Surrealpolitik

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There were 77 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Propaganda'.

  1. "But I agree that rather than giving out information someone would be able to check, it's better to limit yourself to insinuation. Insinuation doesn't involve saying anything in particular, it just serves to raise a doubt about the person making the denial. For example: 'We are happy to note the explanation, but we understand that Signor Perniketti' -- always keep to Signor, rather than Onorevole or Dottor; Signor is the worst insult in our country -- 'has sent dozens of denials to countless newspapers. This must indeed be a full-time compulsion.' This way, readers become convinced he is paranoid. You see the advantage of insinuation: by saying that Perniketti has written to other newspapers, we are simply telling the truth, which can't be denied. The most effective insinuation is the one that gives facts that are valueless in themselves, yet cannot be denied because they are true."

    Source: Numero Zero, p. 68-69
  2. "It is signed by Veruccio Veriti. So, what's the point of this denial of a denial? Point number one, that the newspaper has received the information from sources close to Signor Perniketti. This always works. The sources aren't given, but it implies the newspaper has confidential sources, perhaps more reliable than Perniketti. Use is then made of the journalist's notebook. No one will ever see the notebook, but the idea of an actual record tends to inspire confidence in the newspaper and suggests that there is evidence. Lastly, insinuations are made that are meaningless in themselves but throw a shadow of suspicion over Perniketti. Now I don't say all denials have to take this form -- this is just a parody -- but keep in mind the three fundamental elements for a denial of a denial: other sources, notes in the reporter's notebook, and doubts about the reliability of the person making the denial. Understood?"

    "Very good," they replied in chorus.

    Source: Numero Zero, p. 67
  3. A few of this generation [note: early 20th century] of owners used their wealth to protect and promote decent journalism, but most behaved like Lord Beaverbrook, the model of this kind of proprietor, who famous explained his role as owner of the Daily Express: 'I run the paper for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive.'

    Source: Flat Earth News, p. 16
  4. A former White House press secretary and network correspondent, [Pierre] Salinger announced to the world on November 8, 1996, that he'd received documents from French intelligence proving that a US Navy missile had accidentally downed [Flight 800]. That same day, the FBI's Jim Kallstrom called a press conference to deny Salinger's allegations. When the conference began, he was flanked by Rear Admiral Edward K. Kristensen (the NTSB's Jim Hall was late) and surrounded by a phalanx of other secret service and military personnel. Kallstrom rattled off a prepared speech, and then it was time for questions. A man raised his hand and asked what I thought was a pertinent - and impertinent - question. He wanted to know why the navy was involved in the recovery and investigation while a possible suspect. Kallstrom's response was immediate: "Remove him!" he yelled. Two men leapt over to the questioner and grabbed him by the arms. There was a momentary chill in the air after the guy had been dragged out of the room. Kallstrom, Kristensen, Hall, and their entourage acted as if nothing had happened. There was something very disquieting about the goonish tactics. A dispassionately dismissive response from Kallstrom would have been a more convincing way to tell us that the navy had nothing to do with the disaster. In any case, right then and there, the rest of us had been put on notice to be on our best behavior.

    From chapter: Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 290-291
  5. A second secret element is the clandestine headquarters, which should consist of a 'tiny number of men' who were willing and prepared to undertake 'more or less concerted action' (Mariën, 1989: 67). As a first task, the group should produce a basic liquid capital required for initiating the campaign. To this purpose, Mariën’s (1989) envisages 'real' terrorist acts:

    "[T]he single opportunity to procure that money obviously consists in getting it there, where it is. [...] A blade against the throat, the threat of some Asian torture as well as hostage-taking would make each bank manager a precious and entirely compliant auxiliary tool. [...] Employees and customers [...] are not at all prepared to resist the onslaught of machine pistols, hand grenades, teargas or, if necessary, flamethrowers." (pp.122, 127)

    Source: Surrealistic communication as symbolic terrorism: The example of Marcel Mariën’s theory of political campaigning, p. 197
  6. Any time NPR and The Washington Post agree, I figure it can't be true.

    Source: Vulture's Picnic, p. 167
  7. As a premise, terrorism tends to be about the Other; i.e., one's country, one's class, one's creed, one's president, oneself can hardly be a terrorist...Accordingly, a cursory examination of how news is produced reveals the decisive import of one's own government's perspective in journalistic reporting. The example Cooper adduces is the bombing of La Belle Disco Club in West Berlin on April 5, 1986, which Soviet media described as engineered by the CIA and the Mossad, whereas the U.S. media attributed it to Libyan-sponsored terrorists. The counterposed stories ignored the other side's version, did not grant equal time to neutral spokespersons, and failed to reveal their sources. Rather, they constituted mutually irreconcilable "accounts" of the same events.

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 13
  8. Behind this classic doctrine of liberty, which American democrats embodied in their Bill of Rights, there are, in fact, several different theories of the origin of truth. One is a faith that in the competition of opinions, the truest will win because there is a peculiar strength in the truth. This is probably sound if you allow the competition to extend over a sufficiently long time. When men argue in this vein they have in mind the verdict of history, and they think specifically of heretics persecuted when they lived, canonized after they were dead. Milton's question ["Whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"] rests also on a belief that the capacity to recognize truth is inherent in all men, and that truth freely put in circulation will win acceptance. It derives no less rom the experience, which has shown that men are not likely to discover truth if they cannot speak it, except under the eye of an uncomprehending policeman.

    No one can possibly overestimate the practical value of these civil liberties, nor the importancer of maintaining them. When they are in jeopardy, the human spirit is in jeopardy, and should there come a time when they have to be curtailed, as during a war, the suppression of thought is a risk to civilization which might prevent its recovery from the effects of war, if the hysterics, who exploit the necessity, were numerouds enough to carry over into peace the taboos of war...

    But in spite of its fundamental importance, civil liberty in this sense does not guarantee public opinion in the modern world. For it always assumes, either that truth is spontaneous, or that the means of securing truth exist when there is no external interference. But when you are dealing with an invisible environment, the assuption is false. The truth about distant or complex matters is not self-evident, and the machinery for assembling information is technical and expensive. Yet political science, and especially democratic political science, has never freed itself from the original assumption of Aristotle's politics sufficiently to restate the premises, so that political thought might come to grips with the problem of how to make the invisible world visible to the citizens of a modern state.

    Source: Public Opinion, p. 252-253
  9. Both spectacles [i.e., the Nuremberg rally and Bush's "mission accomplished" pageant] are examples of the distinctively modern mode of myth creation. They are the self-conscious constructions of visual media. Cinema and television share a common quality of being tyrannical in a specific sense. They are able to block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, of its total impression.

    In a curious but important way these media effects mesh with religious practice. In may Christian religions the believer participates in ceremonies much as the movie or TV watcher takes part in the spectacle presented. In neither case do they participate as the democratic citizen is supposed to do, as actively engaged in decisions and sharing the exercise of power. They participate as communicants in a ceremony prescribed by the masters of the ceremony. Those assembled at Nuremberg or on the USS Abraham Lincoln did not share power with their leaders. Their relationship was thaumaturgical: they were being favored by a wondrous power in a form and at a time of its choosing.

    Source: Democracy Inc., p. 2-3
  10. Brute facts in their speechless horror are the very substance of serious terrorism discourse...As if to dispel any doubts regarding terrorism's compelling reality, it is routine for writers to begin their journalistic reports or scholarly papers with...dreadful statistics about the innocent victims. These are indeed the hardest of facts, and who can doubt their validity?

    It is difficult to transcend the initial shock over such numbers in order to contemplate the reality behind them. The reporting of innocent travelers killed in the bombing of an airplane is so brutally factual that no possible explanation makes sense; indeed it is so "real" that it requires no frame, so "true" that no interpretation is necessary, so "concrete" that no meaning need be inferred. Its reality appears to belong more to nature than to society. This is discourse so overwhelmed by the "reality effect" of the facts that the very suggestion that it authenticate itself appears ridiculous.

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 5
  11. But the Public Broadcast System takes our tax money. It owes us something, no? If we can't get the real story about Big Oil, at least we deserve an apology.

    I was waiting for the PBS Frontline reporter to say, 'BP has kept the truth locked in its files for years – and so have we at PBS AND WE ARE ASHAMED. Send us back your Ken Burns DVDs for a refund.'

    But no, they didn't apologize; they asked for more money! And we will send it, leveraging Chevron's and ExxonMobil's payola. As P. T. Barnum once said, there's a PBS donor born every minute.

    Source: Vulture's Picnic, p. 203-204
  12. By now we have been sensitized by the media to accept the existence of a bizarre club of nations, the so-called sponsors of terrorism. What is most striking about the blacklisted is not their sinister vocation but rather the shiftiness in club membership. A country which is today an "evil empire" tomorrow becomes a close partner, or a ruler with whom we have been doing business as usual commits an act of bloody aggression and is suddenly a new Hitler, a nation such as Syria, catalogued for years as a supporter of terrorism, becomes a friendly ally by siding with the West against Iraq, which in turn had been removed from the blacklist for fighting against Iran...A cursory look at the ways that Iraq, Iran, and Syria were dropped from or included in the State Department's list of terrorism's sponsors (depending on the U.S. Administration's policy interests) demonstrates the extent to which blacklisting is indeed a "terrorism spectacle."...

    Academics may object to the erratic changes and other inconsistencies, but they do so in vain since once the Secretary of State decides who is or is not a "terrorist," that becomes an established fact in the U.S. media and its political discourse. Thus, a Pentagon report in 1988 listed Mandela's African National Congress as one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," whereas pro-South African government RENAMO, which the same reports admits killed over 100,000 civilians in Mozambique between 1986 and 1988, is identified merely as an "indigenous insurgent group."

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 12
  13. Corporate media executives perceive their primary, and often sole, responsibility to be the need to maximize profits for the next quarterly statement and not, as some observers would have it, to inform the public. This attitude is not lost on journalists. An April 2000 survey of nearly three hundred journalists and news executives conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review revealed that more than a quarter of the journalists surveyed admitted that they avoid going after important stories that might affect the financial interests of their news organizations or advertisers. Altogether, 41 percent of the respondents said that they either purposely avoid newsworthy stories and/or soften the tone of stories to benefit the interests of their news organizations.

    From chapter: Carl Jenson, What Happened to Good Old-Fashioned Muckraking?
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 427
  14. Critical undogmatic receptiveness is the true attitude of science.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 133
  15. Democracy is more than voting; it's having the information to vote.

    Source: Vulture's Picnic, p. 110
  16. Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It's free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it come to the real down and dirty stuff - stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking - that's where we begin to see the limits of our "free" press. In today's media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion.

    From chapter: Gary Webb, The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 156
  17. During my tenures at CBS and CNN, I rarely ran into a producer working on a very sensitive story. If I had to tell you why, I'd say this: Getting a job at a network is hard enough because the competition is brutal, but keeping it - especially since there's no job security and your contract comes up for renewal every two or four years - is a skill that requires as much political savvy as journalistic talent. There's no point in looking for trouble or hard work by pitching a tough story. Network producing ducing is an all-consuming job. The hours are horrendous. Investigative pieces in particular can wreak havoc on your mind, body, and family.

    On a story like TWA 800, as you saw with my experience at CBS, you can become a pariah among your colleagues as well as with government investigators if you persist with your politically incorrect investigation.

    From chapter: Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 320
  18. During the first weeks following the Flight 800's demise, there was a great deal of coverage about evidence of a high-pressure explosive force - either a bomb or a missile - causing the jet to blow up. Indeed, the coverage was going in the same direction as the FBI...But by September, the press was turning around to the new government line, no questions asked...

    What's fascinating about this is how the same paper first prints a series of reports talking about hard evidence the investigators have uncovered indicating that a mechanical failure was unlikely - like "traces of explosives in the passenger cabin," "very heavy damage to the landing gear," and "portions of the fuel tank wreckage" being "virtually unscathed" - and then turns around and writes a subsequent story that says, "The investigators acknowledge that they have no evidence pointing to a mechanical malfunction. Rather, they say, the failure to find proof of a bombing, after more than two months, lends indirect credence to another theory . . ." Indirect credence to another theory!? What happened to the traces of explosives, etc., that you reported about earlier?

    And that's another huge problem for you, the average citizen seeking good information from your newspaper or TV news broadcast. You probably didn't realize until you read this just how mutable the truth is. You probably didn't know that often what is reported today is the truth, until official sources change it later on. The new truth can be the exact opposite of what was reported before, and it will be reported, no questions asked. What was reported before no longer exists or matters because official sources, our nation's ministers of truth, say it doesn't. Go back and read George Orwell's 1984. It'll give you goose bumps.

    From chapter: Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 297-298
  19. Every democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are incompatible with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of masses is such that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow rather blindly. This has not made non-resistants out of democrats, but it has resulted in all democratic wars being fought for pacifist aims. Even when the wars are in fact wars or conquest, they are sincerely believed to be wars in defense of civilization.

    Source: Public Opinion, p. 217
  20. Every leader is in some degree a propagandist. Strategically placed, and compelled often to choose even at the best between the equally cogent though conflicting ideals of safety for the institution and candor to his public, the official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts, in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know.

    That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

    The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not diee out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

    Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify ervery political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

    Source: Public Opinion, p. 201-202
  21. Exactly 30 years after Bernays' Propaganda was first published, Belgian surrealist Marcel Mariën, who also worked in marketing and advertising, developed his own campaigning theory on the basis of surrealistic thinking. His piece, 'Théorie de la révolution mondiale immédiate', [theory of the immediate world revolution], appeared in 1958 in the surrealistic periodical Les lèvres nues in Brussels (Mariën, 1958). In the text, Mariën develops an alternative, surrealist concept of propaganda.

    Source: Surrealistic communication as symbolic terrorism: The example of Marcel Mariën’s theory of political campaigning, p. 196
  22. Fetishes communicate with each other by the omnipotence of thought and with the rapidity of dreams. Whereas there is a deferred relationship between signs, there is an immediate chain reaction between fetishes because they are made of an indifferent mental substance. We see this in fashion items, where the transmission is unreal and instantaneous because they do not have meaning. Ideas, too, can have this mode of transmission: they just have to be fetishized.

    Source: The Perfect Crime, p. 81
  23. From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. Yet on the face of the evidence there is no reason to charge a conspiracy by Americans. They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.

    Whether they were "giving the public what it wants" or creating a public that took what it got, is beside the point. They were performing the supreme duty in a democracy of supplying the information on which public opinion feeds, and they were derelict in that duty. Their motives may have been excellent. They wanted to win the war; they wanted to save the world. They were nervously excited by exciting events. They were baffled by the complexity of affairs, and the obstacles created by war. But whatever the excuses, the apologies, and the extenuation, the fact remains that a great people in a supreme crisis could not secure the minimum of necessary information on a supremely important event. When that truth has burned itself into men's consciousness, they will examine the news in regard to other events, and begin a searching inquiry into the sources of public opinion. That is the indispensable preliminary to a fundamental task of the Twentieth Century: the insurance to a free people of such a supply of news that a free government can be successfully administered.

    A Test of the News - by Charles Merz and Walter Lippmann (Kindle Locations 156-167).

    Source: A Test of the News, p. 156-167 KL
  24. Hegel believed that progress is ultimately furthered by the person who is out of step with the majority. Only this person, the genuine nonconformist, really experiences the constraints on freedom. Only this person is in the position of questioning the prevailing understandings of happiness. For Hegel, indeed, the "unhappy consciousness" is the source of progress.

    Source: Critical Theory, p. 77
  25. I'm outraged that among journalists there is no outrage.

    From chapter: Jane Akre, The Fox, The Hounds, and the Sacred Cows
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 236
  26. If it is admitted that a condition of rational doubt would be desirable, it becomes important to inquire how it comesabout that there is so much irrational certainty in the world. A great deal of this is due to the inherent irrationality and credulity of average human nature. But this seed of intellectual original sin is nourished and fostered by other agencies, among which three play the chief part -- namely, education, propaganda, and economic pressure.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 142
  27. If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The school master should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the schemes of scoundrels.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 307
  28. In 1976, the Church Committee reported that it was "disturbed" by the Agency's :operational use" of individual academics, which included "providing leads and making introductions for intelligence purposes, collaboration in research and analysis, intelligence collection abroad, and preparation of books and other propaganda materials."

    Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 253
  29. In England, under the Blasphemy Laws, it is illegal to express disbelief in the Christian religion, though in practice the law is not set in motion against the well-to-do. It is also illegal to teach what Christ taught on the subject of non-resistance. Therefore, whoever wishes to avoid becoming a criminal must profess to agree with Christ's teaching, but must avoid saying what that teaching was.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 70
  30. In his paper, "Fearing Fictions," Kendall Walton proposes the notion of "quasi-fear" for that fright experienced when contemplating on a movie or TV screen agents (such as a terrible green slime or the creature from the Black Lagoon) that the viewer knows for certain are only fictional. Then there is the fear of a person afraid of a nonexistent ghost or burglar who are nonetheless "real" since the person believes that they are present. Fear of terrorism is never solely fictional, as in the first case, but is rather of the second type. Still, faced with the extraordinary fact that during one single month 10 million Americans decided to stay at home rather than take an airplane reportedly because of a terrorist threat issued several thousands miles away by a beleaguered dictator, one questions whether they were dissuaded by real feelings of terror or were engaging in some sort of make-believe in which they acted "as if" the threats posed real danger to their lives...

    Terrorism discourse is characterized by the confusion of sign and context provoked by the deadly atrocity of apparently random acts, the impossibility of discriminating reality from make-believe, and text from reader. These strange processes and their mix make terrorism a queer phenomenon. Emptying the sign of its deadly messages seem to be, following Barthes's advice, the best antidote to the experience of terror. And nothing appears to be more damaging to the ghosts and myths of terrorism (for audience and actors alike) than fictionalizing them further to the point that fear dissolves into "as-if" terror.

    The discourse's victory, then, derives from imposing a literal frame of "this is real war," "this is global threat," "this is total terror." Its defeat derives from writing "this is an as-if war," "this is an as-if global threat," "this is make-believe total terror."

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 28-29
  31. In religion and politics, on the contrary, though there is as yet nothing approaching scientific knowledge, everybody considers it de rigeur to have a dogmatic opinion, to be backed up by inflicting starvation, prison, and war, and to be carefully guarded from argumentative competition with any different opinion. If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about these matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 124
  32. In such fashion there is blurring of the line between fact and fiction in ostensibly objective journalistic reporting, particularly since it is the very nature of covert operations and intergovernmental confidentiality to place a premium more upon "deniability" -- a fancy expression for mendacity -- than upon veracity. Hence the novel's plot of intrigue and the journalist's political discourse collapse into the monolithic frame that we have labeled contemporary terrorism discourse.

    This blurring of genres is further exacerbated by the propensity of some journalists and counterterrorism specialists to author terrorism novels (e.g., Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, William Buckley Jr., Brian Crozier). Thus, at terrorism conferences it is not uncommon for the experts to discuss their next fiction project!

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 48
  33. In the 1940s, for example, full-time labor editors and reporters abounded on US daily newspapers, and there were several hundred of them. Even ferociously anti-labor newspapers, like the Chicago Tribune, covered the labor beat. The 1937 Flint sit-down strike that launched the United Auto Workers and the trade union movement was a major news story across the nation. By the 1980s, however, labor had fallen off the map, and there were no more than a dozen labor beat reporters remaining on US dailies. (The number is less than five today.) The story was simply no longer covered. Hence, the 1989 Pittstown sit-down strike - the largest since Flint - was virtually unreported in the US media, and its lessons unknown. As the labor movement declined, coverage of labor was dropped. People still work, poverty among workers is growing, workplace conflicts are as important as ever, but this is no longer news.

    From chapter: Robert McChesney, The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 442-443
  34. It is difficult to disagree with the observations of the historian of US imperialism Richard Immerman:

    "The empire that America constructed in the twentieth century is the most powerful empire in world history...It has assembled institutions -- the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Organization of American States, the World Trade Organization, and more -- that provide potent mechanisms for global management." (Immerman, 2010:12)

    The majority of mainstream media enthusiastically take part in this global management process.

    From chapter: Introduction
    Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 4
  35. It was then that the most bizarre incident I've experienced to date with this story occurred. O'Meara and I had driven up to New York from Washington in her car. We had arrived late at night and parked on the street right in front the building we were staying in. We decided to take out our bags and leave everything else in the trunk.

    "Everything else" included our TWA documents, O'Meara's computer, a movie camera, a tool chest, and some tennis rackets.

    The next morning, we went to the car, and O'Meara opened the trunk. Everything was there, except for the TWA 800 documents and O'Meara's computer. The trunk lock itself looked untouched and worked perfectly. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these things do happen in the United States of America. I would never have believed it if I hadn't experienced it myself.

    From chapter: Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 312
  36. It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.

    Source: Numero Zero, p. 60
  37. Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 79
  38. Not one single mainstream media journalist undertook took to do what my publisher's (Delacorte Press) attorneys had done: conduct a libel reading, or a detailed examination of how I had documented my facts. I was a man whose words in courts across the land were credible enough to convict and sentence thousands to tens of thousands of years in prisons. My book screamed in a loud, clear voice that the drug war was a premeditated fraud, yet no one in the media was interested in investigating the story.

    From chapter: Michael Levine, Mainstream Media: The Drug War's Shills
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 179
  39. Not only did the CIA seek to influence the production of commercial films -- "to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety," as C.D. Jackson put it, the Agency also occasionally initiated film projects. The best documented instance of the latter practice is the animated version of George Orwell's celebrated 1945 novella Animal Farm...

    Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 118
  40. Not surprisingly, the mythography to which novels respond and contribute is frequently paranoid, obsessed with fantastically exaggerated dangers. Before the 1970s, the most famous novels about terrorism commonly depicted terrorism as a type of philosophical and psychological derangement and hence not much to worry about, except insofar as philosophies and psychologies can be worrying. The terrorists in novels like Conrad's Secret Agent (1907) are in fact capable of little; they suffer from indolence and aimlessness, and the police have their number. In G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a presumably dangerous terrorist conspiracy turns out to be wholly an invention of counterterrorist and counter-counterterrorist agents spying on one another. The only terrorist threat, for Chesterton, is the fear of terrorism. Even in Greene's The Quiet American, the main terrorist (the American of the title) is ineffectual; he causes death and destruction but misses his targets and does not accomplish any political goals. Twenty years later, in post-1970 fiction, however, terrorists are often magnificently adept at inflicting harm on others an challenging the security and the politics of their adversaries. It is not just that they succeed in causing damage; they succeed implausibly, stringing up success after success, engaging in more and more elaborate, ingenious, and unlikely conspiracies, and causing all sorts of implausible disruption. That a certain formal realism, including attention to realistic detail, may nevertheless convince their readers to take the fantasies of danger seriously, to see plausibility and vitality in them, is not in dispute. Nor is it in dispute that, though the fictions exaggerate, what they exaggerate is itself something real to the external world. Terrorism disrupts, damages, ills. But i its implausible exaggerations, the fiction is often unmistakably a fiction of fear, nightmarish in its concocting of terrors, ghoulish in its concocting of agents of mass destruction.

    Source: Terrorism and the Novel, 1970-2001, p. 401-402
  41. On 14 April 1897, Milner set out for South Africa on a personal crusade to make it as loyally British as the garden of England. He would remain there for eight years, cement his role as leader and build a team of brilliant young acolytes to drive the Secret Elite agenda forward over the next 30 years. His mission was absolutely clear: govern South Africa, all of it, remove Boer obstacles to complete British domination and take the Transvaal's gold. Milner knew it would mean all-out war. He also knew that the only way to make such a war acceptable to the Cabinet and British public was to portray Kruger's Boers as the aggressors.

    Source: Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 38-39
  42. On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has brought into the argument.

    Source: Public Opinion, p. 184
  43. Once published by an "expert," such findings become part of the scientific discourse and recur throughout the terrorism literature. Nor are such conclusions devoid of political significance when they are recycled as unquestionable dogma by counterterrorism officials. This was the case with Paul Bremer III, Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism, who recapitulated Post's skewed data about the Basques before the Norwegian Atlantic Committee in Oslo, Norway, February 4, 1988. Thus, the highest-ranking US counterterrorism official, in an address ironically entitled "Terrorism: Myths and Reality," employed data that anyone familiar with the Basque case knew to be utterly erroneous. Such a deceptive metaterrorism game, by which experts are allegedly capable of sorting out "reality" from "myth," is an integral part of the entire discourse's strategy of self-authorization.

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 55
  44. One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instruction as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 316
  45. One of the major shortcomings of mainstream media reporting is the failure to put facts into context. Our schools and universities suffer from this, too. It explains why Americans appear to be hopelessly naive, even dumb. They are neither. They just need context.

    Oil context, geographical context, ruling-class context, historical context - all are hidden from the average American.

    From chapter: Charlotte Dennett, The War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 68
  46. Propaganda, conducted by the means which advertisers have found successful, is now one of the recognized methods of government in all advanced countries, and is especially the method by which democratic opinion is created.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 244
  47. Surrealism and PR worked within the same field of interest (How to organize society by communication?) and employed similar means but they developed different strategies with regard to different ends ('How to orient society in a specific direction?' versus 'How to encourage people to develop their own ways and aims?')...

    Surrealism took off from this point to launch the critique of a too-statically organized mass society, answering to demands of economy, politics and science but not to the individual. This society thus had to be dismantled and rebuilt. Mariën's programme of triggering self-organized revolutionary activities by crowds envisaged achieving this by communicative campaigning. This paradoxical idea of 'non-leading' represented a remarkable difference compared to Bernays' interest of arranging society in an 'objectively' proper way. For Bernays (1928), the problem is not that we start with a too static organization but rather that society is in a state of 'chaos' which needs to be put in proper order by PR (pp.9–18). The irrational masses needed to be oriented by rational elites towards rational objectives, that is, to bring 'an idea to the consciousness of the public' (Bernays, 1928: 38). Therefore, in Bernays' (1928) vision the 'conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society' (p.9).

    Source: Surrealistic communication as symbolic terrorism: The example of Marcel Mariën’s theory of political campaigning, p. 202,203
  48. Taking into account the well-known 'revolutionary' spirit of surrealism and its reputation as a kind of 'cultural terrorism' or even as a kind of catalytic converter to establish a culture favourable to 'real' terrorism, the question arises, whether Marcel Mariën’s surrealistic campaigning concept represents a kind of terrorist communication theory.

    Source: Surrealistic communication as symbolic terrorism: The example of Marcel Mariën’s theory of political campaigning, p. 194
  49. The competition was now in full flow, and Fresia intervened once more. 'Why are aspirins different from iguanas? Because have you tried swallowing an iguana?'

    "That's enough," said Simei. "This is schoolboy stuff. Don't forget, our readers aren't intellectuals. They haven't read about the surrealists, who used to make exquisite corpses, as they called them. Our readers would take it all seriously and think we were mad. Come on, we're fooling around, we have work to do."

    Source: Numero Zero, p. 72-73
  50. The German Kaiser sent a telegram on 3 January 1896 to Paul Kruger congratulating him on preserving the independence of his country [the Transvaal] 'without the need to call for aid from his friends'. Kaiser Wilhelm's telegram was portrayed in Britain as a veiled threat of Germany's willingness to support the Boers in any struggle against the Empire. The jingoistic British press raised a lasting storm of anti-German sentiment. The Times misconstrued the kaiser's note as an example of brazen German interference and proclaimed: 'England will concede nothing to menaces and will not lie down under insult.' The windows of shops owned by Germans in London were smashed, and German sailors attacked in the streets. In sharp contrast, the German diplomatic response was conciliatory. Taken aback by such unexpected reaction, Wilhelm replied to a letter from his grandmother, Queen Victoria: 'Never was the telegram intended as a step against England or your Government...'

    But the tide of public opinion had been turned and it was in no mood to turn back. 'A tawdry jingoism filled the air' and a new respect was found for Cecil Rhodes and Dr Jameson. The Secret Elite propaganda machine turned Jameson's violence into an act of heroism and converted a shambolic, potentially very damaging incident to their advantage. Jameson, the butcher of the Matabele, was rewarded with a directorship of the British South Africa Company and would later be made prime minister of Cape Colony.

    Source: Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 37
  51. The Kuma War game includes online missions entitled 'Fallujah: Operation al Fajr', 'Battle in Sadr City' and 'Uday and Qusay's Last Stand'. Its legitimacy and realism are underwritten by the fact that the firm is run by retired military officers and used as a recruiting tool by their former colleagues...Such ideological work became vital because the military-diplomatic-fiscal disasters of the 2001-07 period jeopardized a steady supply of new troops. So at the same time as neophytes were hard to attract to the military due to the perils of war, recruits to militaristic game design stepped forward -- nationalistic designers volunteering for service. Their mission, which they appeared to accept with alacrity, was to interpellate the country's youth by situating their bodies and minds to fire the same weapons and face the same issues as on the battle field.

    From chapter: Terrorism and Global Popular Culture by Toby Miller
    Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 106-107
  52. The lesson here - and I'm going to repeat it over and over in this essay - is that on sensitive stories you can't trust official sources.

    From chapter: Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 295
  53. The political mockery of dismissing entire countries as "terrorists" or "terrorist sympathizers" -- by abolishing their long and rich histories, by debasing their languages, by stigmatizing their representatives, by sheer self-deception -- is premised on the intellectual banality of constructing a discourse around a word that inevitably imposes conceptual reification within a tabooed context.

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 23-24
  54. The theoretical conception of my topic -- that terrorism is both actual killing and a fictional construct, that fiction embodies an acute critique of the power of discourse as opposed to the power of the individual's self-assertion -- owes a great deal to deconstruction and neo-Marxism and will be familiar to readers with a grounding in the New Historicism and cultural studies.

    Source: Plotting Terror, p. 2
  55. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them...And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole. It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition. For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a "question," they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a "fact." And they never do believe it until after long critical education, they are fully conscioius of how second-hand and subjective is their apprehension of their social data.

    Source: Public Opinion, p. 108-109
  56. The whole machinery of the State, in all the different countries, is turned on to making defenceless children believe absurd propositions the effect of which is to make them willing to die in defence of sinister interests under the impression that they are fighting for truth and right....Without an elaborate system of deceit in the elementary schools it would be impossible to preserve the camouflage of democracy.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 160
  57. Then there was the OSS's...penchant not only for paramilitary sabotage and subversion but also for the subtler arts of "psychological warfare," propaganda designed to undermine enemy morale and strengthen that of allies. "Persuasion, penetration, and intimidation...are the modern counterparts of sapping and mining in the siege warfare of former days," believed Donovan.

    Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 18-19
  58. There is also a sense in which the framing of the journalistic report is beyond the individual reporter's control. Public officials and government policy set the parameters. "The State Department stated today that terrorists kidnapped an American professor in Beirut" can be modified slightly by the skeptical journalist, e.g., "The State Department alleged today," but only within strict limits. It is therefore virtually impossible for the journalistic account to begin "The State Department's questionable [or deceptive or false] claim today..."

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 45
  59. There is something fundamentally wrong with the idea that protecting national security requires exempting the CIA - or any branch of the US government for that matter - from all ethical, legal, and constitutional principles. The world needs to know that this is the institutional operating principle of the CIA, not just a few cowboys or rogue agents, and that the CIA now has the statutory right to carry out all manner of crimes anywhere in the world.

    One swallow does not a summer make, but one hundred thousand extremely serious crimes a year makes the CIA a criminal organization. Even if it did not, a suspension of the Constitution exempting the CIA from observing all international treaties and agreements screams for press coverage. So does Congress's sanctioning of CIA crimes against humanity under the well-worn "national security" banner. In fact, there is next to no meaningful coverage ever of the CIA in the mainstream media, let alone analysis. The few exceptions prove the rule, and when they occur, the rest of the media gang up on the exception, side with the CIA, and obliterate the story often before it's published. Case in point: Gary Webb's articles on the CIA's involvement with drugs.

    From chapter: John Kelly, Crimes and Silence: The CIA's Criminal Acts and the Media's Silence
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 130
  60. This is no plea that lies should not be used in war-time, but a demonstration of how lies must be used in war-time. If the truth were told from the outset, there would be no reason and no will for war. Anyone declaring the truth: "Whether you are right or wrong, whether you win or lose, in no circumstances can war help you or your country," would find himself in gaol very quickly. In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie a misdemeanour, the declaration of the truth a crime.

    Source: Falsehood in War Time, p. 27
  61. Universities have applied their idée fixe of rational-actor theory to these developments. In 1996, the National Academy of Sciences held a workshop for academia, Hollywood and the Pentagon on simulation and games. The next year, the National Research Council announced a collaborative research agenda on popular culture and militarism. It convened meetings to streamline such cooperation, from special effects to training simulations, from immersive technologies to simulated networks (Lenoir 2003: 190; Macedonia, 2002). today, untold numbers of academic journals and institutes on games are closely tied to the Pentagon. They test and augment the recruiting and training potential of games to ideologize, hire and instruct the population.

    From chapter: Terrorism and Global Popular Culture by Toby Miller
    Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 107
  62. Virtual or real, national or transnational, state-sponsored or executed by small groups, terrorism in all its forms remains a central concern for contemporary societies.

    From chapter: Introduction
    Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 1
  63. War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies.

    Source: Falsehood in War Time, p. 25-26
  64. What is the mystique of something that, while statistically less fatal than choking to death on one's lunch, has been perceived as one of the greatest public threats? What are the cultural premises and discursive strategies that provide terrorism with its rhetorical power? Why do America's few domestic "terrorist" murders annually arouse a fear that, annually, 25,000 "ordinary" murders cannot? As in the "referential illusion" of the realist aesthetic of modern literature, "the very absence of the signified...becomes the very signifier of realism." [Latter quote from Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p. 148]

    Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 6
  65. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 142
  66. What needs to be stressed is that thousands of Americans, including unelected political cadres like Wolfowitz, and scores of journalists with access to them like Zakaria, know that the CIA-owned Ministry of Interior operates more than a dozen secret prisons. They know what goes on in them, too. As one Iraqi general told the film-makers, "drilling, murder, torture -- the ugliest sorts of torture I've ever seen."

    Likewise, the composition and operations of Special Police death squads, an American interviewee said, "were discussed openly, wherever it was, at staff meetings," and were "common knowledge across Baghdad."

    Common knowledge never shared with the public.

    It is a testament to the power of US "information warfare" that this policy of systematic war crimes comes as a surprise to the general public. Such is the power of National Security State insiders like David Corn and Michael Isikoff, who happily turned a policy of calculated war crimes into the "hubris" of a few sexy mad patriots whom the Establishment is glad to scandalise, but never prosecute.

    Certainly people have to be reminded, and the young have to learn, that America's policy of war crimes for profit cannot exist without the complicity of the mainstream media, which shamelessly exploits our inclination to believe that our leaders behave morally. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

    Belligerent nationalism is understood in America as the essence of patriotism, and this veneration for militants is taught to all budding reporters at journalism schools, along with the sacred Code of Silence. Which is why, when insider Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA and Israel were training Special Forces assassination squads for deployment in Iraq based on the Phoenix program model, he described it in a bloodless manner that made it seem necessary and, at worst, a mistake.

    But war crimes are not a mistake; they are a "repugnant" and thoroughly intentional form of modern American warfare.

    Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 149
  67. What then can we adhere to, since in our world we cannot be sure we have attained the truth? We can adhere, I believe, to the ways in which men have found the truth and to the spirit in which they have sought it...We are explorers in a strange world, and what we must depend upon is not a map of the country -- for there is no map -- but upon those qualities of mind and heart and those distillations of experience which men have learned to depend upon when they faced the unknown...[T]he only sure foundation of action is truth that experience will verify, and the great concern of the liberal spirit with human freedom rests at last upon the conviction that at almost any cost men must keep open the channels of understanding and preserve unclouded, lucid, and serene their receptiveness of truth. This concern with human freedom is not only a matter of resisting encroachment upon civil liberties. It is a matter of personal honor, of seeking always in a spirit- searching self-examination to confront the facts with a mind and with a heart that have no hidden entanglement...The liberal spirit is the effort, not of any cult, or sect, or party, but of any man or woman, to remain clear and free of his irrational, his unexamined, his unacknowledged prejudgments, so that he may the more effectively make his little contribution "to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things."

    Source: The Press and Public Opinion, p. 168-170
  68. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see? When he informs you that France thinks this and that, what part of France did he watch? How was he able to watch it? Where was he when he watched it? What Frenchmen was he permitted to talk to, what newspapers did he read, and where did they learn what they say? You can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is itself a protection.

    Source: Public Opinion, p. 43
  69. William James used to preach the "will to believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will to doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge.

    Source: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, p. 115
  70. With the increase in public advertising, newspapers turned against the annonces déguisées (advertisements in disguise), which no doubt had brought in more for journalists than for the administration. [d14,3] (Chapter on Literary History, Hugo)

    Source: The Arcades Project, p. 770
  71. With the predominance of information technology and global networks of power, war has become both 'postmodern' and 'discursive', [Chris Hables Gray] argues: 'its unity is rhetorical'. What characterizes it are 'the metaphors and symbols that structure it, not...any direct continuity of weapons, tactics, or strategy between its various manifestations...'...Any survey of statements made by politicians in the aftermath of 11 September would certainly suggest that rhetoric and the figurative did play a major part in the event and the responses to it...The attacks on the buildings were declared to be not just an attack on the US as a whole, as bin Laden suggested; for US Secretary of State Colin Powell, 'It wasn't an assault on America. It was an assault on civilization, it was an assault on democracy', and on 'the twenty first century' itself.

    Source: Terrorism and Modern Literature, p. 4
  72. Yet despite its primacy in contemporary politics there is a distinct lack of agreement on how to define terrorism...When Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the main suspect in the 2009 shooting of 13 army personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, was featured on the cover of Time magazine (23 November 2009), the word 'TERRORIST?' was emblazoned over his eyes. Jared Lee Loughner, accused of critically wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killing six others in Tucson, Arizona, also made it to the cover (24 January 2011) but this time the headline focused on 'Guns. Speech. Madness'. The Wall Street Journal also treated the two incidents in very different ways: '[Sen. Joe] Lieberman Suggests Army Shooter Was "Home-Grown Terrorist" was how it covered the Fort Hood story on 9 November 2009 while on 10 January 2011 the WSJ's headline was 'Suspect Fixated on Giffords'. The line between acts of terror and insanity was drawn very tightly. It seems so obvious, after all, that a Muslim targeting American soldiers must be a terrorist while a 22-year-old white native of Tucson must simply be disturbed.

    From chapter: Introduction
    Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 6
  73. You don't choose to have the kind of experience I had while trying to report on the demise of TWA Flight 800. It happens to you. You fall into it. At CBS, I'd recently picked up an Emmy for investigative reporting when I was assigned to investigate the crash. I had no idea that my life would be turned upside down and inside out - that I'd been assigned to walk into what I now call "the buzzsaw."

    The buzzsaw is what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large institutions - be they corporate or government - want kept under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling. Your phone starts acting funny. Strange people call you at strange hours to give you strange information. The FBI calls you. Your car is broken into and the thief takes your computer and your reporter's notebook and leaves everything else behind. You feel like you're being followed everywhere you go. You feel like you've been sucked into a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It gets harder and harder to distinguish truth and reality from falsehood and fiction. The sense of fear and paranoia is, at times, overwhelming.

    Walk into the buzzsaw and you'll cut right to this layer of reality. You will feel a deep sense of loss and betrayal. A shocking shift in paradigm. Anyone who hasn't experienced it will call you crazy. Those who don't know the truth, or are covering it up, will call you a conspiracy nut. The word "conspiracy" is commonly used now (either as an adjective or part of a phrase) to malign those who raise unpopular questions about sensitive issues. The fact is, conspiracies do exist. There are laws on the books addressing them and Justice Department officials deal with them all the time. However, in the case of the TWA Flight 800 disaster, I don't know of anyone who disagrees with the government's conclusions who describes the official investigation as a conspiracy. Incompetent. A cover-up. These are the descriptions most skeptics use to characterize the official investigation. Not "conspiracy."

    From chapter: Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw
    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 284
  74. [A]t Clear Channel, the nation's largest radio network, a very popular show host sent this response to public relations agent Ilene Proctor after receiving Proctor's press release announcing a large peace demonstration: "I will have to pass on this one, as the station is rigidly requiring me to do only pro-war pieces."

    Source: Into the Buzzsaw, p. 19
  75. [T]here exist strong common references in theory between early forms of professional PR (or propaganda)...and surrealism, which also strived to influence public opinion. Surrealism arose in Paris in the first half of the 1920s, a time when on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, in the United States, Edward Bernays developed his concept of propaganda, which was finally put on paper in his canonical book Propaganda by the end of the decade (Bernays, 1928). For PR researchers and practitioners Bernays usually counts as one of the founding fathers of their professions, and it is well known that he, being the nephew of Sigmund Freud, developed his theory of PR campaigning partly on the basis of his uncle's psychoanalytical theory. It is this same basic source of inspiration in psychoanalysis that surrealists share with Bernays.

    Source: Surrealistic communication as symbolic terrorism: The example of Marcel Mariën’s theory of political campaigning, p. 195-196
  76. [With reference to McNamee's Resurrection Man] Coppinger and Ryan feel "obsolete, abandoned on the perimeter of a sprawling technology of ruin"; print journalists in an electronic age, they must cope with a "new species of information" coming out of paramilitary organizations operating under cover names, or from politicians who condemn violence ambiguously, or from courts where unidentified witnesses give their evidence from behind screens...Television news already incorporates this understanding about the marginality of fact. Even Victor recognizes the "narrative devices" it uses...we easily assume that when their reports diverge from fact, they serve some obscure political interest..."Atrocity reports" eschew detail and "achieve the pure level of a chant. It was no longer about conveying information. It was about focusing the mind inwards, attending to the durable rhythms of violence".

    When journalism is no longer about conveying information, journalists like Ryan and Coppinger disintegrate, and even the terrorists whose actions form the ostensible subject of media stories feel disoriented, experience a loss of self.

    Source: Plotting Terror, p. 48-49
  77. [W]ithout agreement on what terrorism refers to as well as the identity of its protagonists and victims, the use of such a slippery term is likely to have serious policy consequences. As Edward Said remarked following the events of 9/11, terrorism

    "has become synonymous now with anti-Americanism, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being critical of the United States, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being unpatriotic. That's an unacceptable series of equations."

    From chapter: Introduction
    Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 9