IN OUR OPINION
Beyond Spin: Perception Management and the Current Financial Meltdown
Most Americans are well aware of the spin put on the presentation of information by contemporary politicians. Americans accept the fact that politicians present information from angles that support their positions and parties or put themselves and their parties in the best light. Since the 1980s, however, professional spin doctors hired by politicians have taken political spin to the whole new level of perception management.
In its Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, the U.S. Department of Defense defines perception management as:
“Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators
…to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning
…as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels
…to influence official estimates,
…ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives.
In various ways, perception management combines
• truth projection,
• operations security,
• cover and deception, and
• psychological operations.”
In her 2004 book National Security in the Information Age: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, Emily Goldman (professor of political science and Director of the University of California-Davis Washington Project as well as a 2003-2004 Woodrow Wilson Scholar) refers to perception management as a “euphemism” for “an aspect of information warfare.”
Falsehood and deception are considered by Goldman to be “important ingredients of perception management.”
“The purpose [of perception management],” she writes, “is to get the other side to believe what one wishes it to believe, whatever the truth may be.”
When spin doctors help politicians “get the other side” (the public) “to believe what one (the politician) wishes it to believe,” they are following the military’s lead into the murky waters of perception management.
The politicians who hire these spin doctors do so to:
• project truths that don’t exist,
• keep true information under lock and key,
• cover up truths,
• set out to deceive (the public), and
• engage in psychological games designed to convince the public of false truths.
When such false truths are repeated by various sources, they become accepted truths.
Sound a bit like 1984? By 1984, perception management was alive and well. Reagan referred to it as “public diplomacy.” It’s also been called “strategic influence” by the current Bush administration, though more direct types of folks consider it propaganda and brainwashing.
In June 2004, Vermont-based author, editor, blogger, journalist, and 1980 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship winner Greg Guma wrote a piece for Toward Freedom, an international affairs newsletter founded in 1952, on the issue of perception management.
“What [terms like ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘strategic influence’] describe is the U.S. government’s desire and capacity to manage mass perceptions around the world and, when necessary, at home.
“If you don’t think it’s been going on for years and continues to this very moment, well, then, it’s working.”
Guma states that the goal of perception management is to “influence enemies and friends alike, and provoke the behavior you want.”
To that end, Guma says, practitioners:
• “present theories as if they’re facts,”
• quote pseudo or anonymous specialists,
• “[warp] the facts to promote spin,”
• or simply “fabricate the news—from the al Qaeda-Sadam link to WMDs.”
What does perception management have to do with the current financial meltdown in the U.S.? Consider the points of view of the two main parties in the upcoming presidential election:
From the Republican point of view, the current crisis has been caused by the Democratic party’s insistence on granting mortgages to subprime borrowers (those with less-than-perfect credit).
From the Democratic point of view, the crisis is the direct result of the obscene greed of:
• unregulated and untaxed hedge funds,
• unregulated and unscrupulous mortgage brokers, and
• many of the financial institutions that populate and run Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs, which current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson once led as Chairman and CEO.
However, what is not being said—another strategy of perception management—is of most critical importance to the American public:
• American taxpayers will fund the estimated $1 trillion bailout on Wall Street.
• This trillion-dollar bailout will not result in the creation of any new jobs or add a penny to the Gross National Product.
• This trillion-dollar bailout will not only save the jobs of the people who created the crisis in the first place, but will allow them to manage the taxpayers’ dollars invested in the bailout with little or no oversight.
• This trillion-dollar bailout will result in higher taxes on Main Street, not Wall Street.
American taxpayers also are not being told if others such as foreign investors from China or Saudi Arabia will benefit from this bailout. And they will not know how this money is used until the first of the proposal’s planned biannual reports designed to detail what bad debts have been bought and sold and in what amounts are made public in six months (March 2009), long after the November presidential election, two months after the Bush administration has left office.
To be truly informed voters, we must consider not only what’s being stated in the media and in candidates’ speeches, but how and why those statements are worded, and what facts those statements may be excluding. To immediately accept the word of any media outlet, of a candidate, or of an administration is to remain incompletely informed—as a practitioner of perception management might put it. More simply put, it’s to remain uninformed.
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