Political Communications Corporations: Sources of Deceit

It is a lie -- not every voice matters

The Washington Post reports that on Jan. 6 (the day of the insurrection), Cumulus Media, which employs some popular conservative talk-radio hosts, told its show hosts to stop spreading the president's lies about the 2020 election. Cumulus owns 416 radio stations in 84 markets. Many of its stations broadcast in a talk format, which has been dominated by conservatives for decades. WaPo writes:

“We need to help induce national calm NOW,” Brian Philips, executive vice president of content for Cumulus, wrote in an internal memo, which was first reported by Inside Music Media. Cumulus and its program syndication arm, Westwood One, “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved and there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths.’ ”

The memo adds: “If you transgress this policy, you can expect to separate from the company immediately.”

The new policy is a stunning corporate clampdown on the kind of provocative and even inflammatory talk that has long driven the business model for Cumulus and other talk show broadcasters.

On his program on Tuesday, the day before the march on the Capitol, for example, [show host Mark] Levin fulminated about Congress’s certification of electoral votes for Biden, describing the normally routine vote as an act of “tyranny.”

“You think the framers of the Constitution … sat there and said, ‘Congress has no choice [to accept the votes], even if there’s fraud, even if there’s some court order, even if some legislature has violated the Constitution?’ ” Levin said, his voice rising to a shout.

[The Cumulus memo] reveals some of the hidden corporate hand behind what is said and discussed on talk-radio programs. Rather than a medium of freethinking individuals expressing passionately held beliefs, the memo reminds that hosts are subject to corporate mandates and control.

“It’s naive not to recognize that a corporate imperative goes into all media,” said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers magazine, which covers talk radio. “Corporations have always called the tune ultimately. Everyone pays attention to the guys at the top and always has.”

Asked how hosts who have repeatedly promoted Trump’s claims of fraud can now credibly flip to acceptance, Harrison said: “I would hope they put their personal feelings aside and come clean with their listeners. I encourage them to pursue the truth and to tell their audience something that Trump may not like.”

However, there’s some question as to whether stars such as Levin will comply with the recent edict and whether Cumulus will discipline them if they don’t.

On his syndicated radio program on Thursday, a day after Cumulus sent its memo and Trump supporters breached the Capitol, Levin didn’t seem to be backing off. “It appears nothing has changed in 24 hours,” he said on the air. “Not a damn thing. The never-Trumpers, the RINOs, the media — same damn thing.”

He went on to add: “I’m not stirring up a damn thing. Everything I say is based on principle and mission. Everything is based on liberty, family, faith, the Constitution. … My enemies and my critics can’t say the same.” (emphasis added)

What does Cumulus actually believe?

Apparently, Mark Levin actually believes the president's lies about the election and his innocent motives in what he does. If Cumulus does not fire Levin, then that will show how powerful individuals can be. Whether the company memo stops the flow of lies about the election remains to be seen.

It is worth noting the the Cumulus memo does not say the election was free and fair. It only said the election is ended, not that it is valid. That makes clear what the bosses at Cumulus actually believe about it. If they believed the election was valid, the memo would have said that. Since it didn't, the belief of the people in power can reasonably be inferred. 

So even in this case, powerful radical right conservative elites cannot see or accept that the election was free, fair and untainted by widespread fraud or manipulation.

The Power of Tribal Politics to Stupefy

The tribe is displeased

Stupefying tribalism

Republican reactions to the president's attempted coup have been mostly muted or non-existent. Some are reasonable and some are incoherent. The silence and incoherence reflects the toxicity of tribal politics. In particular, the incoherence in defense of tribe loyalty leads some into an inability to think clearly or rationally. For example, Senator Patrick Toomey (R-PA), a Harvard graduate commented “I do think the president committed impeachable offenses,” and the president's “behavior this week does disqualify him from serving.” Toomey then went on to complain that House democrats would probably  “politicize” the impeachment process.

The politicized process criticism is incoherent. First, since republican politicians refuse to act quickly to remove the president, they have already politicized the situation. Second, by objecting to the election results, GOP politicians politicized the final vote certification on the basis of no objective evidence. Third, by definition, impeachment is a political process because it is not a judicial or legislative process. That is true whether an impeachment succeeds or fails. The question is whether an impeachment has merit or not, not whether it is political. 

Clearly, Toomey's brain is scrambled into incoherence by his tribal loyalty to the GOP. Such loyalty is inherently anti-democratic because it replaces inconvenient facts and sound reasoning with partisan motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning creates false realities that are usually (~95% of the time?) needed to create to get to a desired belief. Inconvenient facts are simply swept aside.

The art of the lie: Truth- and reason-based democracy is a deviation

A New York Times news analysis article, The Art of the Lie? The Bigger the Better, focuses on tribalism in politics. The NYT writes:

Lying as a political tool is hardly new. But a readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has become a driving force in politics around the world, most recently in the United States.

In a cable to Washington in 1944, George F. Kennan, counselor at the United States Embassy in Stalin’s Moscow, warned of the occult power held by lies, noting that Soviet rule “has proved some strange and disturbing things about human nature.”

Foremost among these, he wrote, is that in the case of many people, “it is possible to make them feel and believe practically anything.” No matter how untrue something might be, he wrote, “for the people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity and all the powers of truth.”

Mr. Kennan’s insight, generated by his experience of the Soviet Union, now has a haunting resonance for America, where tens of millions believe a “truth” invented by President Trump: that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the November election and became president-elect only through fraud.

A readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has in recent years become a driving force in politics around the world, notably in countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines, all governed by populist leaders adept at shaving the truth or inventing it outright.

“The art of tribal politics is that it shapes reality,” Mr. Kreko said. “Lies become truth and explain everything in simple terms.” And political struggles, he added, “become a war between good and evil that demands unconditional support for the leader of the tribe. If you talk against your own camp you betray it and get expelled from the tribe.”

What makes this so dangerous, Mr. Kreko said, is not just that “tribalism is incompatible with pluralism and democratic politics” but that “tribalism is a natural form of politics: Democracy is a deviation.”

The utility of lying on a grand scale was first demonstrated nearly a century ago by leaders like Stalin and Hitler, who coined the term “big lie” in 1925 and rose to power on the lie that Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I. For the German and Soviet dictators, lying was not merely a habit or a convenient way of sanding down unwanted facts but an essential tool of government.

It tested and strengthened loyalty by forcing underlings to cheer statements they knew to be false and rallied the support of ordinary people who, Hitler realized, “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie” because, while they might fib in their daily lives about small things, “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths.” 

Despite his open admiration for Russia’s president and the system he presides over, she said, Mr. Trump, in insisting that he won in November, is not so much mimicking Mr. Putin as borrowing more from the age of Stalin, who, after engineering a catastrophic famine that killed millions in the early 1930s, declared that “living has become better, comrades, living has become happier.”

“That is what the big lie is,” Ms. Khrushcheva said. “It covers everything and redefines reality. There are no holes in it. You so either accept the whole thing or everything collapses. And that is what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed.” (emphasis added)

What we are witnessing with millions of Americans who sincerely but falsely believe that Biden is an illegitimate president-elect is what Kennan, called “some strange and disturbing things about human nature.” Can American democracy somehow cope with American stupefied tribalism? Or, will it revert to the mean, showing once again that democracy is just a deviation?

One thing is certain, some or most of the conservative tribal minds in modern America have been deceived, manipulated and betrayed. 

A big lie in Turkey: Protesters outside a courthouse in Turkey in 

2013 where 275 people were accused of trying to overthrow the

government. Turkey’s leader later acknowledged the case was a sham.

A Key Source of Political Power

NYT caption: Losing his huge online following would deprive 

Mr. Trump of cultural influence. It takes away the privilege 

he seems to covet most: the ability to commandeer the 

world’s attention with a push of a button.

A New York Times article, In Pulling Trump’s Megaphone, Twitter Shows Where Power Now Lies, points out the power that social media has. The NYT writes:

The ability of a handful of people to control our public discourse has never been more obvious.

In the end, two billionaires from California did what legions of politicians, prosecutors and power brokers had tried and failed to do for years:

They pulled the plug on President Trump.

Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Mr. Trump’s account on Friday “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” after a decision a day earlier by Facebook to ban the president at least through the end of his term, was a watershed moment in the history of social media. Both companies had spent years defending Mr. Trump’s continued presence on their platforms, only to change course days before the end of his presidency.

Why these companies’ chief executives — Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — decided to act now is no mystery. They have been under pressure for years to hold Mr. Trump accountable, and that pressure intensified enormously this past week, as everyone from Michelle Obama to the companies’ own employees called for a permanent ban in the wake of Wednesday’s deadly Capitol riot.

These companies, corporate autocracies masquerading as mini-democracies, often portray their moderation decisions as the results of a kind of formulaic due process, as if “don’t incite an insurrectionist mob” had been in the community guidelines all along. But high-stakes calls like these typically come down to gut decisions made under extreme duress. In this case, Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg considered the evidence, consulted their teams, weighed the trade-offs and risks of inaction — including the threat of a worker revolt that could damage their ability to attract top talent — and decided that they’d seen enough.

There you have it, corporate autocracies masquerading as mini-democracies hold major political power. Together, social media along with major political donors, probably hold more power than all other sources of political and social power in the US. The other major contenders are politically active Christianity and authoritarian radical right political and Christian Nationalist ideologies.

What power do the people and voters have? That's not so clear.

A Short Question About Racism

A number of commentators at various sources have commented that the response of the police at the Jan. 6 coup attempt showed far too much deference to the mob, which was almost completely white. They point out that police are not nearly as deferential to protesters when blacks protest and get out of hand. Those people conclude that this is another example of deeply ingrained systemic racism in American society, government and their institutions, especially law enforcement. 

Did what happened on Jan. 6 reflect systemic racism?