Features

Photo courtesy of Martha Stewart for the IOP.

Interview w/ IOP Fellow, Ernest James Istook, Jr. conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP/MTS’12.

You’ve titled your study group, “Propaganda in American Politics.” I’m wondering how you define “propaganda.”

The correct definition of propaganda is “information that is designed to influence and sway people’s thinking and actions.” The information that they use for this may be totally false. It may be totally true. It may be true but warped and distorted. The point is that it’s designed to sway people’s thinking in a political fashion.

So I try to make the point that just because something is labeled as propaganda, it doesn’t mean that it’s false information. But it is information that should be treated circumspectly and with an understanding of the purpose behind what is being told to people. I hope that all who participate in this study group will have a healthy skepticism of information that they receive, and will look beyond the surface to understand what agenda is driving a presentation, what are any biases, and that they look to multiple sources for their news and information.

A Pew study from September of 2009 measured Americans’ feelings toward major news outlets. All of the major media outlets – not just the cable news channels – had strikingly different approval ratings depending on the respondent’s partisan affiliation. Is this an accelerating trend? If so, should we worry about it?

In the very first session, I described and used a Power Point presentation to detail the news sources that are typically relied upon by members of Congress and other decision-makers in Washington, D.C. I wanted to convey to students an idea of how politicians intake information, how they process it, manipulate it and regurgitate it in different forms. At the highest levels of government people are constantly doing this intake and analysis and sending back into the media what the politicians believe people should know and think about the events of the day. It is a constant propaganda machine that’s in daily operation, making it important to understand where they get their data and then how they send it back out.

What were those news sources that you discussed?

I printed out a copy, thinking you might like this. Let me just go get it in my office.

[Mr. Istook returned a few minutes later with a printout of his study group presentation.]

…This material relates to the classic question that was posed to Sarah Palin about what newspapers she reads. The very asking of a question like that is outdated because most people who keep up with current events turn to aggregators of news rather than to a single news source. An aggregator will give you information that may come from The New York Times; it may come from The Washington Post; it may come from newspapers or broadcast outlets from Seattle or Miami or Omaha, or other places.
I like Real Clear Politics. I think it does a good job of highlighting important material. There are places like The Drudge Report on the right; there’s The Huffington Post on the left. There are publications such as Congress Daily, National Journal, the Daily Congressional News Briefing, The Note from ABC News, Frontrunner, Hotline – a whole series of these. Most function as aggregators rather than originators of news. It’s not healthy to depend upon one particular news outlet, but you need a way of tapping into multiple sources.

New media allows for the dissemination of information - including propaganda - in a variety of new ways. I’m wondering, though, whether propaganda tactics and techniques are changing as well. In other words, is propaganda today the same as it’s always been, but just delivered in a new format? Or are our public conversations facing new challenges unrelated to technology?

A few years ago, the term you heard used was “spin” and you would talk about “spin doctors,” who are trying to organize information and to channel people’s thinking into certain pathways. We’ve gotten well beyond spin. It is so strong that it needs a stronger term, which propaganda fits. Plus, with a government as complex as ours and a society as complex as ours, just giving straightforward data with no perspective and no context confuses many people more than it informs them. So some level of interpretation and analysis is necessary.

The question is whether media openly admit that they are doing this, or adopt a pretense of claiming that they are being objective when really they are not. In one of our study groups, John Fund [an online columnist for The Wall Street Journal] described it as saying, “You cannot expect media to be objective. You can only expect them to be fair.”

When you look at the political and media landscape, do you see news sources that our notably more propagandistic than others?

Typically, people will attribute conservative tendencies to Fox News and quite liberal tendencies to MSNBC. Now, in my observation, I think MSNBC has a more difficult time being fair. They not only give their perspective but also cast aspersions on the integrity or intelligence of anyone who holds a contrary view. That’s not universally true of MSNBC or of others. But I think in their programming, they go the farthest in that direction. That’s not to say that Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, or others, never disparage people of contrary opinions. It is a real challenge to present news and analysis in a way that both attracts an audience and achieves a fundamental level of fairness.

Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, talked about this in great length in our study group: Media tend to identify an audience to which they wish to appeal; then they tailor their presentation to appeal to the tastes and biases of that audience, sometimes to the extent of treating contrary thought as having no legitimacy whatsoever.

I’m interested in your distinction between MSNBC and Fox in that respect.

They’re not alone. I thought I’d pick them as examples.

Sure. You described MSNBC as less fair than Fox. Is that an impressionistic view, or are you aware of any systematic analysis that could back up your view?

One of our guests, Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University – and a Harvard PhD – has undertaken to provide more statistical analysis of things such as that, which is the reason that we had him here.

I think about those characters that you mentioned – you know, Hannity, Beck, Olbermann, Maddow -
Maddow, Schultz. Yeah. I was on-air a lot of times with Schultz - we had a difficult encounter the last time I was on, so I don’t know if he’d want to have me on again.

Oh, how did that go?

It’s on YouTube. Give me an email, I’ll send you a link. [The link is http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jack-coleman/2010/03/29/heritages-ernest-istook-again-runs-circles-around-exasperated-ed-schul]

Sure. You know, it’s interesting that you mentioned those folks. To my mind, none of them are even trying to be fair. They might think of themselves as serious news figures, but by no stretch of the imagination do they exhibit the sort of fairness and competence we would expect from serious journalists. I’ve been troubled by the place that this group has come to occupy in the American media landscape. That isn’t to say that I had full faith or confidence in the previous generation of news anchors or anything like that. But it’s a bit of a sad prospect if this group is playing a more prominent role now, isn’t it?

The failures of the old media and traditional media to provide fairness and balance have led to the situation today. The criticisms of traditional newspapers and networks for being biased are very legitimate criticisms. Once they created the standard that says fairness is not a prerequisite of journalism, then they opened the door for people who don’t even have a pretense of fairness.
I’m not saying that the names I’ve mentioned lack a pretense of fairness, but I just name them as some who are best known for providing opinion or invective.

In the presentation handout you provided to me, I noticed that you included a picture of the cover of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent….

In one sense, I think his…thesis…is saying that there is an inherent bias created by the corporate ownership of the media, rather than by the attitudes of those who are reporters. I attend different events here where they bring in different reporters, through Shorenstein and such. But I find that most of them tend to reflect a consistent left-leaning viewpoint. Remember that it’s not always whether you make a slanted presentation of the news; it’s also the selection of what you choose to present and what you choose to exclude that can mischaracterize how things are.

When you think about fairness in journalism, do you think about it in terms of an equal balance of journalists who lean one way or the other politically? Do you think about it more in terms of fidelity to the truth? Or is it something else entirely?

My point is this: Fairness does not dictate that every individual who reports events must give equal weight to arguments of either side (or multiple sides) on a topic, but it means that institutions should make sure that they are presenting multiple perspectives. There’s a key difference there. It doesn’t mean every individual has to portray every viewpoint as though each had intellectual or moral parity. But when an institution presents itself as a new organization, people take note of whether their self-portrayal matches what they actually provide. Today with the multiplicity of media and resources that are available to people through the internet and other means, you cannot hide your slant from being detected. There are too many routes for providing contrary information; it comes bubbling forth.

In your view, are there particular political issues around which the media actually makes it more difficult for Americans to have a useful conversation? Where could we be squabbling less and talking more productively?

I think energy is one such area, and it’s not just the debate over global warming and man-caused climate change. It’s also a failure to include the costs of alternative energy as a legitimate factor in the discussion. Some people, because they are totally devoted to a belief in man-made global warming, will disregard the costs to society and to families of what they propose as alternatives.

It’s a little known fact that – let me see if I can remember this accurately…the use of wind power to generate electricity costs about two to three times more than generating electricity with fossil fuel; and solar power costs about five or six times more. If you convert to those sources, peoples’ home electric bills will reflect that enormous increase; manufacturing costs and distribution costs will also reflect that extra expense. The ability of society to make possible a fair standard of living and opportunity for all will be diminished because energy is central to everything and its costs have skyrocketed. [Mr. Istook later provided the following link via email: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/11/mike-pence/pence-claims-obama-said-energy-costs-will-skyrocke/ ]

People who try to squelch the conversation, either about cost or about the legitimacy of global warming, are doing a great disservice. Yet a one-sided perspective is abundant in so much of so-called mainstream media.

I agree that if that perspective is squelched out of hand, there’s something amiss. My sense, though, is that what you’re saying about comparative costs doesn’t reflect the true social cost of producing energy with fossil fuels. That social cost would include things like the externalities of pollution and global warming.

The challenge is that introducing a new measurement and labeling it “social costs” cannot be readily compared with other costs that are known through general accounting standards. You introduce a broad subjective term by saying, “Well, you haven’t accounted for the social costs.” What is that supposed to mean? It should not be treated as though you were playing a trump card–claiming that other discourse had to be abandoned and other viewpoints must yield when someone says “social cost.”

Remember, too, that if you remove the ability of someone to live where they wish to live and work where they wish to work and move freely between those points – if you remove that capability because you make energy so expensive, that is a severe social cost imposed on us all. How do you measure that? How do you offset it?

Well, I agree that it’s a hard task. I don’t know that it’s impossible. There are economists who try to do exactly that, to literally calculate the social costs that come with climate change.

Usually, they’re very vague and subjective variables.

It sounds like you’re skeptical about even trying to factor in these sorts of externalities.

I’m skeptical about the tendency to use that as a trump card as though it made everything else irrelevant.

I agree with you there. It needs to be considered carefully, just like every other part of the conversation.

Let’s return to Chomsky. You summarized his view quite well - that given the structure of media ownership, the journalistic outcomes that we see are fairly predictable. I’m wondering whether you agree with this view.

I think there are flaws in his basic thesis. Basically, people who adopt his view tend to say that since people with more wealth tend to have larger megaphones, therefore the answer is for government to step in and use taxpayer resources to give more megaphones to more people.

Part of the challenge today is that government is the source of so much propaganda. Rather than reflecting what people are saying, government resources are often used to try to change public opinion to match the desires of those who hold office. That’s part of the difficulty that we have today.

It sounds like you’re talking about public financing of elections.

Oh, that’s only one aspect. But if you look at a lot of the studies that are produced from Washington, D.C., many of them are predetermined in advance to further a particular cause or point of view. That’s not to say all, but there’s a significant number.

I would think that there’d be at least some instances in which it’s appropriate for the government to intervene in some way, to try to change the minds of the populace if they don’t have access to the information they need.

Who decides that?

News

You recently stepped down after 14 years at the helm of the AFL-CIO. In your mind, what should the major goals of the labor movement in America be over the next couple of years?

…The labor movement, under the leadership of President Richard Trumka, is preparing to do a lot more mobilization of rank-and-file workers. We probably had our best political program in the history of the AFL-CIO in the 2008 elections, because we were able to mobilize at the grassroots level hundreds of thousands of workers actively involved in campaigns. I think that the mobilization of rank-and-file workers has to be an ongoing practice throughout the whole year, not just be brought together shortly before elections, and that it shouldn’t be just a part of a political program but it also should be part of a legislative program and work on issues.

Last night’s victory [the passage of health care reform legislation] was a credit to rank-and-file workers who supported the President’s health program, and they actively engaged people, both union folks as well as folks who aren’t organized, on this issue and mobilized a great effort in terms of the number of workers that they have visited with.

We have an entity called Working America that was created four years ago. That entity has been able to organize three and a half million workers who live in communities where they have friends who are union members. In canvassing their homes, we have been able to build their support for being part of an organization. With polling and focus groups, we find that their issues are the same issues that are the priorities of organized workers; health care, of course, is one of them.

Jobs is a big concern of workers. People are angry and they don’t think that they have been treated fairly throughout this whole economic crisis, and they want to see more attention paid to issues such as health care and jobs and pension security, as well as education and training. There is tremendous interest in education programs and up-scaling workers for new jobs.

They are hurt by what has occurred, in terms of the outsourcing of jobs, as a result of bad trade policies and also the greed of corporations in looking for the cheapest possible deal in whatever country, the lowest possible wages in those countries. That has resulted in a loss of employment of millions of workers and it has essentially had the greatest impact, or the worst impact, on the middle class.

We see good jobs with good benefits just being abolished. The auto industry is as classic an industry as you could use as an example. But it’s not just the auto industry - it’s the steel workers; it’s the other industrial unions and union workers who have been affected. But that also has an impact in local communities, on public employees; it’s not just private sector. If the revenues for a city or a state are affected by the loss of industry and business, that impacts on public services, so that’s a really big concern.

You mentioned trade policy just a second ago. If you could advise President Obama about trade policy, what would you tell him?

Well, we had raised the trade policy as one of the issues that we were concerned about during the campaign, and the President has been very responsive on the need for reviewing our trade agreements and seeing what changes have to be made. Basically, we have to insist that workers’ rights and environmental protections, or human rights questions, are all part of what has to be addressed in our future trade agreements. We can’t be going for the cheapest possible deal for our trading practices.

We’re not only concerned about the impact it has on workers in our own country, but we’re also concerned about our trading partners - countries like Colombia, where they have a high record of assassinations of folks who are active in their own country on behalf of human rights and the atrocious murders and assassinations that have taken place with lack of enforcement of those who are the culprits in these situations. That’s just one example.

And it’s taxes, not just trade policy - our tax policies that have to be reexamined, and companies can’t be given an advantage for moving work out of the United States into another country with special tax considerations for them. If anything, we should be rewarding the corporations or businesses that can develop new jobs here in the United States.

I don’t know much about this area. How did such tax credits for outsourcing get created in the first place? In whose interest is that kind of policy, and who would be opposed to repealing those kinds of tax credits? In other words, what’s driving tax credits for outsourcing?

What’s driving that behavior is greed. It’s bad economic policy to be rewarding companies who are taking sources of employment out of our own country and sending them off to a country where the basic human rights are violated. Also, it’s not the right thing to reward those companies and those businesses to the detriment of workers here in the United States.

But I’m trying to imagine what argument congressmen or senators would make to sell this kind of policy to the public. How do they go about doing that? How do they go about selling the public on the idea that they’ve given tax credits to companies to move overseas? I would think they’d be just the widest and fattest target for organizations like yours.

They are so vague…about…reducing prices on a product, about it being a better way of production. The lies that are told in all of the publicity on these situations is just so horrible, and we have to do a better job at educating the public at large. We don’t have to educate our members because they are living in the communities that are impacted by these bad trade policies.

Politicians just have to be convinced that this is bad for the country. We have tried to do exactly what you’re saying, in terms of holding politicians accountable on these issues, and we have been very successful. But there’s no question about it; we have to do a better job. I’m confident that more and more workers, and the average person, have become more mindful of how important it is to have good, fair trade agreements. We want to see the best trading agreements that we possibly can see. We realize how important trade is for our country, for the economy of our country. But it has to be fair trade, good trade.

We saw with NAFTA, as an example, the North American Free Trade Agreement, what happens when a country like Mexico has the advantage of a trade agreement. Sure, they’re interested in creating more business for their country, having better employment for their workers. But NAFTA was basically a failure. It lasted, or it was beneficial to Mexico for a couple of years, but those jobs are gone now. They’re not in Mexico. They’re off in Asia or in the developing world, wherever it might be. It is the same old situation that we see with the greed of individual corporations and their desire to get the cheapest possible deal.

You seek to ensure that human rights considerations, labor standards, and environmental concerns are all factored into our trade policy. Are you willing to consider the possibility that even if we were able to include all of those factors in our trade deals, there might still be some industries here in America that wouldn’t be able to compete globally in the long term?

Well, it’s something that has to be watched, and it’s important that trade agreements be enforced. I think that the auto industry, which is a classic example, shows the vision of the autoworkers’ unions, in terms of what they have been able to achieve in their recovery, as far as it might be, of the auto industry, and the opening of…former plants, as well as new plants. I mean, there are some good examples of new industry in the manufacture of parts…that the union and management are working on, not just in Michigan but in other states around the country.

One final question: You talked about organizing, and particularly Working America. As you may know, Marshall Ganz, a professor here, was one of the architects of the Obama organizing effort, and particularly some of the community organizing strategies the campaign used to devolve power down the chain and empower local organizers. I’m curious to know whether the AFL-CIO or other labor organizations are adopting some of the same strategies or looking at the Obama campaign as an example of new and potentially innovative ways to organize?

Sure….I’ve known Marshall going back to those days of the farm workers, and I admire his good work, especially in terms of helping workers organize. I believe that the labor movement has to put more resources into organizing, that we have to educate and train young people in organizing, or convince them that it can be a very satisfying job. There are some changes that are taking place in many individual unions, in terms of…organizing programs.

I think that there has to be a greater focus on young workers. Liz Shuler, the new Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO spoke at one of the study group sessions and outlined our plans for helping young workers organize and involving young workers more, once they become members, in actual union activities. We plan to engage them and seek their thoughts…on how they see the labor movement and what changes they think should be made to address young people’s issues and concerns.

Snapshot

Culture

‘Profiles in Leadership’ by Jonathan Bailey

Much has been written about Senator Edward M. Kennedy over the last year, most of it by wiser people than me. These words are informed by a fleeting moment in my life when I worked for the Senator not from a lifetime working alongside him. My experience was that of the intern who photocopied memos that he never got to read, of the British student whose accent got him landed giving extra tours of the Capitol to constituents, and of the outsider struggling to understand a nation’s obsession with freedom. My anecdotes are of walking the Senator’s dogs, of hitting three home runs for the TedSox in my opening game, and of my efforts at finding the best free food at lobbyist receptions. But in the midst of all that I found myself being inspired.

The Senator’s legislative record is arguably unparalleled; over three hundred bills that were passed into law which helped students afford college, expanded healthcare coverage, protected minorities through the Voting Rights Act, raised the minimum wage and created a culture of volunteering. He voted against the Iraq War when all around him were in favor, helped bring sanctions against apartheid South Africa, and belatedly assisted the peace process in Northern Ireland. He made mistakes too, sometimes in the most public of ways. By the time I arrived in DC in 2006 these strengths and these challenges were very clear.

What I saw that summer was the Senator trying to create lasting, meaningful, and needed immigration reform. At a time when President Bush was pushing through the surge against collapsing approval ratings and when partisan extremism on both sides was nearing its peak, Senator Kennedy was willing to reach across the aisle and do something that was right for the country. He understood that public leadership is not about ‘me’, it is about ‘us’. Yes, immigration reform would have helped undocumented Irish-Americans, and yes, it would have diluted any Republican gains with Hispanics as a result of reform, but the longer term gains for moderate Republicanism would have been far greater and the benefits to President Bush immediate. Senator Kennedy did not allow parochialism and politicking to get in the way of doing what was needed for the country. To some this may have looked like pragmatism, but to me it showed principal of the most powerful kind.

HKS seems full of students who have asked what they can do and are now set on doing it, but it is also an oddly apolitical environment. The real world of politics is too frequently disappointingly shallow, with people calling for ‘action’ at the slightest flutter of a star spangled banner, but not being willing to act in time or to do what is right for the greater good of the nation. What Senator Kennedy did was to inspire his staff to believe that while there was a political point to what we were doing, what was as important was that we were working to do the right thing. He hired more staff on merit and from outside his home state than any other Senator, drawing some of the best and the brightest to work for him because he wanted to deliver for the American people. He inspired loyalty, trust and belief among his staff that even in the failure of the immigration reform debate we were framing the debate for change for the next round of the battle.

I left these shores to return to Britain feeling as though I had for a moment been part of something unique. Politics is so often portrayed in terms of personality and the narrative of a handful of individuals, but Senator Kennedy taught me how much of leadership is not about the ‘me’. I came to HKS to think about how I could inspire others to change my country for the better. And the best bit? Several other interns from that summer with the Senator in DC had been inspired to do exactly the same thing. That is why the dream shall never die.