roachboy

charlatan: is war a product?
is a state a brand that can effectively sell war?

the ethical question is not new, really---any war requires that support be generated and maintained amongst the public--but it seems to me that there is something basically wrong with shifting from a model in which this is an explicit activity undertaken by the state to a model where the state is understood as a type of corporate body which sells its policies as product, particularly war, particularly war launched on problematic grounds--particularly by selling that war not through explicitly framed official statements, but through the use of proxies that infiltrate information streams and function to blur the line between factual reporting (whatever that really is) and official propaganda.

the line seems clearest if you adopt the approach which emphasizes the nature of the polity--in a democratic political system, information has a certain status because of the way the system is supposed to operate---so the blur of official marketing and information is not only more obviously a problem framed this way, but the consequences of it emerge with a certain polemical clarity.

if you adopt a position that assumes pr as a procedure that can be applied in principle to any relation, then the same problem looks quite different, and does come, as you say, to a matter of scale or degree.

so the meta-problem has to do with the desirability of effects of adopting one approach over another to framing this ethical and maybe legal problem. this is a political matter, really (the criteria that you would use to evaluate approaches are political, in other words, and would involve argument from outcomes).

this is why i have not been willing to concede your way of framing the question at hand here to you---even though i haven't had time to make the case until now.

this seems the place where we are, though. a step prior.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Charlatan

I guess I am approaching this a little differently. While I can agree that selling war a product is problematic to say the least, the matter still stands that the government is always trying to sell their policies. Everything from no-smoking campaigns to the farm bill and back again. Some of the policies are easy to agree with... some are not.

There are politics in all of these issues, just not on the same scale.

Where and how does one draw the line when it comes to the government "selling" it's position on things?

I am pretty sure I would draw my line so that it doesn't include special access to ex-military officers and curtailing access to those who don't tow the party line. I am pretty sure I would draw it even tighter than that. However, it is really not a matter of what I think but what the law thinks and I am not sure this has been an illegal act. It might be but I am not sure.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

roachboy

well, host has presented an argument that they are illegal actions.
ultimately, to decide the matter would require a legal action and a decision, yes?

ethically, it seems to me that war is not a product but a state action and that there is a distinction in kind between the two. efforts to generate support for a war are not marketing--but they are a type of public relations, which i take as bigger than simply marketing, more like bernays described it as engineering opinion (i could be wrong about the wording--something unnerving, though)--so if you assume that generating support for an action is part of the action, it follows that public relations is an extension of war in this case. if you assume that there is a distinction between the state and a private firm, and between information and advertising, it would follow that there *should* be distinctions between political actions (marketing war is a political action by necessity as it involves the state) and private firm pr campaigns--which would obtain across the board--so for example a government representative might appear as a talking head on some goofball roundtable program and advocate the position of the moment on smoking---but he or she would be operating in a clearly marked capacity as a representative and would speak from that position---others who interact with the official position of the moment would probably treat it as one alternative amongst others and engage in an evaluative action---which is fine obviously--this gets confusing though, doesn't it--a private citizen can advocate a position symmetrical with that of the official state line of the moment and that's ok--so i guess the distinction comes down to identifying state representatives as state representatives and so marking their speech as originating from, effectively, the state.

this is clearer in the case of the "experts" who were used by the "news" networks as neutral commentary sources on matters pertaining to the war in iraq--who were effectively instruments of the bush administration--they were not identified as such, did not identify themselves as such, and this seems to me a problem. like a Problem.

it is easy peasy to manipulate public opinion if you don't make distinctions between types of information sources and present ideological positions as matters of fact. perhaps because it is so easy to do--if you control or have systematic access to the repetition machinery that shapes aspects of collective worldviews--that it bugs me that this sort of practice is happening.

particularly given the still-incessant self-congratulations in the states over how "free" everyone is politically.
this seems to me, hperbolic tho it may be just written down this way--an indication of the extent to which the states is a soft totalitarian system...no distinction between ideology and information means that the ability of the polity to make informed judgments is incapacitated. that is a form of domination.

my argument works backward from this general premise to this particular type of situation.

it's much stickier a question framed as you do it, sir.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

loquitur

All this stuff about the media is just flapdoodle. What's really important is that Tim Russert farted on the air on national television.

host

CNN and all of the other major broadcast TV networks have still not reported on the successful effort of the NY Times to convince a federal court to order the pentagon to provide documents related to it's domestic media psy-ops program, but here is CNN, this past week, without disclosure to it's viewers, disclaimer or qualification, continuing to participate in the pentagon's domestic disinformation operation: