war drags on and as the price in terms of Iraqi casualties continues to mount, they are dying in much larger numbers than US Troops are, and the US occupation looks more and more like a foreign occupation by a hostile army to them, the idea that this war is something to be welcomed is becoming increasingly hard to defend.

SMITH: Talk a little bit about the view that the intelligence world takes of the kind of information that just perpetuates itself because you are always basically asking the same sorts of people. They have a word for that right?

RAMPTON: Yes. There is a term that actually was coined by the US Military, the term is “incestuous amplification”. It’s a term used to describe a problem in intelligence gathering that leads to bad interpretations and errors on the ground on the battlefield. Incestuous amplification is a process whereby you will only collect information that tends to reinforce what you already believe. For example, by only talking to people who already agree with you. And the danger of that is that if you are wrong about something you end up cutting yourself off from all of the sources of information that might challenge you and help you recognize your error. And I think that that’s one of the processes that is very evident in the way we got into the war in Iraq. And you see a lot of people sort of acknowledging that now in some of the post mortem analysis that have been done by the intelligence community itself, that we were all saying these things so much to ourselves that we actually came to believe them. But it’s a problem that becomes exacerbated I think, it becomes worse when you have as we now have in the United States, a single party in power at every branch of government, and moreover, a party that has become very good at message discipline. During the build up to war in Iraq, for example, the Bush Administration had a habit of sending out a daily memo by email, and it went out to every US Embassy and every government official with the “talking points of the day”.

The point of it was so that everyone from Dick Cheney, everyone in the White House, everyone speaking for the US Government, had the same message and was on point with regard to Iraq. The problem with that, it sounds kind of innocuous in a way, but the problem with it is that when everyone has to speak from the same page it makes it very difficult for dissenting, challenging voices to be heard, and it eliminates the normal process of give and take through which errors get identified and detected. And I think that the tragic thing about the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war is that they were so good at message discipline that they created this process of incestuous amplification, by which they ended up themselves believing a number of myths that we are now paying for.

SMITH: Are we looking at an administration that is as all powerful as it seems to be? Or, are we essentially seeing a relatively small group of people who deceptively look big because they are using a big microphone to amplify their views?

RAMPTON: Well, US foreign policy right now is being largely driven by neoconservatives in Washington, and neoconservatives are a subset of the conservative movement at large. There are other factions within conservatism that view the world quite differently. For example, Patrick Buchanan is not a neoconservative. He’s very conservative but he was staunchly opposed to the war in Iraq. There are quite a few conservatives with similar concerns. In fact, there is a guy I went to high school with that just recently retired from a career in the military. Very conservative politically but very opposed to the war in Iraq for purely strategic reasons. What he was saying before the war was getting in is going to be easy but once we are in how do we get out?

But neoconservatives have an almost messianic view of events in the Middle East. –An almost religious belief in the power of US Military intervention to achieve miraculous changes in the region. Before President Bush was elected their ideas were fairly unpopular. They had limited success at getting congress to pass resolutions in support of ousting Saddam Hussein and so forth but no one really wanted to actually go to war with Iraq although they did. And even when they themselves were talking about going to war with Iraq they usually talked about having Iraqi resistance fighters lead the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It was only after they were in power that they were able to successfully mobilize the campaign that they mobilized to persuade the public that war could actually be successful. But the war has never been terribly popular with the American people except for the brief period beginning in March of 2003 when US troops were initially committed and were actually fighting Saddam Hussein’s army. Once Saddam Hussein fell there was a brief period of euphoria when a lot of people in this country imagined that this was going to be a quick easy thing. But up until a month or two before we actually committed troops into Iraq public opinion was roughly split fifty/fifty in terms of whether we should go to war at all. And there was a majority of opinion thought we not should go to war unless the United Nations approved it and went along with it.

So it’s been an uphill battle and it has required a disciplined PR campaign for the neoconservatives to create the impression that this has been a popular war and of course that popularity has largely evaporated at this point. You know Bush’s approval ratings are now below 50%. A majority of Americans now believe it was an error to go to war at all, and it’s hard for me to see how they are going to turn that around without some major successes in Iraq which I think they are going to have a very hard time achieving.

SMITH: Princeton grad Sheldon Rampton is co-author with John Stauber of, “Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq,” as well as “Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State.” You will find these books online at Amazon.com.

PR Watch Research and Source Watch Research at the Center for Media and Democracy. Sheldon Rampton is Research Director there.

I’m Dori Smith for Talk Nation Radio.

This was our very first show. Many thanks to the hosts and creators of Talk Nation’s blog and discussion pages for their support and inspiration. Coming soon, Talk Nation Radio for breaking news about Iraq, independent media reports, and discussion about possible further uses of the Bush Doctrine of Preemption.

This program was produced in the studios of WHUS Storrs, Radio for the People, at the University of Connecticut. Talk Nation Radio weekly at 5PM Wednesdays. Click to listen live.