Elliot D. Cohen Says Question! Be Critical! That's How To Take Back Democracy

[Elliot D. Cohen]

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 4:19pm. Interviews
BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

My belief is that the person in the street, the person who tunes in to TV, needs to be more critical, needs to ask questions, needs to demand answers, and should be willing to shut off Chris Matthews unless he starts doing his job for the public and not for General Electric.

-- Elliot D. Cohen, coauthor, Last Days of Democracy


* * *

Elliot D. Cohen is a regular contributor to BuzzFlash.com and most recently the author of The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America into a Dictatorship. Cohen doesn't mince words, as you can see from his most recent commentary on BuzzFlash, "This Summer, Will America Officially Become A Totalitarian State?"

Like many BuzzFlash readers, Cohen is astonished that so many Americans are ignorantly sleeping through the theft of democracy, quite a heist to be sure. Television and corporate media have helped the ruling elite make issues like war secondary to Paris Hilton's release from jail. Make that tertiary, after a wrestler/entertainer killing himself and his family.

Perhaps, Americans with money are far too comfortable and lost in a world of entertainment to be able to identify important news with public policy implications anymore. And the have nots are just trying to survive.

Meanwhile, the corporate media barons hand us a version of the news that is really a combination of Tabloid journalism, Disney entertainment, and Republican propaganda talking points. It's not really news at all. It's a diversion from the news that matters to our security and the future of our democracy.

If you want light summer reading, grab a Harry Potter book.

If you want the truth, grab Elliot Cohen's latest Jeremiad, Last Days of Democracy.

* * *

BuzzFlash: We at BuzzFlash are certainly grateful for your writing commentary over the years, including the Project Censored work. Before we get into your book, The Last Days of Democracy, the piece that won the Project Censored award was specifically about how the Internet is being overlooked by the mainstream media, and also some of the threats to the Internet. Can we talk a little bit about that?


Elliott D. Cohen: Sure. It concerned the Brand X Supreme Court decision, which essentially conceived of the Internet as a one-way information provider, rather than seeing it as an interactive, two-way street. The effect was to reconceptualize the Internet as being like the cable television model, where the controllers of the Internet are really the people who own the pipes. If Comcast owns the Internet pipes -- the cables -- then they can control what kind of content flows down it. This was such an important decision.

That court case moved us away from what was the common understanding of the Internet as a common carrier, where any Internet service provider could provide content. And the mainstream media didn't pay any heed to it. There was a virtual media blackout concerning this Supreme Court decision. My article did an analysis of the Brand X decision and attempted to make this known to people. And I think it did.


BuzzFlash: The implication is that the carriers could discriminate against the individual web sites or providers of content on the Internet. But thus far, the people who are providing the Internet access have not started discriminating based on what one will pay as a content provider to them to provide faster service.


Elliott D. Cohen: That's the next step. The Brand X ruling provided the legal basis to actually do this. It allows the large companies like Comcast and Verizon to create these tollbooths. Really, money will buy what's news and what's truth.


BuzzFlash: Now let's transition, because media plays a big role in your new book, The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship. Your first chapter is titled "A New American Dictatorship." Why did you decide to call it that, and what are the implications?


Elliott D. Cohen: It sort of carries its message on its face -- the new American dictatorship is about the control of the population of Americans by the corporate media political establishment. The media, of course, is supposed to be the guarantor of democracy in the sense that it prevents the government from getting away with corruption and abuse. But because of media consolidation and how much beholden the media is to the government these days, there's really a corporate media/government quid quo pro going on.

This essentially means that the media isn't doing its job the way it was conceived by our Founding Fathers. It's essentially becoming a paid political announcement, to a large extent. Those who are holding the purse strings of the media -- in other words, the government, the FCC -- can make or break these media organizations. If the media corporations simply work cooperatively with a really megalomaniac government to control and censor, they can prevent news from getting out.


BuzzFlash: Let me play devil's advocate, although I agree with you. I believe I heard Ted Koppel once say, in effect, that in all the years he was doing "Nightline," no one from the government that called to say that they wanted a story censored. So that's just sort of poppycock to say that we don't have a free media in America, and an open and democratic and questioning media. How would you respond to that?


Elliott D. Cohen: That does fly in the face with stories that I heard from other people who do know. I've heard that Karl Rove paid a visit to The New York Times to see that stories were not broken. In fact, speaking of The New York Times, when you look at the NSA spying program, they sat on that story for over a year because the government told them not to print it.


BuzzFlash: There was a meeting in the Oval Office. They met with the publisher and editor and asked them not to publish it, and they didn't publish it.


Elliott D. Cohen: Right. And it's not necessarily a call from the President, but it's an understanding that you shouldn't go too far in challenging us. When it comes time to address relaxing media ownership rules, or providing tax breaks or other corporate perks -- how about GE getting a contract to create jet engines for a war? Even if they don't say anything, the idea here is that the media companies are so intertwined with the government that the newsroom becomes just another extension of this whole quid pro quo operation.


BuzzFlash: Something we've examined often at BuzzFlash is this convergence of the mainstream media, where you have corporate consolidation over media. More and more, almost all of them are not separate divisions. Some news divisions fall under entertainment, and all the major networks are subsidiaries of larger corporations. And as you've indicated, in the case of NBC, General Electric is the larger corporation.

It would be hard to have NBC running something on nuclear power plants where GE plays a role. On ABC's "Good Morning America," you're likely to see the promotion of a Disney film. And at CBS, a subsidiary of Viacom, we had CEO Sumner Redstone saying in the 2004 election that he admired Kerry, but he was voting for Bush because Bush was good for Viacom and CBS.


So there are corporate control issues. They don't want to offend the Bush Administration or any Republicans, because they consider them more favorable to their bottom line, and they need them for regulatory relief, and for contracts.

But also there's the entertainment factor, which is to say they need eyeballs, and they're going to the lowest common denominator because that gets viewers, meaning a blonde girl who's gone missing in Aruba, or Brittany Spears, or Michael Jackson, or Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. They also get anchors who are very attractive. On "The Daily Show," we saw a very funny piece by Samantha Bee where she basically showed all the different babes, basically very attractive, sexy women, who are on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, sometimes in very skimpy skirts, laughing through stories about Iraq and so forth.

So reporters know that they can't do certain stories because the parent company's going to take offense, or it might hurt them with the Bush Administration. Is the bigger problem that television news is just sinking to its lowest common denominator for ratings?


Elliott D. Cohen: It needs to be understood in the broader context of the relationship between media and government, because with this whole dumbing-down process, obviously, the media is trying to appeal to the emotions of the populace. But the populace, by virtue of being dumbed down through this process, is also blissfully ignorant of exploitation. It's easier for the government to provide inadequate and really lopsided news.

Why did so many Americans swallow the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11? People are not really paying attention to details. They're so used to being distracted by the glitter of entertainment and infotainment that it becomes just a kaleidoscope of concepts and ideas floating around that really don't have any connections to one another, or clear connections. And people are just learning not to ask many questions. Meanwhile, the media's making money in this way, which is really what they care about. And the government likes it that way. So it's a mutuality in terms of this entertainment aspect that you're talking about -- a mutuality between government and media.


BuzzFlash: Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" also had a segment about a cable news anchor who interrupted coverage of news from Iraq to cut to Los Angeles, because Paris Hilton was entering a car. What is the news value of seeing someone enter a car? And yet CNN, a major 24-hour news provider, cut away from the serious discussion of a public policy issue to break into a non-story about a celebrity who is only known for being a celebrity. What does that tell us?


Elliott D. Cohen: It basically supports what I was saying -- that the media has created a fragmented view of reality where priorities and values are not well understood or even appreciated. When you look at Paris Hilton, she is a symbol of the whole dumbing-down process. She stands for basically a shallow individual who doesn't have much to offer. Yet people are interested in her because she's a celebrity.


BuzzFlash: Is this our version of Marie Antoinette's, "Let them eat cake?"


Elliott D. Cohen: The bottom line is determining what we ultimately see and hear. Fifty years of experience has informed and enlightened the advertisers that this is how they can create a lot of money for the corporations. They keep the people watching, but also keep them unaware of what's going on.

In the book, we talk about the allegory of the cave, which was the story that the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, recounted as a way to get people to see the dangers of not keeping track of reality. It is a story about people who, from the time of their childhood, are living in a cave. They watch shadows on a wall and think that is reality. It's only when one gets out of the cave and sees the reality that he wants to go back and tell the others that what they formerly saw as reality really wasn't.

BuzzFlash: In your book you have a section on Fox News. Fox president Roger Ailes actually got his start as a producer of "The Mike Douglas Show," and now he essentially runs a GOP talking points, propaganda network.With Roger Ailes there was this emergence of the Republican, PR, advertising, propaganda operative. What impact has that had?


Elliott D. Cohen: Again, Fox News is not happening in isolation, but it is part of this whole political corporate machine. Fox is owned by NewsCorp, and that also owns Direct TV. And Direct TV now contracts with Boeing for satellites, which contracts with the U.S. military. So, when you see it that way, what you can see is that Fox becomes basically foot soldiers for the government. That's the function they serve. I think they're doing a good job as these propagandists for the Bush Administration.

But when it comes down to understanding who does the worst for a democracy, Bill O'Reilly or somebody like MSNBC's Chris Matthews, in my estimation, O'Reilly isn't the worst offender. And I talk about that in "Look Who's Not Looking Out for You," one chapter of The Last Days of Democracy.


BuzzFlash: Who is the worst offender then?


Elliott D. Cohen: I think Chris Matthews is worse because he has this air of being unbiased and open. But when you watch how he proceeds, he simply supports those individuals who have the most popularity and are in power. When it came to his interview with Howard Dean, for instance, when Dean was running for President, he trashed him. When it came to Tom DeLay, he coached him through an interview. Then later, when the war started to become less popular, he said that he was never in favor of Bush, and never really in favor of the war. But if you look at some of the things that he said back in the earlier period, he was certainly touting the Administration line.


BuzzFlash: Well, when Bush landed on the aircraft carrier -- the infamous "Mission Accomplished" day -- Chris Matthews talked about what a manly man he was.


Elliott D. Cohen: Yes.


BuzzFlash: And lately he's had, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out at Salon, a "man crush" on Fred Thompson. The interesting thing about Chris Matthews is he comes from a print background. He had a column for the San Francisco Chronicle. I had been looking at some of those columns while he was just being his usual tawdry self on "Hardball." And the columns were actually reasonable. So clearly, who he's playing on television is distinct from his writing persona for a column, which brings us to the question about television of personality.

You have the cult of personality on television. You have people saying things like, Mitt Romney looks like a president -- he's got the jaw. He's got that little grey fleck in his hair. You've got a lot of pundits on television talking about how presidential candidates look. If they look presidential, then that merits being president.


Elliott D. Cohen: What is the end product of this for democracy? People are simply not asking questions. They're not thinking critically about things that are affecting us and will affect us for all time to come, from the environment to whether or not we have a form of government that allows us to vote. There are so many issues that have been swept under the rug and not carefully examined, and not brought to us, because the media's just not doing its job. It's a big list. It means the last days of democracy, as the book suggests.


BuzzFlash: How do you put the genie back in the bottle? Television has such an extraordinary influence on Americans. And for a person who's really relying on mainstream television news, there's almost daily Alzheimer's -- the news does not seem to acknowledge anything that occurred even the day before.

You have Bush going through four years of ever-changing reasons for being in Iraq, ever-changing expectations, ever-changing goals, ever-changing military reports, constantly issuing statements from the White House on almost every front that totally contradict what was said maybe a few months ago, a few days ago, the day before. And yet television never brings these up. You have to watch "The Daily Show" to find out about this.

One specific incident that has bothered me was addressed by Jon Stewart and in a small article in the Chicago Sun-Times. Regarding the U.S. attorneys that were let go by Gonzales at the suggestion of the White House, initially the Administration had said most were released because of performance issues. Tony Snow later said, we never said that they were released because of performance issues. Then Jon Stewart replayed the tape of Tony Snow saying they were released because of performance issues.

I mean, he flat-out lied. This isn't even conjecture. Here was a videotape. Jon Stewart played them side by side. He said, "Let's have Tony Snow debating Tony Snow." That's a minor thing, I guess you could say. But it's not really a minor thing to have the White House Press Secretary caught in a lie that's on videotape, and not even a shade of gray lie, or a parsing words lie, but a lie-lie. There's no room for any interpretation here. He claims he didn't say something he said.

The media made nothing of this. But if television doesn't have a historical memory, how is there any hope that the American people are going to start knowing from day to day when the wool is being pulled over their eyes?


Elliott D. Cohen: Well, I am critical of the tendency to hold the politicians and the media responsible for all these failures that we're talking about -- the failure to provide a consistent and coherent view of reality, and to report it appropriately. We tend to look at the public as just passive recipients of the news, as though they don't have any responsibilities and they don't have any obligations to ask questions, and to look for consistency, and to demand it.

My belief is that the person in the street, the person who tunes in to TV, needs to be more critical, needs to ask questions, needs to demand answers, and should be willing to shut off Chris Matthews unless he starts doing his job for the public and not for General Electric. I think this is a matter of education. What people are doing on the media, is indoctrination and manipulation, not education. If more people become critical thinkers and ask questions, the media does have its dependence on an audience. I think there needs to be a campaign to try to get people to stop being so gullible, and to make more demands, and to be more critical. I think the cycle can be broken through educators and through indie media -- the kinds of things that you do at BuzzFlash.


BuzzFlash: You have a section in The Last Days of Democracy about blaming the liberals. Can you talk more about that? It's certainly a topic near and dear to our heart. On BuzzFlash, we have disagreed when The New York Times and Washington Post are described as liberal publications. The New York Times may be in terms of its editorial policy, but it certainly is not in terms of its news pages. Nor is the Washington Post. In that case, the Post is pro-Iraq war and anti-Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, to almost the extremism of the Wall Street Journal. So where is this liberal media that the right wing talks about?


Elliott D. Cohen: The liberal media that the right wing talks about is in the premises of Bernard Goldberg and people like him who write about it, and try to disseminate the myth here.

BuzzFlash: The mainstream media are now afraid of being accused of being liberal, when I don't find anything certainly politically liberal about the mainstream press. It may be true that in the urban papers, they're liberal to a certain degree on issues like gay rights or endorsing gun control. There are some social issues they're liberal on. But when it comes to election time, and it comes to the war in Iraq, they are not liberal.


Elliott D. Cohen: That's right.


BuzzFlash: Let's finish up by returning to where we started, which is with your Project Censored article about the Internet. Let's assume Net neutrality is maintained. What is the role of the Internet in our attempt to change and perhaps rescue democracy?


Elliott D. Cohen: I think it's immense. If the Internet can survive without being turned into just another corporate media organ, then there's an opportunity for real democracy to flourish in cyberspace. TV news is still the main source, but the Internet is becoming more of a force to reckon with. That's why the Bush Administration as well as The Project for a New American Century, which we discuss in the book, are really pushing this idea of controlling cyberspace. But if they fail to shut it down, I think that's where democracy has its strongest possibility of overriding these forces that tend to drag it down.


BuzzFlash: Elliott, thanks so much.


Elliott D. Cohen: Okay, terrific.


BuzzFlash interview conducted by Mark Karlin.

Resources:
The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America into a Dictatorship (Paperback), by Elliot D. Cohen and Bruce W. Fraser, a BuzzFlash premium.

Elliott D. Cohen on BuzzFlash:
Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
This Summer, Will America Officially Become A Totalitarian State?
Would A Dictator Graciously Relinquish Power?
Chavez Had a Right to Call Bush the Devil - And Pelosi, Rangel and other Dems Should Have Said So
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW