This post describes the rationale for using the book “Intellectuals and Society” as reading material for the training program Media Analysis Skills Training. The purpose is to enable the student to recognize propaganda in media, film and literature.
This book is appropriate for honors students at the senior level.
Below are selected examples, transcribed from the book, of types of propaganda described in the book. These examples represent only a fraction of the topics discussed in the book; the book is a wide-ranging treatise on the motivations behind propaganda, how it reaches the public, and how it effects government decisions. Sowell is a master writer who presents mundane facts in a spell-binding manner.
Intellectuals and Society is a powerful and unique book that is indispensable for understanding the events of the 20th and 21st centuries. All examples below, and the associated page numbers, are from the First Edition. (2009)
Number 1: media manipulation of poverty statistics in America. (to prove the existence of an enduring poor class, consisting of 20% of the population) pp.38-39
“Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a “problem” for which a “solution” is necessary…but the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the “barriers” assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.” (p.39)
“Behind many of those numbers and the accompanying alarmist rhetoric is a very mundane fact: Most people begin their working careers at the bottom, earning entry-level salaries. Over time, as they acquire more skills and experience, their rising productivity leads to rising pay, putting them in successively higher income brackets. These are not rare, Horatio Alger stories. These are common patterns among millions of people in the United States and in some other countries. More than three-quarters of those working Americans whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent of income earners at some point by 1991. Only 5 percent of those who were initially in the bottom quintile were still there in 1991… Yet verbal virtuosity has transformed a transient cohort in a given statistical category into an enduring class called “the poor”.” (p.38)
Number 2: media manipulation of firearm statistics. (for the purpose of advancing gun control/confiscation.) pp.124-125
“….much of what is said about the effect of gun control on crime rates in general, and on the murder rate in particular, is based on what kinds of statistics are repeated endlessly and what kinds of data seldom, if ever, reach the general public.” (emphasis added)
“It has, for example, been repeated endlessly in the media and in academia that Britain and various other countries with stronger gun control laws than those in the United States have murder rates that are only a fraction of the murder rate in the United States— the clear implication being that it is the gun control which accounts for the difference in murder rates. Having reached this conclusion, most of the intelligentsia have seen no reason to proceed further. But a serious attempt to test the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between restricted gun ownership and the murder rate would make other comparisons and other breakdowns of statistical data necessary. For example:
1) Since we know that murder rates are lower in some countries with stronger gun control laws than in the United States, are there other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have higher murder rates?
2) Are there countries with widespread gun ownership which have lower murder rates than some other countries with lower gun ownership rates?
3) Did the murder rate differential between the United States and Britain originate with the onset of gun control laws?
Those who were content to stop when they found the kinds of statistics they were looking for were unlikely to ask such questions. The answers to these three questions, incidentally, are yes; yes; and no.
Russia and Brazil have tougher gun control laws than the United States and much higher murder rates. Gun ownership rates in Mexico are a fraction of what they are in the United States, but Mexico’s murder rate is more than double that in the United States. Handguns are banned in Luxembourg but not in Belgium, France or German; yet the murder rate in Luxembourg is several times the murder rate in Belgium, France or Germany. An international statistical study found that Switzerland, Israel and New Zealand “have relatively lax gun control laws and/or high firearms availability, yet have homicide rates that differ little from those in England or Japan”— which is to say, homicide rates a fraction of those in the United States.”
(Dr. Sowell continues with more examples, but we will stop here)
Number 3: suppressing news stories. (NYT and UK media suppress news of Ukraine Genocide, 1933. Millions die in obscurity.) pp.122-123
“One of the most historic examples of suppressing facts was the reporting and non-reporting of the Soviet Union’s government-created famine in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus that killed millions of people in the 1930s. New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty wrote, “There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.”
“….meanwhile, British writer Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine that peasants there were in fact starving: “I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished as, for instance, most Oriental peasants…and some unemployed workers in Europe, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat.” Muggeridge wrote in a subsequent article that the man-made famine was “one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.” Decades later, a scholarly study by Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, estimated that six million people had died in that famine over a period of three years. Still later, when the official archives were finally opened in the last days of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, new estimates of the deaths from the man-made famine were made by various scholars who had studied material from those archives. Most of their estimates equaled or exceeded Dr. Conquest’s earlier estimates.”
At the time of the famine, however, this was one of the most successful filtering operations imaginable. What Muggeridge said was dismissed as “a hysterical tirade” By Beatrice Webb, co-author with her husband Sidney Webb of an internationally known study of the Soviet Union. Muggeridge was vilified and was unable to get work as a writer, after his dispatches from the Sovit Union, and was so financially strapped that he, his wife and two small children had to move in with friends.
Except for Muggeridge and a very few other people, a famine deliberately used to break the back of resistance to Stalin— killing a comparable or larger number of people as those who died in the Nazi Holocaust— would have been filtered completely out of history, instead of being merely ignored, as it usually is today. This was not a matter of honest mistakes by Duranty and others. What Duranty said privately to some other journalists and to diplomats at the time was radically different from what he said in dispatches to the New York Times. For example, in 1933 a British diplomat reported to London: “Mr. Duranty thinks it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.”
Number 4: suppressing data p.123
“Statistical data can also be filtered, whether by omitting data that go counter to the desired conclusion (such as data on Asian Americans) or by restricting the release of data to only those researchers whose position on the issue at hand is in accord to that of those who control the data. For example, a statistically based study by former college presidents William Bowen and Derek Bok was widely hailed for its conclusions supporting affirmative action in college admissions. But when Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, whose views on affirmative action did not coincide with theirs, sought to get the raw data on which the study’s conclusions were based, he was refused. Similarly when UCLA professor of law Richard Sander sought to test competing theories about the effect of affirmative action in law schools by getting data on bar examination pass rates by race in California, supporters of affirmative action threatened to sue if the state bar released such data— and the state bar then refused to release the data.
In these and other cases, statistics are filtered at the source, even when these are taxpayer-financed statistics, collected for the ostensible purpose of providing facts on which informed policy choices can be made, but in practice treated as if their purpose is to protect the prevailing vision.”
Number 5: Assassinating the character of a public official by creating a fictitious public image of the official.
Below are two examples taken from the section “Fictitious people and fictitious countries”. This section is one of the most poignant descriptions of propaganda in the book. As the title of the section suggests, the media also creates fictitious images for entire countries.
President Hoover pp.132-133. This section documents that Hoover was nothing like how history has portrayed him.
“Perhaps the most striking example in twentieth-century America of a fictitious persona being created for a public figure…was that of Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s misfortune was to be President of the United States when the stock market crash of 1929 was followed by the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Had he never become president, Herbert Hoover could have gone down in history as one of the greatest humanitarians of the century. It was not simply the amount of money he donated to philanthropic causes before he became president, but the way he risked his own personal fortune to rescue starving people in Europe during the First World War that made him unique.”
“Because the blockades, destruction and disruptions of the war had left millions of people across Europe suffering from hunger, or even starving, Hoover formed a philanthropic organization to get food to them on a massive scale. However, realizing that if he operated in the usual way, by first raising money from donations and then buying the food, people would be dying while he was rasing money, Hoover bought the food first, putting his own personal fortune at risk if he could not raise the money to pay for it all.”
“So much for the real Herbert Hoover. What whole generations have heard and read about is the fictitious Herbert Hoover–a cold, heartless man who let millions of Americans suffer needlessly…”
“…the falsity of this picture was exposed back during the Great Depression itself by leading columnist Walter Lippmann, and that falsity was confirmed in later years by former members of Roosevelt’s own administration, who acknowledged that…most of the New Deal was simply a further extension of initiatives already taken by President Hoover.”
Lippmann, writing in 1935, said:
“…the policy initiated by President Hoover in the autumn of 1929 was something utterly unprecedented in American history. The national government undertook to make the whole economic order operate prosperously…the Roosevelt measures are a continuous evolution of the Hoover measures.”
Supreme Court justice (1991-present) Clarence Thomas pp.134-138. The treatment by the intelligentsia of Justice Thomas follows a pattern similar to their treatment of President Hoover.
“…Clarence Thomas has been described as a loner, permanently embittered by his controversial Senate confirmation hearings…a virtual recluse in private life…Wall Street Journal called him ‘Washington’s most famous recluse’…depicted in New Yorker article as ‘someone who can really talk only to his wife…the couple’s life appears to be one of shared, brooding isolation’…”
“Those who have bothered to check out the facts, however, have discovered a flesh-and-blood Clarence Thomas the exact opposite of the fictitious Clarence Thomas portrayed in the media. Repoerters for the Washington Post…interviewed colleagues and former clerks of his, as well as consulting notes made by the late Justice Harry Blackmun at private judicial converences amont the justices, and came up with a radically different picture of the man:
“Thomas is perhaps the court’s most accessible justice–except to journalists…He is known to spot a group of schoolchildren visiting the court and invite the students to his chamabers. Students from his alma mater, family members of dormer clerks, people he encounters on his drives across the country in his 40-foot Prevost motor coach–all are welcome…
“Thomas seems to have an unquenchable thirst for conversation…A planned 15-minute drop-by invariably turns into an hour, then two, sometimes three, maybe even four, according to interviews with at least a dozen people who have visited with Thomas in his chamabers…Washington lawyer Tom Gold stein, whose firm devotes itself primarily to Supreme Court litigation, has met all the justices and has declared Thomas ‘the most real person’ of them all.”
This is the end of Rationale #1; two more rationales will be published for other books, later this month or in September.