Media Manufactured Monsters
Manufacturing Monsters is a series of articles from Index on Censorship that explores the process by which monsters are created in the media. Monsters can be anything or anyone. They can be entire races of people, religions, or nations; they can be individuals like celebrities, presidents, or athletes; they can be ethnic groups, ideologies, organizations, movements, or lifestyles; the list goes on.
This monster making process has often destructive consequences. Once monsters are created, you can rationalize committing any number of atrocities against that monster, and commit atrocities, we do. Thus, the monster making process presents an explicit threat to our aim to live in peace and justice, yet we tend to eagerly participate in this process anyway, a process that runs counter to the true interests of our global society.
To understand how we fall into this trap, we must first understand the baiting process going on between the media and its audience. "Mythomaniac editors," pick up on what's out there, spinning stories in such a way as to appeal to their audiences, which most of the time means pandering to their baser instincts, namely, that "primeval public anxiety" of the 'other', the "itinerant bogeyman", the 'monster' lurking outside our door (Petley 71, 41, 74). Once they've sounded that alarm, we can't help but listen-- our survival would seem to depend upon our listening. They lead us into "our dark dream about the intruder," our dark dream about the unheimlich: "The German word unheimlich, the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”" (Petley 56, Freud 20). "Unheimlich, uneasy, eerie, bloodcurdling;" “I feel heimlich, well, free from fear. . . .;" “These pale youths are unheimlich and are brewing heaven knows what mischief” (ibid 21).
These "mythomaniac editors," Roy Greenslade writes in his article 'Monstermania and tabloid antics', "know just what buttons to push" to evoke this feeling in us (Petley 71). They often do so by exploiting our latent prejudices, tensions, and incomplete understandings we have of others in order to ignite fear and stimulate anger, and, in doing so, they make these feelings active and dangerous. These stimulating stories come at a high price, and we pay for them with peace and justice. The primary narrative emotions of these stories-- these hatchet jobs, this gutter journalism-- are fear and anger, two emotions that clearly run counter to our interests of peace and justice. These stories don't rouse us to achieve this higher calling, but steep us in those feelings that oppose it. After all, it was Bertrand Russell who said, 'fear is the parent of cruelty'-- if fear is the parent of cruelty, then manufacturing monsters is the parent of fear.
"The first requirement of media monsters is that they appeal to the prejudices of the majority, that by their acts or, on occasion, simply by their existence, they can be portrayed as separate, different" and in the creation of 'them', the outgroup designator, the media can, without much difficulty, project upon them any number of ingroup insecurities (ibid). In order to manufacture a monster, the media "must show that they pose a threat to our way of life," and from that threat emerges a predatory figure we should not only fear, but destroy for the sake of restoring our own safety (ibid).
This safety, however, is never restored (and, ironically, almost always endangered by its campaigns). There is always some new monster that threatens us according to the media, which should raise suspicions about the legitimacy of a lot of their claims of supposed threats to our way of life. Noam Chomsky touches on this trend in his article, 'States of Concern', when he writes that "the end of the Cold War necessitated new enemies. The conventional techniques for mass mobilization... such as 'JFK's monolithic and ruthless conspiracy' (mentioned during a speech that JFK gave at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on April 27, 1961) was losing its effectiveness... and new enemies were needed" (ibid 44).
According to Chomsky, the media tends to act as a kind of extension of or tool to propagate government policy (and other special interests) in order to gain public consensus, or rather, avoid public dissent. Therefore, when JFK gave his speech, he wasn't so much warning the public about this monolithic and ruthless conspiracy, i.e. communism, as much as he was constructing a narrative for 'every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation' to reproduce in order to fix the threat of communism into the minds of the public. All too often "the media is particularly happy to go along with the government" instead of offering criticism or dissent (ibid 53).
There is always a new monster to terrorize us, because there is always a new policy to peddle, always a new interest to hawk, and always a new product to push. Overtime, some monsters may lose their effectiveness to outrage the public, or fail to elicit the kind of response the media and government want it to, so the media must form new monsters in the public's imagination to achieve its elusive goals. At home, as Chomsky writes in 2000, it was the fear of crime and "The War on Drugs"; abroad, it was the 'rogue state' and terrorism (ibid 45).
With the gift of hindsight, we can see now how monstrously over-inflated these threats were. These supposed monsters never posed the kind of threat to people that they claim they did, and should serve as a reminder to us that over-inflated threats often indicate ulterior motives.
For instance, Iraq, the primary 'rogue state' in the sights of politicians, private industry, and the media was not harboring nuclear weapons or Osama bin Laden, nor did they produce a single one of the nineteen September Eleventh terrorists. However, nine years of US led war later, which all began with the media manufacturing of the Saddam Hussein Monster that cued public outrage and with it support of the Iraq War, has resulted in an untold amount of loss of life and human misery with the fates of an entire nation placed on hold for generations to come.
As for "The War on Drugs," perhaps no other movement undertaken by US government officials in the history of America has caused as much ruin to the lives of its own citizens than "The War on Drugs," a war, in fact, that couldn't have been legitimized without the collusion of the media. Certainly more devastating than the effects of the drugs and crime itself were the effects that the war on drugs had on America's most impoverished and marginalized communities. Generations of young men were raised in single parent households, and left even more destitute, desperate, and vulnerable to repeat the same fate as their incarcerated parent. And for what you may ask? To protect its citizens from the organic fear of the realistic threat of drugs and crime in their community? No. But to "protect" its citizens from the implanted fear of the unrealistic threat of drugs and crime in their community in order to serve special interests. "The National Criminal Justice Commission concluded" themselves that those fears [of drugs and crime] had little or nothing to do with crime itself" and had everything to do with "'the role of government and private industry in stoking citizen fear,'" using the media as its propagator (ibid).
"Journalists and editors may like to think of themselves as reflecting their audience, but actually they are imagining and constituting them. Fear of genetically modified foods did not spring spontaneously from the public," just like suburban America's fear of crack cocaine did not spring spontaneously from a walk through their gated community's park (Street 52). This fear can only be constituted in an audience that has an underlying prejudice towards, or at least an ignorance about, the monster being depicted in the media, as appears to be the case with the popular monsters presented in the media such as communism, Islam, recreational drug use, or refugees.
The media likes to play to their audience, which means they like "to act, behave, or perform in such a way as to receive as much approval from an audience as they can get, especially the lowest common denominator therein" ("Play to the Crowd"). Thus, they are very reluctant to take the unpopular stance, however true and necessary it may be for the achievement of peace and justice, and they are even more reluctant to challenge their audience. "They merely want to tell you a story that matches with the story you are already telling yourself" ("Why Do We Really Follow the News"). They are very cautious of spinning a tale of a monster that may clash with your own experience with said monster, so it's best that they choose as their monster someone or something you have no experience with at all.
The media relies on a variety of tools to manufacture a monster in the public's imagination, but there is nothing the media relies on more than the audience's own prejudice and ignorance to create monsters. It relies on the fact that you have never lived in a communist or socialist country, and that you don't have an Islamic friend; it relies on the fact that you didn't spend a year volunteering in an inner-city, impoverished community, and that you don't know any refugees; it relies on the fact that your "prejudice and ignorance have not broken down yet in the face of fact" (Petley 73). The media like to choose monsters that "cannot be reached by the public," because if they were easily reachable, our prejudice and ignorance would breakdown, and they'd never succeed in turning them into the monsters they need in order to serve their interests (ibid). If and when they do succeed in creating a monster, they do all they can to keep them out of reach. Stanley Cohen demonstrates this tactic in his article, 'Some thoroughly modern monsters,' when he writes that during a media campaign against the IRA, "Gerry Adams was kept off British television not because of the unlikely prospect that he would convert anyone to the IRA cause, but because there was a possibility that he would seem more human" and undermine their ability manipulate public opinion by, among other methods, appealing to their audience's fear of the unheimlich, which in another sense can mean, "concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others, cf. Geheim [secret]" (Petley 38, Freud 21).
Just as critical to the media's success in manufacturing a monster is the false belief, nested somewhere deep within the vastness of the public's prejudice and ignorance, that our actions are somehow reflective of the type of person we are (and will always be), and are not reflective of the type of environment we grew up in or are living in now. For instance, "The War on Drugs" media and political campaign will never concede that drug use and crime are a product of poor social conditions. Perhaps this is because the media's audience, "the American people, utterly reject the utopian presumptions that see man as a creature of his material environment--" and believe instead that the individual "is the one and only factor responsible for his or her destiny in the 'Land of opportunity'" (Jones and Mauer 39). Or perhaps this is because the media never tells them any better. Criminals and drug users, and, for all intents and purposes, any media-manufactured-monster, are not "the product of fashion, situation, setting, opportunity or chance, but always express the essence of the type of person they are and always will be"... "they cannot be redeemed" (Petley 40, 70). If we were to take the uncomfortable position and confront the fact that we could've been just like them-- a drug-user, a criminal, a Nazi, an ISIS terrorist-- had we been raised in the same environment under the same conditions, these "offenders" would become glaringly more human and cease to be monsters. The social conditions that created the "offenders" would overthrow them as the rightful heir to the throne, Monster. But this "philosophy holds that government can usher in an era of prosperity and virtue through expensive social programs," which, one can imagine, flies in the face of special interests who would see their budgets, revenues, subsidies, etc. funneled into social programs that would actually serve the public’s true interests for peace and justice and not their private interests (Jones and Mauer 39).
Chiefly, the manufacturing of monsters must be understood as a process used to push an agenda, whatever that agenda maybe; "such ideas" as Chomsky writes "are only fit for internal planning documents, not the general public," but it is not always so difficult to discern why someone or something has been turned into a monster, or who stands to benefit from turning them into a monster (Petley 44). The motive may be to generate an audience for profit. The motive may be to distract, to pit ourselves against each other so we don't pay attention to the real monsters behind our problems. The motive may be to create solidarity between the country and its leadership, to boast, for instance, approval ratings. The motive may be to preserve existing power structures by 'whipping up resistance' for anything perceived to pose a threat to that existing power structure, such was the case when,
"In 1993-94, as the Clinton administration moved to establish federally guaranteed medical coverage for all Americans, the Medical-Industrial Complex (M-I-C) went into high gear in an effort to defeat the legislation and protect its highly profitable status quo. In a colossal public relations blitz, calculated to turn public opinion against universal health insurance, more than one hundred fifty million dollars was spent by an alliance of vested interests" (Ewen 30).
Sometimes these media monster campaigns are so successful that they "wipe out any possibility of dissent and... rational disagreement... so that the public immediately equates" "even the least understanding, compassion," or support for the monster as "bad, mad, or both," (Andrews 94, Petley 70). As a result, dissent becomes just as much of a threat as the monster itself, which has particularly devastating consequences when the thing that has been turned into a monster is quite literally in the best interest of the society, like free healthcare or free education.
In order to prevent the media from frustrating our pursuit of truth, peace, and justice, we must root out our prejudice, and educate our ignorance, so our opinions and thus our actions cannot be manipulated. To do so, we must frustrate the media's ability to exploit our feelings of the unheimlich, and the best way to do this is to identify what gives us the feeling of the unheimlich and seek to transform it into the heimlich. So if Islam makes you feel a mix of fear and dread, go to a library and find out everything there is to know about Islam, or, better yet, just go to a mosque and encounter Muslims for yourself.
There is often times "a wall of anger, of hatred and of ignorance that separates us," a wall that media propaganda erects when they make a monster; that wall serves the dual purpose of alienating that monster as well as keeping it out ("How Can Tourism..."). As a result, it is hard to bring ourselves to encounter the monster; it takes courage to tear down the wall once it's erected, because, among other things, you risk letting the monster in to your heimlich space, but how much of this anger, hatred, prejudice, and ignorance could be reversed and broken down, if we merely acquainted ourselves with the monster. Connecting with people, ideas, etc. and understanding them is the best way to break down these walls, and a lot of these walls would've never been erected between us and them if media simply changed their narrative from one that manufactures monsters, fear and anger-- one that is conducive to conflict and hostile to peace-- to one that manufactures heroes by inspiring hope and love-- one that is conducive to peace and hostile to conflict.
Andrews, Molly. Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. eBook.
Ewen, Stuart. PR: A Social History of Spin. New York: Perseus Books Group, 1996. eBook.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.
"How Can Tourism Promote Peace In The Mid." TED Radio Hour. NPR. 22 Apr. 2016. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.
Jones, Sabrina, and Marc Mauer. Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press, 2013. Print.
Petley, Julian. ed. "Manufacturing monsters." Index on Censorship 29.196 (2000): 36-85. Print.
"Play to the Crowd." Idiom. The Free Dictionary. n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2016. <http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/crowd>.
Street, John. Mass Media, Politics and Democracy. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
"Why Do We Really Follow the News." Freakonomics. NPR. 5 Aug. 2015. Web. 23 Sept. 2016. <http://freakonomics.com/podcast/113127/>.
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