Randal Marlin
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of legislation. As an Opposition MPP, I questioned why I was even in the legisla-
ture.”44 Prime Minister Harper’s omnibus bills of 2012 were widely viewed as a blatant
assault on the democratic process.45 For McChesney, it is not just a question of a cri-
sis in national sovereignty, but of “sovereignty writ large,” since nations are “required
either to toe the global capitalist line or to face economic purgatory.” Interestingly,
McChesney links the powerlessness of democratic procedure with “antirationalist,
fundamentalist, nationalist movements that blame democracy for capitalism’s flaws
and threaten to reduce humanity to untold barbarism.”46
With negative features of the Internet acknowledged, McChesney returns to a
very qualified reason for some optimism. There are generally acknowledged positive
features, such as the ability to reach like-minded others for discussion, thus creating a
sense of empowerment. Pro-democracy forces can communicate with people in other
countries. Being almost instantaneous, the Internet allows for concerted action over
virtually the whole world. Organizations such as Avaaz can produce petitions with an
impressive worldwide number of signatures in only a few days.
McChesney concludes that the Internet may be indeed a boon for democracy
but that certain qualifications are needed. First is the problem of universal access and
computer literacy. Without that, of course, the people who are worst off get the least
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access to communications, guaranteeing that their situation in life will not improve and may perhaps worsen. Second, he wisely observes that people come to the Internet
bulletin boards already conditioned by other forces in society, and there is no reason
for believing that they will not perpetuate those attitudes in the new media. Rather
than politicizing people, it may help to commercialize them more.47
Third, McChesney worries that many people will not be up to discussing the
details of important political issues as these become more complicated. Here is a role
for the academic: to go online and explain matters to the public, even though “such
behaviour runs directly counter to the priorities, attitudes, and trajectory of academic
life.” Good public journalism also has a role to fill in making the Internet live up to
its potential for democratizing society. However, professional journalists have had
to work for organizations that have become oriented to “infotainment.” Who will
support financially the work of a committed investigative journalist? Certainly not
the market. It comes down, once again, to the need for a public policy to support
such work and to pay for it. A danger McChesney sees is that illusory benefits of the
Internet will successfully persuade a population to accept the industry line that anti-
monopoly controls over the media are not needed.
McChesney does not take a defeatist line but rather proposes a Herculean task
for structuring communications in the future. He agrees with William Greider48 that
the reform of communication must be part and parcel of a movement to reform the
global political economy. Universities will have to provide the research for this pur-
pose. Unfortunately, as McChesney recognizes, universities have suffered cutbacks,
putting pressure on academics to seek funding from the corporate sector. So, at the
time when university autonomy is most needed, it is also under severe threats to its
mission. The academics in the communications disciplines must resist the temptation
to cultivate ties with the business communications sector. They will need to do this,
McChesney thinks, in order to maintain a university tradition of commitment to
independent inquiry, in furtherance of democratic values.
In a more recent interview, McChesney reiterated his view that “unless there is
explicit social policy to develop cyberspace as a noncommercial, nonprofit entity, it
is going to be taken over by the most powerful elements in our society.” The Internet,
he says, is becoming a hierarchical commercial entity, even though it is still a useful
tool for social activists. He still is optimistic in the light of successful movements in
Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, India, Brazil, etc. to gain popular support for the
idea of taking control of the media away from corporations and advertisers and mak-
ing it instead “central to the project of building a democratic society.”49
More Speculation
Any attempt to say something new and worthwhile about the Internet may well
become obsolete in the time lag between the writing and publishing of this book.
With that caveat, it seems to me worth risking some speculation about the scope of
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impediments to democratization of the Internet. Assuming that a public segment of the Internet will continue, just how potent is the threat of its increasing marginalization? Here are some ideas that occur to me as at least possibilities for ruining the
Internet as a tool for democracy, although I cannot predict the likelihood of their
happening.
1. With the new commercial orientation of the Internet, many distractions appear.
For example, I used a search engine to look up “Democracy Watch.” Immediately
I was bombarded with advertisements for all different kinds of watches, including
wristwatches. This has its funny side, but such a plethora of alternate sites and objects
distract attention from the goal of increasing political involvement. Given the forest of
information available, the key to sustained investigation will be adequate links. If the
links to commercial sites are plentiful but scarce to political sites or to sites of only a
particular political colouring, the result will be an impoverished political debate. The
Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) provides many valuable links for the study
of public relations, but its value for Canadians would have been enhanced regarding
the tobacco industry by linking to the Non-Smokers Rights Association of Canada
(NSRA), which has been very active and effective at combating pro-tobacco propa-
ganda. This omission is explained easily by the fact that the main concern of CMD is
to observe PR in operation. And, since it views PR negatively, it might not wish to
include an organization whose PR it might value. However, for those who wish to
combat the PR of the tobacco industry, the NSRA is a valuable source of information
and would have been usefully included in a list of links. The CMD list has a section
headed “Activism,” and NSRA might have been placed there.50
2. One of the key aspects of political use of the Internet is e-mail. People can orga-
nize with others through e-mail, either directly or through a list reachable automati-
cally through a listserv. But what is to stop hundreds of people e-mailing a person at
one time, thus burying relevant messages and consuming time? Such “mail bombs”
can overwhelm an individual’s account and even crash a server. Already I, like many
others, receive dozens of unsolicited e-mails—or “spam”—a day. If they are artfully
presented—
for example, in a form that suggests they are responding to a request—it
may take several minutes of reading to realize what they are. If the user responds with
a request to be removed from the sender’s list, this verifies that the e-mail account is
active, and more messages may be sent. What is manageable in small numbers rap-
idly becomes unmanageable, in the sense of screening out the worthwhile messages.
Software exists to screen “spamming,” or the sending on a huge scale of unsolicited
mail, but so far, it is a matter of software countering other software, and breaches
in the devices designed to protect against spamming are possible. Democratic use
of the Internet seems to me vulnerable on this score. We know that a group called
“Anonymous” had some success, though short-lived, in overloading and bringing
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to a halt activities of financial institutions such as Visa for denying service to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. If that can happen to large institutions, it stands to reason
that an ordinary individual with an influential blog attacking wealthy power-wielders
in society might be shut down by “cybergoons” acting like Anonymous but paid by
those same wealthy people or institutions.51
3. It is also possible for members of the established power structure—or any wealthy
individual with an axe to grind—to pay agents to contribute to public discussions in
order to shape the agenda on various bulletin boards. If a discussion site is monitored
and certain views are censored, the discussion site loses some credibility. On the other
hand, if it is unmonitored, anyone can enter the discussion. Blake Harris, in a 1999
article in Infobahn (“The Magazine of Internet Culture”), quotes an anonymous post,
which expresses the problem:
Internet is a fascinating lab for the study of idea dissemination. A number of times
I have watched how an idea briefly mentioned in one post will suddenly get a great
deal of play a few weeks later. Even more interesting is how the idea might suddenly
appear in posts in another group. My study of this is informal and intuitive, but I
have a sense that somebody who carefully studied the communication dynamics (and
coincidences in the cases where causal effects are hard to find) could exert a great deal
of control over what was discussed and how. Since Internet originated ideas have a
smal , but growing influence over the “mass consciousness” of the nation, this capac-
ity could be exceedingly useful to tacticians and strategists who want to have some
voice in the “national agenda.”52
There are many examples of how widely misinformation posted on the Internet
can travel and, in so doing, gain legitimacy. One such notice claimed that a study
had shown that George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any US president in the past
50 years. This “study” was proven to be a hoax, but not before Garry Trudeau had
accepted it and made it the subject of a Doonesbury cartoon on September 1, 2001.53
In another instance, Pierre Sal inger, former Kennedy press secretary, claimed to have
documents proving that TWA Flight 800—a Boeing 747–131 that crashed off Long
Island on July 17, 1996, killing 230 passengers and crew—had been hit by a stray US
navy missile. This claim was widely circulated on the Internet, although he was con-
tradicted by the Chicago-based Emergency Response and Research Institute (ERRI),
which, in an equally widely circulating post, maintained that Salinger’s information
had come via the Internet from Parveez Syad, an alleged Iranian extremist Muslim
propagandist, who operated from a base in Birmingham, UK, at the time. Whether or
not ERRI was right about Sal inger, the episode reveals a potential for misinformation
from the Internet.54
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4. In earlier discussions of freedom of the press and Zachariah Chafee’s Government and Mass Communications (see Chapter 7), we observed that legislation to promote
freedom in communications can have unintended consequences. Not discussed
then was another of Chafee’s ideas: to require by law that the ownership and busi-
ness links of a major newspaper be very clearly stated in the newspaper itself, either
annually or more often when changes are frequent. However, as he points out, this
requirement could work against progressive causes, since people might be reluctant
to make donations to a progressive publication if they thought that doing so could
expose them to investigation by a McCarthyite committee, should one ever come
into being again.55
A similar reluctance to support radical causes might develop from the awareness
that the FBI or other investigators can track websites visited by an individual. Unlike
secret meetings, the Web is easily monitored. Not long ago, a high Canadian naval
officer was court-martialed because he was caught visiting pornographic sites from his
office computer.56 There are various ways of enhancing one’s privacy while surfing the
Internet,57 but law enforcers with the power to force ISPs to provide details on one’s
activities presumably would be able to override such protections. The pendulum can
be expected to swing between maximum freedom and privacy to maximum yielding
of these to law enforcers, depending on events. The huge powers of government to
intrude on our privacy have been nicely spelled out by Daniel J. Solove in “Digital
Dossiers and the Dissipation of Fourth Amendment Privacy”;58 there he rightly calls
for legal architecture specifically to balance privacy interests against potential mis-
use by government and other powers. Privacy is a public as well as a private good,
he argues, and it should not be left just to individuals to fight for their legal rights.
The legal powers given to officials in a time of emergency should be matched by sun-
set (automatic termination of the laws beyond a certain date) and oversight laws to
protect against misuse. In Canada, proposed “lawful access” legislation to facilitate
government surveillance of the Internet was met by demands from civil libertarians
that abuses of the powers be recorded and those responsible be held accountable and,
where appropriate, punished.59
Without automatic protections built into the legal architecture, individuals’ free-
doms will be greatly at risk as people will feel afraid to speak out in times of panic. No
one will want to be the target of a loyalty inquisition.
5. From a world perspective, the problems of information imbalance may well be exac-
erbated in some respects. Most powerful search engines are heavily weighted toward
things American, which is not surprising or unjust given that US funding was behind
the development of the Internet. What we see with the convergence of media is the
bringing together mainly of US media and entertainment, so that what is readily acces-
sible on the Internet, and reflected in the search engines, can hardly be expected to
differ from customary US concerns. That could change, of course, if more people in
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the United States come to take an interest in other parts of the globe and if other countries develop rival search engines with the same capabilities.
Having said this, it is necessary to underscore the point that, despite the obstacles
on the path to a more balanced flow of information worldwide, the Internet has pro-
vided a remarkable opportunity for bypassing the normal media filters. As an exam-
ple, my sister who lives in Kenya and is a citizen of that country was able to send me
an interesting and fairly lengthy report on the fallout from the explosion at the US
Embassy in Nairobi on August 7, 1998. She knew some of the victims, being originally
American herself, and the impact was presented more significantly than in the usual
media accounts.
The reception given the McBride Report by the Western media was so over-
whelmingly negative that it is hard to imagine a similar kind of response with the
Internet in existence today. Sean McBride’s Many Voices, One World was a UNESCO
publication, whose subtitle indicates its purpose: “Towards a New More Just and
More Efficient World Information and Communication Order.”60 Its conclusions were
roundly derided by the press at the time of its publication in 1980. The word about
media bias is certainly getting out,61 and today more people are willing to challenge the
one-sided preoccupation with free speech issues that governed the report’s reception
in the industrialized countries of the West. Granted that reaction focused on serious
concerns that free speech would be threatened by the recommendation of government
interference with the media, still the problem of adequate reporting of Third World
issues and the swamping of the world with Western perspectives are problems that
should be addressed seriously, not dismissed out of hand as they were then. Western
media reports on the UN-sponsored World Conference on Racism in Durban, South
Africa in September 2001 rightly called attention to its anti-Israeli and anti-US bias
and properly denounced the overt anti-Semitism of some of the participants, but they
also tended to ignore or avoid serious treatment of other issues raised there, such as
the high price of patent medications for victims of AIDS. Some left-oriented web-