July 8, 2004

Robert Kane Pappas, Director of "Orwell Rolls in His Grave," PART 2

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

The first part of this interview can be found here.

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."

Here is the second 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: Charles Lewis talks about the Internet as one of the hopeful opportunities for the free exchange of information without major corporate control. But he also sounds a note of caution in saying we don’t know how long that’s going to last. While the documentary does leave some hope because of the free-ranging democracy, Tom Paine style, that’s still available on the Internet, there is an ominous note from someone who’s been one of the experts in watching the FCC that the Internet may, in the near future, come under the corporate control and censorship that we’ve seen in the mainstream media.

What are your thoughts about both the hope in the Internet and the possibility that it may also fall prey to becoming just another part of Disney or G.E. or Time-Warner?

Robert Kane Pappas: I think we’re at the transitional moment. Think of what happened at the prison in Iraq. Pictures and video were transmitted on the Internet, and all of a sudden stuff that was underneath the mainstream news radar, everyone saw it. Immediately, the shit hit the fan. That’s an amazing thing that happens. But at the same time, the economic and political powers could think differently. The Internet was originally conceived as running over a telephone network that would not discriminate over any content or any user. But they didn’t anticipate cable. And the old telephone network is going to be, according to Jeff Chester, in the film, looked upon as the dirt road, as the telephone Internet.

The convergence that’s happening between what’s on television, what is on the computer, music, radio -- it’s all converging in this cable system of high-speed broadband service. According to Chester, who runs the Center for Digital Democracy, the large cable companies -- ComCast, AOL Time-Warner, Paul Allen’s Charter -- are fighting tooth-and-nail behind the scenes in Congress to keep their status as a closed network that is not subject to government regulation and does not have to take your business. He thinks that they are fighting behind the scenes to extinguish the freedom of the Internet, and largely in favor of profits, so that you could pay as you go on the Internet and cable.

Once again, at the FCC, Powell has called it an informational network to try to get around this idea that you need to be regulated. Now that’s been disputed in court in a court decision. By declaring it an informational network, they’re not subject to government regulations where everything else that broadcasts is.

BuzzFlash: So he’s saying the government has no right to intervene to keep it open.

Robert Kane Pappas: Exactly. So it’s really the reverse, because what happens is, according to another source, they’re trying to come up with a way to have micro-payments on the Internet. And it’s very close. There will be a new generation of programs coming out that may allow much more control, a way to make us pay as we go. There’s intense lobbying. There are a number of Congressmen, I’m sure, that are worried about it. But the real key is if they pervert the openness of the Internet so that it can’t be used as a common carrier.

BuzzFlash: Right now, basically anyone who can afford or get access to the Internet can put their opinion out there like Tom Paine. And anyone in the world can have access to it. Is it possible that in the future, say, someone like AOL would require that any Internet site that wants to be carried on AOL has to pay a fee?

Robert Kane Pappas: I don’t know.

BuzzFlash: But is that technically possible? Could they, for instance, block BuzzFlash.com unless I paid them an access fee?

Robert Kane Pappas: It’s quite possible. Controlling access and finding a way for you to pay in very, very small amounts as an individual customer, or I’m sure there would be different deals for organizations. But anything that gets people to pay as they go, like long distance phone calls -- everything changes.

BuzzFlash: I don’t know if it was Bill Gates -- I think it was -- who said one of the ways that we might reduce spam is to actually charge a small fee, a penny per e-mail, perhaps. That way, the mass e-mailers would eventually find it burdensome to send out millions and millions of e-mails at once.

Robert Kane Pappas: There’s a good reason to do it. But a lot of times, the real strategy of clamping down is hidden in an ostensibly good reason. They’ll say, well, there’s a lot of spam, so if we clamp down, you won’t have that. Or, it’ll be identity theft that we can avoid if it’s secure computing. Or there will be no child porn on the Internet. Or there will be no bad words if you don’t want them. And inside these ostensibly good ideas for the public good or convenience, can be hidden funny things that essentially change the nature of something. That’s what’s really interesting, and I think the discussion has to get out there so that people don’t change the laws before we really know how it plays out.

BuzzFlash: Our worst fear is that you can end up with an Internet that’s like cable television. You have a limited number of sites and you have to pay a high premium to have your site available on the Internet.

Robert Kane Pappas: Jeff Chester brings that up. I did not put it in the movie, but he compared the Internet situation to cable in the ‘70s. The cable owners or operators went to the local government and said you give us this franchise, we’ll give that to the community. Deregulate us, and you can see what happened in cable. When I was in graduate film school, I remember we thought there’s going to be hundreds of channels. If you’re a consumer, you’ll have your consumer channel. But you can see how it really evolved to just tons of channels, all owned by the same couple of companies.

BuzzFlash: When cable first started and you had to pay for it, one of the advantages of cable, you were told, was there was no advertising.

Robert Kane Pappas: Right.

BuzzFlash: The trade-off for that was you were paying an access fee. Now you’re paying a higher access fee. It’s loaded with advertising. And almost every channel is just another corporate American channel.

Robert Kane Pappas: With all those channels, we don’t have a single channel that I have seen that is a consumer channel. Can you imagine the type of information that could go over one of these channels? There’s nothing. But you’ve got QVC.

BuzzFlash: And we pay for the right to watch what has become corporate cable TV from the original vision of being a democratic alternative for television.

Robert Kane Pappas: Right. But I don’t think that the people know that the same companies that own the broadcast networks own the cable stations.

BuzzFlash: Well, that brings us to a second point we wanted to follow up on about your film, Orwell Rolls. Both television and print are very pro-Republican, for the most part, because they are large companies that benefit from corporate tax breaks. As you’ve just mentioned, people don’t realize most of the major cable stations are owned by major corporate entertainment entities, or that major entertainment entities own the major news entities. Disney owns ABC. Viacom owns CBS. Murdoch owns Fox News and Fox Television. There doesn’t seem much distinction between entertainment and news anymore. It’s kind of all profit driven. It’s all about selling products and cross-promotion.

For instance, on some of the morning programs, their features revolve around promoting a book that may be published by a subsidiary of the parent corporation. The viewer doesn’t know this. They think a news value judgment is being based on this book. Maybe in some cases, it is. But in some cases, it isn’t. They’re cross-selling a book that benefits the bottom line of the parent corporation on what is supposed to be a news program.

Robert Kane Pappas: I saw "60 Minutes" bashed by the right wing because their parent company was selling -- I believe it was O’Neill’s book. So Viacom’s parent company was selling the book of one of the "60 Minutes" guests who was, you know, bashing Bush. The tales of these ex-officials would not be reported unless they were promoting a book. So they say: Why are you out there now selling a book? Why didn’t you talk about it six months ago? Well, the answer is they wouldn’t have reported it if it wasn’t in a book. Then they accuse you of selling out by promoting that book or telling the story in the book about something they don’t want to hear.

BuzzFlash: Well, no one knows this better than the right wing. People like Ann Coulter are pure vehicles of the entertainment news culture. She writes a trash book called Treason and says these incredulous, off-the-wall statements and yet she gets credibility on all these shows merely because she’s published this book. But that’s what gives those people entry into the television entertainment pundit circle, which is what passes for news nowadays.

Robert Kane Pappas: That’s absolutely correct. I do want to touch on what you said before about the conglomeration of entertainment and news. The larger issue here is that the cultural effect of always having ratings as the bottom line is perverse. The right wing makes a lot of hay with voters on, saying look at what Hollywood has done to our culture. And we’ve demeaned people, and all this type of stuff. The fact is, the bottom line sensationalism of everything may be more responsible for this culture of consumerism, of violence, of children going off the track. I believe the argument could be turned directly against them, and that sensationalism and sensationalism in the news have such a culturally negative effect.

BuzzFlash: Let’s talk about a specific incident about creating news. When Bush landed on the U.S.S. Enterprise in the flight suit with the helmet and all, on television afterwards, the Fox pundits, the CNN pundits, everybody judged it as a performance. Chris Matthews asked who else could pull off that macho stuff, who else could look like that in a flight uniform. The incident was judged on the success of the stunt or performance, not in terms of asking whether the Iraq war had really ended and was the mission accomplished. The fact of his being AWOL from the National Guard -- the fact he was grounded, although many people think it was because he was using cocaine at the time and wouldn’t go for his medical test. None of that came out. It was him as an actor, acting the role of a pilot. And the White House created this whole myth about him.

Robert Kane Pappas: Can you imagine if a reporter had reported that story and brought up anything that was off message and said there were reports that he was AWOL? Or had talked about his history in the military? They would have lost their jobs.

BuzzFlash: Here he was, the macho man.

Robert Kane Pappas: Bernie Sanders said in the film that ideas don’t matter anymore. At first I didn’t know what he was talking about until he said: "You look like a nice fellow. You married? You have any kids? Why don’t we vote for you?" He said that to me, the interviewer. The context for what Bush does or means is not discussed. What’s discussed is the performance. It came down to whether or not he could walk out and do a good walk and look good, and the favorable writing.

I’m a film director. They made sure that they had that really good lighting that the French use a lot. It’s like a quarter back light. And they’re well aware of that. This is the real thing. Our news focuses on pieces of events -- on a piece of a story. When the tremendously important part of the story is taking place in front of you, they’ll be talking about some little focus, some little tidbit that really is not the important part of the story.

Politics is always going to be covered as entertainment to some extent, but something else is going on here. We know that people don’t want to be depressed with numbers all the time, and that some of the most interesting news is the very visceral -- the tragedies -- or the visual, such as the cyclones, the hurricanes. However, when there are things going on, or big things underneath the surface where a certain law is being changed, and it’s not reported just because it’s not very entertaining, they’re doing a tremendous public disservice. These are the public airwaves. The people that believe in the free market of ideas -- the free market outside diversity -- by having a few companies control everything, they’re crushing the free market of exchange of information and ideas to the general public.

BuzzFlash: Even when they analyze the State of the Union address, they don’t compare it to what happened the prior year. Instead the focus is on the delivery. How presidential did he seem? Our political pundits are all now like Tom Shales. I mean, we like Tom Shales. He is a very good media reporter. But he often gets more into political analysis than the political pundits.

This year we saw all three networks make censorship decisions related to the Bush administration. CBS did it with moving the Reagan mini-series from CBS to Showtime, and they wouldn’t let the MoveOn ad air on the SuperBowl.

Robert Kane Pappas: The implications are huge economically when these conglomerates can be vertically integrated. They’re not just in television, they’re in movies, news, radio, advertising, the whole bit. There are many corporations in a real dance with the administration for deregulation. It doesn’t bode well for the public that the implications of these decisions are just huge. And they’re not reported to the public because the people wouldn’t stand for it if they saw it.

BuzzFlash: General Electric, which owns NBC, is a huge defense contractor and has a tremendous number of government contracts. So you’re not going to see many exposes on NBC about nuclear facilities or problems with the electrical industry, nor much that’s critical of the government. Congressman Waxman has all but proven that Jack Welch ordered the election desk at NBC to call the election for Bush. When you have the head of the parent corporation interfering in a political election call, it’s kind of a frightening moment.

In an age of People and Us magazines, with the cult of celebrity and reality TV, Bush has survived for a long time and still polls highly on having integrity, despite the fact that there’s daily evidence that he and his administration are chronic, perhaps pathological, liars. Why does his personality trump the reality of his administration, like the president is just another character on TV or in a movie?

Robert Kane Pappas: Well, it’s tricky. You know, Robert McChesney said that what they’ve done is they’ve changed the nature of the left and the right so that they don’t discuss issues of corporate power, but they discuss little knee-jerk issues so that they get people to align with issues. They focus group them. And they say, boy, 20 percent of the population is really liking "x" -- you take this position, you’ve got them. Maybe it’s on abortion. Maybe it’s on something else. And they’ll hammer out that issue. They know you can get a certain percentage of the population on your side just by playing to their fears with the use of code words -- saying those five things that will get 30 or 40 percent of the population on their side.

Now it all being personality, it becomes an actor’s medium, right? God knows what they did to Al Gore in I think it was the first debate with George Bush when he was huffing and puffing. So you can destroy personality by selectively showing it. I mean, suppose they had George Bush in his flight suit, and this would be a disparaging commercial, and they just kept saying, “Mission accomplished. Mission accomplished.”If the Democrats did that, they could make the guy a laughing stock, much the way they did it with Clinton when he waved his finger and said, “I did not have sex with that woman.”They could put George Bush’s ratings in the ground. But I’m sure I don’t think the Democrats are given to that level of vileness or bashing.

BuzzFlash: Well, they don’t have the heart for it.

Robert Kane Pappas: I really believe that he’s left himself open, so that I think his personality is being levitated by pundits who want to pretend that they’re fair. At some point in Orwell Rolls In His Grave, we say, “Ignorance is strength.”This is a quote from Orwell. He has it in 1984. Well, they can construe, “I will never change my mind.”I am incurious, and I know what I know, and I knew what I knew, and I know it. And it’s the same today, and it’ll be the same tomorrow. It has a tremendous clarity.

BuzzFlash: We had a headline recently in BuzzFlash which is a paraphrase of H.L. Mencken. “For every complex problem, there is a simple solution, and it doesn’t work.”Bush keeps repeating the simple solution that doesn’t work, and the press makes a virtue out of that.

Basically every day, Bush is like a big blow-up doll who manages to deflate himself through some colossal blunder in his administration. And the next day, the press blows him up again. You watch him deflate, and then you read the headlines the next day and you say, “Wait, they’ve made a virtue out of a failure.”

Robert Kane Pappas: It’s also through the control of the video images you see. What you see of criminals is often the perp walk where they’ve got the jacket over their head. March them out of a cop station and the head’s getting pressed so that they fit into the car. When Bush does one of his walks, it’s from the helicopter on the White House lawn into the White House. You watch him for 10 seconds, and he’s got that walk down. Or he’s in a golf cart. I actually had a part in the film and I took it out where he’s with his father on the golf course, and he looked at the press filming him and he goes, “See you at church.”And he just blew away. See you in church. They keep using that little bit of him in the golf cart with his father. They never let you hear that. It was funny in the way it was given. It was a very strange moment. It didn’t make the actual final cut.

BuzzFlash: In Michael Moore's film, "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- there's a clip after there had been a big suicide bombing where many Israelis were killed. And Bush was on the golf course, and they had a photo opportunity. And he said, “I want all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killings. Thank you." And then he paused just a second and said, "Now, watch this drive.”Of course, the "Now, watch this drive," didn't get mainstream coverage.

Robert Kane Pappas: Controlling the video image of someone is an art. When you compare the Bush administration to any number of presidents and administrations, they have so much more control over the video image. There are very few candid moments when you really see George Bush interacting with anything more than a canned audience. It’s very, very odd. Therefore you can control what people consider personality to a degree they never did before.

BuzzFlash: His presidency is a presidency of video images. If you look at Sept. 11, everything happened around him. He sat in the classroom until his administration decided they could write a statement for him. He didn’t take control of the presidency or the situation.

Robert Kane Pappas: That image was not broadcast to the public. The image of him sitting for another seven minutes reciting a child’s story made the Internet. That did not make the primetime airwaves.

BuzzFlash: This was after the second plane hit. He just sat there while people around him decided what he should do. And then he went on his exile flight for awhile, based, the White House said, on threats that turned out not to be true.

Robert Kane Pappas: This goes back to the methodology of large corporations reporting the news. When you have such a giant corporation, it leads to these types of things. It’s conducive to the packaging and to the misrepresentation of public figures. There’s definitely a trend of controlling every image, and the networks own that image.

BuzzFlash: Tim Russert had Bush on and he gave him some softball questions and Bush couldn’t handle them. He did the usual goof-up he does when he’s out on his own for more than 30 seconds. And they wouldn’t let your fellow documentary maker use the images. We all know the reason why: It’s embarrassing to him. And you don’t want to get in trouble, even though this is the president of the United States whose comments belong to all of America.

Robert Kane Pappas: The ironies should not be lost on the general public. I fear that it is lost to a fairly large percentage of them.

BuzzFlash: Robert, thank you very much.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

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