Miner Queries: What Do We Know: Facts or Slogans?
On a gloomy morning last week as I was surveying headlines, I came across this equally gloomy AlterNet headline: “Millions of Americans Are Embarrassingly Ill-Informed – And They Do Not Care”. The article focused on American voters’ ignorance about civics and highlighted a disturbing lack of knowledge about our own government and history.
Author Rick Shenkman noted: “The most comprehensive surveys, the National Election Studies, were carried out by the University of Michigan beginning in the late 1940s. What these studies showed was that Americans fall into three categories with regard to their political knowledge. A tiny percentage know a lot about politics, up to 50-60 percent know enough to answer very simple questions, and the rest know next to nothing.”
Shenkman also chronicled five aspects of American
“stupidity:” lack of knowledge, resistance to seeking reliable and credible sources of information, believing what we want to believe regardless of facts, supporting policies contrary to our long-term interests, susceptibility to slogans, biases, fears, and overly simple diagnoses and solutions.
Does it matter if voters know the facts? Shenkman concludes his article using the example of Social Security: “How many know that the system is running a surplus?” he asks. As an equal opportunity critic, Shenkman dings Democratic and Republican Congresses for treating Social Security reserves as funds to be spent, whether using them to fund other social programs or to cut taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations.
Shenkman also alludes to deliberate obstructions to voters getting credible information. This ignorance, as I like to say, is by design. And Exhibit A is Justice Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
As Bill Moyers & Company outlined in a September 2012 essay on The Powell Memo: A Call to Arms for Corporations: “Using rapidly emerging tools of marketing and communications, they [corporations] learned how to generate mass campaigns. Building networks of employees, shareholders, local companies and firms with shared interests (for example, retailers and suppliers), they could soon flood Washington with letters and phone calls. Within a few years, these classically top-down organizations were to thrive at generating ‘bottom up’–style campaigns that not only matched the efforts of their rivals but surpassed them.”
Not only did Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo envision such business organizing, but it also laid out: corporate ownership of media (television, radio and publishing); developing corporate-friendly think tanks, speakers and messages; evaluating and revising textbooks; infiltrating and influencing college faculties, especially schools of business and economics; and lobbying policy makers at all levels through the use of campaign financing.
With corporations employing all these tactics, is it any wonder we’re ignorant? In nearly every direction, we are confronted with corporate-constructed information. It’s the marketing plan from hell, and it’s dominated our lives for 40-plus years.
And it’s amplified an illiteracy that leads Shenkman to ask, “How much ignorance can a country stand?”
If voters expect any help from government, we’ll have to re-energize our own organizing. Let me suggest the first step: turn off the TV and radio; shut down the Facebook games and YouTube videos; and go read. After you check who financed your source, of course.
Cherie Miner is a local parent, community volunteer, freelance writer and artist. In a former life, she was a corporate writer and public relations professional. Contact her at news@redoakexpress.com or on Facebook.