News on the street is that Hugo Chavez has done it again: the Venezuelan president has made the wild claim, this time, that the United States was behind the earth’s recent attack on Haiti. In English, the source of these claims seems to be the TV channel Russia Today, especially this clip, which has been bandied about the Internet:

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There was an interesting segment where Jeremy Scahill went into the RNC to interview delegates — presumably because Amy Goodman and the two producers of Democracy Now! had been detained and had their RNC press badges were taken by the Secret Service — and talked to this lady who was selling buttons. She shows him one, that has a bald eagle flipping the bird, as it were, next to a caption that says Jihad This! The lady runs along for a while, discussing how this reflects her views, on how she loves the troops, how she loves America, and doesn’t love jihad. Scahill listens quietly and waits for her to finish, then he says “I don’t get it.” There, in that moment, the surrounding and sustaining ideology of the woman’s views are no longer self-evident, and she struggles to justify what she has just said. It even seems that she feels shamed for saying it.

This passive attack — which boils down to “oh really, why do you think that?” — on a received and baseless view may be more effective than more aggressive efforts.

Iran is a rabid dog: Don’t even think about kicking it, the Arabs tell us. Click

This is how mass perception is shaped: not by flatly untrue statements, declarations that are patently false on their face. It is sculpted by tweaked metaphors, chauvinist innuendo, racist cliché. Iran is a rabid dog: it is mad.

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It seems that the mainstream treatments of communications have always ignored the political-economic import of the way media are used; such treatments functioned as a fitting basis for later postmodern reconsiderations of communications that treat media as immaterial, as if they operated in a political-economic vaccuum. So Robert Babe argues in “The Political Economy of Knowledge,” anyway. According to Babe, work in the field of communications studies, which attempts to get a grasp on the effect of media on society, has been either naively unaware of the insidious impacts of economic concerns on communication, or has been undertaken as only slightly veiled political campaigns in the service of the national elite. This applies across the length of 20th century communications studies, from the seminal work of the so-called Chicago School, comprised of John Dewey, Robert Park and Calvin Cooley, through to the most recent postmodernist takes on the field. While the first efforts can be said to be naive and idealist, the most recent seem to be, at best, insular or, at worst, complicit in the power structures of that comprise the manner in which media operate in a society.

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Alas: the NewStandard is to cease publication this Friday. The public’s loss is the corporations’ gain.

The allegations of an Iraq-Iran link occurring right now in the American press do not represent fact, nor do they represent any new strategy or loss of credibility on the media’s part: in the run-up to the war on Iraq the major papers, television stations, radio etc, all parroted the (intentionally) faulty intelligence and bald assertions coming from Washington. This is only a recent example, and one that follows in a long tradition that is well documented, should one care to look. In fact the major media outlets have long served the interest of the elite, and it should come as no surprise to anyone with a bit of sense that they continue to do so. It is elementary, really, and anyone who can doubt this may as well doubt that 2 and 2 make 4.

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Given the ever increasing media consolidation in the United States (and abroad), studies of how political and corporate interests bend, twist, or otherwise distort news coverage are taking on greater importance. Noam Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions offers a thoroughly researched and ranging treatment of political news coverage ranging from the Vietnam war to the late 80s, the time the book was published. And while the events investigated may seem like ancient history to the flightly attention-spans of our (media-trained) eyes, they are not yet resolved and the historical imbalance of news coverage accorded to them remains to be corrected, which, one can surmise, will entrain a needed shift in public opinion.

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