The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
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As concerns the genesis of this volume, I will acknowledge that one title that I floated for it was Political Ebola. Instead, The Rise of Weaponized Flak finally won out over the perhaps more colorful if morbid and commercially suspect title.
As for people who have helped summon the book into being, I will name names. I thank the members of the Professional Development Advisory Committee at Saint Louis University-Madrid and its chair, Dave Howden, for granting me a teaching release in Spring 2019. The release enabled locked-on focus and completion of the book in a timely fashion.
While the book was in progress, I had the chance to rehearse and refine evidence and arguments through a series of presentations at different moments in the two-and-a-half-year sojourn through flak. I thank my colleagues Simona Elena Rentea and Joan Pedro Carañana for scheduling me three times (2016–2018) to deliver presentations for the Humanities and Social Sciences Division Research Seminars as I prepared the book proposal and while writing was in progress. Mulțumiri to Emilia Parpala-Afana and her colleagues at University of Craiova, Romania for giving me hospitality and the opportunity to address the Comparativism, Identity and Communication Conference as a plenary speaker. In Spring 2019, Tony Ozuna enabled the chance to present ←ix | x→findings at Anglo-American University in Prague, Czech Republic—with further support from Rob Warren and Andrew Giarelli who brought their students en masse. Arne Saeys was hands-on in arranging a Faculty of Social Sciences lecture later in Spring 2019 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in a room that memorably overlooked the final resting place of P.P Rubens in Saint Jacob’s Church.
Prior to crisscrossing Europe with the message on flak, I benefitted from the generosity that Intersections in Communication and Culture Series Editor Cameron McCarthy has afforded me, as well as countless other scholars, during his dazzling career. Cameron has been an encourager in first asking me to consider a book proposal more than ten years ago; the volume in your hands now is our fourth collaboration with Peter Lang. Speaking of Lang, although she is relatively new to the firm, Acquisitions Editor Erika Hendrix inspired total confidence as she shepherded the book to endgame and nailed even obscure questions with good cheer.
More thanks: a hand to Paul A. Vita, Director of the Saint Louis University-Madrid campus for his consistent support over many years, after bringing me to my first academic post coming out of University of Illinois. Anne Dewey and Cary Barney were among the first people I met on arrival at SLU’s distinctive and ahead-of-its-time international campus; their encouragement, wisdom, and example have been vital to my career trajectory. Daniel Chornet’s arrival on our campus in 2006 propelled our department forward and heralded a rigorous and positive culture within it. As noted, many people have now heard me present this book’s content at different moments of progress toward completion, but my colleague Dale Fuchs was brave enough to read an advanced draft. Students in my Political Communication course have also sharpened my concept of flak over the years; shout outs are in order for Ema Debeljak, Luis Garanzo Asensio, Paula Otero Santos, Bracey Parr, Nada Tahiri and Jennyfer D. Zuili.
El gran amigo John Kayan has listened to soliloquies on the emergent theory of flak across untold trajectories through zonas de marcha while Cristina Domingo Zaragoza has been similarly regaled at her kitchen table.
Finally, I hope the contents of the book on the written page are equal to the lofty artistic accomplishment of the cover artists: Paul Francis Goss (cover painting) and Lua Fischer (author photograph).
Brian Michael Goss
May 2019
Madrid, Spain
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1988/2016: from pac and flak to hack and flak
Introduction: Remembering 1988
The year 1988 witnessed two events of considerable interest to the study of flak as a sociopolitical force.
The first event was the publication of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent in which the authors introduced their propaganda model. In presenting their structuralist account of the behavior of news media in the contemporaneous United States, Herman and Chomsky’s objective was to illuminate “a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent” (1988, p. 1); a system far more supple and decentered than the then-terminally ill Soviet system. Herman and Chomsky were interested in how a force that steers the conduct of news workers is exerted without evident force for having been embedded within a framework of robust formal freedoms.
In explaining the paradox, Herman and Chomsky (1988) posit five systemic filters that condition the performance of news workers and the resultant news narratives. In their account, the filters behave in concert to palpably but un-coercively bring news into alignment with powerful (capitalist, nationalist) interests. Herman and Chomsky characterize news as filtered from the ←3 | 4→start through oligopolistic ownership patterns. Thereafter, news is conditioned by commercial imperatives (transacting the delivery of an audience to advertisers in exchange for revenue), sourcing patterns (massively tilted toward elite information brokers) and unswerving ideological opposition to the communist Other (recall that this was 1988!). These constraints play out within a news milieu structured by professional procedures that shunt reporting toward prevailing consensus and its circumscribed controversies. With the filters deeply insinuated into the news media industry and internalized by news workers, journalism is generally, if imperfectly, textured by the status quo.
Alongside these four filters, Herman and Chomsky also propose one more filter that limits the autonomy of news organizations: flak. In contrast with the first four filters, Herman and Chomsky’s “classic” version of flak construes it as a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside news organizations. In their characterization, flak consists of “negative responses to a media statement or program” (1988, p. 16). Flak goes into motion when the other filters, in effect, slip-up and ideologically wayward reporting is broadcast or published. Vintage 1988 flak could be mobilized through “letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action” (1988, p. 16). Herman and Chomsky stress the gravity of flak: if “produced on a large scale, or by individuals or groups with substantial resources, it can be both uncomfortable and costly,” with the professional and personal implications that follow. Efforts to discipline news media with flak may—or may not—be immediately successful, but news organizations need to be mindful of the costs of disapprobation or harassment. That said, at least in their “Introduction,” Herman and Chomsky (1988) devote relatively little attention to flak.
Today, as in 1988, flak can be understood as ideologically purposeful, enacted with the objective of delegitimizing, disabling or dismantling the careers and activities of its targets. In this volume, I will further posit flak as having slipped the propaganda model leash to become a significant force in its own right. In this view, the practices of flak have claimed a more central place in contemporary sociopolitical processes, far beyond disciplinary mechanisms directed against news media. Contemporary flak arguably works through media far more massively than against it.
Since the publication of Manufacturing Consent in 1988, the advent of new media platforms has altered news in ways that are being debated even as they unfold (Curran, Fenton & Freedman, 2016; Fenton, 2010; Morozov, 2011; Peters & Broersma, 2013). On one hand, the new media era has facilitated ←4 | 5→notable improvements in the news environment. The new media order has loosened the demands of the simplistic objectivity doctrine and,