Background to Domestic Espionage: Constructing Public Opinion: How Politicians and the Media Deliberately Misrepresent the Public

CSU (California State University)

Constructing Public Opinion: How Politicians and the Media Misrepresent the Public

Featuring Justin Lewis

SYNOPSIS

Constructing Public Opinion explodes the myth that politicians too often cave into polling numbers, that too little leadership and too much knee-jerk democracy is at the root of Americans’ disillusionment with politics. Professor Justin Lewis argues instead that public opinion is in effect manufactured and distorted in ways that undermine true democratic participation. He also maintains that the reasons for this are less conspiratorial than institutional: a reflection of the mandate of political, corporate and media elites to maintain the status quo in order to satisfy their interdependent interests.

The film takes a sustained and critical look at the rise and influence of public opinion polls in American politics, and examines the relationship between politics, media and the public. It demonstrates that public opinion data used by politicians and reported by media do not so much reflect what Americans think as construct public opinion itself. Lewis investigates, against conventional wisdom, a central paradox: that the very opinion polling that appears to wield such influence over politicians, and media coverage of politics, has in actuality distorted and limited the voice of the public.

The film explores this paradox by showing how the potential power of polling to give people a voice in the political process is undermined by the nature of the political system itself. While the public is now surveyed with greater frequency and sophistication than ever before, Lewis demonstrates how people’s desires often carry less urgency with political elites than the need of elites to manage people’s desires. His argument is not an indictment of a few powerful individuals conspiring against the public, but of a political culture so infused with money, so confined by mainstream corporate media coverage, and therefore so beholden to elite moneyed interests, that it fails to respond to the real opinions of ordinary people. The chief casualty in all of this is the truth, the real things that real people say they want from their government and representatives – and the effect is cyclical: true public opinion continues to be misrepresented, and these misrepresentations in turn continue to shape and severely limit the public’s sense of political reality and their place in it.

The film shows how this ongoing misrepresentation of public opinion:

• constructs, rather than reflects, true public opinion by failing to reflect the specific and accurate opinions of the public on specific issues;

• constructs by misrepresentation the public itself;

• excludes real and mainstream public sentiment that has been shown repeatedly in surveys to lie outside, and to the left, of what mainstream reporting of opinion allows;

• reflects the interests of politicians who must first satisfy the interests of those who fund them, interests that are by definition conservative because wedded to the status quo;

• reflects the interests of the mass media whose job it is to report what the public says it wants: the media’s institutional interests as corporations themselves, and the related pressure on them to trade in labels, image and oversimplification – rather than specifics, nuance and substance – in order to maintain ratings and market share;

• reflects media bias toward the elite interests who have the greatest access to media;

• does not so much measure public feeling about the direction or shape of policy as it does direct and shape public feeling about predetermined policies that often work against what the public says it wants.

• creates a climate of misinformation which in turn affects public opinion by affecting people’s understanding of major issues.

THE FILM: KEY POINTS

1. Introduction:

In his introduction, Lewis challenges the myth of the "poll-pandering" politician. He cites data that show the American people to be far more "liberal" than their representatives on a broad range of issues. The section ends with these questions: If, as we so often hear, politicians do only what the polls tell them to do, then how is this mismatch between popular sentiment and mainstream policy possible? And what does this mismatch say about the democratic process?

Key Points:

• It is a myth that politicians, in quest of popularity, do what polls tell them to do.

• This myth creates the impression that the political system may have problems, and that politicians may not be strong leaders, but that on the whole both are responsive to the public.

• A detailed look at public opinion reveals broad support for a range of liberal or left-wing policies, including increased government spending on inner cities, the environment, education, health care, a minimum wage increase, more gun control, and campaign finance reform.

• Despite the popular support of ordinary people for liberal policy on a range of economic issues, their representatives – whether Republican or Democrat – are generally far more conservative.

• This discrepancy raises questions about the true influence and use of public opinion, and in a democracy forces us to ask how it’s possible that there could be such a mismatch between what the people want and the actual policies pursued by their representatives.

2. Political Perceptions:

This section begins to explore reasons for the discrepancy between popular support for liberal policies and the more conservative policies pursued by representatives. After defining what is meant, broadly speaking, by the terms "liberal" and "conservative," Lewis shows how people often support vague conservative themes – like individual liberty and wariness of big government – while at the same time supporting specific policies that favor government spending and intervention. The section ends by considering one possible reason why people support conservative ideas and liberal policy: the negative connotations in the public mind of extreme labels like left-wing or right-wing, liberal or conservative.

Key points:

• In terms of the role of government in the economy, the term "liberal" or "left wing" refers to a belief in high government intervention, high spending on social programs.

• "Conservative" or "right wing" refers to a belief in low government intervention, low spending on social programs.

• Public opinion enters here: people often support vague conservative "themes" – abstract notions like "individual freedom." But when given specific options, they tend to support policies that favor government spending and intervention.

• This apparent inconsistency is due, in part, to people’s reactions to political labels – specifically their ambivalence about extreme labels.

• People prefer the label "moderate" to either conservative or liberal.

• The way media construct narratives in political coverage plays a role in this: In political stories, "moderate" is constructed again and again in positive ways, extremists in negative ways.

• This reaction to labels is supported by surveys that show that many people favor liberal approaches on a range of policy issues, but reject the term liberal.

• In addition to media narratives that create negative associations with the term "liberal," the composition of government itself tilts mainstream political discourse to the right.

• Conservative views and opinions on issues such as the death penalty and abortion are represented in government, whereas liberal responses to public opinion surveys reveal that people are very much to the left of most Democrats in Congress and the White House.

• On economic issues in particular, the public are actually further to the left than those elected to represent them.

3. Economic Forces:

This section focuses on why the actual liberal or left opinions of many Americans are excluded from mainstream political discourse. Lewis shows that while there are real differences between Democrats and Republicans on so-called civil liberty or social issues, there is little difference between the two dominant parties on economic issues. He argues that Democrats can afford – literally – to adopt liberal stances on social issues, but cannot afford to adopt the public’s often liberal stance on economic issues. This leads to a discussion of the role money plays in politics. While money is not central to how we think of such issues as the death penalty and abortion – where we see real differences between the two parties – it is central to issues such as health care, wages and corporate taxes – issues on which the two major parties tend to agree. Lewis argues at the close of this section that Democrats and Republicans are so close on economic issues because both parties rely primarily on money from corporate and business interests that are, by definition, economically conservative because they are concerned primarily with maximizing profit.

Key Points:

• The real difference between mainstream politicians can be found mainly on so-called civil liberty or social issues.

• What defines these issues – for example the death penalty, gay rights, women’s equality, abortion – is that money isn’t central to how we think about them.

• In contrast, Democrats and Republicans tend to share a similar stance on those issues that do involve money, issues such as health care, wages, trade agreements, and the environment.

• Money in politics enters here: the massive amount of money raised by politicians undermines liberal policy solutions. The reason for this is that both parties get most of their money from corporate and business interests, and must therefore heed these economically conservative interests or risk losing the money that sustains them as politicians.

• In this political environment, it is logical that community concerns that threaten business interests are not given priority.

• Surveys show clearly that the public is interested in community concerns such as health care, homelessness and the environment, but politicians tend to ignore radical solutions to these concerns because they need money to run effectively.

4. Media Coverage

This section, and the two that follow, examine more closely the role media play in shaping what counts for "public opinion." Having established that the more liberal views of Americans fail to be represented within the political spectrum, Lewis shows in this section how media feed, and feed off of, the artificial perception that public opinion is more moderate or conservative than it actually is. Key to his argument is that media do not simply report survey data, do not simply reflect what the public says it wants, but actually play a central role in constructing public opinion.

Key Points:

• Mainstream media don’t cover public opinion so much as they construct narratives about public opinion.

• When media cover polls, they tell a story about what public opinion is, shaping the very way we understand it in their choice of questions, what they exclude, their lack-of follow-up and specificity, and their reliance on mainstream political stereotypes and labels to tell a good story.

• Media coverage of public opinion does not recognize the gap between a public that tends to be more liberal than mainstream politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike.

• Media reports on public opinion exclude the possibility of left-wing approaches to economic issues, making the public appear more conservative than it actually is.

• The reasons for these exclusions, distortions and misrepresentations are systemic, caught up with the elite-oriented nature of reporting.

• Media have an "elite" orientation – a built-in bias toward the views of those in positions of power – because elites have the greatest access to media. In this way, politicians, who tend to have power, control and money, set the media stage for what we talk about and how.

• Because politicians are more conservative than the public, their power and access alter and shape the media narrative in more conservative directions.

• Polling and the interpretation of poll results therefore tend to steer away from nuance and specific measures of ordinary people’s views on issues, focusing instead on so-called "horse-race," candidate-centered polls.

• Candidate-centered polls and coverage reduce politics to image, steer people in one predetermined direction or the other, and in this way set up a narrow range of artificial choices while excluding alternative views about policy.

• At the same time that media coverage narrows the ideological spectrum on economic issues, it also creates the impression that real debate is happening by focusing on the differences between parties and candidates on civil libertarian and social issues like gay rights and abortion.

• The excessive coverage of differences on social issues and not the similarities on economic issues "masks the degree of elite consensus."

5. The Phantom Liberal

Continuing his look at media’s pivotal role in shaping public opinion by seeming simply to report it, Lewis looks more closely at how mainstream media skew political discourse to the right. This section demonstrates how media narratives create the illusion that a real battle of ideas between left and right exists in the mainstream, while in reality excluding left-wing ideas altogether. One of the effects of this narrowing of the spectrum is that what mainstream media characterize as moderate is in actuality conservative, and that what’s characterized as liberal is actually closer to moderate. The section concludes by illustrating the influence on the public mind of this elimination of liberal opinion, showing that most people believe former President Clinton, a self-described conservative New Democrat "moderate," was a liberal.

Key Points:

• Media create the sense that politics is generally responsive to the people: that they present a broad range of issues, and that politicians listen to the people through polls.

• In reality, the range of opinion is skewed to the right in ways that marginalize liberal opinion.

• Bill Clinton was covered by mainstream media as a liberal, when in fact his stand on most issues – Nafta, the Telecommunications Act -- was conservative, as indicated by his corporate support and left-wing opposition.

• Polls show that people incorrectly believe that Bill Clinton voted on the liberal side of a number of key issues.

• While there was significant media coverage of Clinton’s positions on these issues, the general framework and tenor of media coverage overwhelmed the specifics.

6. Military Omissions

This section develops the idea that media not only cover public opinion, but also influence it. Lewis argues that media play an "agenda-setting" role, that what they choose to cover is in turn considered by the public to be important – rather than the other way around. As an example, he examines media coverage of military spending in the United States, showing how the exclusion of specific detail inspires consensus from people who would otherwise question military spending.

Key Points:

• Media play an agenda setting roll, with public concern about issues tending to follow media coverage of those issues – rather than any changes in the real world.

• Shifts measured in so-called "public concern" about problems such as drugs and violence have nothing to do with the scale of these problems, and everything to do with the amount the media cover them.

• The power of media to define what issues are important has to do with what they report, and what they don’t.

• Polls measure public response to issues that are often incompletely reported.

• People’s responses to polls about the specific details involved in such issues as military spending are often wrong, but at the same time represent a rational response to the information they’re given.

• The overall effect of media omissions is "to suppress active public support for changing the current course."

7. Democratic Ideals

This concluding section points out that polling was viewed originally as a tool capable of enhancing democratic participation. In the beginning, innovations in the measuring of public opinion had the potential to make elites more responsive to the concerns of ordinary people. Instead, Lewis concludes, polls are now used primarily as market research – not to make government and media more responsive to the public interest, but to help make elite interests more palatable to the public.

A Brief History of Domestic Espionage in the United States: The Beginning...

A History of Domestic

 Espionage in the 

United States

By Sam Prince 

In lieu of the recent scandal surrounding the National Security Agency after whistleblower Edward Snowden released classified information regarding the federal government’s involvement in domestic espionage, we started to wonder when exactly the government became so interested in our lives.

Edward Snowden, NSA Whistleblower: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Edward Snowden is at the epicenter of the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history. Here's what you should know about him.

Click here to read more

Turns out, it’s not a new revelation.

No terrorism, no communism, no Nazism…

Just the feds abusing power and ignoring the Constitution.

Here are five milestones in the history of the federal government domestic espionage — starting with the long-lost ancestors of the “NSA.”

---

1. 1850: Pinkerton Government Services

Originally called the “Pinkerton National Detective Agency,” it was started by Scottish-born American Allan Pinkerton. Credited with helping foil the Baltimore Plot, which was an assassination plot on President Elect Abraham Lincoln while he would be en route to his 1861 inauguration, Pinkerton gained notoriety for this and became a confidant of President Lincoln as the Civil War loomed.

---

---

In the wake of the Civil War, Pinkerton’s popularity continued to spread in all facets.

One of the more infamous federal uses of the Pinkerton Agency was union-busting during the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Homestead Strike is one such example. Citing Wikipedia:

During the labor unrest of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, as well as recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers. One such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist…Andrew Carnegie.

Pinkerton Government Services continues to operate to this day as a private security contractor.

---

---

YOUR FRIENDS WOULD BE SO INTO THIS, SHARE IT!

Share46 Tweet Share Email

---

2. 1919: The Cipher Bureau, or “The Black Chamber”

Proving to be just as mysterious it sounds, the Cipher Bureau was the United States’ first peacetime federal intelligence agency and is the direct precursor to the modern NSA.

According to a Federation of American Scientists article:

In June of 1917, the first U.S. signals intelligence agency was formed within the Army. Known as “MI-8,” the agency was charged with decoding military communications and providing codes for use by the U.S. military. In 1919, at the end of the war, the agency was transferred to the State Department. Known as the “Black Chamber,” it focused on diplomatic rather than military communications.

Wikipedia delves further:

Jointly funded by the Army and the State Department, the Cipher Bureau was disguised as a New York City commercial code company; it actually produced and sold such codes for business use. Its true mission, however, was to break the communications (chiefly diplomatic) of other nations. Its most notable known success was during the Washington Naval Conference during which it aided American negotiators considerably by providing them with the decrypted traffic of many of the Conference delegations, most notably the Japanese.

After the Black Chamber was shut down in 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was quoted as saying: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

With current allegations, it might not be so presumptuous to say now that Mr. Stimson was alluding to a more domestic abuse of power.

---

---

3. 1945: The AFSA / NSA & Project SHAMROCK

A covert operation begun by the NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), Project SHAMROCK was a government espionage exercise unauthorized by courts and without warrants.

It began in 1945 and continued operating for 30 years, falling under NSA protocol in 1952 after President Harry Truman dissolved the AFSA and secretly created the National Security Agency to allow the Defense Department to continue surveillance activities after World War II.

According to NDTV News, Project SHAMROCK is best described as:

…a large-scale spying operation designed to gather all telegraphic data going in and out of the United States. The project, which began without court authorization, is terminated after lawmakers begin investigating it in 1975.

Wikipedia expands:

The Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and its successor NSA were given direct access to daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. NSA did the operational interception, and, if information that would be of interest to other intelligence agencies was found, the material was passed to them.

“Intercepted messages were disseminated to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), and the Department of Defense.” No court authorized the operation and there were no warrants.

At the height of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages a month were printed and analyzed by NSA personnel. In May 1975 however, Congressional critics began to investigate and expose the program. As a result, NSA director Lew Allen terminated it, on his own authority rather than that of other intelligence agencies.

Sound familiar?

At the 1975 court hearings following the revelation of Project SHAMROCK, Senator Frank Church(D-ID) was quoted as saying that Project SHAMROCK was “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”

Somebody call Guinness, we have a new record.

---

YOUR FRIENDS WOULD BE SO INTO THIS, SHARE IT!

Share46 Tweet Share Email

---

4. 1978: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)

On the heels of the Project SHAMROCK hearings, the ruling of the 1972 Supreme Court in the United States v. US District Court case, which established that the Fourth Amendment also included electronic surveillance, and the notorious Watergate scandal, Senator Frank Church decided enough was enough.

Quoting NDTV:

Senator Frank Church leads a select committee to investigate federal intelligence operations. Its report, released in 1976, detailed widespread spying at home and abroad, and concluded that “intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens.” The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created as a check on US surveillance activities.

Senator Church’s report also results in Congress passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). It sets up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to consider requests for secret warrants for domestic spying.

Regarding the FISC courts, Wikipedia states:

The Act created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and enabled it to oversee requests for surveillance warrants by federal police agencies (primarily the F.B.I.) against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the U.S. The court is located within the Department of Justice headquarters building. The court is staffed by eleven judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States to serve seven year terms.

This was the way things operated until 2001, until September 11.

---

---

5. 2001-Present: The PATRIOT Act

After nearly three decades of dormancy, FISA erupted back into the news.

According to the Daily Mail:

October 2001: Congress and Bush rush the USA Patriot Act into law. It gives the government unprecedented authority to search, seize, detain or eavesdrop in pursuit of suspected terrorists. Because of privacy concerns, lawmakers make the eavesdropping provisions and other controversial aspects temporary, requiring renewal by Congress.

December 2005: The New York Times reports that the National Security Agency is secretly eavesdropping on telephone calls and emails of Americans communicating with people outside the United States, without seeking warrants from the FISA court. What becomes known as ‘warrantless wiretapping’ began in 2002 under a presidential order. Critics call it unconstitutional, but the Bush administration says it’s legal.

March 2006: Congress votes to renew the Patriot Act, although lawmakers voice concerns about the government’s broad powers to conduct surveillance and collect data.

May 11, 2006: USA Today reports that the NSA is secretly collecting phone records of millions of Americans in a giant database. Some of the phone companies cited dispute the story.

August 2006: A federal judge in Detroit rules that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program is unconstitutional because it infringes on free speech, privacy and the separation of powers. The program continues as the case is appealed.

January 2007: Responding to the court challenge and lawmakers’ concerns, Bush suddenly changes course. His administration announces it will begin seeking approval from the FISA court when eavesdropping on telephone calls between the U.S. and other countries in pursuit of terrorists.

August 2007: Congress approves changes sought by the Bush administration to the FISA Act, officially allowing NSA eavesdropping on communications between an American and a suspect foreigner, without a FISA judge’s approval.

May 2011: Congress passes and Obama signs a four-year extension of Patriot Act provisions on record searches and roving wiretaps. Some lawmakers complain that the law doesn’t do enough to protect Americans’ privacy and the disagreement forces the renewal to the last minute.

June 5, 2013: A British newspaper, The Guardian, reports that the NSA is collecting the telephone records of millions of American customers of Verizon under a top secret court order. Security experts say the records of other phone companies are also involved.

June 6, 2013: The Guardian and The Washington Post report that the NSA and the FBI are tapping into U.S. Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, scooping out emails, photos and videos to track foreign nationals who are suspected of terrorism or espionage.
That night, in a rare disclosure, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reveals some information about the programs to counter what he says is the ‘misleading impression’ created by news coverage.
Clapper says the government is prohibited from ‘indiscriminately sifting’ through the data and can only review it when the query involves a reasonable suspicion that a foreign terrorist organization is involved. Clapper says articles about the Internet program ‘contain numerous inaccuracies’ but does not specify what those might be.

June 7, 2013: Obama defends the programs, saying he came into office with ‘healthy skepticism’ about them and has increased some safeguards to protect privacy. But he offers assurances that ‘nobody is listening to your telephone calls’ or reading citizens’ emails. Obama says privacy must be balanced with security: ‘We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.’

June 8, 2013: For the second time in three days, Clapper takes the unusual step of declassifying some details of an intelligence program in response to media reports. He says the government program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a U.S. citizen.
Clapper says the data collection had the approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court and was done with the knowledge of Internet service providers. He says media revelations of government intelligence-gathering programs are reckless and give America’s enemies a ‘playbook’ on how to avoid detection.

June 9, 2013: Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old contractor who claims to have worked at the National Security Agency and the CIA allows himself to be revealed as the source of disclosures about the U.S. government’s secret surveillance programs. Snowden tells The Guardian newspaper his ‘sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.’

So now that you know a general history of government espionage, what’s to become of our newest whistleblower Edward Snowden?

Read more here:

The Hunt For Edward Snowden: What is Government’s Next Move?

NSA Leaker Edward Snowden was seen most recently in Hong Kong but is now on the run. Republican Peter King is calling for his arrest but where is he and what are the charges?

Click here to read more

Sam Prince is a New York-based actor/writer/producer. Follow him on Twitter @thesamprince or check out his real-time news novel A Quiet War at aquietwar.com.