Building Meaning

This bin Laden show — “Inside the Situation Room” — was hagiography in its purest, most propagandistic, and most subservient form. This is typically the role Williams plays — he cleanses and glorifies American government actions, especially military actions, with his reverent, soothing, self-important baritone — but he really outdid himself here.

From the start, Williams proudly displayed his child-like excitement over his special access: “television cameras are inside the Situation Room for the very first time,” he gushed.”[Glenn Greenwald on Brian Williams' televised tour of the WHSR]

Absolutely accurate, yet it's not so personal.

It's business.

As usual.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. ... The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.[source]

Every profitable profit-driven institution is integrated; poor performance in one sector degrades the performance of the entity itself. 

People want comfortable cohesion rather than inchoate impressions and disturbing -- that is, dissonant -- imagery. (eg, repetitive images of 911 and no images of coffins from Iraq or charred bodies after drone strikes.)

As human creatures, our minds actively make sense of the world -- that is, we fill in the more nebulous details to match the gestalt presented.  Discordant details get discarded and/or changed while harmonious details gain significance because we empathize with the subjects of our perceptions.  We remember the image of the person falling/jumping from the WTC because it makes iconic the horror rather than recalling a white van somewhere off site which demands analysis rather than visceral response -- which is to say, we subvert our own conscious processes when we choose visceral concordance.

In the natural world, we're pretty accurate at drawing conclusions. In a mediated world (one seen through your television or newspaper), we're pretty bad at an accurate understanding of events because we rely upon others' presentation rather than our own impressions. We have our impressions of others' presentations rather than our own impression.  It's rather like seeing an image of food and feeling hungry yet being entirely unable to satisfy our hunger with the food presented to us (intentionally presented in the most evocative way.)

Advertisers (or, for the politically minded, "propagandists") don't put a for sale sign on a product and leave the sale to the buyers' discretion; they sell the entire experience:  This is their job and they're experts at it.

The continuous pressure is to create ads more and more in the image of audience motives and desires. The product matters less as the audience participation increases. ...  The steady trend in advertising is to manifest the product as an integral part of large social purposes and processes. [Marshall McLuhan 1962]

NBC isn't selling patriotism so much as it's selling Brian Williams -- the persona, the celebrity, the everyman who happens to be an insider.  Thus:

For his first inquiry, Williams, holding his spectacles in his hand,... [gg, above]

Human details -- idiosyncrasies like his clutched reading glasses -- are intentionally part of the scenery.   At any point, Williams could have handed them off to an assistant, but he keeps them -- consciously or unconsciously -- to establish a connection with the viewer.  WE, (not me, well-coiffed, well-attired, well-spoken, well-powdered Brian Williams but all of us, viewer and special representative and advertiser) share this adventure.  We vicariously experience this archeological excursion into the shadowy pyramid of power we call the White House Situation Room.  Here is where, when it comes, nuclear apocalypse begins and the human species ends.

Shhhh ... whisper in sacred awe, because truly, it is naked power which WE observe ... which WE dare not disturb lest it turns it gaze on us.

Brought to you by NBC(Comcast/GE) and the DNC, partners in a better world for all of US*.



*Disclaimer, if you think you're one of US, you're not. That's why we go to such expense creating these illusions.  It would be simpler just to kill the lot of you parasites and be done with it.  Every now and then you amuse us.  Plus, who would shine our shoes?