June 21, 2004

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

As BuzzFlash has repeatedly taken note, we believe that "Orwell Rolls in His Grave" is a brilliantly assembled documentary that cinematically distills down to its essence the argument that the corporate media have become a de facto extension of the Republican party.  And it's all accomplished in a low-key, low-budget style that only adds credibility to the weight of its accomplishment.

For the time being, BuzzFlash.com is the exclusive seller of "Orwell Rolls in His Grave" at: http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/04/05/pre04014.htm.

Here is the first part of our interview with Robert Kane Pappas, the New York-based director and producer of "Orwell Rolls in His Grave."

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BuzzFlash: You directed and produced this remarkable documentary, Orwell Rolls in his Grave, subtitled: Explores What the Media Doesn’t Like to Talk About -- Itself. During the film, you make a very compelling case that we’ve entered an Orwellian world. Often we use the Orwell analogy at BuzzFlash, as do other progressive web sites. I feel like it’s almost a cliché. But you really made the case here effectively that in an age of corporate media consolidation, where the media are aligned with the governmental message -- that is to say, the Bush message -- we’ve truly entered an Orwellian age.

In 1984, one of the main goals of the Ministry of Truth was to erase history on a daily basis so that anything that conflicted with the message of the government perished. There was only one person who had the repository of truth. You keep coming back to this in a very striking way, to imply that either we’re at the point, or not far from the point, where the media are a megaphone for the government.

Robert Kane Pappas: Well, 1984 is a novel, but a couple of things struck me about Orwell. One had to do with the newest story obliterating the last story, so there was this public forgetfulness. A story runs its course, you see it day and night, and then it goes away. And then I started watching, and it appears that if you have the right experts speaking, and more importantly, choose the right moderator, it's quite easy to control the discussion. You can focus the people’s attention here and then focus it there. With all our investigative tools of the news media, it seems that they never connects the dots. You may have a series of stories, all showing a pattern of behavior in government, and for some reason, the news media don’t treat it as a pattern. It’s each individual bit, each little dramatic thing, and then it goes away.

BuzzFlash: So there’s no context?

Robert Kane Pappas: Right. It’s so ubiquitous -- the mass news media, and the mass media in general -- that the public consciousness really is affected. It influences the way the public looks at things. Anecdotally, just talking to people, it’s incredible how confused they are. They only hear around the edges of stories. They have the collective ability to remember what happened six months ago, but the ability to make any kind of connections seems to be diminished.

BuzzFlash: The medium itself doesn’t have historical memory.

Robert Kane Pappas: Correct. The history of Ronald Reagan's presidency, as recounted by the mainstream media, is a case in point. Orwell Rolls in his Grave examines two striking examples of this: deregulation and the "October Surprise." Deregulation's failures and excesses were largely ignored, despite the fact that the public paid a huge price economically. And the October Surprise is, in my view, a watershed example of "losing history." Ex-Newsweek reporter Robert Parry at Consortium News wrote a startling series on the subject.

The other thing I wanted to say about Orwell that really struck me was the misuse of language that he goes into in 1984 primarily, but also Animal Farm, and the ability to name something or misname it. Watching the news over the last several years more carefully, I realized that complicated stories or concepts are boiled down to short euphemisms -- tag lines -- so the public's understanding of it is diminished. They don’t know. This euphemistic use of language turns everything into either a two-word marketing phrase, or they name something the opposite of what it means. By lying first, or misnaming something first, you can define how people think about it, and quite strikingly.

BuzzFlash: This is something that was discussed during an interview BuzzFlash had with George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California who’s an expert on messaging. He uses an example -- the phrase “tax relief” that the Republicans say -- and who’s going to be opposed to tax relief? The very structure of the phrase makes it almost impossible to oppose because it uses the word “relief,” which people associate in a positive way. You want to have relief. So if you’re opposed to the so-called Bush tax relief, well, you’re opposed to people feeling better, and less stressed and less burdened.

Robert Kane Pappas: It cuts off discussion. And, given the methodology of the mainstream news media, the time restrictions, the short audience attention span etc., rectifying these false impressions is difficult. We are now slaves to polls and focus groups.

When watching TV news, you notice there are polls for everything. We hear about these things called focus groups. I guess anybody who lives in America today is always buying stuff -- you know, we’re consumers. The way they sell us anything -- which car we’re going to buy, what cereal we eat -- the same exact techniques are used for politics, and for grouping the population very specifically, like you’re trying to sell them something. You massage it with the right words and focus group those words. It’s almost dehumanizing. It’s treating things that could be very serious, life and death things, like they’re selling you some cereal. You can see how dangerous that is when it’s indiscriminately used or purposely used to manipulate a population.

BuzzFlash: You brilliantly show this through interviews and through a very creative use of lingo back and forth between the interviews and documentary footage. Your focus is on the collusion of the corporately owned media, whose interests are aligned with a government that provides economic tax breaks and economic incentives to the corporate media.

Robert Kane Pappas: People don’t understand how overwhelmingly important that point is.

BuzzFlash: Well, this is your point, and you make it very clearly. But it’s also something that the media itself -- what we’ve just been discussing -- lends itself to. Marshall McLuhan said television was a cold medium. But for many people, at least as far as politics today, it’s an emotional medium. I recall reading an interview with Chris Matthews saying issues don’t matter any more. He said, and I paraphrase, that he goes with what his instincts tell him, and his emotions -- that’s what interests the viewership. And so television, whether it’s news, entertainment, commercials or negative political ads -- it’s all the same technique, in a way.

Robert Kane Pappas: Bob McChesney and Charles Lewis make the point in the movie that people who started out as journalists entered it as a public service, and they find out that they’re really involved in the numbers. It’s like they’re selling a TV series. This perverts news reporting terribly, because some of the most important stories -- certainly the most important stories most of the time -- are not that dramatic. What’s going on in the committee room, which changes the scope of what you can own, where all of a sudden a big entertainment entity can own both the conduit and the product -- all those TV stations, all those cable stations, the newspaper, the movie studio, the radio -- those behind-the-scenes, committee-type lobbyists hammering out the way the law is written, or something that happens at the FCC, are so crucial to what we’re going to see, how people are going to feel.

Yet it’s not dramatic, so the story goes under-reported, a blip on the radar screen. We give much more notice to one kidnapped child than we do to something that is vastly more important to the population in terms of consequences.

BuzzFlash: At one point, you show a chart of all the cross-ownership of the media. CBS, for instance, recently didn’t allow MoveOn.org ads during the Super Bowl, and CBS canceled the airing of a movie about Ronald Reagan because of opposition from the right wing. NBC will not provide tapes of an interview with Bush to a fellow documentary maker, Robert Greenwald, for a film he’s doing because it’s embarrassing to Bush. In other words, they won’t provide footage of a public appearance by Bush on "Meet the Press" to a documentary maker. Disney, which owns ABC, prohibits Miramax from distributing Michael Moore’s documentary. All this cross-ownership is serving a censorship function for basically one political perspective and one political party -- the Republican Party.

Robert Kane Pappas: The media companies say, "It’s our airwaves, it’s our free speech," when it's really public airwaves. They use that type of argument. They originally got all this extra ability to have these various networks by claiming that it was going to improve diversity. But in fact, through the use of stuff like copyright, Greenwald, for instance, can’t have that news piece, which is a very important interview because it showed whether our president understands a serious issue. They said, well, that’s our program; we won’t license it to you. We own it.

BuzzFlash: As Mark Crispin Miller says in your film, we basically have the appearance of diversity in media, when really there’s a uniformity of message. He quotes Goebbels about that in your film. We keep hearing there’s diversity, but then we get an instance like Sinclair Broadcasting saying they won’t allow their affiliates to air "Nightline" the night it memorialized the soldiers killed in Iraq, because they said that was a political statement.

Robert Kane Pappas: In Disney’s case, the argument was we don’t want to offend people, so we don’t want to distribute Mike Moore’s movie because we have a family audience. Well, they have many divisions in Disney -- Touchstone, Miramax -- and their films are not what you would call family-friendly.

Bigness makes you common-denominatorize everything. You don’t want to offend. And then, at the same time, there are the government connections between, say, the Bushes and major broadcast owners. And there’s such a connection that there’s probably a wink and a nod, I would guess, and they make sure that certain types of stuff doesn’t get on with regularity. So underneath it all, there can be a political agenda, and it’s very easy to pull it off now. You only need a few people well positioned. For instance, George Bush's first cousin, John Ellis, ran Fox's presidential desk on election night in 2000.

BuzzFlash: And was talking to Jeb Bush and George Bush that evening on the phone.

Robert Kane Pappas: And Fox was the first network to call the election for George Bush. We didn't hear much about that story.

BuzzFlash: In your film, the Clear Channel connection to Bush is brought up, which we’ve covered on BuzzFlash. Here is a corporation that now owns about 1,200 radio stations, and basically they are shills for the Bush administration. They sponsored “support our troops” rallies. Well, we support our troops, but they were basically saying support the Bush administration, and they wouldn’t air any opinion to oppose the Iraq war. And the owner of Sinclair Broadcasting was involved in the deal that made Bush a millionaire with the Texas Rangers.

But let me go back to one of the people you interview. You’ve got an all-star cast of experts on corporate media. Charles Lewis, who is stepping down after a very illustrious career at the Center for Public Integrity, is a very candid fellow and obviously has been non-partisan in exposing political chicanery and fraud. But he admits that the Center for Public Integrity hasn’t focused on the corporate media because to do so would, in essence, be stupid; he’d lose media coverage for the other things they expose if they started to focus too heavily on the media -- he didn’t say it exactly that way, but close to it. And he said, well, how many people do you think we would get if we started exposing the media? Coming from a guy who has as much integrity as one can have in the world of public affairs, it was kind of chilling to hear that. And he was being very honest about it, admitting that he’s not particularly proud of it, but that’s the reality.

Robert Kane Pappas: The news media control the stories about the news media. So if you want to report on the media, it has to go through the media. They can stop it directly. They can frame any discussion on one of the news shows so as to avoid or absolutely bounce off an issue like that, where it’s immediately directed away from that type of discussion. The implicit threat is, if you talk like that too much on the media, they will marginalize you. You won’t be invited on the show. That is the implicit threat Charles Lewis was talking about. So they have two levels of power there, like no other industry.

As Bob McChesney brings up, even the oil industry and the tobacco industry are not in control of the discussion of their stories. You can see how tobacco was outed, in terms of its health effects. And oil -- you’ll have some discussion about it. But in the realm of mass media and their unbelievable impact, they never have to say they’re sorry. They never have to apologize for completely blowing it. A good acquaintance of mine who works with Fox News, I called him in January of 2003 and said, “What’s going on?” It was the run up to the war, and he goes, “It’s the Super Bowl.” And that phrase just caught me -- the Super Bowl. So this war was treated like something to be sold.

The media never have to admit, "It wasn’t just the bad CIA information. It was us, too." They don’t have to discuss that. Charles Lewis explains how media consolidation impacts our political system because of the amount of money candidates need to run political ads. He says that you are basically a money-raising machine if you’re a politician. And you have to get that money from people who want access. So on that level, it’s destroying our political system. And Lewis explains that they control how much airtime a politician gets, and you’ve got to be famous to be elected. It’s an amazing methodology that’s evolved.

BuzzFlash: You’ve mentioned that it’s all a kind of selling. Corporations own these media companies. Their purpose is to sell products through advertising dollars. To sell products, you have to have viewership. To have viewership on politics now, it’s been decided by the corporate media that you have to goose the emotions of the viewer, not necessarily provide information.

If you go up to Canada, they have what they call news readers, and you get information. Here, you get a lot of emotion or visual imagery. As you were mentioning about the Iraq War, the Super Bowl -- the first day of the Iraq war, you had this 24-hour coverage of shock and awe, as though the bombs dropped in Baghdad were a fireworks display.

Robert Kane Pappas: It’s visuals and drama. As a filmmaker, I understand this. We love the great big visuals and the drama of movies. That’s what drives people to the movie theater a lot. This whole technique has been applied to the news, and it kind of pulls things out of balance, and then what gets the coverage is not what’s necessarily important.

BuzzFlash: The media today are part of a corporate world that’s in the business of making a profit and selling something, not necessarily in the business of serving the public interest. Let’s say a newspaper in a mid-size city saw its primary goal as making money. But maybe it was family owned and it had a sense of “civic responsibility.” At least, this is our image of the ideal kind of print paper in America. Today we have large corporations of which news divisions are only divisions within a television network that’s owned by a larger parent company that, as you said, for ABC, may have many divisions, including entertainment, and even many other businesses. The news division is just a profit center for the larger company. As a profit center, it has to, in essence, sell things -- in this case, advertising -- in order to make money. So the news division just becomes part of that selling machine.

Robert Kane Pappas: That seems to be intrinsically what’s going to happen in these large corporations. But look what’s happened in addition to that -- we had oodles of coverage about Martha Stewart. Not a single reporter that I can think of asked, "Whatever happened with that Harken Energy thing and President Bush?" At no point did the media ever say “Bush.” They went back with Whitewater 10, 15 years with Clinton. The information is out there in the public record; the prima facie evidence against President Bush with regard to inside trading was very strong. They just never connected the dots in what was a significant parallel. So here we have a case where, whether it’s their corporate attitude of not offending or it’s purposeful, they missed a very important story that defined Bush’s character.

BuzzFlash: I think it’s Charles Lewis again in your film who talked about the range of coverage being very narrow -- in other words, the reporter knows that they have to report within a certain framework, and that framework means basically not doing investigative journalism to any great extent in the papers any more. It means not riding the Bush administration too hard. It means it’s acceptable to follow up on a story that Karl Rove and the RNC planted -- that Kerry threw away his medals -- but not to emphasize the AWOL issue of Bush too much.

Robert Kane Pappas: It’s a very particular type of self-censorship on the part of reporters. Number one, you don’t want to offend your boss. What happens in journalism is -- especially among the people on the tube -- you can make seven figures if you become a star reporter, or you could be working at a newspaper for $50,000 a year. As you get higher up in corporate journalism circles, the amount of money becomes exponentially more, so the tendency is to self-censor more.

And when an administration like the Bush administration has such connections to one of the three or four companies that can hire you and pay you these huge salaries -- as opposed to if there were 20 viable broadcast news services that had nationwide reach -- when there’s only a few, you can be blackballed easily. You can be viewed as too much of a muckraker, which can kill your career.

BuzzFlash: When you were a film student, you interviewed an outgoing editor of The New York Post, a Murdoch-owned paper.

Robert Kane Pappas: Right. I was in graduate film school at NYU. It was during the hostage crisis and the gas crisis. And it was the first time I could remember where there was this endless news story. In the case of The New York Post, every day there was a little icon of a hostage blindfolded or something. From day one to day four-hundred-something, it was just endless. We’ve come to be used to it now with stories like the OJ trial, but this was like a year-long soap opera. It seemed like something was happening to the way they were reporting the news -- you could just feel it. When Murdoch bought the Post, I didn’t even know who Murdoch was at the time, but its sensationalism quotient went way up.

One day, I took a video camera down the Post, and I got an interview with the city editor, Peter Mitchelmore, who was actually a Fleet Street guy. I asked him about this hostage story. He goes, “Well, you know, actually we’re getting kind of sick of the hostages now, aren’t we? I mean, I hate to put it that way.” He himself had a problem with the presentation of it, because at the end of the evening, he told me he was leaving the Post.

BuzzFlash: And you have that videotaped -- that grainy black-and-white interview with the city editor of the Post who was about to be fired because he was objecting to the sensational bent?

Robert Kane Pappas: I think he said he quit. He just laughs at the end of the tape.

BuzzFlash: He says, “This is my last day,” or something. You were there at the beginning of an era, sort of accidentally. Or you sort of sniffed something in the air in the coverage of the Iraq hostages -- the sensationalism, which now is regularly on television. Fox is certainly the chief exploiter of that.

Let’s look at the role of Fox. It’s headed by Roger Ailes, a former GOP operative, and one could argue he still is a GOP operative, although not paid by the Republican party. Now he’s paid by Murdoch, who is a backer of the Republican party. And talk about Orwellian -- here is a station that Cheney says he watches, and it’s the only truthful station on television.

Robert Kane Pappas: It’s a propaganda service.

BuzzFlash: It’s a propaganda arm of the White House, more or less. In fact, they became involved in trying to discredit Wesley Clark. They distributed a videotape transcript the morning he was to appear at a Congressional committee meeting.

Robert Kane Pappas: I don’t think people understand how much power that gives Bush and company, because they have a major worldwide news corporation that can not only disseminate what they want disseminated, but it can keep a story alive. It can set the focus on what part of the story we’re looking at. And that’s key because, if you focus on a certain part of the story to the exclusion of what was really important about the story, you can effectively hide in plain sight what a more rigorous news media would pick up on. Oftentimes, it's what the foreign press picks up on.

BuzzFlash: What could be more Orwellian than Fox calling itself “fair and balanced” as a slogan?

Robert Kane Pappas: I believe they also tried to copyright it.

BuzzFlash: And sue Al Franken.

Robert Kane Pappas: But to call yourself the exact opposite of what you are -- that’s free speech. It’s your speech. And you can repeat it. And you have the image of the waving flag on your screen suggesting "This is the patriotic network." Well, Murdoch, born in Australia -- Australian citizenship, American citizenship -- he refers to himself as a Brit. We’re talking about a man of the world who is married to a Chinese national, his third wife. He has two young children. In a true sense, he controls a huge hunk of the Chinese media. And he’s in partnership with the Chinese. Now for him to own the patriotic network where everyone’s running around -- I watch Fox! I’m a patriot! -- because the flag is waving on the side of the screen, and it calls itself fair and balanced, but it’s an arm of the Republican party’s propaganda, is an incredible situation.

BuzzFlash: And Fox knows how to use modern technology to be graphically attractive, visually enticing.

Robert Kane Pappas: They’re brilliant technicians. They know how to move images on the screen and use music. They’re as good as or better than CNN, NBC, they’re tops in that field. There are a lot of very talented editors and graphics people working at Fox.

BuzzFlash: The most basic political technique of the right wing and the Republican party is character assassination. We’ve seen a shift perhaps from the discussion of politics into a dissection of personality. We saw that tellingly, of course, in the Clinton administration, with "Slick Willie" and so forth. Then we saw The New York Times and Washington Post adopt the Republican party attack on Al Gore -- that somehow he was a liar -- without really seriously questioning the massive deception and lies of the Bush campaign in 2000. They have started up with John Kerry, following the Republican line, saying he’s a waffler.

Robert Kane Pappas: If you wrote or sold a product so deceptively, you’d be in jail or out of business.

BuzzFlash: What is it about television? Most of the right wing commentators attack personality and character more than they even attack public policy.

Robert Kane Pappas: But it’s a technique. Some of this is real dark science. I remember in the run-up to the 2000 election, after the first debate -- and I believe it could have been planned because it was worked out so quickly -- one of the networks put together a montage of close ups of Al Gore expressing impatience with Bush’s answers -- exhaling. They strung together these two- and three-second clips. And within hours, on all the news shows the debate centered on Al Gore’s expressions, not the substance of the debate. They were able to absolutely change the discussion from what these guys were talking about, to a discussion about Al Gore’s facial expressions, giving Bush a complete free ride. Bush was barely coherent in the first debate, but it was all about Al Gore. That shows the amazing power of video.

The same thing happened with Dean, when he exhorted his followers following the Iowa Caucuses.

BuzzFlash: Didn’t Diane Sawyer ultimately apologize?

Robert Kane Pappas: Apologies don’t make it, because everyone knows the first impression is the impression that’s repeated and repeated and repeated. And these are techniques that the Republicans use. Bush has flip-flopped on many things when it suits him. He will change on a dime, and the media will not call it a flip-flop. The Republicans have been so clever about, as we said, euphemistically using the language in a very disciplined way, and to ends that I don’t believe in. They repeat and repeat that two-word phrase to describe someone or to assassinate their character.

If the Democrats turned around right now and had the picture of Bush in his flight suit with the caption, “Mission accomplished,” and then someone laughed on the track, and we showed that thousands of times to the public, I wonder what would happen? It’s a one-way street, largely, in the area of character assassination.

BuzzFlash: Is this because the Democrats won’t do it?

Robert Kane Pappas: When you’re really thinking in terms of marketing in a strict sense, it would be like one ad says, “This cereal is really good. This cereal is really good. This cereal is really good” -- never changes the pitch -- that's the Republican marketers. Meanwhile, the Democratic commercial says, "This cereal is good," and then another commercial says, "This cereal's usually good, but if you eat too much you might get sick." I'm simplifying, but that's pretty much the difference between the Republicans' and Democrats' discussion of issues.

The Republicans have taken a corporate marketing approach very akin to marketing a product on TV. They repeat the same phrase until people are sick of hearing it, but now they believe it. The Democrats actually think that there’s information being transmitted here, and maybe more is better. Or let’s see more than one side. Let’s air this thing a little bit more. By definition, that is not going to be as good a marketing technique as repeating your same phrase. It just makes sense. And on that level, that’s what the Republicans do. They have the discipline to sell that product. And then they have the choir repeating that same phrase. And that’s how it works.

BuzzFlash: Yours is the only documentary we’ve seen that’s so focused completely on the media while tying in other issues -- the media’s role in the Florida recount, judicial nominations, and so forth. Are the media what would be known in marketing terms as the vehicle of distribution for the brand products?

Robert Kane Pappas: Yes.

BuzzFlash: And so the messaging gets through the brand identity which is, in Bush’s case, he’s a virtuous man. He’s an honest man. He’s a family man. He’s a religious man. He’s a man of values. This is key to their brand identity, which is eroding a bit now because of the Iraq torture scandal. But the media still accepts as conventional wisdom that he is all these things.

Robert Kane Pappas: But this problem will continue to go on even if Kerry wins. We need to fix what they’ve done over the last four years. We can keep that at bay by focusing on a mistake Kerry will make if he’s elected, so this is an ongoing problem. We couldn’t be in the pickle we’re in if it weren’t for just a few companies reciting the same line in unison and then moving on to the next one. Their techniques and their structure and their methodology are really problematic. The media conglomerates need to be re-regulated. Their structure and methodology are seriously flawed.

BuzzFlash: Greg Palast, who is a favorite of ours, makes an appearance in your film. There’s a wonderful flow to your film, and it brings together many diverse issues relating to media coverage and corporate ownership. You spent some time on the issue of the so-called consortium that studied the recount and hired the University of Chicago firm that’s expert at polling and polling analysis to do an analysis. You come to the conclusion that the consortium intentionally took a position that made it appear that Bush actually won, when that wasn’t the case.

Robert Kane Pappas: The network consortium did a couple of things. They said you can do all this research about what happened with the ballots, but you cannot characterize it. This company was not allowed to categorize or speak about its own results. That’s crucial. Once again the discussion was contained.

CBS said it had never seen such an exit poll where the one candidate was projected to win by seven-plus percent, and they were off, and he lost. Look at the Congressional testimony of that stuff. It speaks volumes.

BuzzFlash: Let’s return again to something that I believe Charles Lewis brought up. In the issue of deregulation that’s recently come up, there have been a few rounds of this. One of them occurred, I believe, in ’96. He brought up that, before the Internet really blossomed, and there wasn’t a large alternative for news, the media, he said, hardly covered at all the fact that they were seeking deregulation. And this is sort of understandable; they don’t want to draw attention to it themselves. But the statistic on the number of stories about the issue of deregulation coming before the FCC was miniscule on television.

Robert Kane Pappas: It was the 1996 Telecommunications Act. I was watching the process a little bit by now, and the press would keep repeating the phrase, "Telecommunications Act," sometimes using the adjective "landmark," but we never had any idea what was in it. According to one survey -- and I can’t think of the name of the group -- one of those centers that calculates what appears on all the major networks and for how long -- found that there was a total of 19 minutes of coverage on the Telecommunications Act by all the major networks combined over a period of 9 months.

John McCain stood in front of the Senate and said: This discussion we’re having now -- you will not see this on any TV news program or read it in any newspaper. He’s one of the Republicans that will call a spade a spade occasionally. And this massive bill that changed all the rules was kept from public view, and was drafted behind closed doors.

[BuzzFlash Note: Part 2 of this interview will appear at a later date.]

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

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