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Undergraduate
Mass Opinion: Its Measure and Meaning
Versions of Censorship
Class and Taste in Mass Culture
Comtech and Global Politics
The Nature of Adaptation
Op-Ed on the WEB
Graduate
Culture and Communication
Community and Communication
Propaganda and Persuasion
Government and Its Publics
United Nations Onsite Communications Seminar:
The UN System & NGO Disarmament
Comprehensive Seminar in Ethics and Communication
"My teaching interests involve the philosophical and social
science analysis of propaganda, censorship, and ethics in the
contexts of modern industrial global communication systems. These
interests converge in the study of modern lobbying techniques
in American politics and public information compliance campaigns
with global reach, the net effect of which has greatly contributed
to the collapse of journalism into a distribution system for
corporate public relations, partisan propaganda, and obscurantizing
mass entertainment.
Plato noted that a well governed republic
required 'noble lies,' beliefs that were not in accord with the
facts but which helped government keep order for the good of
all. Pierre Boule's mythic Planet of the Apes cast this
idea in novel form - although the apes of the story were in fact
descendants of man, this truth was denied by their leaders because
they felt it would demoralize the apes and lead to the destruction
of law and order. In Plato, who approved, and in Boule, who disapproved,
the concept is based on the elitist premise that only a select
few can tolerate the disillusioning power of the truth. Common
people must live in and on fairy tales or they will not 'carry
on.' It is the logic of the Grand Inquisitor.
Is this governing principle somehow operative
in today's democratic 'information society'? If so, the most
pervasive modern high-tech form it takes, 'public service information,'
deserves at least as much scrutiny as media watchdog groups have
accorded both news and entertainment programming. The noble lie
may have devolved into noble hype."
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