The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
time, the seemingly filter-less new media environment has been conducive to the growth of flak campaigns. New media has smoothed the way toward proliferation of flak-dedicated channels, specialized in the production of ideologically-driven harassment against individuals, organizations, and political causes.
Accuracy in Media (AIM, founded 1969) presented Herman and Chomsky’s lead example of flak when they introduced the propaganda model. In AIM’s appraisal, then and now, mainstream news media channels are not sufficiently monochrome, self-censorious and Pravda-like in enforcing a right-wing line. While AIM continues its dreary brand of antagonism (Goss, 2009), it is now more of a relic in what has become a crowded flak industry. To take a couple of examples of newer flak players, the Heartland Institute (founded 1984) and Project Veritas (founded 2009) are themselves media presences through their products and (niche as well as mainstream) media appearances. The remit of the flak new-wavers extends beyond ostensible media critique to produce ideologically radioactive flak against the usual litany of targets: “liberals,” universities, climate science, marginal populations, and effective State regulatory intervention in the economy.
In the effort to thoroughly characterize flak and draw attention to its techniques and impact, I am not positing flak as “the clue that solves all crimes.” As I have previously argued (Goss, 2013), the propaganda model’s amalgam of concentrated ownership patterns, rampant commercialism, elite sourcing and dichotomized narrative forms (Us/Them) continue to shape the news. I also acknowledge that flak presents a relatively limited—but influential and growing—place within the sociopolitical arena. However, flak’s impact is likely misunderstood in large part because flak campaigns are rarely identified as such. Flak’s impact can be observed, even as flak itself remains largely unmentioned and shrouded in shadows. To my knowledge, there are no previous book-length treatments of flak as political harassment. To begin to remedy this previous lack of scrutiny, I will now drill down further into defining the contours of flak.
Beyond Bullshit: Defining the Term
As Terry Eagleton (1991) points out, ideology can be considered in at least some situations as a normatively neutral term, as everyone carries ideologies ←5 | 6→just as everyone hosts bacteria. To characterize something as flak is, as I am defining it, never neutral and always a criticism in the first instance. Flak is (pick one or more) weaponized, instrumentalized, contrived, spoofed, counterfeit, simulated—or, in Harry Frankfort’s terms, encrusted with bullshit that even the cynical flak merchant may not even believe (2005).
What more specifically is flak? In the brutal concision of a few words, I define it as centered on tactics and strategies toward political harassment. Flak is enacted by powerful entities—or backed by powerful players in the wings—toward consequential sociopolitical objectives. It is distinct from good faith criticism (of a speech, of a bill) as well as from indiscriminant trolling against whomever is convenient. In this view, flak is a multidimensional form of weaponized political activity intended to attract notice, while it impedes or abolishes the effectiveness of its targets. Flak strategies and tactics toward these ends are not simply expressions of personal antipathy, but are driven by purposeful, ideologically-defined goals with tangible impact in the sociopolitical domain. Campaigns of astringent disparagement and delegitimation are perhaps the most straightforward tactics toward disabling a target’s (or targets’) effectiveness. These campaigns often aggressively kick-off by asserting the target to be, irreducibly and in essence, a problem (i.e., problematizing) or even criminal. It follows that the conduct of flak is regularly tendentious as well as contentious, and is often brazen about making moves (claims, actions) far outside of proportion or basis in evidence.1
As for power that I have characterized as nourishing flak, it can assume distinctly different forms with their associated modalities. Power can be analyzed in terms of its coercive, economic, political, and symbolic dimensions (Flew, 2007, pp. 4–8). While coercive power is not directly in play in this discussion, I posit flak as imbued with power’s palpable economic, political, and symbolic dimensions. These dimensions can be converted into each other and then back again in an almost infinite loop. A tycoon or an industry consortium can exert economic power to fund “think tanks” or flak mills ostensibly characterized by intellectual rigor and authority. In turn, think tank symbolic power can be marshaled to reinforce the funders’ bottom-line and economic power. Politicians can, for their part, rally to the think tank flak campaigns with slogans and bills (symbolic and political power). At the same time, flak memes can be peppered over the symbolic realm of discourse in media—and reinforce the same array of economic and political powers; and so on, ad infinitum.
In this view, power is not inert, nor is it simply some discrete force that one person exercises, cudgel-like, to make another person do something; the ←6 | 7→internalization of multidimensional power relations penetrate far deeper into a person’s subjectivity and partly constitute him or her as, for example, a member of a socioeconomic class. While attentive to political and economic forms of power in the backstory of flak campaigns, I will largely focus on the symbolic dimensions of flak by analyzing flak discourses.
About those discourses: I am dwelling in the opening pages of this volume on flak’s origins in the propaganda model to emphasize that my arguments are in no measure nostalgic for the late twentieth model of U.S. journalism. In terms compatible with the propaganda model, researchers have demonstrated that U.S. news media was failing to educate the public on high-consequence issues to a shocking extent during the era of professionalized, objective journalism; high-consequence issues that include, for example, the 1991 assault on Iraq (Clark, 1992; MacArthur, 1993) and the subsequent sanctions regime against Iraqi civilians during the 1990s (Gordon, 1999; Goss, 2002).
In this view, the RAND Corporation’ recently minted concept of “truth decay” contributes a clever name to current scholarship on news (Kavanaugh & Rich, 2018). However, the truth decay analysis does not extend far enough in making its critique of what has been and what is wrong with news. To some extent, truth decay seeks to contain a contemporary crisis of authority and reassert “official” parameters of truth. In this manner, RAND’s formulation of truth decay implies a nostalgic desire to re-enthrone the status quo antebellum of ostensibly “trusted” twentieth-century news; an outcome that is neither possible, nor desirable. A flak-grounded analysis harbors no nostalgia for the U.S. news model of the twentieth century that, metaphorically speaking, outfitted systemically skewed news in a “reassuring” suit-and-tie.
Having situated flak with respect to its eruption beyond its conceptual origins in the propaganda model, I will step back to examine what another series of events in 1988 augured for a future of heightened flak. I will then trace the path of flak’s development to the new media era in 2016. The upshot of this discussion is to look in some detail at how flak, past and present, behaves in vivo, before fashioning a more systematic theoretical mapping of flak in Chapter 2.
1988: Duke of Hazard
The 1988 U.S. presidential election furnished a high-profile rehearsal for new logics of political discourse in which flak would become increasingly prevalent; a glimpse of an internet-memed future still to come.
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In the summer of 1988, Michael S. Dukakis, Massachusetts governor and Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency, appeared well-positioned to challenge for the White House. His standing in polls against sitting Vice-President George H.W. Bush was high with a steep 17-point advantage with voters by late July (DeCosta-Klipa, 2016). It may not be surprising that a decisive margin of voters pivoted to quasi-incumbent in Bush as summer gave way to autumn. However, the manner in which 1988’s electoral turnaround played out is of interest. Specifically, the case of William Horton presents a keynote flak discourse that delivered for Bush against Dukakis. Kathleen Jamieson Hall’s account of the 1988 election posits it as unusual to that moment in modern campaigning for its bare-knuckle qualities (1992). With the benefit of decades of hindsight, I suggest that the 1988 campaign can be construed as the missing-link to contemporary, flak-saturated politics.
The main blows at Dukakis’ campaign concerned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’