In an article published in the New York Times Magazine a few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, the author of several investigations into White House communications after 2000 and a former op-ed columnist on the Wall Street Journal described a conversation he had with one of George W. Bush’s aides in the summer of 2002.
“We’re An Empire … And We Create Our Own Reality”
The aide, who had not liked the article about Bush’s former communications director Karen Hughes that Suskind had written for Esquire, took him to task in unexpected terms:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.1
These comments from a high-level American political figure (probably Karl Rove) are not just cynical or worthy of a media Machiavelli; they seem to have come from a stage play and not an office in the White Office. They do not just raise a political or diplomatic problem. They are not just a new version of the old dilemmas that have always haunted the corridors of power or of the debates between pragmatists and idealists, realists and moralists, hawks and doves or, in 2002, between the defenders of international law and those who wanted to resort to force. They reveal a new conception of relations between politics and reality: the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world were turning away not only from Realpolitik but from realism itself, and were beginning to create their own reality, to control appearances, and to promote what might be called a fictional Realpolitik.
Already invested with the supernatural power to heal (or to tend the wounds of a nation damaged by terrorism, as we saw in Chapter 5) that was once attributed to the kings studied by Marc Bloch,2 the American executive was being granted a truly “divine” ability by a White House spin doctor: it would constantly create new “realities” that were inaccessible to reason and observation.
Suskind’s article caused a sensation. Op-ed writers and bloggers seized on the expression “reality-based community,” which spread across the Web—in July 2007, Google picked up over one million references to it. Wikipedia has a page devoted to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism at New York University, “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud member of the reality-based community,’ their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah, right.’)”3
It was a perfect example of what the New York Times executive director Bill Keller defined as an “intellectual scoop”: “When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way, that’s something.”4 In his long commentary on Suskind’s piece, Jay Rosen went so far as to say: “The only piece of political journalism ever to make me cry was Ron Suskind’s article … I felt an immediate kinship with Suskind. Because I could see what he was trying to do: warn us about something that sounded crazy but that was all too real. I could see he was going to fail in that, and I sensed that he knew it too. That’s what made it so sad to read.”
Rosen explained:
Over the last three years, and ever since the adventure in Iraq began, Americans have seen spectacular failures of intelligence, spectacular collapses in the press, spectacular breakdowns in the reality-checks built into government, including the evaporation of oversight in Congress, and the by-passing of the National Security Council, which was created to prevent exactly these events … Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the sense of it with his phrase, “the retreat from empiricism…” A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely.5
The government’s reaction to Suskind’s article was proportional to its impact. According to Eric Boehlert, writing in the webzine Salon: “Bush aides once welcomed reporter Ron Suskind into the White House … Today, Suskind may rank near the top of the administration’s list of least favorite journalists.”6 Interviewed by Boehlert, Suskind argued that these practices represented a break with “a long and venerable tradition in this country.” Asked if these attacks on the press were designed to do away with investigative journalism, he replied:
Absolutely. That’s the whole idea, to sweep away the community of honest brokers in America—both Republicans and Democrats and members of the mainstream press—sweep them away so we’ll be left with a culture and public dialogue based on assertion rather than authenticity, on claim rather than fact. Because when you arrive at that place, then all you have to rely on is perception. And perception as the handmaiden of forceful executive power is the great combination that we’re seeing now in the American polity.7
Paradoxically, it was the far-right commentator Pat Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative which asked, with a certain lucidity:
How did realism become a submerged, almost dissident philosophy amongst American elites, and how did its opposite triumph so completely? Unless one chalks it up simply to the historical caprice of the Bush presidency combined with 9/11, one must consider the motivations of major donors and the myriad factors that determine the acceptable limits of what people in think tanks think. If powerful Americans think differently about the world than they did in the late 1940s and 1950s, an explanation should be sought.8
From Propaganda to Infotainment
The explanation is to be found in American history. The different stages in the history of storytelling and the “fictionalization of history” have been traced in earlier chapters, and their triumph in every domain (marketing, management, the media, political communications) did not emerge ex nihilo in the 1990s. They are a logical continuation of a tradition of brainwashing whose foundations were established at the beginning of the twentieth century by American marketing and “propaganda” theorists. While their methods were very similar to their contemporary alter egos who worked in Communist Russia “agit-prop,” the way they were deliberately used to promote a cynical capitalism allowed them to be much more effective in the long term.
Even though many other factors were involved, the lasting popularity of a book that is now largely forgotten is symptomatic of this mutation. In his Propaganda, Edward Bernays combines the French writer Gustave Le Bon’s ideas about crowd psychology with his uncle Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious.9 He was one of the first to notice how mass brainwashing techniques were to flourish in economic, political, and military communications in the twentieth century. Bernays gives a significant example:
Czechoslovakia officially became a free state on Monday, October 28, 1918, instead of Sunday, October 27, 1918, because Professor Masaryk realized that the people of the world receive more information and would be more receptive to the announcement of the republic’s freedom on a Monday morning than on a Sunday, because the press would have more space to devote to it on Monday morning. Discussing the matter with me before he made the announcement, [President] Professor Masaryk said, “I would be making history for the cables if I changed the date of Czechoslovakia’s birth as a free nation.” Cables make history and so the date was changed. This incident illustrates the importance of technique in the new propaganda.10
In Bernays’ view, there was nothing reprehensible about using propaganda: “Let us make haste to put this fine old word back where it belongs, and restore its dignified significance for the use of our children and our children’s children.”11 It has to be said that, for Bernays, the word refers to a vast, unexplored field. It would later be referred to as “public relations,” and Bernays is regarded as its pioneer.
Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized—the manipulation of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public opinion is organized and focused may be misused. But such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life.12
Throughout the twentieth century, countless works confirmed his cynical observation. In his famous Rape of the Masses, Serge Chakotin mentions a book entitled Feldherr Psychologos (Marshall Psychologos), which was published in Germany in 1922. Its author, Kurt Hesse, was a military man who admired Clausewitz’s theses, and it paints a prophetic portrait of a “Führer” (according to the author, this was the first time the expression had been used). Marshall Psychologos could compensate for the humiliation of Germany’s defeat: “The best quality he has is his speech; it has a full and pure resonance, like a bell, and it reaches the heart of every man … Often he will play his cards like a gambler, and men will say then that he is a consummate politician. But he alone will know that he is merely playing with human souls as on the strings of a piano.”13
“Words, Mr. Bond, are the new weapons,” claims the press magnate in the film Tomorrow Never Dies. Caesar had his legions, and Napoleon had his Grand Army. The magnate has his own divisions: television, the news, magazines. By midnight, he boasts, he will have influenced more people than anyone in history, with the exception of God himself!
There is of course a damning archive of material on propaganda, but restrictions of space mean that it cannot be discussed in any detail here. But, from Edward Louis Bernays to Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, from Viktor Klemperer to Jacques Ellul, and, more recently, Philippe Breton, André Schriffin, and Eric Hazan,14 propaganda has always been seen and criticized as an act, or set of concerted actions, designed to propagate political or ideological contents by using manipulative techniques in various media.15 Bernays, for example, gives what may now look like a rather quaint list: “The printing press and the newspaper, the railway, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes.”16
The new electronic media appeared in the 1990s. CNN was no longer the only news channel; it was joined on the cable networks by channels such as Fox News. The Internet became a means of mass communication, and television, which is still Americans’ main source of news, was gradually absorbed by industry giants like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner, which now play a dominant role in packaging news and covering both news stories and scandals. The new rolling news system encourages an anecdotal version of events, a black and white picture of reality, and helps to blur the boundary between reality and fiction more than ever before.
The Bush administration obviously did not invent this new media environment, which is often referred by the neologism “infotainment.” But it was the first administration to take office after its appearance, and it made brilliant use of it. New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich writes:
The chronicle of how a government told and sold its story is also, inevitably, a chronicle of an American culture that was an all-too-easy mark for the flimflam. The synergistic intersection between that culture and the Bush administration’s narrative is a significant piece of the puzzle. Only an overheated 24/7 infotainment culture that had trivialized the very idea of reality (and, with it, what was once known as “news”) could be so successfully manipulated by those in power.17
Fox News: A Mutation in the History of the Media
“Every morning brings us news from across the globe, yet we are poor in newsworthy stories,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936. “This is because nowadays no event comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing happens that benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one recounts it.”18 Thanks to a strange irony of history, the American channel Fox News seems to have heard Benjamin’s complaint: it does keep its stories free from explanation. It replaces actual facts with stories. Almost nothing that is seen in its programming aids understanding, and almost everything promotes an impoverished account of striking events larded with puerile observations.
Fox News was founded in 1996 by the press magnate Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, who was one of Ronald Reagan’s first spin doctors (in March 2007, he sparked a lively controversy by intentionally confusing Barack Obama, the candidate running for the Democratic primaries, with Osama bin Laden). According to the Project for Excellence’s 2004 report on the news media, Fox News overtook CNN’s audience ratings in 2002. It kept its lead in 2003, gaining over 53 percent of audience ratings and 45 percent of prime-time ratings. During the war in Iraq, its audience ratings shot up and viewing figures for its coverage of the war were higher than CNN’s.
Marketing guru Seth Godin has a very clear idea of the reasons behind Fox’s success: “Roger Ailes understands that he is in the storytelling business and has used that insight to build a multibillion-dollar business.” According to Godin: “The news on television isn’t ‘true.’ It can’t be. There’s too much to say, too many points of view, too many stories to cover. The best a television journalist can hope to do is combine the crowd-pleasing, ad-selling stories on fires and crime with the insightful but less popular stories on world events. And, we hope, to do it without an obvious bias.”19 Fox News, he goes on, took a different approach:
Fox knows that this bias exists in any news organization and has decided to use this unavoidable problem to frame the news in a way that matched the worldview of their target audience. What world-views does this audience share?
•a desire for a consistent story
•a point of view that emphasizes personal responsibility, conservative ethics, and Republican politics
•the appearance of fairness, as opposed to being pandered to…
Every day Fox management sends a memo to all the writers, producers, and on-air talent. The memo outlines the talking points for the day. In other words, it’s the story they intend to tell. By managing the news to fit the story (as opposed to the other way around) Fox develops a point of view; it tells a story that viewers are happy to believe. It gives the audience a lie to tell themselves and, just as important, to share.20
“We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is!” said David Boylan, head of Fox Tampa Bay. His comments are reported by Ron Kaufman, who runs the turnoffyourtv.com website. Kaufman goes on: “This, of course, is so far removed from reality that it is risible … the reporting style is so biased and skewed that trying to find any real information from a news report is quite challenging.”21
The establishment of Fox News does indeed signal a mutation in the history of the media:
Instead of its being a random mix of individual biases, Fox News chose to tell a coherent story, a lie that its viewers can choose to believe … The worldview of the Fox News audience was that they were disrespected by the established media. Suddenly this audience was watching a network that broadcast news that they agreed with. And they were told that they were the mainstream and that the news they were hearing was fair and unbalanced.22
The success of Fox News and its pseudo-journalism attracted a following in the White House. No longer content with influencing the media or bringing pressure to bear on them, the Bush administration created a truly underground structure by using pubic funds to employ fake journalists to produce and spread false news, reviews, reportages, and investigations. As John S. Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, explained in a lecture on the ethics of journalism at the University of Oregon in May 2004:
All across America, there are offices that resemble news rooms, and in those offices there are people who resemble journalists, but they are not engaged in journalism. It is not journalism because it does not regard the reader—or, in the case of broadcasting, the listener or the viewer—as a master to be served. To the contrary, it regards its audience with a cold cynicism. In this realm of pseudo-journalism, the audience is something to be manipulated.23
The growing number of local stations provides this propaganda-news with the perfect outlet. The pre-packaged news stories put out by the American administration were manna from heaven for low-budget channels employing very few staff and broadcasting over very wide areas. To mark the first anniversary of 9/11, a Fox News subsidiary broadcast a moving report about how America was helping to liberate women in Afghanistan: the commentary read by journalists working for local stations was part of the package, but the journalists were unaware that the government had written the text. In September 2005, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a non-partisan arm of Congress—revealed that the government had engaged in “covert propaganda” by paying conservative commentators to defend its educational policy. 24
To take another example: on March 14, 2004, a New York Times journalist revealed that the Department of Health had paid two fake journalists to defend its policy in two commercials. The advertising campaign cost $124 million, but no mention was made of who had paid for the so-called reports. A government spokesman justified the use of fake news in these terms: “Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information campaigns.”25
More seriously still, Frank Rich reported that in 2006 the GAO revealed that:
At NASA and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), political appointees rewrote or censored public documents and agency press releases if they conveyed scientific findings about pollution and global warming that contradicted administration environmental policies. One NASA appointee even enforced the addition of the word theory to any mention of the Big Bang in NASA materials, in keeping with the Christian right’s rejection of evolutionary science.26
That appointee was forced to resign when the press learned that he had invented his degree in journalism. In his film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Al Gore gives several examples of how the scientific truth was travestied in order to promote the obscurantism of a bygone age.
In July 2007, a former Surgeon General corroborated this analysis in testimony before the House of Representatives. The affair hit the headlines and the New York Times reported Richard Carmona as accusing the Bush administration of failing to take scientific criteria into account in its public health decisions. “The administration … would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues.”27 Le Monde reported Carmona as saying that: “Anything that did not fit in with the ideological, religious or political programme of those in power was ignored, marginalized or simply buried.”28
The obscurantism of the fundamentalist Christian right influenced both the Bush administration’s reports and the media, which were being asked to rethink the role of journalists and to abandon the investigative journalism that had been so important at the time of Watergate. Journalists were expected to become reporters who were “embedded” in the world according to George W. Bush, which was a virtual world created by the White House’s storytellers. At a Bush press conference in February 2005, one Jeff Gannon, speaking of the Democrats, asked the president:
“How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?” Liberal bloggers, their curiosity aroused by such blatant partisanship from a reporter, soon discovered that Gannon wouldn’t have known what reality was if it had slapped him in the face. His name was a fake, and he worked for a fake news organization, Talon Web, a Web operation with no known audience and staffed mostly by volunteer Republican activists … The Talon owner, Bobby Eberle, had posted effusive thanks on the Web to both Liddy and Karl Rove for “their assistance, guidance and friendship.”29
According to Frank Rich, Jeff Gannon regularly attended White House briefings. A careful study of the transcripts of the press conferences reveals that “Jeff” was often called upon to create a diversion when journalists asked embarrassing questions about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or about Karl Rove’s possible involvement in leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.30 Even the conservative columnist William Safire, who had always supported George W. Bush’s policies, stated in September 2005 that “the fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before.”31
The manipulation of news also played an essential role in the American occupation of Iraq from 2003 onwards. On December 30, 2005, for instance, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the Pentagon had subcontracted the Lincoln Group to publish fake stories for the Iraqi press in order to distract public opinion away from the real situation. The Group was run by a Briton with no experience of communications and a former Marine. “The operation is designed to mask any connection with the US military … The Lincoln Group’s Iraq staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.”32 The fake stories were reportedly written by members of the American military specializing in “information operations” aimed at the Iraqi press.
Some of the papers labeled the stories as “advertising” to “distinguish them from standard editorial content,” but for the most part these “reports,” which praised the efforts that the US was making to rebuild the country and denounced the insurgents, were described in the Iraqi press as impartial accounts written by independent journalists.
Several sources confirm that American troops were asked to compose storyboards about events in Iraq. They would describe, for example, a raid by American and Iraqi forces on a supposed insurgent stronghold, or an attack that killed Iraqi citizens. The Lincoln Group helped to translate and place the articles. “One of the military officials said that, as part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouth-piece.”33
On November 29, 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went so far as to claim that: “the proliferation of news organizations in Iraq [was] one of the country’s great successes since the ouster of President Saddam Hussein.” Besides its contract with the military in Iraq, in 2006 the Lincoln Group won a major contract (up to $100 million over five years) with Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, Florida, to develop a strategic communications campaign in concert with special operations troops stationed around the world.34
American intervention in Iraq in March 2003 did indeed provide a spectacular illustration of the White House’s desire to “create its own reality” by using all the techniques of fictionalization. Anxious not to repeat the mistakes it had made during the first Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon paid great attention to its communications strategy. The 500 embedded journalists have been widely mentioned, and a great deal of care went into designing the press room in the US forces’ headquarters in Qatar. A storage hangar was reconfigured—at the modest cost of one billion dollars—as an ultramodern TV studio, complete with podium, plasma screens, and a whole electronic arsenal capable of producing real-time combat videos, geographical charts, animated films, and diagrams.
The stage on which US Army spokesman Tommy Franks was to address the press was created by a designer who had worked for Disney, MGM, and TV’s Good Morning America. Since 2001, he had been employed by the White House to design backdrops for the president’s appearances, but there is nothing surprising about that, given the links between the Pentagon and Hollywood. What was more surprising was the Pentagon’s decision to recruit David Blaine to work on the conversion. Blaine is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and the conjuring tricks that allow him to defy the laws of physics by levitating himself or going without food for days while shut in a cage—not that the two are incompatible. In a book published in 2002,35 Blaine described himself as the “Michael Jordan of magic” and claimed to be the heir to Robert-Houdin, the legendary French conjurer who, in the nineteenth century, agreed to go to Algeria on the government’s behalf to help put down a rising by demonstrating that his magic was more powerful than that of the rebels. Whether or not the Pentagon expected Blaine to do the same is not on record, but it was presumably because his talents as an illusionist could be used to create special effects that he was summoned to the White House and then sent to Qatar.
Not all of this surprising—and highly revelatory—news made it on to the front pages of the American press. It was revealed by Frank Rich, who was for a long time a theater critic, in his 2006 study of the triumph of fiction in the management of public affairs. The book, which has already been cited, is subtitled “The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America.” Not the least of this enchanted world’s paradoxes is that it was a theater critic who did so much to help unmask it. Discussing Rich’s book in the New York Review of Books in 2007, Michael Tomasky commented:
Rich is particularly good, in fact, on the question of sets and backdrops, which in its early days the Bush administration used to such Napoleonic effect to lead television viewers toward the desired conclusion. Rich documents the way that Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer who worked for the Republican propaganda machine, created many of the backdrops against which Bush delivered key speeches. It took a special sort of chutzpah in the summer of 2002, during the Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and other scandals, to push Bush in front of a backdrop that said, over and over, “Corporate Responsibility,” or one, at an economic forum in Waco, Texas, that repeated the phrase “Strengthening our economy.”36
It was Sforza who stage-managed Bush’s speech of May 1, 2003, on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Speaking in front of a banner emblazoned with the slogan “Mission Accomplished,” he solemnly announced: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” The stage-management did not end there. The president landed on the carrier in a fighter that had been renamed “Navy One” for the occasion; it bore the inscription “George Bush, Commander in Chief.” He climbed out of the cockpit, draped in combat gear and helmet in hand, as though he had just returned from a mission in some stunning remake of Top Gun. That film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is very familiar with Hollywood–Pentagon joint operations and who produced a reality TV show about the war in Afghanistan called Profiles from the Front Line. Frank Rich reports how the Fox News’s pundit remarked that “This was fantastic theater.” He meant it as a compliment. The Washington Post’s David Broder was “agog” over what he called the president’s “physical posture.”37 Sforza had carefully ensured that the camera angle did not reveal the San Diego skyline less than 40 miles away; the aircraft carrier was supposed to be on the high seas in the combat zone.
But no presidential speech has ever been more stage-managed than that of August 15, 2002, when Bush solemnly spoke about “national security” at Mount Rushmore, where the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln are carved in the rock. During his speech, the cameras were positioned so that Bush was seen in profile, with his face superimposed on those of his famous predecessors.
Three weeks later, recounts Rich, Bush spoke on the first anniversary of 9/11 in order to prepare public opinion for the invasion of Iraq, “the great struggle that tests our strength, and even more so our resolve.” Sforza hired three barges to ferry the presidential entourage to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below with powerful lights. The camera angles were chosen to ensure that the statue served as a backdrop to the president’s speech. Rich cites the specialist Michael Deever, the impresario of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential announcement speech, with its own Statue of Liberty backdrop: “They understand the visuals as well as anybody ever has … They understand that what’s around the head is just as important as the head.”38
It is “what’s around the head” that transforms an image into a legend: “Mission Accomplished,” the founding fathers, the Statue of Liberty… This is iconography for beginners. Inscribed in time, the image becomes a story. But it also has to resonate with the viewer, or in other words establish a dialogue between two moments in history: the moment represented in the image and the real moment of its reception. That is what produces the emotion. Frank Rich calls it “timing”: “Timing, being everything, was at least as important as the visuals. For Americans in 2002, no date could lend more emotional weight to a speech about war than the first anniversary of 9/11. And besides, the country was just back from vacation, ready to focus on big-ticket items.”39
When asked about the choice of date, White House chief of staff Andrew Card did not in fact use that argument; he was much more prosaic: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
The American state’s use of storytelling techniques was obviously not restricted to the White House during the “Bush Jr. years.” As early as 1998, a US Air Force manual on “Psychological Operations” (psychops) claimed that:
There is a growing information infrastructure that transcends industry, the media, and the military, and includes both government and non-government entities. It is characterized by a merging of civilian and military information networks and technologies … In this environment psych-ops are “designed to convey selected information and indicators to foreign traders and audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately their behaviour.”40
As the political scientist Nancy Snow, a professor at California State University, recalls, when Colin Powell was appointed Secretary of State in March 2001, he said: “I’m going to be bringing in people into the public diplomacy function of the department who are going to really … branding foreign policy, branding the department, marketing American values to the world.”41
Three weeks after 9/11, Charlotte Beers was appointed Under-Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. During the 1990s, she ran J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, two of America’s biggest advertising agencies. This was the first time that a marketing professional had been appointed to a post with diplomatic responsibilities and not just to an advisory post. In an interview with Beers on Good Morning America, anchorwoman Diane Sawyer described her as “the woman whose job it is to tell the world who America is and make the Muslim world understand. Talk about a daunting assignment.” 42
In the course of the interview, Beers explained that she wanted to use the resources of the Department of State’s website—one of the most sophisticated in the world—to apply marketing techniques to modern diplomacy, because diplomacy was no longer simply a matter of communicating rationally with governments and elites. It had to market emotions if it wanted to communicate with mass markets around the world: “This is not a reasonable argument we’re engaged in; it includes some emotions.”
In 1999, the Financial Times introduced Charlotte Beers by explaining that she had three obsessions—branding, branding, and branding—and “never stopped talking about it.” She had no political experience, but she did have a solid background in marketing. The woman known as “the steel magnolia of advertising” was “immediately thrust into the media spotlight as head of the administration’s new war on terrorism.” Advertising Age joked that “The State Department which implemented the Monroe doctrine is about to embrace a new doctrine: branding.”43
When challenged about her appointment, Colin Powell had to defend his decision to members of Congress: “Guess what? She got me to buy Uncle Ben’s rice. So there is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something.” The press had a field day with this. She had succeeded in selling the Uncle Ben’s brand to Colin Powell, but could she sell Uncle Sam to the rest of the world? (Beers herself admitted that: “This is the most sophisticated brand assignment I’ve ever had.”)44
According to Charlotte Beers, the Internet explosion had changed the face of political communications:
People who have a story to tell, however negative or terrorist [sic], are emboldened by the possibilities of doing mass communications … And that also includes a very one-dimensional picture of America. So what we have to do is persuade our Congress and our constituencies everywhere in the world that we have to answer this and we have to get into young people’s hearts and minds. We have to broaden these audiences past the elite and governments … And we have to activate every single person who can speak well on behalf of the United States.45
She in fact played the role of a real Secretary for Propaganda, “with emphasis on developing strategies and programs for communicating with Arab and Muslim audiences around the world.”46 For two years, she devoted herself to applying the techniques of branding and storytelling to foreign policy, and to using brochures, commercials and videos to popularize the administration’s version of American values and virtues. She was behind the creation of Radio Free Afghanistan, and at her suggestion the State Department put a few pages online about the lives of Muslims in the United States, complete with stories about happy families and pictures of American mosques. In March 2003, she resigned from her post.
As Nancy Snow wrote: “Madison Avenue, Hollywood and the White House must do their triad campaign, but their storytelling will always be somewhat suspect as manufactured spin that promotes a particular United States policy … The world continues to view us predominantly as a product, not as a country of diverse peoples with dissenting principles.”47
At a press briefing on December 18, 2002, a few months before the start of the war in Iraq, “State Department public diplomacy chief Charlotte Beers extolled the importance of ‘storytelling’ in convincing overseas audiences that the US is only trying to do good.” She cited George W. Bush’s remarks in From Fear to Freedom, which was published by the State Department: “I hope the people of Iraq will remember our history. America has never sought to dominate, never sought to conquer. We have, in fact, sought to liberate and free. Our desire is to help Iraqi citizens find the blessings of liberty within their own culture and their own traditions.”
Beers explained:
“And that’s something we really have to get better at. This is an emotionally laden universe now. It’s not just the facts that are operating in the world now. It’s also something as emotional as terrorists, and violence, and religion, and spiritual issues. So, often now, we turn not just to the facts or the words or even the speaker on camera, but to books and pictures and something that conveys stories.” Several protesters began shouting “You’re selling war and we’re not buying.”48
Two years after his article, Ron Suskind admitted he “didn’t fully comprehend” that Bush’s aide’s comments about the reality-based community got “to the heart of the Bush presidency.” Eric Boehlert commented that Suskind’s article demonstrated “the extent and degree to which Bush and his senior aides are ‘faith-based’ in their decision-making, and disdain those who are ‘reality-based’. It also discusses how Bush allegedly sends special symbolic signals to his evangelical constituency of ‘faith-based’ true believers.” 49
The Bush administration’s propaganda was amplified by publicity campaigns orchestrated by the Christian right and conservatives:
Christian bloggers are part of a growing group of Christian news providers. The Christian Broadcasting Network, home to Pat Robertson’s 700 Clubs, employs more than one thousand people … Evangelicals control six national TV networks and over two thousand religious stations … This well-funded network includes newsletters, think tanks and talk radio as well as cable television news and the Internet. Often in cooperation with the White House, these outlets have launched a systematic campaign to discredit what they refer to disparagingly as “MSM,” for mainstream media.50
The French philosopher Jean Lacroix seems to have foreseen this development in 1946. Writing in the journal Esprit, he remarked that: “Propaganda is not just brainwashing. Truly democratic propaganda does not necessarily go downwards from the government to those who are governed, or from state to nation. It is in fact an expression of the active involvement of the masses in the democratic life of the nation through actions and attitudes.”51 We now know—and this, perhaps, is the Bush administration’s greatest contribution to the recent history of propaganda—that this transversal propaganda does not rule out top-down brainwashing, unless it can be described as progressive … assuming that we are subscribe to Chesterton’s aphorism to the effect that “Apparently, progress means being moved along—by the police.”
In his Propaganda, Edward Bernays reminds us that the Standard Dictionary tells us that “The word was applied to a congregation or society of cardinals for the care and oversight of foreign missions which was instituted at Rome in the year 1627. It was also applied to the College of Propaganda at Rome founded by Pope Urban VIII, for the education of the missionary priests. Hence, in later years, the term came to be applied to any institution or scheme for propagating a doctrine or system.”52 The word “propaganda” comes from the Latin; the gerundive form refers to that element of faith that must be propagated: beliefs, mysteries, the legends of the saints, stories of miracles. It is therefore not a matter of spreading objective knowledge that is rationally available to all, but of converting people to hidden truths that are a question of faith and not reason.
The Bush administration’s use of propaganda therefore constitutes a sort of return to the word’s etymological origins. Propaganda must not simply modify or influence individuals’ opinions: it must influence all their beliefs and their habitus: culture, ideology, and religion. Influencing individual consciousnesses gives way to the interactive and social propagation of a form of belief. George W. Bush happily described it as a “crusade.”
In his second inaugural address of January 20, 2005, Bush celebrated his “democratic” crusade thus: “By our efforts, we have lit a fire—a fire in the hearts of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this fire will reach the darkest corners of our world.”53 He presumably did not know that the phrase, which was suggested to him by Karl Rove, comes, as Slavoj Žižek notes, from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, where it refers to “the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: ‘The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses.’ ”54
The quotation from Dostoyevsky was probably not something that Karl Rove remembered from school. Fire in the Minds of Men is also the title of an essay by the American political scientist and historian James H. Billington, which had been published twenty-five years earlier by the neoconservative Basic Books. The book, which looks at the origins of the French and Russian revolutions, concludes that the revolutionary idea is religious: “Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. [This revolutionary faith] is perhaps the faith of our times.”55
“Today, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists,” Don DeLillo wrote in Harper’s Magazine after 9/11.56 Taken out of context, his formulation may seem ambiguous, but it does not mean that the dominant narrative is that of the terrorists. It means that the world narrative itself has become terroristic. It is a regime of fiction and terror, and it is inscribed within a symbolic field where terrorist-inspired representations and counter-representations clash. The American sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander is saying exactly the same when he asserts that “We need to theorize terrorism … as a particularly gruesome kind of symbolic action in a complex performative field … [and] the American response to that terror [as] a counter-performance that continues to structure the cultural pragmatics of national and international politics today.”57
This analysis defies common sense. Common sense would have it that the decisions made by states, including the United States of America, obey only the logic of strictly rational interests (increasing the profits of American multinationals, securing the country’s hydrocarbon supplies, and so on). The pursuit of those objectives is, however, by no means in conflict with the pragmatics of symbolic actions that take the form of what Peter Sloterdijk calls “thematic epidemics,”58 the only difference being that it is not themes that spread, but useful narratives and effective emotions subject to the effects of the mimetic contagion (or contagious seduction) that Gabriel Tarde described as a “current of imitations.”59 As the American management consultant Lori Silverman puts it, it is now “stories that are ‘like viruses.’ They are contagious.”60
Thanks to the extension of the Internet, cable television, and the increase in the number of blogs, which have become so many relays for viral marketing, these imitative mechanisms are now reinforced by new and reticular forms of communication. Propaganda action therefore no longer targets socio-professional categories, market shares, or segments of the population, but highly contagious places and milieus. In the United States, faith-based communities have become real sources of contagion that spread viral communications by using the new interactive technologies.
When he evoked the fires lit by Russian nihilists, Karl Rove applied Billington’s messianic analysis quite literally: if revolutionaries are believers and if revolutionary faith is the faith of our times, then the faith of the neoconservatives can be revolutionary, and it can reconfigure and convert the real world. That is the real meaning of the American conservative revolution and its faith-based narrative. We thought that the neoconservatives were fighting the “nihilists,” but we have caught them in flagrante: they are guilty of creating legends, and they are trapped in their metaphors. And their narratives are borrowed: the fire really is in the minds of men and not on the roofs of houses.