Prof. Robert Jensen speaks with Darley

Q1. What’s wrong with contemporary mass media & what should we be asking from them?

I think everybody says the media sucks, the media is bad, I hate the media. These things circulate all over in the US, no matter what side of the fence you are on - on the right or left. Everybody has got complaints about the media, but vague complaints like that aren’t particularly useful. The question is "Why are our media bad?", which means you have to articulate criteria on which you are going to evaluate the media. So the fundamental question is "What do citizens need or want from mass media in a democracy?". That is, what do citizens need so that they can make good on citizenship and actually participate and not simply be sheep? That is the question, and I think that you can really articulate three main things that people need from news media in a complex industrial society like our own.

The first thing people need is an independent source of factual information. By independent, I mean independent of other centers of power, so that your needed information doesn’t simply come from your government, or doesn’t come from corporations, the two main power centers in the world we live in. So you need a reliable supply of factual information. But that is not enough, because everybody understands that facts in and of themselves, random facts, have no particular value. You need a context in which to understand them, historical, political and social. So journalists, while not being historians, who are going to write a book everyday, do need to provide some context for the facts they are reporting. The third thing I think we need from journalists, is to express or to give space for the expression of the widest possible range of opinion in the culture, because everyone understands that the process of belief formation involves rubbing up against other people’s ideas. You don’t figure out what you believe by going into a room by yourself and pondering. Most of us figure out what we believe by engaging other people in their arguments. So those are the three criteria in which I would evaluate news media in a democracy.

I think that the American news media fails routinely on all three of those, and the place where you see that failure most profoundly is in coverage in general of foreign policy, but specially coverage of foreign policy and foreign affairs that involves militarism, military activity, the US going to war. It is at war time that you see the absolute failure of American journalism, and I think there are a couple of basic reasons for that. One is that we are The Empire. I think it’s important to start understanding America as an empire, and now as the empire. And you may want to ask the question, what does one expect from people in the heart of the empire? Empires aren’t based on dissent and critical activities. Empires are based on power and power operates to enhance conformity. So from the intellectual institutions of an empire, and the main intellectual institutions I am talking about are basically the academy and journalism – the places where knowledge is produced and disseminated – it is hardly surprising that both of those are sites of high ideological conformity to the goals of the empire. You don’t advance in journalism and you don’t advance in the academy by being a critic and a dissenter. It doesn’t mean the institutions shut out everybody who is critical. It means that those people who tend to advance are going to be those who conform to the demands of power. This is not surprising. It is hardly idiosyncratic to the United Sates. I am sure that if you look closely at nineteenth century Britain, at the height of the empire you would find basically the same kind of configurations. In the United States that ideological conformity, which you would expect in any great power, especially in an empire, is enhanced I think, by a couple of other things. One is the nature of media ownership which is now highly concentrated and completely commercialized. That is, the vast majority of people get the vast majority of their information from commercial entities. And those commercial entities are almost always organized around corporate hierarchies. Those institutions have their own interests. And their main interest is in seeing the existing system continued. So again, it is hardly surprising that journalists who come out of a corporate setting, are in some ways connected to, wedded to, the existing system of power. Again, it doesn’t mean that no critical journalism is allowed, what it means is that the basic tenets of the system, the naturalness of capitalism, the appropriateness of corporate hierarchies, the sort of willingness to just subordinate yourself to authority, that is so taken for granted in this culture, that despite all the rhetoric of freedom is a culture that highly encourages subordination to power. It is hardly surprising that out of those institutions you would get that orientation, you would expect it. In fact it would be dramatic if it weren’t the case. And it is the case.

The second one is the professional journalism routines that have evolved over time. As the United States moved originally from really a press connected to the freedom struggle, or at least the freedom of certain people in the culture, into a partisan press, into a penny press - the evolution of American journalism has taken us to a point where journalistic practices, journalistic routines, that is, the way in which day to day journalists go about assembling, writing, producing and distributing stories, has been collapsed into a set of what we call 'objectivity norms' or routines. And the thing about objectivity norms, it is crucial to understand, is they inherently, as they exist today in American journalism, they inherently privilege power. That is, they take as trustworthy and credible sources of information to be those centers of power. So if you look at a report on anything that has to do with American foreign policy, the main sources of information are going to be the White House, the State Department, and the corporate supported think-tanks that are basically in-line with those other two institutions. That’s the picture of the world that emerges, because those are the people that are deemed to be credible and trustworthy sources. You can have dissenting information sometimes included in a story, but it is going to be marginalized, it is going to be dissent from what it is accepted as the obvious way to view the world. Those objectivity routines and norms privilege power, and therefore in combination with the institutional structures, the business plan of journalism, corporate capitalism, the objectivity routines, and the ideological conformity that goes on in the culture, what do you get? You get a press that is fundamentally unable to fully inform citizens about policy.

Q2. What has happened to journalism since 9/11 and how is the mass media handling the runup to the attack on Iraq?

Let's look at the post 9/11 American landscape.

Never before, even in my life, I've seen some pretty dramatic examples of subordination of journalism to power. Take the “91” Gulf War, an extraordinary capitulation on the part of American journalism. But that doesn't even touch what happened after September 11th. After September 11th, any space in the mainstream for dissent was pretty much shut down. Some of us were allowed in at the margins in brief appearances, but for the most part after September 11th, the wave of hyper-patriotism and the way in which the Bush administration very cynically manipulated that sense of patriotism and manipulated people's fear and anger and grief and revenge, right. To further constrain the arena for debate was really quite phenomenal. It was probably one of the greatest public relations coups of my lifetime. I mean, I'll give the Bush administration credit. They're extremely skillful at manipulating public opinion, but not only that but creating a very narrow and constricting range for discourse. Journalist's were part of that, they were integral to that. The main thing you need from journalism which is to stand-up and be independent and critical, was simply, that ground was ceded by the press. There were a few people in the press who dared to speak, they were routinely swatted down. Those of us from movements who were allowed in occasionally were treated basically as a freak show, the standard way that you allow dissent while marginalizing it, ok. Journalist's themselves should have been asking the the critical questions. Now, those critical questions were being asked by journalist's, but none of them were in the United States for the most part, with the exception of a few alternative journalist's. The critical questions about what's really going on in Afghanistan, is this really a war that's going to effect terrorism, right? Is it really a war that's going to stop terrorism? Or is it about the US designs on controlling the energy rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia? Those questions are being asked all the time by journalists in Britain, by journalist's on the sub-continent.

You could read, even if you were limited only to the english language press, with the internet, you could read these questions being examined all over the world with exception of the United States. And I think that is continuing as the United States plans its' war against Iraq. Take a simple factor, the United States government has put forth 3 reasons why we should attack Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, terrorist's ties between Iraq and al Qaeda and the need to, and the human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein. All of those have merit, they're all issues we should examine. Weapons of mass destruction are in fact a threat to the region, not only Iraq's but many other nations. Terrorism is a serious problem and we should be thinking intelligently on how to end it. And certainly the liberation of the Iraq people from a thug-like dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is an important issue. But none of those issues are really what an American war is going to be about. It's going to be about oil, not just simple control of Iraq oil, but the construction of a system in the middle east that the United States has been engaged in since the end of world war II. That gives the United States effective control over the flow of oil and the flow of oil profits. Because control over the flow of oil is control over the world economy and the United States has made it clear since 1945 that that is the goal. Now, the rest of the world knows this and the rest of the world is talking about it. So, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, actually in front of a town hall meeting that was being conducted by a journalist said, “it was nonsense” he said, “that anyone could think oil had anything to do with the US plan in Iraq. “Nonsense” he said, “it literally has nothing to do with it.” That's roughly equivalent to saying that the sun is going to rise in the west tomorrow. It's just an obvious lie, ok. Now, the journalist doesn't challenge him, and in fact journalist's haven't challenged them. But it's an obvious point, would the US even be concerned about the middle east if not for oil? Would we have tens and thousands of troops on the border of Iraq? Would we have aircraft carriers stationed ready to? No, of course we wouldn't give a rip about the people of Iraq. I'm not saying that we shouldn't, we should care about people in their situations all over the world. But the fact that the US government and the power interests it represents wouldn't care. So, obviously it's about oil, it's the one thing the the US journalist's should be exploring, examining and asking critical questions about and it's the one thing that is virtually off the table as an issue.

Q3. How is the media itself being manipulated, especially since 9/11, and now prior to Iraq?

Here the media - and I wouldn’t constrain this just to journalism, but to the mass media generally (television, the film industry) - all of them are sort of preparing Americans for war.

Some of it is just outrageous and obvious. VH-1, the video channel on American cable television, actually produced a series called 'Military Diaries', and what they did was they gave small video-cams to service people in Afghanistan and that theater. They taped their everyday activities. And these were presented as letters from the troops to the folks back home. The whole thing was an one consistent advertisement for the military.

You look at movies like 'Blackhawk Down', a very popular feature film last year. Probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen just in technical film terms. But it was basically an hour-and-a-half ad for the American military. It asked no critical questions about what the US military was doing, in that case in Somalia. It accepted the American government’s version of events and treated it as a heroic activity.

Well, historically, entertainment media have been used that way, to sort of pulverize people’s critical sensibilities and get them to believe that military activity is always a grand expedition in which we participate. This is often condensed into the phrase “We should thank the service people for fighting for our freedom.”

Well, if you look at our post-World War II American military activities, it is clear that we have never fought for anybody’s freedom. We have fought to deprive people of freedom, the freedom for them to choose their own course of development. That is what the Vietnam War was about, that is what the US intervention is Latin America is about. Its not about our freedom; it’s not about anybody’s freedom. So when somebody says “I am in the service, and I am fighting for your freedom”, no one has fought for America’s freedom.

America’s freedom has not been threatened. What has been threatened are the elite interests of certain folks in the corporate sector around the world, and the American military has fought to protect those interests. But if you repeat over and over again in the news and entertainment that America’s fighting men and women are fighting for our freedom, it becomes almost a mantra. And it’s patently false.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I think the people in the service are moral monsters who should be denigrated. People join the service for all sorts of reasons, and I think that we should try to have empathy and understand why they are in the service. But the fact is that the military establishment of the United States is an instrument of control and domination in the interests of a very small portion of the American elite, not for you and me and other citizens.

That kind of preparation for war goes on all the time in the American media, and it is contrary to the American spirit. It is propaganda. It not what I think decent people in a society should strive for. We should strive for engagement and debate, not propaganda.

Q4. How does the US see itself in the world - purely as a force of good?

This notion that there’s a new sort of ‘humanitarian’ intervention in the world today, that the United States sort of went through some sort of sea change in the 1990’s and now instead of a Cold War, where the United States is battling for its interests around the world, now we go forward with a new kind of nobility and benevolence. It’s an interesting theory, it’s unfortunately contrary to fact.

The US intervention in Somalia was mostly a public relations game, and in fact if you look at the actual history of US intervention in Somalia, we did more harm than we did good. First of all, we wouldn’t operate under the UN regime, so we were kind of like a cowboy element. I think the history bears out we did more to disrupt Somalia than to help anybody.

Kosovo. The US intervention in Kosovo was just a flat out, you know, series of atrocities. The US intervention, the bombing was basically manufactured by the United States by creating conditions that the Serbs couldn’t accept, and then the beginning of the bombing unleashed just what everybody predicted it would unleash; a massive refugee flow, and Serb atrocities against the Kosovar Albanians. Those did happen, but they happened as a predictable result of the US bombing. So the conventional understanding of it actually inverts reality.

Right, well, if people say “well what about Kosovo?” you know, “We did that for humanitarian reasons.” the first thing you have to do is challenge the factual assertions that are underlying that claim. They're just simply not true.

Now, the problem is, the American propaganda system is very strong and at the core of American propaganda is this conception of American exceptionalism; the notion that America is somehow distinct in history, almost outside of history.

The way the story usually gets told is: there were these bad Europeans and they had empires and they went around pillaging the world; the French and the Germans and the British and the Dutch and the Spanish; they were greedy, they were self-interested, as nation states they operated purely out of their own self-interest. But then comes the United States, a new continent, the ‘City on the Hill’ in the more theological version of this, almost touched by God, in fact some people would say directly touched by God, with a new mission to go forward in the world in the interests of peace, democracy, freedom and justice. Americans are sold this bill of goods from literally the earliest stories we hear. The only problem is, it’s contrary to history.

The United States is a nation bathed in blood. It was formed, the material, the land base of the country comes from the only recorded genocide in history I know of that was almost completely successful. By the turn of the 20th century the United States had eliminated about 98% of the indigenous population.

Alright, so the actual nation itself comes out of a holocaust, and yet we tell ourselves that we’re the first benevolent, you know, benign nation in the world. African slavery, the second American holocaust - tens of millions of victims; the rounding up of slaves, the middle passage, plantation life; a huge blood bath, and then the post World War II American genocide and holocaust in the third world; three to four million Southeast Asians, hundreds of thousands of people in Latin America dead, as a direct result of American policy.

The factual record suggests that America is not a benevolent empire, that it is not touched by God, that it is just like every other nation state, and like every other great power and now, like every other empire. It acts in its own self-interest and it creates a rhetorical cover for that, just like the British were carrying the ‘white man’s burden’ and the French had the ‘civilising mission’.

Every great power has a cover story for its atrocities, that’s true of the United States, but that mythology about a different kind of America, the ‘City on a Hill’ is so deeply ingrained, that facts sometimes don’t matter, because people’s frameworks are so set, so deeply in that mythology. How do you combat that? You try to come at it with facts. You try to come at it with different perspectives. But it’s an uphill battle.

Q5. What is the US connection between space exploration, limits, & Manifest Destiny?

This sense of a distinctive American mission in the world, what originally was called ‘Manifest Destiny’, the assertion that we had a right to colonize the American continent has now been expanded into space in really troubling ways. The space program is basically a boondoggle - has been for the last 40 years- to transfer public money to high-tech industries. It’s like the Pentagon, one of the primary functions of NASA is to take money from the public treasury and give it to corporations. It’s a way of covering that transfer.

But there’s something also disturbing about the space program two ways. One is, it’s also increasingly part of the militarization of space. And the one thing all the world has agreed on for a long time is that space should stay for peaceful purposes - that we’ve ruined the globe with military, let’s leave space alone.

Everybody agrees on this except the United States, which now sees it has the technological capacity to both fight wars in space, and fight wars from space, and it’s damned determined that it’s gonna do that.

There’s actually a Defense Department document called ‘Vision 2020’, put out by the Space Command, which articulates this quite clearly and it gives you a reason. The reason, it says, is because conflicts for resources on the globe are going to heighten the tension, so we have to dominate space so we can dominate the globe.

Well, that’s a disaster for the future of the world. Everybody understands it’s a disaster, the United States pursues it anyway. On a more philosophical level, I think this need to explore space is, in a sense the culture running from its problems. The problem is, we don’t understand the concept of limits. What nature teaches is that there are limits to everything, and capitalism is a system which knows no limits and accepts no limits, and the engine of capitalism, this notion of unlimited growth, is an absolutely lunatic idea.

Anyone who understands natural systems knows it can’t be that way. There is no such thing as unlimited growth. Systems are bounded. Our resources are finite. A ten year old can figure that out. But capitalism sort of puts into the public mind a sense of growth, unlimited growth as good and necessary.

So where does that growth come from? Well, it comes by going out into space, as though in space we’re going to solve the problems on the Earth and I think, this is more a speculation about how people think, but when I talk to people I get this sense that people literally do think that technological advances that will allow us to travel in space, will allow us to in some sense leave the Earth behind. In a sense it’s being treated like a throwaway planet, right. You use it up, throw it away and somewhere out there, there will be other solutions.

Well that’s part of an insane belief in technology as a solution to problems that technology has created. But it’s also a very disturbing, I think, break from a traditional human understanding of how we are part of natural systems, part of ecological systems. And the industrial revolution and capitalism, I think, broke that understanding in people’s minds.

So if you go back to a more agrarian, or even back further into the pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer types, people had almost an instinct, a visceral understanding of how we are part of the non-human world, and what the modern era has done is break that, and let us believe that we are outside of the natural world, the non-human world.

I don’t like the word ‘nature’, because ‘nature’ and ‘human’ sets up a very strange dichotomy. There are human and non-human elements to the world, but we are all of the world, we are all of nature. The industrial mind set and capitalism have, I think, sowed the seeds for what quite frankly could be the ultimate degradation of the planet, because we don’t see ourselves as part of it. It has literally become another resource to be used. And when we’ve used up all of Earth, we throw it away and we go to Mars, we go to a new planet, we go to the Moon, we do something. And people's very naïve belief in technological solutions allows them to have what are essentially fantasies & illusions about where the solutions to our problems will come from.

Q6. How do you view the 'oil peak' problem?

This sort of inability to accept limits, you know, is so evident in or relationship to oil, right? I mean, it’s quite clear now, from all of the data, that we have a limited supply of oil, which is almost by definition true. No natural resource is infinite. There are no renewable oil reserves that we know of, so by definition it’s finite, but it’s not just finite in the abstract, it’s finite in the very near term.

Sensible people who are looking at the near term exhaustion of a natural resource on which the entire economy is built, sensible people would start planning, would start saying ‘Ok there have got to be both reductions in the way we consume energy… we can’t continue to consume, because not only is the supply running out of the main fuel now, but the environmental consequences of a high-energy society are now clear and they’re dangerous.

So sensible people would be both trying to figure out how to replace the existing fuel supplies with other fuels, but also how to reduce a high-consumption, high-energy lifestyle, because the ecological survival of the planet clearly depends on it, but in fact the United States is doing exactly the opposite right now, The President of the United States is saying live the lifestyle… at one point his press secretary a year and a half ago, before the 9/11... two years ago, said, when asked if the President thought Americans should start conserving energy, said “No. It is a blessed lifestyle”. Again, this almost theological tenor. “It is a blessed lifestyle”, as if God himself had said “Consume. High-energy lifestyle is the blessed way.”

It’s insane! It’s a culture which has literally gone mad, because it doesn’t understand limits and capitalism is about trying to get people to believe there are no limits, and you see this in all sorts of ways, in I think very profound human ways. It’s a culture that doesn’t know how to accept death anymore. Right? It prolongs life in ways that are insane, because people have this notion of unlimited life. Well, the only thing that’s obvious about life is that it terminates, and that people have long understood how to accept limits.

Look at things like fertility drugs. People can’t accept the limits of the human body and that some human bodies, for various reasons, aren’t capable of reproducing. So you have this bizarre investment in fertility drugs, when you have forty million people in the United States without health insurance. You have thousands and thousands of dollars being spent by people who can’t conceive through natural methods to fertility drugs.

Now I’m not denigrating people who do that, or making fun of them, but there’s a certain kind of wackiness to that, right? Priorities. And I think it’s a lot about the fact that as a culture we’ve been systematically told that we don’t have to accept limits. We don’t have to accept limits on economic growth, we don’t have to accept limits on natural resources, we don’t have to even accept limits on our own bodies. We should be able to do everything. If you don’t like the way you look, go get cosmetic surgery.

It’s a culture which I think has literally gone mad, because it has so divorced itself from the wider world, from the non-human world of which we are a part, and if we don’t start to understand that, we will not long be a part because we will destroy the entire planet.

Edited by AMEdgmon