Learn How Propaganda Works: The Giffords Shooting

January 10, 2011

Below, we include several frames that you should watch for. They are already starting to appear in the discourse and will continue to spread through mainstream media channels in the coordinated attempt (that will likely be successful) to spin this tragedy into conservative frames.

We encourage you to pay attention to the narratives as they unfold and consider the significance of the agendas they support. Our ability to address the threats of violent rhetoric will depend upon our understandings of media frames that set the scope of what is considered to be “reality”.

Watch for These:

The “Lone Shooter” Frame
Emphasis will be on individual actions, ignoring cultural patterns that influenced the event like the militant imagery of Tea Party leaders and Fox News personalities.

The “Crazy Gunman” Frame
Effort will be made to reduce this complex event to the explanation that the shooter was insane, disregarding the anti-government sentiments that fueled him to action.

The “Both Sides Equal” Frame
Media coverage will presume violent rhetoric is equal on the left and right, ignoring how leftist individuals target single people (e.g. Bush hater) while right-wing individuals target groups (e.g. liberals, Jews). Also the scale of violent imagery is disproportionately on the right side.

The “We’re All Sorry” Frame
Spokespeople on the right who have fueled violent rhetoric (e.g Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh) will publicly condemn violent actions while continuing to promote negative views of entire classes of people. This behavior will not be present among liberals.

This piece isn’t bad, but in my view it suffers from its own cognitive limitations and conceptual constrictions. The simple list of “four frames” lacks sufficient explanatory power to unravel the social and political realities blurred by US propaganda. As written, the first two frames isolate the shooter’s actions by individualizing or pathologizing him; the latter two frames let the right-wing off the hook by suggesting false equivalence or false contrition. In other words, the piece argues that US propaganda tilts and distorts popular perception toward a “conservative” rather than “liberal” viewpoint, presumably to the advantage of the Republican Party and to the detriment of the Democratic Party.

These four frames are certainly discernible in a good deal of mainstream media coverage, but there’s much more to US political propaganda than a pro-conservative anti-liberal bias. As Chomsky argues convincingly in Thought Control in Democratic Societies, the institutional function of US mass media is to establish the permissible range of thought. The permissible spectrum ranges from Fox News to MSNBC, from Limbaugh to HuffPo, from Malkin to MoveOn. Throughout this spectrum, the fundamental tenets of liberal imperialism are largely shared, upheld, and unquestioned; most fundamentally, the benevolent legitimacy and democratic exceptionalism of the US political system, as well as a progressive theory of history wherein present-day US politics are believed to have evolved to a point of civility beyond a violent past.

Brewer writes, “Hate speech should never be condoned, as it has been for years now by prominent public figures in the conservative movement.” Actually, hate speech has been endemic to US politics throughout US history, and it has not been confined to “either side of the aisle”. During the Chinese Exclusion era, the populist Workingman’s Party had as its slogan “The Chinese must go!” as an explicit call for lynch mobs and ethnic cleansing. The hate speech surrounding Japanese internment was uniform among liberals and conservatives. Need I mention the Jim Crow era? White liberals were generally hostile to the Civil Rights movement, and no public outcry occurred when the US government violently attacked the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement.

Democratic and Republican politicians and pundits alike have advocated and pursued imperialist wars overseas for at least the past century. What is war if not the ultimate assertion that violence is the answer to political differences? Can a nation which has conducted over 50 foreign military interventions in the past half-century, including multiple overthrows of democratic governments and countless political assassinations, possibly claim to renounce political violence? Can a country currently engaged in two imperialist wars truly claim to abhor political violence? Can a society which accepts the regular killing of unnamed enemies and their families, with utter impunity, by aerial drone, truly claim to oppose political violence? Can a government which has two million of its citizens locked up at gunpoint truly claim to embrace civil discourse over rule of force?

None of this is to downplay the horrific shootings in Tucson. Certainly, it’s been a while since a national US politician was assassinated (I always had my suspicions about what happened to Paul Wellstone, but I’ll leave that alone). But it also seems to me that many US citizens might do well to emerge from a state of denial about the fundamentally violent nature of their society, government, and political system. People are playing for keeps, it’s not an online game. Even when it’s not as shocking as a mass shooting or a bullet to the head; even when it’s just the slow crushing grind of systemic oppression and exploitation; political violence is not an abberation, it’s the norm.