Fake news is nothing new. As clearly revealed in the writings of Noam Chomsky (and others), the media has long served as a willing accomplice of the ruling elite in dishing out propaganda aimed at maintaining the status quo. The vast majority of citizens in a democracy are judged to be the “bewildered herd” too stupid to understand the complex issues involved in governance and thus not only unable to manage their own affairs, but potentially a danger if allowed to do. Lacking the capacity to exercise rational judgment and ruled by emotions and baser impulses, the masses must be kept in line by a specialized class of individuals who possess the intelligence and expertise to analyze information, make decisions and run things in compliance with the wishes of the ruling elite. As Chomsky notes, vast sums of money are spent on what is called “public relations” in order to exert control on the minds of the public by engineering their opinions to conform to the decisions being made of them. Thus, the media’s principal purpose in what is supposed to be a democracy is the “manufacture of consent”.

To achieve what Chomsky calls a “spectator democracy” in which the majority of citizens assume a passive and disempowered role, media relies on two key strategies is shaping opinion through propaganda. The first is to keep the masses distracted from what is actually going on, by turning their attention to something else. A common means of achieving this is to play upon their emotions and to portray certain events in a highly dramatic and overblown fashion. This strategy of framing events was described by the political scientist, Murray Edelman, as “political spectacle”. The media and other forms of public relations carefully craft a distorted version of events in accord with the beliefs and values espoused in the dominant or hegemonic ideology (in our case that would be neoliberalism). A very commonly form of “political spectacle” is to frame an event as a crisis.

That brings us to the second key strategy employed in propaganda — fear. Again as Chomsky asserts, to control the masses the media uses propaganda to keep them scared. Generally this requires the invention of some “devil” who poses an existential threat to our way of life. This drums up support for upholding that way of life at all costs. The status quo is deemed to be not only the best of all possible worlds, but the only viable way of living. When there can be no actual alternative to the “way things are”, even the most unpleasant and unpalatable of situations become necessary. Further, as Edelman observed, crises often rationalize the maintenance and creation of policies that are particularly harmful to groups that are already disadvantaged. The creation of crises in the service of the powerful involves the use of language, images and other forms of framing that present an exaggerated and overblown version of what is often a single anxiety-provoking situation. The sociologist, Stanley Cohen, called these “moral panics”.

The need to placate the masses in the Roman Empire was expressed in two words: Bread and Circuses. To avoid rebellion, people had to be fed and kept entertained. In our own times, there seems to me to be a disturbing lack of concern with the first of these. The powerful elite seem to have little compunction about starving the masses be means of an ever-more brazen and immoral redistribution of wealth, resources and other social benefits. Perhaps that is because the second method of keeping the masses entertained has been so finely honed. I believe that mainstream media has adopted a new philosophy of “Dread and Surfaces” to thwart awareness, anesthetize troublesome emotions, and quell rebellion. Fear continues to play a central role in this process as the media utilizes the ever-present anxieties and vulnerabilities of the public to distract them from what they should actually be afraid of, to inhibit critical reflection, and to seduce them into directing hatred and aggression on either themselves or some scapegoat. Along with fear, the media employs hype, exaggeration, and overly dramatized forms of spectacle that not only distract the public from the real issues at play, but restricts their understanding of circumstances to the merely superficial.

The most prevalent example of “fake news” at present is the preoccupation of the mainstream media with Russia-gate. An examination of Russia-gate free of all the hype, political jingoism, and cynical exaggeration exposes it as a story about nothing. It has all the makings of what Edelman called a “political spectacle”. Language, images and other strategies of framing claim that our country is in the midst of a dire crisis threatening the very fabric of our democracy. A veritable army of experts, intellectuals and analysts provide a cunningly constructed narrative intended to stir fears and, of course, distract attention away from a host of far more pressing (and real) issues. The villains involved in the story (though villains they may well be) provide a very narrow target for the public’s anger — leaving a host of many other villains to go about the work of aggrandizing themselves at the expense of millions.

Similarly, Russia-gate can be understood from the lens of a form of “moral panic” as proposed by Stanley Cohen. The mass media, at the behest of the ruling elite, has seized on a single issue and proceeded to employ hyperbole and hysteria to exploit it shamelessly. Cohen’s choice of the word “panic” is intentional. It is intended to convey a state of extreme and even crippling fear that prompts efforts, no matter how desperate, to restore safety. Five features of moral panics have been identified. The first is that the matter involved is one of concern — often of moral proportions. The second is that it triggers hostility toward the perpetrator(s) who are often portrayed in demonic terms. The third is consensus or the need to promote widespread agreement on the issue. The fourth is disproportionality which is the extreme and exaggerated manner in which the event is portrayed. And the fifth is volatility in which there seems to be a steady eruption of new examples of the crisis. Sound familiar? But what must not be lost in all of this is that the construction of moral panics can lead at times to serious legal and political measures that themselves have far more adverse consequences than the crisis itself.

There is one other point I want to emphasize in this analysis. It has to do with dread or fear. Why is it such a potent instrument in the use of propaganda? There is a biological and psychological basis to this. The fear that we are talking about is rooted in a primal response that human beings make to situations which they judge to a threat to their well-being and exceed their ability to control or manage. It is called the fight-or-flight response which is triggered automatically. In other words, the body mobilizes to meet the threat without our having to think about it. It takes time for our conscious awareness to catch up with what we are experiencing and why we are reacting the way we are. This response is mediated by what is called the autonomic nervous system, the same nervous system involved in a number of other important involuntary functions (e.g. heart rate, respiration, digestion). The other part of our nervous system (involving our brain and spinal cord) called the central nervous system is involved in voluntary and higher order functions (such as abstract thought, logic, analysis).

This distinction between the two nervous systems is relevant to the use of dread in propaganda. When we are anxious, in a sense we are more likely to be “stupid”. What I mean by this is that the heightened arousal we experience when our fears are stirred makes it harder for us to step back and consider what it is that is making us afraid. We are caught up in the immediate threat. The arousal of the autonomic nervous system interferes with our ability to use our capacity for self-reflection and critical analysis. We take things at face value rather than take time to step back and examine them more objectively. In other words, dread makes it far more likely that we will confine our attention to surfaces, to the way things appear. We miss what is going on behind the scenes.

While there are certainly situations in life where the fight-or-flight response comes in handy, the manufactured crises employed by propaganda are not one of them. Particularly when that dread is used to shroud genuine threats to our well-being. We need to stop making something out of nothing. Be forewarned. Every time the media tells you that “There’s nothing to see here,’ they are quick to follow it with “But there’s something to see here”. My advice to you is to reject that framing of events. Instead we need to realize that something is nothing and that nothing is something.