Hardening of the Articles:

An Ethicist Looks at Propaganda in Today’s News[1]

 by Jay Black[2]

 Introduction

            This paper explores the problem of “journalistic attitude,” a disposition that leads reporters—consciously or unconsciously—to inject bias, innuendo, and propaganda into their work.  Drawing  from the field of general semantics, and building upon the insights from propaganda and belief systems research, a  half dozen “semantic tools” propose a cure for the problem I call “articlesclerosis”—the hardening of the articles.

Some weeks ago a stranger walked into my office and tossed the front page of his local newspaper onto my desk. “I find this kind of journalism reprehensible,” he said, and asked if I agreed. He pointed to an article (Unger 2000) that dealt with the death of a young boy, a family friend. The headline said “Teen’s Body Found in Ditch.” The story opened with a routine lead, implying an almost formulaic inverted pyramid approach to a hard news story:

            One 13-year-old boy is dead and another was in intensive care Saturday after an apparent overdose of the over-the-counter motion sickness medication Dramamine.

Four paragraphs later came the passage that most disgusted my visitor: a flat assertion that “The imprint of Schuster’s face was still visible Saturday afternoon in the muddy banks of the drainage ditch.”

The angry middle-aged man in my office asked why journalists engaged in such sensational, insensitive, gratuitous writing. He called it “front page editorializing”—a radical departure from the kind of journalism he knew and respected. “Why’d they have to put something like that in the story, when it wasn’t going to do any good and would certainly hurt the boy’s family,” he asked. Whatever happened to objective journalism, he wanted to know.  “How come reporters have such attitudes nowadays? What are they trying to prove? Who’re they writing this stuff for?”

It set me to wondering, too. Over the next several weeks I began routinely collecting news stories from my own local paper, the St. Petersburg Times, a respected, Pulitzer prize-winning paper recognized in the area as a “writer’s paper.” I collected quite a few news articles—emphasis on “news,” not feature—that got me to thinking the man in my office might have been on to something. Here are a couple of examples, not to prove a point unilaterally, and not to be picking on one particular newspaper, but just to set the stage:

When Steven John Bartlett climbs behind the wheel, bad things happen.

He’s not exaggerating.

Bartlett has been driving in Florida for 13 years. In not one of those years has he had a valid license. He has never been insured. He has two DUIs. He injured a woman in a crash and fled the scene. He owes traffic fines totaling $2,675. . . .

Drivers like Bartlett—people who repeatedly scoff at the law and drive despite racking up dozens of minor violations—frustrate police, motor vehicle officials and judges. (Lush 2001)

A couple of weeks later, the lead story on Saturday’s  City & State news section was the first report of a fatal auto accident that had occurred the day before. The story began:

Joe Kolacki sat stunned and red-eyed Friday afternoon at the kitchen table of the South Tampa home he used to share with his wife, Stacy.

He had kissed her goodbye before leaving for work at 6 a.m. Later that morning, he got a message at work: Call the St. Petersburg police, your wife has been in an accident.

Then, after a couple of formulaic hard news paragraphs about  his wife’s meeting someone who was interested in buying her car, and then getting into a fatal accident during the test drive, we read . . .

                Mr. Kolacki, 42, had expected the day to be like any other. After he got home from work, Mrs. Kolacki would cook dinner for him and the two youngest of their four daughters, and then they’d spend the evening watching television. Maybe they’d talk about their plan to attend the Knight Parade in Ybor City on Saturday.

                Friday afternoon, everything around him in the neat, pink and blue kitchen and dining area of the house in the Gandy Gardens neighborhood was just as his wife had left it that morning.

                Yet nothing was the same. (Gibson & Minai 2001)

Let us consider another story, which appeared atop the front section of the Sunday newspaper and jumped to a full inside page. The headline (“$6 Million. Hundreds of Questions.”) and the kicker (“One man knew of Henry Chapman’s millions. He wrote Chapman’s will. Should he get the money?”) may have alerted us to the fact that this was not exactly a straight news article. However, read carefully as the reporter interweaves hard facts and direct quotes with a veritable truckload of inferences and value judgments:

Henry Chapman never worried about earning a paycheck. Every day he would lunch at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club and sip Old Fashioneds in the club lounge. When he and his parents weren’t taking train trips to the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia or the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Chapman could be found honing his golf swing on Snell Isle, once even nailing a hole in one.

But when paramedics responded to a 911 call at his home in the Old North-East two years ago, they found a different Henry Chapman.

Their emaciated, 102-pound patient lay helpless on the floor in tattered pajamas, surrounded by dust, cobwebs and the stench of urine and cheap cigars. The only food in the house was a box of Corn Flakes. Hundreds of empty milk cartons were piled against a dingy wall.

Mr. Chapman died nearly two years later. His obituary, like most, offered the barest glimpse of a life: age 84, former resident of Pennsylvania, Mason, former member of the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. The notice said Chapman had no known survivors.

What it didn’t say was this: Henry Ford Chapman was the $6-million hermit of 20th Ave. NE.

Only one man knew the extent of his riches: his tax preparer.

The main beneficiary of Chapman’s more than $6-million estate? His tax preparer.

Years earlier, Larry Welke had been charged with trying to cheat an 89-year-old woman out of $62,000. Now, as Chapman neared the end of his life, Welke had changed his will.

Welke prepared and typed the will that would make himself a millionaire. To have it notarized, he drove Chapman to Fred’s Garage, a gritty auto repair and salvage shop in an industrial area of St. Petersburg. Fred of Fred’s Garage, a buddy of Welke’s with his own criminal record, served as notary. (Smith 2001)

Readers sucked into this spellbinding narrative would go on to learn many details about Chapman’s life, up to and following the death of his closest relatives. And then, “Enter Larry Welke, a 6-foot-4, 350-plus pound tax accountant, former City Council candidate and gun seller.” More details, coupled throughout with attitude:

• “In Florida, non-professionals are allowed to prepare wills that would enrich themselves, with no independent scrutiny.” 

• “Welke fully expects that he soon will be a multi-millionaire. He can’t recall whether he ever thanked Mr. Chapman.”

• “In 1990, (Welke) was charged with aggravated assault after a traffic confrontation. A man told police that Welke pointed a handgun at his 5-year-old daughter and threatened, ‘I’ll shoot her black monkey ass.’

“Welke, who has an extensive firearms collection and sells at gun shows, said he only had a stun gun and pointed it only to protect himself. The other man was the aggressor, he said, and he made no racial comments. Again Welke pleaded no contest and received probation, again adjudication was withheld.”

• “Fred’s Garage is a place where, as one employee put it, most customers have enough money ‘for a bag of weed and a 6-pack,’ not $6-million.”

And, later, “When a man is allowed to deteriorate alone, in a dank house with little food or support, does anyone really deserve his money?” Then, “Welke . . . dismisses Henry Chapman’s relatives as greedy money chasers. He took care of his friend for years, he says, and is being unfairly portrayed as a villain. ‘Henry was just somebody nobody cared about,’ Welke said.” The final sentence of the article: The author’s flat assertion that “People sure do now.”

Finally, let us look at some recent political reporting. A hotly contested mayoral race in St. Petersburg found the newspaper’s editorial page endorsing candidate (and eventual winner) Rick Baker, and criticizing the personal and leadership qualities of city council member Kathleen Ford. As even the most strident critics of journalism know, the editorial page is where such endorsements and criticisms belong. How, then, to account for similar editorializing throughout the news pages , including the following “Know Your Candidates” story, which was promoted as an introduction to the nine candidates for the city’s leadership post (LaPeteer & Gilmer 2001):

Rick Baker has shaped his campaign around the perception that voters are ready for a strong leader as mayor, printing “Rick Baker, Leadership for Mayor,” on his campaign signs. Throughout his four-point “Baker Plan” in his campaign brochure, Baker promises he would be vigorous and visible as mayor . Baker’s campaign trail oratory has been conversational and measured, and not as impassioned as some of his opponents’. When they have shot barbs his way, calling him the establishment candidate or hinting that he is beholden to the people who bankrolled his campaign, he has refrained from responding angrily even when the attacks have stung.

Instead, he has talked of the broad support he says the contributions indicate, and he has kept going over the Baker Plan points, hinting that he likes to set goals and drive steadily toward them without getting sidetracked.

Now, compare that reasonably balanced—some would say objective—treatment of the so-called “establishment candidate” with the parallel introduction to candidate Kathleen Ford:

Kathleen Ford, known to be abrasive, dismissive, even downright accusatory to staff as a City Council member, said it’s all necessary to bring accountability to city government.

She prides herself on being a diligent researcher and fact-checker known to question the spending of dollars documented deep within thick reports, but said she didn’t realize she could pay a $1,000 campaign qualifying fee from her campaign account.

Her blunt words have sometimes gotten her into trouble. During her bid for the District 4 City Council seat in 1997, Ford, criticized by her opponents as an elitist, talked of buffering poor neighborhoods from rich ones. Later, she complained about the city’s tendency to ‘cater to lower socioeconomic groups.’

In this campaign, too, Ford’s words have at times been jarring. Ford has repeatedly blamed the Times for missing her points. She says she has worked for the whole city and pushed tirelessly for more black businesses to win city contracts.

During her campaign for mayor, Ford has toned down her in-your-face demeanor, offering a kinder, gentler persona. She argues that St. Petersburg needs her style of leadership, someone who can make ‘tough decisions despite criticism.’

What, if anything, is wrong with these pictures? Are all of the above pieces of journalism news stories, news-feature hybrids, editorial analyses, or what? They certainly are not labeled as anything other than news stories. As the visitor to my office asked, what is happening to objective journalism? Why do reporters have such attitudes nowadays? What are they trying to prove? Who is this stuff being written for, anyway?

If some recent letters to the editor of the St. Petersburg Times are any indication,  the man who came to my office is not the only one observing and lamenting this trend. “I am writing to express my concern that your newspaper rarely presents an article in which the writer does not express his or her  viewpoint,” said Lawrence Marlin (2000). “I wonder how your editors can honestly deny their biased writing when (letters to the editor) writers point it out to them so often. I think it is because they talk exclusively to each other and, are, therefore, unconstrained by dissident thought. They convince themselves, in spite of overwhelming examples to the contrary, that they are presenting the news fairly.”

Another letter writer, Shelly Munoz (2001), said “I have been tempted to discontinue your paper many, many times because of biased reporting . . . but Friday’s paper really wins the contest. If Sen. John Ashcroft had even winked at another woman, he would have merited five full pages of disparagement, including a front-page spread with color pictures. I found the tiny article about the Rev. Jesse Jackson . . . in a little corner of the front page with two thumb-sized pictures and the headline ‘Scandal may not damage Jackson.’ . . . This kind of scandal in the Republican Party would have received pages upon pages of related articles for days and possibly even weeks. Please—you people are so obvious it is incredible.”

Journalistic attitude and the credibility crisis

I do not have to cite reams of statistics to delineate the problem at hand. Numerous studies of late, by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, Times/Mirror, Ford Foundation, and others have made it quite clear that there is a serious disconnection between news media and their audiences. The American Journalism Review’s “Signs of Progress” (Stepp 2001) turned up recently with a poll it said “indicates newspapers’ efforts to rebuild credibility are paying off. The responses suggest the public’s view is not as negative as has been believed,” AJR claimed. However, upon close examination we find 64 percent of all those surveyed maintain that news stories are “very biased” or “somewhat biased.” Only 19 percent said newspapers were not very biased, and 11 percent said they were not at all biased. Only eight percent said they believed everything they read in the paper, 57 percent said they believed most of what they read, five percent a little, and one percent none. These may be signs of progress; AJR was particularly smitten with a slight upturn in younger readers’ attitudes toward newspapers. In my opinion, however, the credibility bottle is still less than half full.

Most of us have heard that long-term and serious readers’ and viewers’ traditional expectations for reasonably objective news coverage are constantly being thwarted. The disconnection takes many forms, but I would like to focus on the ways journalists seem to be confusing and misappropriating fundamental media functions—the functions of informing, entertaining, and persuading—in misguided attempts to attract and hold younger  audiences. This is particularly true for newspapers in their efforts to compete with television’s multisensory domains, but it seems also to be true of television news in its frenetic technologically and market-driven competition for audiences. Newspapers and television news people appear to be running scared of new media and what they see as a world of bifurcating, self-indulgent, highly transient, and significantly younger audiences whose pocketbooks are larger than their attention spans. In their morally justifiable quest to attract audiences, build community, and stay in business, many in the news industry seem to have opted for morally and semantically problematic methods of gathering information and reporting the day’s events. I would argue that they have become propagandists, wittingly or not, and that their behavior is unethical.

The problem may be due in large part to what The Washington Monthly has called “Attitude Reporting.” Thirty years ago, attitude reporting—a.k.a. “New Journalism”—in news and current affairs magazines “sought to cloak bare-bones objective reporting with novelistic flesh,” by adding “explicit analysis and a search for solutions to replace what was sometimes a concealed or unconscious bias underlying the old objectivity,” according to The Washington Monthly’s editors (Just the facts? 1999, p. 22).  Recently, though, the new journalism techniques seem to have moved out of magazines and onto the front pages of daily newspapers and into network and local broadcast news reports. The result has been a blurring of inverted pyramid and narrative styles of writing, of fact and opinion, of detailed description and value judgment, of straight information and distracting entertainment. Nowadays, the route to journalistic stardom seems to wind its way through the boroughs of commentary, analysis and attitude, rather than traditional dogged pursuit of facts and straight reporting.

Fred Brown (2001), capital bureau chief and political editor for The Denver Post and co-chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics committee, laid it on the line in a recent Quill magazine column: “We are increasingly inserting ourselves between our readers and the information they need, and that surely counts as an ethical problem.” Brown faulted his profession for two practices that violate traditional norms and that are ethically disquieting. He called them bottom-up and top-down reporting, the first being a patronizing and condescending story-telling approach to everyday stories, the second being smarty-pants reporting of politics, or “reporting for consultants.” He concluded that

We use the (bottom-up) story-telling, ordinary-person approach in an effort to attract people who don’t much care about the news... writing newspapers for people who don’t read newspapers. And we employ the (top-down) oh-so-cunning, supercilious approach when we’re trying to impress people who spend altogether too much time trying to outmaneuver us. (Brown, F.  p. 38)

David Ignatius, veteran reporter and editor, is equally stern in his critique of contemporary journalism. Writing in The Washington Monthly’s analysis of “attitude reporting,” Ignatius said that

The biggest danger I encountered in my years as an editor was a reflective cynicism among some reporters that led them to assume they knew what a story was about, before they had actually done the reporting. They would begin with an assumption of who the good guys and bad guys were, and then organize the facts around that hypothesis. Sometimes, reporters were so confident about their a priori hypothesis that they would make only the most perfunctory, last-minute efforts to contact the “bad guys.” (“Just the facts?” 1999, p. 27)

What are Brown and Ignatius describing if not hardening of the articles— journalistic arteriosclerosis? Articlesclerosis?  Is this  “stuff” not a form of propaganda? Does it not sound like the product of closed-minded, dogmatic, semantically unsophisticated reporters and writers who are indifferent to the ethical ramifications of their work product?

Indeed, one approach to understanding the nature of the growing disconnection between and among journalists, sources, subjects, and audiences might be to use the analytical tools of propaganda, social psychology, semantics and, fundamentally, the tools of ethics. Those tools may explain some reasons for and results of the confusion that occurs when journalists—particularly those who espouse objectivity—blur facts, inferences, and value judgments; when we are careless about sourcing; when we make unjustified inferences and assumptions about audiences’ and sources’ knowledge and their expectations of us as information providers and gatekeepers; when we violate any number of common sense semantic principles; when we go about our journalistic business confirming our closed-minded preconceptions about  individuals, institutions, and events; when we do journalism with “attitude.”

The moral and ethical ramifications of all this are significant. They are found in our manipulation of sources, subjects, and audiences; in the  fuzziness of our claims about truth and the subtle ways in which we discourage critical thinking; in our simplification of inherently complex stories; in any of a number of ways in which we blur the lines among the media’s foundational but discrete roles of informing, entertaining and persuading.

In short, it seems a good time to revisit the concept of propaganda to ascertain how it is that many of today’s journalists are acting, wittingly or unwittingly, as propagandists, how it is that they have contracted and are spreading that dreaded journalistic and public malaise: the hardening of the articles. 

            The Nature of Propaganda

Ever since Pope Gregory XV launched “The Congregation of Propaganda” in the early 1600s, the concept of propaganda has been evolving. Throughout most of the past several hundred years, the word has had far more negative than positive connotations. As a value-laden enterprise, propaganda has been seen as a tool for political, military, religious, educational, and other institutions—including, most assuredly, the mass media—to exert a heavy-handed impact on public opinion. Whereas most of the pre- to mid-twentieth-century explorations of the topic concluded that propaganda was pernicious and highly manipulative of its weak-minded target audiences (Bernays 1923, 1928; Martin 1929; Catlin 1936; Institute 1937; Lasswell 1947; Doob 1948; Lee 1952; Qualter 1962), most recent work, largely influenced by French social philosopher Jacques Ellul (1964, 1965), has taken a more dispassionate, sophisticated view of the matter (Gordon 1971; Johannesen 1983;  Smith 1989; Pratkanis & Aronson 1991; Combs & Nimmo 1993; Edelstein 1997; and Jowett & O’Donnell 1999).  Current thinking seems to be largely that propaganda is a complex and multi-faceted enterprise, inherent in post-industrial political and media life; that it is employed, consciously or unconsciously, by gatekeepers of every ilk; that it affects perceptions, cognitions, and behavior; that many members of the public—including intellectuals—willingly consume it as they struggle to make sense of and master information; and that some types of individuals are more prone to fall for its allure than are others.

One of the most comprehensive views on propaganda—one that is especially pertinent to this paper’s effort to consider the ethics of contemporary media—is that of Canadian scholar Stanley Cunningham (2000). Drawing from Ellul and many other more recent observers, Cunningham has defined propaganda as a complex phenomenon that poses serious ethical challenges. Propaganda, he said:

comprises a whole family of epistemic disservices abetted mostly (but not entirely) by the media: It plays upon perplexity; it cultivates confusion; it poses as information and knowledge; it generates belief systems and tenacious convictions; it prefers credibility and belief states to knowledge; it supplies ersatz assurances and certainties; it skews perceptions; it systematically disregards superior epistemic values such as truth, understanding and knowledge; it discourages reasoning and a healthy respect for rigor, evidence and procedural safeguards; it promotes the easy acceptance of unexamined belief and supine ignorance. This, in sum, is the quintessential core of propaganda: its utter indifference to superior epistemic values and protocols. (p. 6)

            Propaganda and the News. 

Propagandists and propaganda analysts have known for many years that the most effective means of manipulating public opinion via the news media is not through advertisements and editorials, but, in Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ terms, in slanted news that appears to be straight.  Nearly forty years ago Terrence Qualter (1962) noted that with the growing recognition of the extent to which opinion governs the selection and manner of presentation of news any division between editorial opinion and straightforward presentation of facts on the news pages is an artificial division (pp. 91-92).

 Thus, students hoping to understand contemporary media propaganda better need tools to discern the mind sets and techniques utilized by propagandists. This is easier said than done, however, because many forms of propaganda do not actually reflect the conscientious efforts of the special pleader. Even journalists who fancy themselves as objective in their treatment of news can fall into propagandistic patterns. As John Hohenberg (1969) said:

The temptation is great, under the pressures of daily journalism, to leap to conclusions, to act as an advocate, to make assumptions based on previous experience, to approach a story with preconceived notions of what is likely to happen. To give way to such tendencies is to invite error, slanted copy, and libelous publications for which there is little or no defense. An open mind is the mark of the journalist; the propagandist has made up his mind in advance. (p. 330)

John Merrill (Merrill & Lowenstein 1971) said that journalists act as propagandists whenever they spread their own prejudices, biases, and opinions—whenever they attempt to affect the attitudes of their audiences. They, and others, are manipulative when they use stereotypes to simplify reality or when they present opinion disguised as fact. The process of information selection becomes a propaganda technique, according to Merrill, when a pattern of news selection of a viewpoint is exercised with some consistency. (pp. 188-201)

Merrill maintained that mass media practitioners generate their own propaganda and spread the propaganda of others to a far greater extent than most citizens believe. He referred to journalists as propagandists when they propagate or spread their own prejudices, biases, and opinions; use stereotypes in simplifying reality; present opinion disguised as fact; use  biased attribution; manipulatively employ information selection or card stacking; write misleading headlines;  bias photographs; engage in censorship (which they call “exercising news prerogatives”) through selective control of information to favor a particular viewpoint or editorial position, and deliberately doctor information in order to create a certain impression; constantly repeat certain themes, ideas, and slogans, and rely upon the same persons as sources and subjects; emphasize the negative, selecting targets in line with preexisting dispositions of the audience; appeal irrationally to authorities, to well-known and reputable sources; when they fictionalize, creatively filling the gaps in a story, making up direct quotations, etc. (Merrill & Lowenstein 1971 pp. 221-26)

The conclusion reached by Robert Cirino (1971) is that the great volume of news, the way it must be processed, and the public’s need to make some kind of order out of the chaos of news events, make bias, and therefore propaganda, inevitable. (pp. 134-179) Jacques Ellul (1965), the most influential contemporary propaganda analyst, has implied that propaganda in media may appear and be consumed unconsciously, given how thoroughly those who produce what he calls sociological or integration propaganda are invested in the values and belief systems they promulgate.  Nevertheless, Ellul (1981) concluded that the enterprise as a whole is pernicious and immoral.  He argued that pervasive and potent propaganda that creates a world of fantasy, myth, and delusion is anathema to ethics because: 1) the existence of power in the hands of propagandists does not mean it is right for them to use it (the is/ought problem); 2) propaganda destroys a sense of history and continuity and philosophy so necessary for a moral life; and 3) by supplanting the search for  truth with imposed truth,  propaganda destroys the basis for mutual thoughtful interpersonal communication and thus the essential ingredients of an ethical existence. (Ellul 1981, pp. 159-77; J. Black 2000; Johannesen 1983, p. 116; Combs & Nimmo 1993, p. 202; and Cunningham 1992)

The Open and Closed Mind

      The above depictions of  manipulative media and the manipulated audiences mesh well with Rokeach’s (1960) depiction of the close-minded, dogmatic personality.  In his seminal work, The Open and Closed Mind, Rokeach demonstrated that the basic characteristic defining the extent to which a person’s belief system is open or closed is the extent to which the person can receive, evaluate and act on relevant information received from the outside on its own intrinsic merits, unencumbered by irrelevant factors in the situation arising from within the person or from the outside (p. 57).

In short, closed-minded dogmatists have a heavy reliance upon authority figures, have narrow time perspective, are driven by irrational inner forces, and have little cognitive discrimination among different sets of information, beliefs, and consequent actions by internal self-actualizing forces and less by irrational inner forces; they resist pressures exerted by external sources to evaluate and act in accordance with their wishes; and they distinguish between information received about the “world” and information received about the “source” during communication.

Dogmatists seek out and take comfort in simplified, pat answers that confirm their preexisting prejudices.  They relish polarized and predictable messages about good guys and bad guys, about clear and direct connections between causes and effects.  Nondogmatists value independence and pluralism, and even welcome a bit of dissonance in their communications.  They want to be challenged to think for themselves, rather than have pat explanations jammed down their throats. (Rokeach 1954, 1960, 1964)

      By definition, then, closed-minded dogmatists would appear not only to be made-to-order propagandees, but would have the fundamental cognitive structure permitting if not encouraging them to be propagandists.  Nondogmatic, open-minded individuals, on the other hand, would seem to be relatively immune to propaganda, and, indeed, would be sympathetic to the communicative needs of others to the extent of being conscientious nonpropagandists.

Social psychologists’ insights into open- and closed-mindedness have not been lost on media critics.  For at least the past half-century, one of the dominant themes in media criticism has been the tendency of media to mitigate against open-mindedness.  Gilbert Seldes (1957) expressed fear that the mass media had begun to inculcate in the audience a weakened sense of discrimination, a heightening of stereotypical thinking patterns, a tendency toward conformity and dependence.  In the long run, Seldes argued, the mass media may discourage people from forming independent judgments.  If the mass media are the brakes on the mental and emotional development of their followers, media help make social structures rigid.  “This may help create a people who would accept a dictatorship,” he concluded. (pp. 26, 50-62)

A decade earlier, Harold Lasky (1948) had observed that “the real power of the press comes from the effect of its continuous repetition of an attitude reflected in facts which its readers have no chance to check, or by its ability to surround these facts by an environment of suggestion which, often half-consciously, seeps its way into the mind of the reader and forms his premises for him without his even being aware that they are prejudices to which he has scarcely given a moment of thought.” (p. 670) Likewise, Charles Wright (1959) expressed concern over the potential cognitive damage created by the very function of news reporting and editing:

When news is edited for him, the individual does not have to sift and sort, interpret and evaluate information for himself. He is free to accept or reject prefabricated views about the world around him, as presented by the mass media. But at some point, it can be argued, the consumer of predigested ideas, opinions, and views becomes an ineffectual citizen, less capable of functioning as a rational man. (p. 21)

The mid-century views of Seldes, Lasky, and Wright do not depart radically from the 1922 lamentations of Walter Lippmann concerning the stereotypical pictures in the heads of people, the incomplete reflections of political, economic and social reality from which individuals make choices and public opinion is produced.  If news consumers lack time, opportunity, and inclination to become fully acquainted with one another and with their environment, it is only natural for them to act as Rokeach’s dogmatic, closed-minded individuals—prompted and fulfilled by media whose stock in trade is production of such public opinion-molding propaganda.

            Propaganda Reconsidered

At this juncture propaganda in journalism can be usefully and holistically redefined in terms of the process or the methods used to gather and report, the product or the manifest content of the news, and the motives of the people involved—journalists, sources, and audiences. Propaganda thus describes particular means of producing particular types of mass communication messages, and involves certain traits of the gatekeepers and certain expectations of those receiving those messages. Just as news is a multi-contextual enterprise, so is propaganda in news, and it can be fully appreciated only when process, product and people are taken into consideration.

Propaganda is characterized by at least the following  half-dozen specific techniques:

1.        A heavy or undue reliance on authority figures and spokespersons, rather than empirical validation, to establish its truths or conclusions.

2.        The utilization of unverified and perhaps unverifiable abstract nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and physical representations, rather than empirical validation, to establish its truths, conclusions, or impressions.

3.        A finalistic or fixed view of people, institutions and situations, divided into               broad, all-inclusive categories of in-groups (friends) and out-groups                       (enemies), situations to be accepted or rejected in whole.

4.         A reduction of situations into readily identifiable cause-and-effect relationships, ignoring multiple reasons for events.

5.         A time perspective characterized by an overemphasis or underemphasis on the past, present or future as disconnected periods, rather than a demonstrated consciousness of time flow.

6.        A greater emphasis on conflict than on cooperation among people, institutions, and situations. (J. Black 2000, pp. 22-23)

            This description allows both practitioners and observers of journalism to investigate their own and their news media’s behavior carefully. Journalists slipping into propaganda when their assignment calls for “telling  it straight” can benefit from the above warning signs. Audiences unwilling to accept distorted pictures of reality, simple explanations for complex issues and other propagandistic  perspectives promulgated by journalists should also benefit from the definition. Scholars hoping to assess propaganda in media systematically should find the definition helpful.

To take the process one step further—to work the kinks out of “attitude journalism” and “media propaganda” and to inform both the public who consume such journalism and the media practitioners who produce it—we need to employ a systematic set of tools. Insights and guidelines from the literature of general semantics should prove particularly useful for the task at hand.

                        General Semantics and the Job of Journalism

Many of the speculations of propaganda analysts and most of the empirical findings of belief systems researchers are entirely consistent with the body of knowledge referred to as “general semantics.”  Propaganda analysts, social psychologists and general semanticists are all concerned with how people perceive the world and how they subsequently communicate their perceptions or misperceptions.

Numerous empirical studies of general semantics reinforce many of Alfred Korzybski’s original statements in Science and Sanity, first published in 1933: that unscientific or “Aristotelian” assumptions about language and reality result in semantically inadequate or inappropriate behavior (Korzybski 1948).  Studies of children and adults trained in general semantics principles have demonstrated that semantic awareness results in such diverse achievements as improved perceptual, speaking, reading and writing skills (Berger 1965, Glorfield 1966, Haney 1962-63, Livingston 1966, Ralph 1972, True 1966, Weaver 1949, Weiss 1959, Westover 1959), generalized intelligence (Haney 1962-63, Steele 1972), decreased prejudice (J. A. Black 1972), decreased dogmatism (J. Black 1974, Goldberg 1965), and decreased rigidity (J. Black 1974).  These studies offer substantive refutation of early criticisms of general semantics as an overly generalized and pedantic system of gross assumptions about language behavior.  From the studies emerge a series of semantic patterns typifying the semantically sophisticated or unsophisticated individual (many general semanticists refer to “sane” or “un-sane” behaviors, but those terms are fraught with semantic difficulties!).  The patterns  are highly reflective of Rokeach’s typologies of the open-minded or close-minded individual and of propaganda analysts’ descriptions of the nonpropagandistic or propagandistic individual.

Korzybski argued that prescientific structural assumptions, primitive metaphysics and outmoded semantic orientations underlie the language and accompanying semantic reactions of those whose labors are futile and unproductive, and that structurally more adequate and more flexible assumptions underlie the language and accompanying semantic reaction of those who are making signal progress in their fields.  His criticisms of the Aristotelian, or, as he noted, Indo-European language structure have been summarized by S. I. Hayakawa (1948):

1.        The traditional structure of language, involving the so-called “is of identity,” tends to obscure the difference between words and things.  The traditional philosophical quest in the history of Western science has been to seek to “define” the essence of things.  This is seen in the “natural logic” of unreflective persons who feel that when a thing is named, one has discovered all one needs to know about it.

2.         Traditional language structure (and accompanying semantic reactions) divides the indivisible into discreet entities—often obscuring or totally concealing functional relationships.  The divisions of “substance” and “form,” of “body” and “mind,” of “cause” and “effect,” of “actor” and “act,” of “reason” and “emotion,” of “space” and “time,” etc. Korzybski called elementalism.  He advocated in their place “non-elementalistic” terms and orientations, especially in those areas of contemporary thought which he saw as stalemated by elementalistic structures.

3.        Traditional language structure (and accompanying semantic reactions) tend to be two-valued: propositions have to be either “true” or “false,” specified ways of behaving are either “right” or “wrong,” etc.  Internalized, this language structure results in two-valued, “black-and-white” behavior patterns.  Korzybski proposed in place of this orientation an infinite-valued orientation, based on the internalizing of modern probability logics. 

4.        Traditional Aristotelian language structure (and accompanying semantic reactions) tends to ignore a fundamental fact of the functioning of the human nervous system, namely, that we abstract at an indefinite number of levels. Thus, care must be taken when we move between and among lower levels of abstractions such as descriptions and statements of fact, and higher order abstractions such as inferences and value judgments. (pp. 225-30) 

                        Some Semantic Tools

What is the well-meaning journalist to do with these insights? Let me suggest a set of journalistic behaviors that follow logically from principles of general semantics and reflect the concerns of propaganda analysts and social psychologists. The “behaviors,” as suggested earlier, address not only the process of gathering and reporting, but the news product, and the relationship of both to the concerns of the people who rely upon journalists to help them make sense of the world.

1) Problem: the blurring of abstraction levels. Problems arise when we jump  among different levels of abstraction, when we leave the impression that “that’s the way it is,” when we draw inferences and value judgments without sharing with our readers and viewers the hard data we used to move to those higher levels of abstraction. Remember the story of old Henry Chapman and the sleazy tax preparer? It had plenty of detail, but abruptly jumped to the inferential and judgmental levels. Clever writing? Perhaps. Appropriate for a news feature? Maybe not. Additionally problematic is the trend David Ignatius (“Just the facts?” 1999, p. 27) cites when faulting journalists for having reached premature conclusions, sometimes even before initiating their actual reporting chores. This, too, is a problem of abstraction: Journalists, like scientists, should not be overly prescient. They can begin their assignments with some sort of hypothesis, but the actual reporting should constitute truth mining and hypothesis testing, not selective gathering and sharing of data that merely support the journalists’ speculations and preconceptions.

            Alternative: We should know the differences among objects, statements of fact, inferences and value judgments. We must remember that abstraction is the inevitable process of narrowing and reducing data from the real world and from our ability to observe it, and we should be aware of what we are leaving out and what we are adding.  Statements of fact can be verified by impersonal means and are used to apply to particular persons or situations at a particular time at a particular place (Berger 1965, p. 2). Inferences and value judgments may, but do not necessarily, emerge from statements of fact. We do well to  tell what someone or something “does” rather than what it “is.” We should encourage our readers and viewers to draw their own conclusions rather than doing all their thinking for them.  When we do draw conclusions—traditionally permissible in editorials and news analyses, but not in straight news stories, and problematic in feature stories—those conclusions are based on verifiable evidence that we share with our audiences. For an excellent discussion of how this plays out in investigative journalism, see Ettema and Glasser’s Custodians of Conscience 1998 who show us that morally sensitive investigative journalists are acutely aware of the impact their editorial decisions have on readers and viewers . . . and public policy. Our order of abstraction should move progressively and cautiously from fact to description, to inference, to value judgment; we show our evidence so audiences can follow the same logical pattern. As David Ignatius (1999) explains in The Washington Monthly, journalists would do well to follow the 1950s advice of J. Russell Wiggins, who said that “The reader deserves one clean shot at the facts.” Ignatius said, “That may be a good motto for the new, new journalism. Don’t tell people what to think. Present readers with information, as cleanly and clearly stated as possible, along with context that gives them a chance to make up their own minds what it means.” (p. 26)  For instance, when considering the St. Petersburg Times’s news coverage of the city’s mayoral candidates, we do well to attend to the dramatic differences in its “just the facts” introduction of favored candidate Rick Baker and its demonization of Kathleen Ford.

2) Problem: the tendencies toward “allness.” Problems arise when we act as though we have seen all we need to see, have described all we need to describe, and have concluded all we need to conclude. Shame on Walter Cronkite, reportedly the most trusted man in America, who wrapped up every night’s broadcast with his “allness” statement: “That’s the way it is.” Semantically unsophisticated writing is replete with terms such as “all,” “every,” “none,” “never,” “nobody,” “everybody,” “unanimous,” “absolutely,”  “positively,” “forever,” “always,” “finally,” etc.  The writing appears dogmatic, as though all the evidence is in and has been duly considered, as though people, situations, and problems are generally alike in most respects. We ask absolute and simplistic questions that encourage absolute and simplistic answers. We make unqualified predictions based on what we pass off as complete evidence.

Alternative: Be conscious of “etcetera,” that while our descriptions may be adequate, they are not complete: We can never see or say everything that needs to be seen or said about an individual or situation, so should we not pretend we are doing otherwise. Our writing is characterized by “etc.” terms. We note that there may be exceptions to generalizations, that “perhaps,” “some,” “several,” “sometimes,” “however,” “on the other hand,” “maybe,” “not always,” “usually,” “generally,” “often,” “most,” “majority,” “plurality,” “minority,” “indefinitely,” and other such qualifying words more adequately describe the situation/person/problem. The journalistic dialogue encourages statements of theory and hypotheses rather than absolute law. We have what James Fallows (“Just the facts?” 1999, p. 28) calls the marks of great reporters: boundless curiosity, a desire to find out all there is to know.  Humility and ethics require that we do not leave the impression that we have exhausted the territory.

3) Problem: the “two-valued orientation.” Semantic and ethical problems arise when we divide the world into mutually exclusive, polarized opposites. Two-valued journalists write that “on the one hand . . . on the other hand”; they seek out spokespersons who confirm these perceptions of mutual exclusivity; their adjectives describe stereotypical types, such as “hot/cold,” “tall/short,” “black/white,” “liberal/ conservative.” What are we to make of the “conversational and measured” oratory of one candidate  vis-à-vis the “abrasive and dismissive” oratory of the other?  Remember the letter to the editor that excoriated the St. Petersburg Times for its political bias in covering Jesse Jackson and John Ashcroft? To hold and to propagate such a two-valued view demands that belief-discrepant information be avoided or downplayed, dissonance quickly reduced. It also suggests that a possible byproduct of articlesclerosis is a cognitive clot.

Alternative:  To demonstrate a multi-valued orientation, the use of “etcetera” is helpful. It reminds us that persons and situations are rarely two-valued; that propositions do not have to be either “true” or “false”; that specified ways of behaving do not have to be either “right” or “wrong,” “black” or “white,” that continuum-thinking and an infinite-valued orientation are more intellectually  honest ways to perceive and communicate about the world than an Aristotelian two-valued orientation. Hyphens rather than “either/or,” are the stylistic tool of choice to describe mind-body, secular-religious, and other relationships.

4) Problem: the “is of identity.” When we ask “What is?“ or “Who is?” the answers  may make us appear unconscious of myriad individual differences among individuals, situations, problems, etc. “Truth claims” can emerge from observation and scientific evidence or from unverifiable bases such as faith, aesthetics or philosophy. Problems arise when we do not recognize which is which. When “to be” verbs are used as  equal signs they suggest that language is equated to reality (Candidate Baker is  yada yada; candidate Ford is yada yada).

Alternative: Use verbs of “non-identity.” Separate nouns with qualifying verbs; instead of saying what someone is, we should at least think, if not write, what someone “may be classified as,” “goes by the name of,” “is referred to as,” “calls himself/herself/itself/themselves,” “so-called,” or any other terms that answer the question “How do you classify?” Do whatever it takes to differentiate among people, situations and problems. Details are the tools of choice here—details that are observed by open-minded reporters.

5) Problem: the “is of predication.” When we use “to be” verbs between nouns and adjectives, or when we carelessly employ adjectives to affirm qualities, we may be assuming falsely that everyone else sees the qualities the same way we do. Consider Fred’s Garage, “a gritty place where customers are more likely to have a bag of weed and a six-pack than $6 million.” And consider our mayoral candidates . . . are they really the sum total of the adjectives and adverbs chosen to describe them? The “is of predication” problem arises when we ignore our own selectivity processes.  Ultimately, our language reveals more about our own biases than it does about the persons or objects we are describing, and we may unconsciously project our biases onto our audiences. The result is the sort of propaganda that gives rise to our credibility crisis.

Alternative:  Be conscious of our selectivity and projections by qualifying problematic noun/adjective relationships; use “to me,” or “according to . . .” or “in . . . opinion,” or “from . . . point of view,” or “as . . . sees it,” or “perhaps,” or “one school of thought is,” or “possibly.” Competent journalists not only use these constructs in their own conclusions, but they ask questions in such a way that interviewees are encouraged to use them also. Instead of asking “What is . . . ?” the journalist asks “What do you think is . . . ?” The news stories then reflect both the journalists’ and their sources’ consciousness of projection.

6) Problem:  being time-bound. The time-bound, ahistorical journalist apparently fails to understand or appreciate the interconnectedness of time and development, the interrelationship of past, present and future. Such a journalist dwells on the past, fixates narrowly on the present, or dreams idly of the future. Some manifestations of this trait: When we are fixated on the past—as, for instance, when we dredge up ancient and often petty and perhaps irrelevant incidents from a public figure’s past —new news is not really news unless it resembles old news, making it more understandable and predictable. When we are breathlessly fixated on the present, breaking stories on deadline, our reporting may be devoid of context. When we are fixated on the future there’s little value in taking note of precedents—prognostication is the coin of the realm.

Alternative: Change is the constant companion for the semantically sophisticated, time-binding journalist. To such a journalist, life is gestalt: Anything is the cause and result of everything. In  “world of changes” thinking, curiosity is the journalist’s most useful tool.

            Conclusions: The Ethical Challenge

The preceding is a truncated application of a half-dozen principles of general semantics. Numerous other guidelines could be drawn from the general semantics literature and tied to insights from propaganda analysts and belief systems researchers. But for the task at hand—to suggest some ways journalists can do a better job of gathering and reporting the news and connecting with audiences—this list should suffice for starters.

Journalists focusing on these principles should find themselves also thinking about ethics. Ethics has to do with working through our owes/oughts/obligations; with conscientious use of power; with fulfilling duties such as truthtelling, minimizing harm, remaining independent of forces that would corrupt the enterprise, and holding ourselves accountable; with seeking the greatest good; andwith being virtuous. It follows that journalists who recognize and seek to fulfill the implied contract between themselves and their audience will want to take the high road. They will want to avoid being propagandists; they will attempt to remain open-minded; they will be semantically sophisticated. Our audiences should expect no less from us.

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