The ruling class’ propaganda corps

THERE is a powerful Marxist insight on media and people’s dominant views developed more fully by European philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser and in the US by Noam Chomsky, especially with the latter’s seminal Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

The class that controls the means of material production controls, at the same time, the means of mental production. The myth in democracy is that ideas compete freely for the people to determine the truth by themselves, and that there is such a thing as a national conversation of equals, a discourse.

The reality of a class system, though, is that the ruling elite and even its dominant faction at a given period dominate such discourse because of the resources it commands, so that its view of society, of current events, even if patently false, justifies its rule, is embraced by most.

It is not President Marcos, his robotic spokesperson, their information agencies and their allies who directly do the propaganda work to cover up even his regime’s most blatant corruption and creeping authoritarianism.

As it is in all capitalist systems, this is the task of a stratum of people whose vocation is to take the elite’s interests and dress them in the language of morality, reason and the national good — to make a particular arrangement of power feel like the only arrangement a thinking person could accept. Gramsci called them the organic intellectuals of a class: the journalists, professors, jurists, the literati and clergy who do not merely hold opinions but manufacture the frame within which opinions are allowed to occur. They are not necessarily paid agents. Most of them are sincere. That is the point. I call them what they are plainly: the ruling class’ propagandists.

Hegemony works best when the people transmitting it believe they are simply telling the truth. This legitimizing caste is not new; only its uniform changes from one epoch to the next. Under feudalism, the work was done by the clergy. It was the priest who taught that the lord’s dominion was ordained, that the hierarchy of estates mirrored the order of heaven, that to obey one’s betters was to obey God, and that the misery of this life would be repaid in the next

Capitalism did not abolish the function — it merely reassigned it. The cathedral gave way to the newsroom, the pulpit to the opinion column, the sermon to the editorial, the catechism to the manufactured consensus of all serious people. Where the medieval ruling class was legitimized by those who claimed to speak for God, the modern one is legitimized by those who claim to speak for reason, democracy and the public interest. The vestments are different; the office is identical. As Chomsky pointed out, these types of intellectual and business elites see themselves as the only ones capable of understanding the “national interest,” and thus justify propaganda as being “for the common good.”

Identify

One can easily identify the main members of this stratum here, and you can too, as they are always on the same side in all of the controversies gripping the nation. Other than the elite universities staffed by US-educated faculty, this consists of mainstream print media, especially its columnists. The Philippine Daily Inquirer, through its spin of its news stories and, more importantly, its columnists, used to be the most powerful instrument of the ruling class led by the Yellows. After two populist presidents, Estrada and especially Duterte attacked the paper so as to drive it into dire financial condition; it has mellowed from being the prime echo chamber of the ruling elite, partly as the Yellows lost their grip on politics. Playing it safe, it even reduced its opinion pages to just one, with the elite’s views there mostly articulated by only three columnists. The Inquirer’s forte has been advertorials — especially on the property market — that even run for a dozen pages.

The Inquirer’s vanguard role in forming public opinion for elite views has been taken up by the Philippine Star that used to be owned by diehard Cory activists.

The Star now hews closely to the classic capitalist model: through various corporate layers, it is owned by the powerful Metro Pacific conglomerate, whose public face is Manuel Pangilinan, but which is tightly controlled (as I have explained in detail in my book “Colossal Deception”) by a son of the Indonesian strongman’s big crony, Antoni Salim. While mostly unknown to Filipinos, which has made it easier to portray Pangilinan as the owner of the conglomerate, Salim has long been listed among the world’s billionaires by Forbes and Bloomberg. Of course, big businesses, especially this one, whose foreign ownership is constitutionally questionable and in industries (communications, power and infrastructure) subject to heavy government regulation, cannot risk antagonizing the administration in any way.

All of the Star columnists — except for two — mouth the administration’s views, from the most sophisticated apologetics to gross insults against Marcos’ enemies. The Manila Bulletin has not changed its views that a newspaper is just a public bulletin board, with its opinion writers, even a leftist one there, ordered to write on controversial issues.

This newspaper is unique: thanks to its idiosyncratic founder, my old longtime friend the late Dante Ang, this paper has columnists ranging from the chairman of a government propaganda unit to a ghostwriter of the Marcos dictator to near-crackpots and anti-establishment Marxists.

The overarching elite in this epoch, although on a downward trajectory, is the US. Other than its control of media through the universities staffed with US-educated professors, the American line is transmitted through US agencies (such as the National Endowment for Democracy and NGOs) funding Rappler, the PCIJ, and the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility.

Manufacturers

There are also non-media manufacturers of content whom the press often turn to for their biased views, even if these, as those of former magistrate Antonio Carpio and Liberal Party stalwart Franklin Drilon, have been proven so wrong on so many issues.

Rather remarkably, the ranks of the ruling class’s propaganda corps in recent years in media have been swelled by those who for decades have been anti-establishment: the parliamentary Left and its party-list formations, the “Pinks” of Akbayan, the revolutionaries who were terrified by armed struggle, the cluster of vocal Church bishops and clerics, the Liberal Party and the Yellows. Even a former left-leaning writer, the Inquirer’s Randy David, appears to have joined this corps, even muting his criticism of the son of the dictator he has been lashing out at for 40 years.

One can very easily spot this propaganda corps since, on controversies gripping the nation, they sing in unison.

On the maritime dispute with China, they are of one mind to the decimal point: the 2016 arbitral award is holy writ, confrontation with China is the only permitted posture, and any talk of negotiation is appeasement, if not treason. They refuse to see that it was the filing of the arbitral case that China used as justification for turning their erstwhile reefs into islands for military use, the most important development in the South China Sea disputes.

On the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte, they are of one mind: she must be tried, the sooner the better, and any obstacle is a scandal. They refuse to confront the obvious: Taking out Sara through impeachment is the only way to prevent a Duterte restoration in 2028. On the International Criminal Court’s pursuit of Rodrigo Duterte, they are of one mind: justice arriving at last, and to raise the issue of sovereignty was to side with murder. They refuse to see the Marcosian hand behind this, as this is one way of chipping at the Duterte political brand. On the conviction of the late Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012, they were of one mind: a cleansing — never mind that it was also a sitting president bending the judiciary to his will. On the claims of 18 ex-soldiers that they delivered graft money to the Marcos family and their allies, they are of one mind, with David dismissing it as “manufactured spectacle” by Duterte forces.

Gatchalian

And most recently, on the capture of the Senate presidency by Sherwin Gatchalian, who is so vulnerable to Marcos’ puppetry, they were of one mind.

This issue even illustrates the diabolical genius of the ruling class. Its apologists are not merely echo chambers. They are creative in finding different ways of disseminating the elite propaganda line. One Star columnist praised Gatchalian to high heavens, enumerating his qualifications and experience in government. He refused to mention the one thing that would disqualify Gatchalian in real republics: The conglomerate he is a ranking pillar of is dependent on Marcos’ largesse concerning four of its billion-peso projects. He will easily be a Marcos puppet, for the sake of his family’s business empire.

The government-salaried columnist in this paper even outrightly lied to demonize the senators who have refused to be Marcos’ minions. He claimed that these senators led by Alan Cayetano were a minority that had kept “the Senate hostage.” This is false. The Cayetano bloc booted out Tito Sotto on May 11 with its majority of 13, with the Marcos minions numbering only 9, and two abstaining.

Marcos, however, got two of the two spineless fence-sitters to defect, after Jinggoy Estrada was “sampled”: He was jailed, and his graft case was raised to one of plunder, so he couldn’t post bail. Two other senators, Chiz Escudero and Joel Villanueva, got the message and joined the Marcos bloc on June 17, after they were threatened that their graft cases would be accelerated, with even the former’s entertainer wife, Heart, to be charged and jailed.

With these defections increasing the Marcos bloc to 13, Cayetano and his 10 senators yielded to the will of the majority. Yet this government mouthpiece ridiculously wrote, echoing the Marcos line, that Gatchalian’s ascension to the Senate presidency meant the “survival of democratic institutions under sustained pressure.” What is this guy smoking?

Intelligent

A more intelligent Star columnist took a different tack, as she couldn’t in conscience deny the obvious that it was Marcos who placed Gatchalian as Senate president, thus dismantling the basic republican principle of separation of powers between the executive and the legislative branches. She had a preposterous argument: “Of course, the Duterte bloc and its supporters have claimed that Malacañang has effectively taken the Senate hostage by dangling potential cases over senators like the sword of Damocles. Oh, but that’s really not something new or outrageous in our banana republic, is it? C’mon.”

This argument illustrates one of the most critical functions of the elite’s organic intellectuals: to make the abnormal seem normal, for people to just accept injustice and an exploitative system, to just accept that ours is a “banana republic.” A classic illustration indeed of that saying that democracy dies not with a bang but a whimper.

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: @bobitiglao

Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com

The post The ruling class’ propaganda corps first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

The ruling class’ propaganda corps
Source: Breaking News PH