Death of Democracy in America: Chapter 4

If you would like to start at the beginning of this series of posts, go here.

The previous chapter in this series is located here.

The Role of the Media in the Death of Democracy in America

The Corporate Media

Again I turn to my favorite source for concise definitions, Wikipedia:

Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies—including television, newspapers, and radio—which are used for mass communication (delivering messages to a large audience), and to the organizations which control these technologies.

Mass media play a significant role in shaping public perceptions on a variety of important issues, both through the information that is dispensed through them, and through the interpretations they place upon this information. The also play a large role in shaping modern culture, by selecting and portraying a particular set of beliefs, values, and traditions (an entire way of life), as reality. That is, by portraying a certain interpretation of reality, they shape reality to be more in line with that interpretation.

This definition highlights some important facts:

• The media are an integral part of the free-market capitalist system and thus are primarily (if not exclusively) profit motivated.
• The media play by far the most dominant role in shaping people’s beliefs and values and determining what people perceive to be “reality” and “truth”.
• Corporate media is tightly integrated (through outright ownership or other formal relationships) with the broader corporate structure of free-market capitalism.

Taken together, this means that “the media” are primarily at the disposal of corporate interests to present “truth” and “reality” in such a way as to serve the profit motives of free-market capitalism. This is (probably) not malicious in nature, it is just part of the DNA of corporate media.

Let’s recall from our review of what makes democracy tick that, according to Robert Dahl, one of the five criteria for the successful functioning of democracy is

“Enlightened understanding: Within reasonable limits as to time, each member must have equal and effective opportunities for learning about the relevant alternative policies and their likely consequences”.

Elliot D. Cohen and Bruce W. Fraser in The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship(18), the authors present a comprehensive description and analysis of the dominant and destructive influence of corporate media. They liken the situation in America today to that described in the widely read fiction of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984). In Brave New World all citizens in the World State are conditioned from birth to value consumption in order to maintain the economic order. In1984 the world is in a perpetual state of war and the public is subjected to incessant mind control and surveillance. In both of these works of fiction the perpetrators are the “government” or “state”, but if you add corporate media to that list, you have a very good description of American society today.

Most people will likely dismiss this comparison because we all feel we have absolute freedom of choice and can always opt out of any possible “mind control” and can choose not to consume, and are protected by our laws against pervasive surveillance. After all we live in a “free” society where our freedoms are guaranteed by a constitution and the law.

However, we underestimate the degree to which corporate media have learned to influence each and every one of us with the methods learned over the years by the advertising industry involving psychological techniques speaking directly to our subconscious. Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders(19), details the methods and techniques of what he calls the “depth manipulators” which, even in the 1940’s and 50’s were shown to be extremely powerful in “the use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion ... to sell us their wares -- whether products, ideas, attitudes, candidates, goals, or state of mind”. Packard observes that

“..these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, ‘hidden’ “.

These techniques have become much more powerful with the advent of television, a medium even more effective, through its use of visual images, in its ability to influence us through our subconscious needs and weaknesses. And the effectiveness of these methods of hidden persuasion, also known as mind control or propaganda, are set to take yet another quantum leap with the Internet. As Mark Crispin Miller, in his Introduction to the latest edition of Packard’s book puts it

“In short, the modern history of America is, in large part, the history of an ever-rising flood of corporate propaganda...”.

And further on in the Introduction

“... there’s no longer any civic space for us, our very ballots having been erased, we are now endlessly distracted, or (barely) placated, by a daily spectacle of “politics” in which We the People figure not at all”.

True freedom of choice requires that we have, if not full, but then at least adequate knowledge of all the options open to us, and that these options be presented in a complete, fair and unbiased way. Note that the very theory of free markets assumes that the consumers have complete and accurate knowledge of all the options available in order to make the correct (rationally self-interested) economic decisions. But perversely, marketing by corporate media have as their ultimate goal to present us with a biased, if not outright false, view of the options available to us.

Without complete and truthful information about all options open to us, our freedom of choice is completely fictitious - we are manipulated and channeled to make choices only among the options presented to us by corporate media.

Cohen and Fraser argue that

“Americans are being reprogrammed by the media to be utterly complacent... and forced into a form of psychological slavery. What makes this transformation so frightening is the degree to which the majority of Americans willingly give over the control of their lives as a result of the subtle influence of the media on their beliefs, thinking and behavior”.

Just to highlight how reckless we are today in allowing the (advertising) media to exercise surveillance on all of us and then use that data to control us, there are now over 550 million people world wide who voluntarily supply Facebook with a wealth of personal information. Even though there are supposedly “privacy” guarantees, we all know how useless they are. The main reason why Facebook has been valued at about $50 billion (a ridiculous valuation when compared to companies which actually produce something) is that it offers a huge potential for corporate media to exercise surveillance of us and direct their misleading and often downright false information to ever more targeted segments of the population.

Another example of this 1984-like surveillance, not by government but by corporations, is Google’s “street view” project. On the surface innocuous enough (providing “street views” as part of their Google Map project), but the trucks collecting this information are also equipped with electronics to “harvest data from private Wi-Fi networks”. This came to light in Germany, where Google’s project was delayed until authorities received assurances that such electronic surveillance would be stopped.

In todays world, “marketing” is not restricted to products and services offered by the “free” market economy. Today virtually every aspect of our lives, and every choice we make is subject to the pernicious influence of marketing. Most destructively in terms of the survival of democracy this includes the “marketing” of politicians and “issues”. The images we are presented of politicians in making our “free” decisions in the polling  booth have virtually no relationship to reality. We are presented with an “image” which “focus groups” have determined to be the most likely to appeal to the voters, largely unrelated to the ideas and convictions of the men or women running for office.

To highlight this image over substance in all aspects of American life today, including politics, a new book by Frank Lutz(20), a self-describes pollster and communications specialist, has proposed “11 for 11” words and phrases which should be used by politicians and their campaigns in order to “win”. These words and phrases are purposely completely devoid of substance but instead are geared to speak to our emotions and subconscious while purposely hiding the substantive “positions” these politicians actually believe in (that is probably an oxymoron).

All this has reduced elections in America not to a competition of ideas and values, but to a hugely expensive marketing campaign characterized by misinformation, mostly negative sound bites and visual images designed to engage our subconscious emotions rather than our rational thinking.

Personal Experiences

I will again relate my personal experience in Germany to highlight the points made in this section about the pervasive and destructive influence of corporate media in America, I have to start by acknowledging that no “first world” country seems to be free form significant, possibly dominant influence by the corporate media. Thus, my point here (again) is not to present Germany as the shining example to emulate, but rather to show only that there are alternatives which are compatible with a free and democratic society.

Germany has a very high concentration of media ownership. Two companies stand out as by far the most powerful in the German media landscape. Axel Springer AG is the largest on the print news scene, with Bild Zeitung as the largest circulation daily in Europe in the boulevard press genre, and Die Welt on the high end, while Der Spiegel, initially emulating Time, is the most influential weekly news magazine. Bertelsmann owns some of the largest publishing houses in the world and is also owner of one of the two largest private TV companies in Germany.

It is however also telling that Axel Springer’s attempt to take ownership of the other of the two large German TV companies was retracted due mostly to public opposition in addition to some regulatory concerns. This highlights the fact that Germany, like most European countries, has not succumbed to the American trend to completely capitulate to corporate powers and the false promise that “market forces” will guarantee open and diverse media.

In spite of this high concentration of media power, advertising in Germany is subject to much more stringent conditions for accuracy and what can be advertised to the public. For example, pharmaceuticals which require prescriptions may not be advertised directly to the public but only to members of medical and related professions. Prohibited also is advertising which directly compares a product to its competitors, mainly because the consumer has no opportunity to verify the claims. The laws and regulations which govern advertising do not provide any direct legal recourse to consumers, but they do provide legal recourse for competitors and interest groups, including consumer groups.

The sum total of these more stringent regulations for advertising in Germany is that advertising, although still very pervasive, is much less intrusive and obnoxious than in the US. I cannot remember ever seeing an advertising spot in Germany which features animated bathroom or kitchen objects or happy faced cleansers, which seem to cater to the intelligence level of an average seven-year-old. 

On the public broadcasting stations there is significantly less time devoted to commercials. In general there are scheduled 20-30 minute time slots two or three times during the day where blocks of commercial are aired. Durning other times there are no interruptions of programming due to commercials.

Even with the commercial broadcasters the time devoted to advertisements is significantly less than in America. Thus, for the average “consumer” in Germany there is very much less exposure to the constant mind-numbing and mind-altering (literally) influence of advertising. Americans have been conditioned to maintain focus for only between 3 and 5 minutes (i.e. between commercial interruptions) while most Germans can still maintain mental focus for 30 minutes or more.

Most importantly however, in the context of the survival of democratic institutions, having understood the irrational and falsifying nature of advertising by political campaigns, political parties and candidates are not permitted to buy commercial time on radio or TV. Thus, to get their messages across, political candidates must present themselves to the public, not via embarrassingly negative, misleading and banal 60 second spots, but through personal appearances and media interview programs. We will dig more deeply into that aspect of the media below.

My very personal (and subjective) experience of “the corporate media” in Germany is that they are vastly less invasive and obnoxious compared to the U.S. It is often downright painful to sit through a program on American TV, with the constant commercial interruptions. The previously cited observations by Cohen and Fraser come to mind in that Germans and Europeans in general are much less complacent in their acceptance of what corporate media pre-digests for them, both in the commercial and the political arena.

The Press

As we described above, the media, have an important role to play in ensuring this “enlightened understanding” required for a properly functioning democracy as well as (in theory) providing consumers with the complete knowledge required to make the “rational” decisions in the “free enterprise” market place. These ubiquitous media are a far flung enterprise today which pervade all aspects of our daily lives. “The press” is only a very small part of this, but it is completely integrated into and subservient to the larger corporate media environment.

“The press”, or journalism, is given a special role by the Constitution by virtue of the First Amendment. In recognition of this important role of the press, journalism, in theory at least, holds itself to the following Code of Ethics:

Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility.

Again I turn to my favorite early (and enthusiastic) observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville. The entirety of Volume One, Part II, Chapter 3, On the Freedom of the Press in the United States is fascinating.

“In the United States, therefore, the position of the journalist is not a very high one; his education is rudimentary at best, and his ideas are often expressed in a vulgar way. ... Even with such limited resources, the press yields enormous power in America. It carries the currents of political life into every section of this vast country. Ever vigilant, it regularly lays bare the secret springs of politics and obliges public men to appear before the court of public opinion. It is the press that rallies interest around certain doctrines and formulates the creeds of the political parties. It is through the press that the parties speak to one another without meeting face-to-face and understand one another without direct contact. When numerous organs of the press take a common line, their influence over the long run becomes almost irresistible, and public opinion, battered incessantly on one side only, ultimately gives in to their bludgeoning”

“Opinions that become established under the influence of the free press in the United States are often more tenacious than those formed elsewhere under the influence of censorship”.

So much for the optimistic view of the functioning of the press in the early days of American democracy.

Journalism today is an integral part of “the media” and despite the optimistic view of de Tocqueville and its lofty code of ethics, it is entirely subservient to the profit making requirements of the media corporations for which they work. Journalism thus will, consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, present the “truth” and “reality” to conform to the needs of their corporate owners.

To be fair, there are some media (primarily the traditional print media) which still make an attempt at living by the journalistic code of ethics. However, these are either fighting for economic survival (New York Times, Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report) or are relatively insignificant in their reach and penetration (NPR, PBS).

Whatever journalistic philosophy you subscribe to (as exemplified by Lippmann versus Dewey), it is clear that journalism (“the press”) has a huge responsibility in ensuring the proper functioning, even the survival, of democracy. And sadly, in my view, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the fact that journalism and the press has not lived up to this responsibility and has contributed mightily to the death of democracy in America.

With the beauty of Google one can very quickly assemble a reading list to keep one busy for years. Even a cursory sampling of the available material shows that there is a growing body of evidence, some of it thought provoking, some angry, some partisan, but all of it sounding alarms about the state of journalism today, both in and of itself, but also, more frighteningly, in relation to its role in sustaining democracy.

One of the more prolific writers on this subject is Robert W. McChesney. One of his more recent books, The Death and Life of American Journalism(21) (with John Nichols), states:

“That examination [of journalism] leads quickly to the recognition that the existing policy toolkit -- which pretty much begins and ends with calculations of ways to make the news profitable -- is all but worthless. Journalism must be understood as a public good. It is something of value to society that the market might once have produced... But if Americans want sufficient journalism to make our constitutional system to work, it means we need a massive public intervention to produce a public good”.

With the takeover of the press by corporate media conglomerates the guiding principle for the new journalism (just another branch of the entertainment industry) was no longer “all the news that people need to know” but rather “everything people want to know”.

What is obvious even to the casual consumer of news of all types (print, broadcast, cable, etc) have become entertainment shows, not surprisingly since virtually all news is produced by entertainment companies.

In research reported in Journalism.org (http://www.journalism.org/node/444) a 1998 study analyzed the changing content of news, it was found

• There has been a shift toward lifestyle, celebrity, entertainment and celebrity crime/scandal in the news and away from government and foreign affairs. But infotainment still comes nowhere near dominating the traditional news package.
• There is an even more pervasive shift toward featurized and people-oriented approach to the news, away from traditional straight news accounts. This tends to make the news more thematic and make the journalist more a story teller and mediator than a reporter.
• The news media are dividing into market-based niches, with a result that a citizen's perception of society can vary greatly depending on the source of news. Prime time network news magazines, which have replaced documentaries on network television, have all but abandoned covering traditional topics such as government, social welfare, education and economics in favor of lifestyle and news-you-can-use. News magazines which once concentrated heavily on coverage of ideas have moved heavily toward celebrity. Newspapers continue to cover government, foreign policy and domestic policy as a staple. The network news has become a hybrid of all the others.

By the standards of today’s rapid change in the media landscape, 1998 is an eternity ago. If you subtract the increased time for commercials on broadcast news, the pervasive use of “news teasers”, “cross advertising” for other shows from the same supplier, “personal exchanges” among the newscasters (the “giggle segments”), the “feel good” segment which seems to be a “must” for both local as well as national news programs, then the time remaining for “real news”, that is, to provide the public with enlightened understanding on issues they are called upon to make decisions about as part of the democratic process, is reduced to between 5 and 7 minutes in a typical 30 minute news broadcast.

Every once in a while even the mainstream corporate media will come up with a new program, such as CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, which for a few weeks gives you hope that journalism is not completely dead. His first few shows devoted the entire hour to one topic or one guest, with fabulous questions and in-depth answers from which the public could actually learn something new. However, a few weeks later, no doubt after some “focus groups”, and aware of the short attention span of the “target audience”, this was changed to the typical format of multiple topics without real substance, and populated by the typical talking heads of all the other “shows” - in fairness, even with this change, GPS tends to be far superior to the typical Sunday morning fare.

But much more serious than this surface “dumbing down” of news is the behind-the-scenes pressure which corporate owners exert on their “news media” divisions or subsidiaries. There are innumerable documented incidents of corporate media management inserting themselves into the editorial role to control both what is covered and how it is covered. This can range from the seemingly innocuous efforts to protect the image of the corporate entity, to the much more insidious efforts to control and manage the national discussion on war and peace, such as in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. And who knows how much more is going on which is not reported, since those who are supposed to report these abuses are part of the abuse.

Under these circumstance, it is not unreasonable to speculate on why the media are whipping up such a frenzy about the Wikileaks disclosures and coordinating a frenzied lynch mop to “get” Julian Assange. One could easily speculate that the reason is that they fear disclosures about just how deep the control of the media by their corporate owners runs and how corrupt the media have become in using their special constitutional privileges towards misleading and controlling the public to the benefit of their corporate owners.

Here again, Americans have chosen to put all their faith in free-enterprise, in this case free-enterprise journalism, and have chosen to cast the state, or government, as the villain. It is easy to understand that in the early days of the republic the emphasis was on protecting the free expression of ideas from government, as to that point the state had historically been the only entity strong enough to potentially exert a stifling influence on the press. And indeed, in many countries such as Russia and China, the state still is making every effort to bend to press to its desires.

The authors McChesney and Nichols come to the conclusion that “the press” and journalism, with its special responsibility in a democratic society, cannot be left to flourish or die as a for-profit enterprise in a laissez-faire market economy, but, like other public services for which a democratic government assumes responsibility (the military, roads and other forms of transportation, public safety, the courts), must of necessity be supported by public funds in order to ensure a free and open press. 

The question then becomes, how does the state provide those subsidies to the press without dominating and perverting the press?

There are of course some home-grown models, such as PBS and NPR. Even a casual comparison of the journalistic quality of news programs from these sources to those form the mainstream corporate media show PBS and NPR to be vastly superior in terms of scope, depth, and credibility. When is the last time you did not hear a mainstream media “journalist” end an interview on an important topic (yes, sometimes they actually do that) with a long-winded, self-serving, pontificating “question” (actually more like a statement), ending with “you have 30 seconds to answer”?

And here again it is frightening how ruthlessly the mainstream corporate media pounce on organizations such as PBS and NPR in order to control, if not wipe out, even such relatively insignificant threats to their complete control of the news media. When NPR recently fired Juan Williams in the same week when it accepted a large grant from George Soros, both actions probably ill advised, the call immediately came to cut off all federal funding for NPR.

And this is not the first time that commercial interests, through their pressure and lobby groups, have induced the government to effectively censor the public broadcasters. McChesney and Nichols describe an incident in the early 1970’s where, in response to a PBS report entitled Banks and the Poor, which was very critical of bank practices, the Nixon administration vetoed the public broadcasting budget authorization.

This again is one of these perverse situations where the conventional wisdom, inflicted on us by the overwhelming dominance of corporate media, is that the danger of public broadcasting is that the state can too easily exercise unfair control over public media through its control of the purse strings. The truth however is the exact opposite: corporate media uses its lobby-based control over the government to stifle any hint of criticism by public broadcasting of the for-profit interests of free-market capitalism.

Personal Experience

Again, I close with personal observations on at least one alternative to America’s failed free-market corporate media model to sustain the kind of free and open press that might have saved American democracy. And again, I do not argue that Germany provides the best alternative (Germans themselves are not always that happy with it) or the only alternative. Even if my experience is certainly subjective, possibly biased, and definitely not complete, it is ultimately in the collective experience of individual citizens of how their country’s and their society’s laws and institutions are perceived that success or failure is determined.

For a more complete, and certainly more rigorous, description of public service models for maintaining news media and journalism capable of sustaining democracy, I invite the reader to start with McChesney and Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism, in the chapter on “Subsidizing Democracy” under “What We Learn from Abroad”.

The German model of Public Service Broadcasting is a variant of a model common throughout Europe today and is based on the granddaddy of them all, the BBC.

The BBC was started in 1922 as a privately held company, but, after attempts by private enterprise to exert undue influence and attempts at government takeover, it was legally turned into a public service enterprise in 1927. As such it gained enormous world wide respect for its unbiased reporting and the breadth and depth of its programming and in most ways it became the “gold standard” of what good broadcasting and especially good (broadcast) journalism was all about.

After the war Germany’s legal foundation for broadcasting, under the leadership of the Allied occupation forces, especially in the British zone, initially only radio but subsequently including the new medium of television as well, was organized along the lines of the BBC public service model. Rather than distributing frequencies to for-profit private enterprise, the state gave broadcasting rights only to these public service entities.

Initially under one monopolistic umbrella group (ARD) the public service entities were organized along state (Laender) lines. Funding came primarily from usage fees. Everyone who owns a radio or television is required to to register it and pay monthly fees. Secondary sources of funding allowed by the legal infrastructure were through (limited) commercials and product placements.

As mentioned, the ARD originally had a monopoly for all broadcasting. As television became more wide spread, the limitations of this monopolistic structure in terms of entertainment content became obvious. In comparison to American TV entertainment shows, German television was in many ways pathetic. In those early days  the most popular shows were those syndicated from American TV.

To try and rectify this situation a second competing public service broadcasting entity was launched (ZDF, much like BBC2), in order to introduce an element of competition into the broadcast environment. This did indeed help a little to improve the entertainment value and a number of German shows became quite popular and “successful”. Note that successful here means the size of the audience and not the advertising profit -- although related, the two are by no means the same.

Ultimately broadcasting was opened to for-profit commercial companies, which has dramatically changed the broadcasting landscape in Germany and in Europe.

The underlying rationale for todays dual public/private broadcast media landscape in Germany (and Europe in general) is that the public service component is charged with supplying a basic or minimum broadcast media service to the public, which is independent from both government and commercial interests. This greater independence from commercial domination in all aspects of public life has been and is a major distinguishing factor between life in Europe and the US, and it has an especially obvious effect on the non-entertainment news and information programming.

Putting aside the sometimes mediocre entertainment value of German public service TV programs, what is immediately obvious is that the non-entertainment news and information programs are vastly superior to the US counterparts. News and information programs are not artificially pressed into the corset of entertainment formats (short segments, lots of moving and distracting graphic aids and backgrounds, the need to be controversial rather than informative, the perceived need to always end on some artificially uplifting note, etc.) Discussion and interview programs allow the guests, who generally actually have some firsthand knowledge of the topic, to speak in full sentences and even paragraphs, rather than trying to elicit snappy one-liners. The host, rather than trying to put words into their guests mouths by asking endlessly convoluted and long-winded “questions”, which are more like statements, actually allow the guests to develop and express ideas and concepts.

The acceptance of public service versus commercial broadcasting reflects these observations. According to recent surveys by (non-profit) institutes, the “market share” is divided evenly between the two public service broadcasters (ARD and ZDF) and the relatively larger number of commercial broadcasters.

More tellingly for this discussion, however, is the fact the in surveys about the “trustworthiness” of the journalistic content, the public service broadcasters outrank the commercial stations 69% to 15%(22).

An interesting and very important side effect of this greater perceived trustworthiness of public service journalism is that the commercial broadcasters model their non-entertainment programming more along the lines of the former, which lifts the quality of the entire offering of news and information programming.

When watching almost any and every “news” or interview program on US television my reaction tends to range between shaking my head at the stupidity and predictability of the “canned” and pre-produced segments, to wanting to throw something at the TV for the transparently false, misleading and self-serving statements which are allowed to go unchallenged.

Although on occasion that happens to me when watching German TV also, (I am getting to be a grumpy old guy), more often than not I am captivated by the depth of the discussions, the breadth of the knowledge of the speakers or guests, and the fact that blatantly simplistic gobbledegook is not allowed to stand unchallenged. At the end of the show I will have typically learned something new or gained a better understanding of political or other social/policy issue.

It is also noteworthy that all political parties have criticized the public service broadcasters at different times for unfair or biased reporting, both when they were in and out of power, which means that these broadcasters are more than likely doing a good job.

Finally, form my own experience, given the choice between equally interesting programs on public service and commercial stations, I would generally go with the public service station simply because of the absence of the tremendously intrusive commercial breaks and the evidently better content. Personally I cannot overstate the difference in the effectiveness of, for example, an interview or discussion program which is not fragmented by commercials every three minutes.

Conclusion

The major points to keep in mind about the role of the media in killing American democracy are:

• The media in America (with few exceptions) are an integral part of free-market capitalism and are thus geared exclusively to serve the interests of free-market capitalism and not society at large.
• In its primary role to entertain Americans and induce them to spend money on often inferior and useless products and services, the media have learned to use psychological methods which are extremely powerful and very much like brainwashing.
• The mix of entertainment and advertising used by the American corporate media serves both to dumb down the audience and to fragment the attention span of the typical American so that critical and independent thinking has become the exception.
• Because the news and journalism are an integral part of corporate media, the vital role of informing and education the American electorate about issues and political candidates has been abandoned in favor of entertainment.
• Corporate media are the primary channel through which Americans receive virtually all their information regarding issues and candidates prior to elections (see also the chapter on the role of lobbying). The information the American electorate get in order to make their “sovereign” decisions in the voting booth is thus hugely biased in favor of corporate interest.

Footnotes:

(18) Elliot D. Cohen and Bruce W. Fraser, The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship, Prometheus Books, 2007.

(19) Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, Ig Publishing, 2007 (first published in 1957)

(20) Frank Lutz, Win: The Principles That Take Your Business From Ordinary to Extraordinary, 

(21) Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Nation Books, 2010.

(22) Source: Wikipedia (German) “Oeffentlich-rechtlicher Rundfunk”

The next chapter in this series is located here.