The discussion of conspiracy in the mainstream media tends towards a very specific formula. The writer first notes with shock and disappointment the growing popularity of conspiracy theories and then goes on to provide explanations for this new popularity. This explanation almost always assumes that these theories about the ‘true’ nature of social reality exist to satisfy some psychological need in their audience. Perhaps in the absence of religion we have only our paranoia for comfort. Or perhaps fundamentalist religion encourages a conspiratorial world-view complete with dark forces and an embattled humanity. Social scientists suggest that humans find it difficult to cope with the idea that events with a major impact can just happen the accidental death of a global celebrity is difficult for us to make sense of. The death of a princess must be as sensational as her life. Too many of us dismiss accident and coincidence on narratological grounds. Technology helps to spread conspiratorial theories, and the sheer quantity of information we are faced with encourages us to take refuge in the conspiratorial world-view.
Melanie Phillips’ January 2004 article in the Daily Mail is a model of concern about the growing credulity of the public as evidenced by its taste for conspiracy theories. While she recognises that conspiracies do happen, and cites the Catilinarian 2 and Cato Street conspiracies along with the Cambridge spy ring and Watergate as evidence of her breadth of historical vision, she is in no doubt that
‘…historical conspiracies are rare. The vast majority of apparently inexplicable events turn out to be caused by chance, accident or individual error or culpability.’
Once that is established she then ropes in an enormous variety of beliefs and world-views as examples of conspiratorial fantasy (a ‘conspiracy theory’ is rarely defined carefully in mainstream accounts, be they academic or journalistic. The lack of interest in the relative validity of various non-mainstream world-views is a striking feature of this particular kind of article). Everything from an interest in crop circles to ‘the belief in sinister links between the military-industrial complex and the intelligence services’ is taken as evidence of ‘a flight from reason’ on the part of the public. She also suggests some possible causes for the growing vogue for paranoid explanations. On the one hand it is something to do with post-modernism, with its relentless assault on the idea of objective truth. On the other hand, Islamic fundamentalists ought to take some of the blame.
For all the variety of examples and explanations in Phillips’ article and in others like it, there is near-unanimous agreement that conspiracy-as-fiction is a game for amateurs, lonely obsessives and political extremists. Conspiratorial thinking is something that our enemies and competitors indulge in, but it has nothing to do with how the ‘real world’ of politics and the mass media work. But is it reasonable to take that view? And why is it so prevalent in the mainstream? Of course there are strong inducements for journalists to believe that governments are basically truthful and that the media are generally reliable. It is difficult to make a career and think otherwise. More generally, it is difficult to enjoy a reputation for common sense and reliability unless one’s opinions on such matters fall inside the community standards of scepticism and credulity. One can doubt that the White House and Downing Street is always 100% truthful, but to call into question key assumptions of the Cold War or the War on Terror isn’t going to win you a reputation for clear-eyed realism. It is one thing to believe that Nixon authorised the Watergate break-in (he didn’t), quite another to believe that Bush has done and is still doing, much, much worse.
While it is conventional to assume that conspiratorial story telling happens ‘out there’, on the margins, a brief study of the historical record makes it clear that the mainstream media have themselves often championed doubtful and sometimes ludicrous fantasies. In the 1950s it was widely accepted in the American media that the drugs trade was driven by a conspiracy between Chinese communists and organised crime – sometimes in the form of left-wing trade unions – in the United States. At the time Chinese nationalists and the South Vietnamese establishment were producing much of America’s heroin. The other main heroin producer, Iran, was also an American ally. In later years Cuba and then Nicaragua were both described as prime movers in the Caribbean cocaine trade when it is obvious now, and was fairly clear then, that Cuban and Nicaraguan exiles were far more important in this trade. These errors were not innocent misunderstandings. The close links between the CIA and the drugs trade meant that the US state knew that these stories were untrue – were no more than conspiratorial fantasies – and permitted them to be circulated widely.
Fictitious criminal networks
This mainstream weakness for fictitious criminal networks extends into the heartland of conspiratorial fantasy, the world of the assassination. The Western press were energetic proponents of the idea that the Soviets, working through their Bulgarian allies, were behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope, even though the assassin himself belonged to a far-right group from Turkey, the Grey Wolves, and there was no evidence for a Soviet connection. In other words the same journalists that react with more-in-sorrow-than-anger pieties to claims of a conspiracy in the deaths of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were happy to peddle fantastic tales of a conspiracy between the Bulgarian secret service and a Turkish neo-fascist.(Just as they were later prepared to promote the idea that Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were conspiring together against the West. Notice, by the way, how even critics of the White House/Downing Street information campaign rarely use the term conspiracy theory in the context of the Al Qaeda/Iraq fantasy.)
Nor are the mainstream media entirely immune from the all-explaining global conspiracy that they rightly denounce when cooked up by non-professionals or political enemies. The media in the US in the early sixties had no problem with the idea that the Vietnamese communists were working as the puppets of the Chinese and the Russians as part of an orchestrated plan of Asiatic conquest. The communist world constituted a vast, ruthlessly disciplined left-wing conspiracy and a victory for North Vietnam would inevitably lead to the domination of Indochina, and perhaps all of South East Asia, by the Kremlin. As subsequent events demonstrated, and as neutral observers often noted at the time, the Vietnamese communists were fighting for the unification of their country and the end of foreign control. They were no more puppets of the Chinese or the Soviets than the Americans were puppets of the French or the Spanish in their war of independence.
Paranoid dynamics
The paranoid dynamics of Cold War thinking are certainly complicated. In claiming that the communists dominated the heroin trade, the FBN and the CIA were presumably peddling fantasy for clear political ends. But only a few years later, the inherent difficulty in establishing motives and the background of domestic paranoia about communism made the idea of a vast communist conspiracy irresistibly seductive to many of its advocates in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
In these examples government sources provided the basis for the fantasy. The inherent plausibility of the claims and the discoverable facts on the ground carried less weight than the say-so of government institutions. After a while a fantasy can be abandoned and historians can shake their heads at the credulity of earlier generations. New fantasies come along, masquerading as social science, common sense or informed opinion. Throughout this process, the mainstream media retains an unshakeable faith in its own reliability and the reliability of its sources in government. At the same time it continues its heroic work of casting a sceptical eye on official truths and defending the right of the citizen to know against powerful vested interests.
A bodyguard of lies
Each new fantasy is fresh and every care is taken to embed it into a rich factual framework. Churchill was only half-right or half-honest when he said that a truth must have a bodyguard of lies. A lie must be protected by as many facts as possible if it is to have a chance to survive, even for a while. It is of course difficult to believe that key elements of our shared common sense might be no more than figments of a propagandist’s fevered imagination, and it is always tempting to believe that while governments lied in the past, post-war, post-Nixon, or post-Hutton, such things are no longer a cause for concern. But it is worth remembering that the authors of the Second Cold War, the Bulgarian Plot and the first golden age of Middle Eastern terrorism joined Bush in the White House now. There is a definite family resemblance between those earlier productions and their latest showstopper, the War on Terror.
The dismissive attitude in the major media towards conspiracy theories is often justified. Although the language and definitions used are confused and confusing, they are right to point out that conspiracy theories can be extremely dangerous. They simplify a complicated world in ways that leave us less able to understand it, let alone to change it for the better. But they fail to recognise the central importance of state institutions in creating conspiratorial fantasies and their own role in broadcasting and corroborating them.
These fantasies are far more dangerous than the folk-politics the mainstream denounces with metronomic regularity. Official fantasy goes largely unchallenged and so does far more to distort our understanding. And by policing a line between acceptable and marginal ideas without applying anything like an equality of scepticism, journalists themselves add to the public’s confusion. Mainstream and marginal ideas need to beconstantly tested against discoverable facts. The alternative is to accept our cues from authority, with all that that implies for our individual maturity and for the sanity of our society. Seen in this light, the disappointment of journalists at the credulity and lack of sophistication of the public begins to look like a form of paranoid projection.
This came from Dr. Jeffrey Bale just after the US presidential election in November.
How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a light bulb?
- one to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed;
- one to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed;
- one to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb;
- one to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for darkness;
- one to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb;
- one to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner “Light bulb change accomplished”;
- one administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally ‘in the dark’;
- one to viciously smear #7;
- one surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along;
- and finally one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.