Manipulation with the public opinion

L 7

Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2014

Politicians and special interests have attempted to capture and manipulate citizens for as long as recorded history.

The question is not whether elites attempt to manipulate citizens but whether and to what degree they succeed.

Is public opinion relatively autonomous from the willful strategies of politicians and private interests to manipulate it in specific directions?

Are citizens willfully manipulated into engaging in a form of mass karaoke in which they mouth "opinions that they would not hold if aware of the best available information" (Zaller 1992)?

The relative autonomy of public opinion is an age-old question that cuts to the core of debates over the scope, nature, and feasibility of democratic government --government based on responsiveness to the mass public.

Joseph Schumpeter (1950), one of the most influential democratic theorists of the twentieth century, argued for government by technocrats precisely because of his deep skepticism about citizens, a skepticism that has been shared by a string of political observers from Plato to Walter Lippmann.

Schumpeter declared that the "popular will" had "little, if any, independent basis" and was captured by the organizationally and financially advantaged.

Mass public opinion was simply the manufactured "product" of "salesmen"--self-seeking politicians and special interests with an "axe to grind" who skillfully used the techniques of mass advertising to produce the public attitudes that they desired.

Workable democratic government, Schumpeter argued , required narrowly restricting the role of citizens to selecting "the men who are able to do the deciding" based on their instrumental and technical knowledge that uniquely equipped them to fashion wise and beneficial policy.

For many political observers, the political history of the twentieth century seemed to illustrate the potential for elites to mold public opinion in ways that were both horrendous (such as the German Nazis' use of mass rallies) as well as narrowly opportunistic within the confines of representative government, such as the Health Insurance Association of America's use of "Harry and Louise" advertisements to turn public opinion against President Clinton's health care plan.

The potential of special interests and demagogues to capture public opinion as well as more general doubts about the competence of Americans has led most contemporary policy makers -- upwards of two-thirds of legislative and executive branch officials -- to agree with Schumpeter's dismal appraisal of the mass public's potential to serve as a reliable partner in government decision making (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000;

Pew 1998).

Determining whether mass public opinion can be captured and turned into a manufactured product through the advertising of an interest group like the Health Insurance Association of American (HIAA) or a powerful government official is a decisive issue in assessing the potential for democratic government and the appropriate role for public opinion in decisions on health policy.

The Conditionality of Public Opinion Manipulation(Cross compliance)

Writing just after War World II and its period of extraordinary but ultimately false fears that German propaganda would seize the minds of civilians, two social science pioneers, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, argued that manipulation of public opinion was unlikely and highly circumscribed; it required a set of specific and rare conditions related to elite behavior and information content (1948).

In particular, they suggested that successful manipulation required unified elites that would transmit uniform information.

For the public to be manipulated, it needed to be instructed -- in harmony, if not by one voice -- on a clear direction to follow. The normal state, though, of American public life and that of other representative democracies is elite division and divergent/ different messages.

Indeed, the reality of American policy debates in our own time is intense partisan disagreement. The press also plays a critical role: its reporting tends to mirror the intensity, content, and relative degree of dissensus/ disagreement in ongoing debates among authoritative government officials (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000).

The result is that the press tends to convey the genuine divisions among prominent sets of policy makers.

“Why does the dog wag its tail?

The movie itself is science fictional but the main message comes through:

How does media influences us in every day life and situation and how politics influence media.

Wag the Dog is a 1997 black comedy film produced and directed by Barry Levinson. The screenplay by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet was loosely adapted from Larry Beinhart's novel American Hero. The film stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, with Anne Heche, Denis Leary, and William H. Macy in supporting roles.

Just days before a presidential election, a Washington, D.C. spin doctor (De Niro) distracts the electorate from a sex scandal by hiring a Hollywood film producer (Hoffman) to construct a fake war with Albania. The film was released one month before the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal.

Reality has become not what we see for real but what is shown to us by media, manipulated or shown from a point of view to make us believe, what they want us to believe. The film emphasizes those things and makes a clear statement about the influence on the main population.

It is though a little exaggerated thus it seems as if the general population would be too stupid to realize all the dramatical shifts of media distraction taking place in the movie.

Media’s influence in reality also has a big impact on how we build up our opinion.

Politic influences media, in a good or a bad way, telling the truth or lying or saying something than can be misinterpreted. This is clearly influencing us in our opinion, if we want it or not.

“The Iraq war and its aftermath have raised compelling questions about the capacity of the executive branch to elicit public consent for the use of military force and about the role the media plays in this process.”

The government under Bush let people know, through media, that Iraq is producing mass destruction weapons and so supports the Al Qaida. In order to prevent possible terrorist attacks, the government took this as justification to begin the war against Iraq.

It is interesting to observe how the majority thought to know that there were Mass Destruction Weapons in Iraq, even without any proof.

It was fear of getting attacked and being vulnerable, which made them believe easily what media said, and also made them interpret words and images differently and more dramatically then they were meant.

As this came out, to make it more dramatic and prove the war, it was presented differently to the public and again people believed it even though proof of it not being entirely true existed.

It again shows us how people do believe in things they see in Television, Newspapers and Photographs rather than things proven to be true.

The answer is Media: we see rebels, terrorists, arab countries in flames, etc. and an explanation is given us and naturally we do believe it.

What else should we do? There is not much of a choice left to believe something else, because for us things happening so far from our country seem to be the total truth when it is shown to us. Most of the population has never been there, taking part actively, in political measurements to know what is the complete truth.

Politics nowadays are all surrounded by fast spreading news and media.

We interpret and understand things unconsciously, if we see a symbol or a signifier, things which are said, images, situations and relate them with things we have experienced. This is used by the government to make convictions about a specific action.

These manipulations and speculations have existed since politics itself.

What has changed nowadays is the speed information spreads and that we have the possibility of different media sources, who also have a political conviction and thus according to which media source, channel, newspaper we are referring to, different outcomes on our opinion are reached, as they display information differently.

The movie in his radical and critical analysis of media and how politics can influence them and so the nation, makes us aware of it’s impact on us.

Interestingly it is also showing how media adjusts itself to the population’s belief and so makes them feel secure and aware and give them the feeling of being informed.

The important thing is to know what power lyes behind images and words and the way they are displayed to us and thus we should not immediately believe what we see and especially not word by word, but think critically of what is shown to us, if it is or is not the truth. 

Some examples…

The ‘real war’ and ‘propaganda war’ fought over Northern Ireland for thirty years polarised party and public opinion.

The key dilemma faced by politicians during the recent peace process has been how to wind down the ‘war’ and win sufficient party and public support for an accommodation between unionists and nationalists which falls so far short of previous expectations.

Some examples…

Northern Ireland

Scripts telling contrasting stories have been prepared to convince rival republican and unionist audiences to support the peace process.

In addition, the pro-Agreement parties have attempted to shift opinion towards accommodation through a range of political skills and choreography.

Key competing parties and governments have sometimes co-operated back stage while front stage they have on occasion ‘play acted’ conflict between

each other.

Some examples…Northern Ireland

The political skills, or lying and manipulation, by which the peace process has been driven forward have been uncovered creating public distrust in the political process.

Realists see such political deception as an inevitable part of politics and permissible on the grounds that the ends justify the means.

Absolutists attack the ‘spin, lying and manipulation’ of the peace process as an assault on democracy.

Some examples…Northern Ireland

A third democratic realist position argues that sometimes moral leadership requires doing wrong to do right but the gap between ‘truth’ and ‘spin’ should be narrowed.

A more open and honest politics would not only be more accountable and democratic but also effective in advancing the peace process.

‘Manipulation’ is one of the crucial notions of Critical Discourse Analysis that require further theoretical analysis.

We need to look a triangulated approach to manipulation as a form of social power abuse, cognitive mind control and discursive interaction.

Socially, manipulation is defined as illegitimate domination confirming social inequality.

Cognitively, manipulation as mind control involves the interference with processes of understanding, the formation of biased mental models and social representations such as knowledge and ideologies.

Discursively, manipulation generally involves the usual forms and formats of ideological discourse, such as emphasizing Our good things, and emphasizing Their bad things.

At all these levels of analysis it is shown how manipulation is different from legitimate mind control, such as in persuasion and providing information, for instance by stipulating that manipulation is in the best interest of the dominated group and against the best interests of dominated groups.This theory is illustrated by a partial analysis of a speech by Tony Blair in the House of Commons legitimating the participation of the UK in the US-led

war against Iraq in 2003.

Political campaigns are increasingly making use of new media tools to both broadcast messages to and communicate with potential voters.

Such use of a range of new and traditional media channels synergistically has been theorised to offer specific advantages to campaigns, leading some media scholars to attach the term ‘hypermedia’ to the practice.

Features of hypermedia campaigning include flexible organisational structure, synergistic feedback of messages across multiple online and offline media channels, and the identification and targeting of key groups of undecided voters with wedge issues.

Some examples…

Recently, the 2010 labour leadership contest afforded the opportunity to evaluate the use and effectiveness of these strategies in a live campaign.

The authors analysed traffic and visitor behaviour on the Ed Balls labour leadership campaign website for 100 days leading up to the election.

The hypermedia strategy was deemed partially successful: while the candidate's website successfully attracted a large number of visitors, data suggest that the wedge issue strategy.

Some examples…

Edward Michael "Ed" Balls (born 25 February 1967) is a British Labour Party and Co-operative Party politician, who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Morley and Outwood since 2010, and is the current Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The campaign's focus on social media platforms rather than search engines meant that the majority of visitors to the campaign website were already familiar with, or supportive of Ed Balls political platform.

Some examples…

A key concept in research on the media coverage of politics is the game or strategy frame.

Contrasted with coverage of politics as issues, the framing of politics as a strategic game is marked by features such as winning and losing as the central concern and a focus on how candidates or parties are doing in opinion polls.

One key concept in research on how the media influence political processes is mediatization, which denotes a long-term process through which the media have become increasingly independent from politics and through which political actors and institutions have become increasingly dependent on the media.

While it is often claimed that politics has become increasingly mediatized, the process of mediatization has not yet been properly addressed in the literature.

Some examples…

American public opinion about foreign policy is neither volatile nor capricious/ moody.

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, collective opinion has tended to be rather stable. When it has changed, it has done so by responding in rational ways to international and domestic events that have been reported and interpreted by the mass media and by policymakers and other elites.

Some examples…

The public has not always successfully judged the best interests of the United States or that of people elsewhere, nor have elites and the media always reported truthfully and interpreted correctly.

Nevertheless, we maintain that Americans, as a collective body, have done well with whatever information has been provided, and that they have formed and changed their policy preferences in a reasonable manner.

Thank you for your attention.