Legitimation, Hegemony and the Media:

A Grarnscian Account of the Rise of the New Right in the US- and Canada

A Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of .Arts

in Social Studies

University of Regina

by

Mi tch Diamantopoulos

Regina. Saskatchewan

December 13,2000

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This study argues that Gramsci's theory of hegemony provides valuable conceptual tools for analyzing contemporary political movements. The rhesis elaborates the basic theoretical concepts used in hegemony analysis and situates the rise of the New

Right in the larger histoncal context of struggles for hegemony. Finally, case studies provide a basic overview and institutional analysis of the strategies. structures and techniques which facilitated the rise of New Right hegemony in the US.and Canada.

Due to their critical role in struggles for hegrnony. special attention is also paid to the role of newspapers. The rise of Conrad Black's press empire, and the central role of

New Right organic intellectuals like Black and his editorial staff in the movernent's rise to cultural and political power. are highlighted in an appendix. This project would not been have possible without some key people to whom 1 am very grateful.

First arnong those to whom I have theoretical debts to pay is Bill Livant who taught me to think crïtically and act generously. Without Bill's personal intervention, patience and generosity 1 am confident that 1 would never have embarked on this exercise. Thanks are also due to my advisor, John Conway, who encouraged me, by both his advice and his academic and public examples, to keep it relevant. C. Wright Mills,

Ralph Miliband, Wallace Clernent, Car1 Boggs, James Curnn, Michael Apple and, of course, Antonio Gramsci have influenced this work considerably.

Outside the discipline, I have also been deepl y influenced by contemporxy journalist-historians like Myrna Kostash, Ron Verzuh, R.T. Naylor, Pierre Berton,

Stephen Dale, Linda McQuaig and Murray Dobbin. 1 also recognize the important influence of successive waves of media-activists in this region, particularly the founders of -rVexr Year Country and Briarpatclz magazines, and the Prairie Fire weekly. The example of Michael AIbert, Lydia Sargeant and Cynthia Peters at South End Press and Z

Magazine to advance and expand the alternative media have also encouraged me in this effort.

This project is more than an academic treatise. It is also an artifact of my lifework of the last decade. As such, it depends on many. These include, first and foremost, rny parents. They taught me an appreciation of the tmth and a respect for knowledge. My father instilled in me a patriotic devotion to the democratic tradition, an interest in history and the determination to achieve. My mother shared with me her love of language and culture and her passionate cornmitment to freedom, equality and human decency. 1

Iargely credit them for what might be worthwhile in this work.

1 must also recognize the many exceptions! people with whom 1 have had the

great pleasure and deep satisfaction of working at Regina's only independent newspaper, prairie dog magazine. My CO-workershave played a crucial role in helping me broaden

my analysis, helping me rnove from the contemplation of media systems in the abstract to an appreciation of al1 the concrete subtleties which emerge only from practical engagement and real world media struggle. I must single out two of these people for special mention, Terry Morash and April Bourgeois. They are rny closest partners in work and arnong my best frïends in life. I dedicate this work to them. Others who have made special contributions to Our work and to rny thinking are Guy Marsden; Adriane

Paavo, my first editor; Michelle Kowalski, a CO-founderof prairie dog and a dear fnend;

Shannon Avison, Ar10 Yuziccipi-Fayant and finally Leonzo Barreno.

1 would be remiss not to mention our partners in the social movements and the

Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation (CWCF) who taught me the importance of thinking historically, strategically and boldly. In particular 1 thank the CWCF board and braintrust for the propaganda of their deeds.

Thanks also are due to the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Regina.

Without Faculty funding support, this project simply would not have been possible. Table of Contents

Abstract 1

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

Introduction: Analyzing Media-Power in a Propaganda System 1

Chapter 1: Nature and Scope of the Work: Gramsci's Theory of Hegemony

9

Chapter 2: Precedents and Parallels: The Histoncal and Global Context of

Communications Struggle 21

Chapter 3: The Theory and Strategy of Hegemony: Gramsci Applied

40

Chapter 4: A Popular Revolution: The U.S. Case

Chapter 5: A Silent Revolution: The Canadian Case

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Discussion

References

Appendix A: The New Right's Newspaper Revolution and the Rise of Conrad

Black, an Organic Intellectual of the New Right 154 Introduction: Analyzing Media-Power in a Propaganda System

Just as clerîcal authot-ity was revered in the IMiaddle Ages, today's journalistic and academic elites have also gained relatively unquestion ~edauthority. Like clerics, however, the professional power of knowledge-workers is only "relatively autonomous' from the institutional orders and patronage systems within which they work. Like the doctrine of divine inspiration which underpinned the authonty claims of the mediaeval church and its representatives, the professional monopoly of modern academics and joumalists over .

'objective truth' is central to the hegemonic role of madern-day joumalism and scholasticism. Occupational ideologies of objectivity provide these highly-educated strata privileged authority clairns against the non-expert masses whose perspectives are tainted by self-interest and unprofessionalism. Professional id*.eologies, by contrast. suggest that the technical and rational accounts of modem experts are disinterested, objective, and socially neutral (Wexler: 1976). This doctrine therefore provides modem professional knowledge elites, who largely represent corporate and state power, with tremendous leverage in opinion-leadership, decision-makîng and pwblic policy-setting.

The doctrine of objectivity assigns the academiic inteilectuaI and joumalist the role of detached 'observer,' presumably stepping 'outside' social reality into a value-free and interest-free zone of professional neutrality. It sanctioms a restricted fom of criticism under the rubric of disinterested academic inquiry, or abjective and balanced newsgathering and commentary. Studies have demonsErated, however, that the production of knowledge is not as random and arbitrary as the libezral-professional ideology of

'knowledge for knowledge's sake' would suggest. Studiles demonstrate that modem research professions are profoundly shaped by historically specific social relations, forms of institutionalization and the level of technological advance, whether car-edout by journalists working within mass media systems (Bagdikian, 1992; Gitlin, 1980; Herrnan and Chomsky, 1998; Kent, 1981; Nelson, 1989; Schiller, 1969; Simpson, 1993; Warnock,

1975; Winter, 1990 and 1997) or by scholars working in higher educationa1 institutions

(Boggs, 1993; Giddens, 1991 ; Newson and Buchbinder, 1988; 07Nei11,1972; Simpson,

1993; Wexler, 1976). Knowledge produced in the universities and the mass media actually "derive from the wider structure of society, which embodie(s) a particular set of values and political and economic interests" (Wexler,l976:20), including the professional self-interests of this social stratum itseIf.

This critique raises a substantial challenge to the objectivity and truth claims of modem experts and to the specific professional ideoIogies of modem journalism and science. In contrast to the ideological claims of professional knowledge-workers to socially-neutrd, objective fact, sociological theory contends that knowledge is always sociaIly constructed. The conception of knowledge as a social artifact dso suggests chat the institutionalized predominance of dominant class values and interests has important impiications for the production and circulation of ideology and information- Professional elites' claims that they are impartial observers of social reality, and therefore the best qualified to interpret social reality, are seen as part of that occupational group's attempt to monopolize authority and pursue prestige and career-advancement. The class and ideological interests of this intelligentsia, according to litemture in the sociology of media and knowledge have their own contaminating effect on research practices. O'Neill

(19728) has argued that sociological professionalism has deeply damaged the sociologist's sense of relevance and concern with the profession's value, concerns which

in fact cover for careerism, scientism and opportunism. Sim*larcriticisms have been

made of the occupational ideologies governing the behaviour of modem joumalists

(Barsamian,l992; Gans, 1980; Christian, 1980). This chailenge to professionalized truth clairns has significant implications for the authoritative character of modem social scientific research, as well as for the production of news, popuIar worldviews, public opinion and the overall structure of ideas in contemporary society.

The range of research choices in university and mass media settings is not merely limited by the free choice of the individual researcher as liberal professional ideology suggests. Rather, it is shaped by a number of specific institutional factors. One is the interests of employers. In the case of media enterprises, which are ovenvhelmingly privately owned, owners often also hold directorships in other capitalist enterprises and are cIoseIy interlocked with other class fractions of the economic elite. In the case of university boards, directors often also hold corporate directorships anaor are appointed by state-officials. Owner-appointed management make allocation and hiring decisions, and establish personnel policies that are disproportionately shaped, therefore, by the corporate ideology of this highly interlocked and dense social network (Clement,1975;

Winter, 1994; Newson and Buchbinder,l988).

The values and perspectives of the corporate elite are likely to be reflected both in hiring decisions and in the institution's overall management philosophy. This can have dramatic effects on the survival or elimination of departments, and the employrnent prospects available to young journalists or researchers. Whether it is a decision to reallocate funds from the sociology department to the CO-opworkktudy program, or from

the 'labour-beat' to the business pages, managerial elites in the knowledge industries

exercise powerful influence, on behaIf of their employers, over the character of the

knowledge to be produced in those institutions- This, in tum, has a narrowing effect on

the opportunity structure within which individual researchers make their career choices

and choose their research specializations. Since the sarne class composition of

directorships in universities and mass media enterprizes obtain nation-wide, it has a

systemic effect.

Other factors shaping the research agenda, and the structure of knowledge in

modem capitalist societies such as Canada, include: the interests of research patrons

(generally govemment agencies or private corporations); the availability of resources; the

nature of institutional reward structures; the organizational culture, including disciplinary

convention and theoretical traditions; and broader social and cultural trends. Although

perhaps Iess pernicious than overt thought control measures in totalitarian societies, the

mechanisms of this "guided market system" exercise a profound effect on the overall

structure of knowledge and culture in a society (Heman and Chomsky,l988:xii).

Due to the fact that the stuff of social research always embodies the perspectives

and interests of certain social groups, researchers are either consciously or unconsciously

taking sides when they produce and distibute knowledge. This is as true of the dissident

sociologist documenting the role of elite power in increasing the incidence of poverty, as

it is for the conformist economist studying 'efficient' ways to shift university resources from soft sciences and the humanities to the hard sciences where technology and skills can easily be transferred to enhance the global cornpetitiveness of Canadian capital.

Different orientations toward the selection of topics and the definition of the problem inevitably reflect different values, ideologically loaded assumptions, the availability of research patrons, or a political preference for serving different interests. The point is not that social scientists shouId abandon the pursuit of a fair and accurate understanding of modem social problems in favour of outright partisanship and propaganda, the point is simply to be methodologically reflexive rather than naïve about working within a propaganda system (Gouldner, 1970:489-490). This means, in part, recognizing that

'Iegitimate' knowledge can be not only explanatory and descriptive, but aIso evaluative, cntical and emancipatory (Sayer,199243).

As a consequence of this increasing reflexivity, which is charactenstic of modemity (Giddens: lWl), the critical intelligentsia have become inextncably linked to the popular struggles of trade unions, civil rïghts movements and citizen groups in the course of, or as a consequence of, their research in recent decades. While such relationships have often led their critics to accuse them of unprofessionalism for violatint, the doctrine of objectivity, these research and advocacy practices are in no way fundamentally different from those choices of the career intellectual who engages in applied research and development which serves corporate interests, or in public policy studies which serve the capitalist state, as the expression of their own career interests.

Similarly, the advocate-journalist is not substantially different from a peer who chooses to specialize in public relations, assisting corporate and state agencies in 'managing' the news. In fact, while dissident intellectuals are often highly visible advocates for particular interests or causes and their findings are thus disqualified within the conventionai structure of authority, institutionalized partnerships with government and business as research patrons are often more pernicious. Research contracted by corporate and state managers, for example, often involves as part of the terms of employrnent or funding that the reai beneficiaries of the research are concealed or that public access be subject to the selective interests of the patron or that unpleasant findings of fact be suppressed. Similady, the inrerested character of the results are often misleadingly cloaked in the technical ideology of objectivity characteristic of, for example, sociological functionalism. The propagandistic value of apparently neutral scientific fact, of course, is great in a society in which influence and power is increasingly based on persuasion rather than outright coercion-

Further, while 'applied' research that brings research revenue and prestige to the universities is encouraged and even celebrated, a clear double-standard applies to partnerships with less powerful social groups. In general the dissenting or cri tical intellectua1 is increasingly viewed with suspicion and embarassrnent by increasingly marketing-savvy university administrators. Eager to generate goodwill and revenue from the corporate sector and weaIthy alumni, they view left-intellectuals as institutional lepers whiIe academic-entrepreneurs assume the status of veritable heroes.

This study is inspired by critical theoretical traditions which developed against the prevailing objectivity orthodoxy in media studies. Conflict media theories have challenged the assumptions of functionalist approaches which suggest that media practices and institutions exist to serve a universal system-wide need for information and are essentially therefore socially-neutral or positive. Against tradi tional mass media research, much of which is historically rooted in efforts to consolidate corporate and state-power, the critical approach employed in this study recognizes that mass media practices embody the interests of dominant social groups as they stniggle to maintain and expand their power, and to defend and extend social relations of dominance and subordination. In contrast to mainstream, functionalist media theory and the professional ideology of objectivity which have developed with the patronage and institutional support of corporate and state power, this study has been developed through cornmunity organizing participatory action research, and reflects the perspective of popular movements as they challenge corporate propaganda systems, including the mass media.

Following on Schlesinger (199 l:ZW), this study argues that "the media and wider cultural fields are indeed to be conceived as battlefields, as spaces in which contests for various forms of dominance take place."

WhiIe this study's topic, method and definition of the probiem al1 reflect critical theoretical and political assurnptions about the nature of this social and mass media system, this is no more or less objective or political than conformist accounts which use more conventional methods or focus on less controversial subjects. The whole sociological enterprise is based on the assumption, after all, that the nature of social reality is not simply self-evident and that the common sense of social actors is nddled with incomplete and mistaken understandings about the nature of their society. Without a recognition that Our knowledge is partial, contingent and flawed there would be no need for formal academic inquiry, The role of the inteIIectua1, following on Chomsky, should not be to conform to established convention and reproduce the established ideologies OF the day. Rather, the role of the intellectual shouId be to "find out and tell the truth as best one cm, about things that malter, to the n'ght aitdience"(Chomsky 199655). To discover and communicate the truth from behind layers of propaganda and institutionalized misunderstanding, however, involves precisely a break with conformist and conventional approaches to the production and distribution of knowledge. According to Andrew Sayer, the practice of critical social science depends, in large part, on resisting the rnethodologïcal imperialism of scientism which "uses an absurdly restrictive view of science... to derogate or disqualify practices such as ethnography, historical narrative or explorative research, for which there are often no superior alternatives" (19924). The test of a theory, study and argument shouId therefore be its practical adequacy and explanatory power rather than a pretence as an untenably 'objective' truth. CHAPTER 1)

NATURE AND SCOPE OF THE WORK:

Gramsci's Theory of Hegemony

The rise of the New Right in the post-sixties period has been treated as an intellectual fad or political movement of free enterpnze ideologues (Watkins, 1993). It has also been theorized as the organized ideological expression of the emerging interests of the transnational corporate lobby (Skfar,1980). While the New Right clearly combines these ideological and class elements, and cannot be adequately understood without an analysis of its intelligentsia and transnational corporate patrons, a critical and historical account of the New Right's rise to political power must aiso analyze the specific hegemonic agencies through which this critical Iinkage between capital, the New Right intelligentsia and popular culture has been constructed (Miliband, 1976). It is this critical institutional nexus where corporate class interests meet the institutionalized and ideotogical practices of elite opinion-leaders thât the historical origïns and development of the New Right can best be traced. This privatized propaganda system includes the opinion-leadership of a broad stratum of articulate, educated, and politically active intellectuals such as think-tank researchers, policy advisors, public relations experts, teachers, journalists, editors, columnists and academics. This study, therefore, approaches the New Right's social bloc as a complex dliance of elite and popular forces consciously constructed through the institutional expansion of the hegemonic apparatus. The achievement of New Right hegemony is understood, therefore, neither as the automatic ideological reflex of transnationalizing monopoly capital, nor an autonornous intellectual/ideological developrnent. Instead, it reflects a sophisticated and strategïc effort to create the research and mass communications capacity necessary to elaborate and sustain a new moral and intellectual order.

It is argued that mass media have provided strategically cntical infrastructure for the success of the New Right's sociai project. By providing critical institutional supports for the production and distribution of New Right propaganda, the increasingly concentrated and interlocked corporate media have assisted in the cultivation of an authori tarian populism that presses for regressive social change from below. Through advanced and sophisticated foms of ideological struggle, the New Right has pIayed more than a leading role in shifting the tems of legitimation for state power. Indeed, by reconstmcting and remobilizing Canadians' everyday 'comrnon-sense,' the citizenry itself has been complicit in transforming the social formation in elite interests- This process has reached well beyond the electorai arena. The New Right has reshaped the tems and conditions of capital accumulation. It has defeated the nationalist and redistributive economic policies of the past, including Keynesianism, progessive taxation, state regulation and intervention and public ownership, while populxizing free trade, de- regulation, privatization, and contracting-out, to cite a few examples. It has led a cultural backlash against different and historically disadvantaged groups, multiculturalism, bilingualism and employment equity, fundamentalIy shifting patterns of group identity formation and community development in the process. Its attacks on trade unions, advocacy groups, the welfare state, 'dependent' populations, and 'cnminal' elements from youth to immigrants have al1 involved a shift in moral and intellectual authority back toward the privileged. Rather than a managerial change of direction carried out behind the backs of the people, the New Right has shifted the opinions, attitudes and values of millions of Canadians in a comprehensive and thoroughgoing fashion. The masses have themselves been enlisted in this disciplined mobilization to the right.

The New Right's multi-dimensional challenge to the basis of the post-war consensus in Canada was political, cutltural and economic. By organizing citizens around resonant and mutually rein forcing themes, the Ieading strategists of the New Right have launched a sweeping and comprehensive set of challenges to progressive liberalism.

Through this thoroughgoing restructuring, the New Right has won a dramatic measure of moral and intellectual authonty. ft is argued that the communications infrastructure available to conflicting social forces has played an important role in the outcorne of modem authonty stniggles and the unequal growth of rival social blocs. Mass communications systems have played a central role in the New Right's manufacture and mobilization of public opinion.

To analyze the full complexity of the New Right phenornenon, this study draws on

Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony, key concepts of which are briefly introduced in this chapter (Boggs, 1976; Boggs, 1986; Boggs,1993; Gramsci, 1990; Gramsci 199 1;

Laclau and Mouffe, 1989; Miliband, 1976; Miliband, 1978). Culture occupies a fundamental place in hegemony analysis and is therefore a rational starting point for an exposition of the theory's main tenets.

In Gramsci's neo-Hegelian conception of social reality, the activities of individuals are necessarily invested with moral and intellectual meaning. Moving beyond the excessive structural deterrninism of political economy, Gramsci's conception places the existential and expressive dimension of individual lived expenence at the centre of his studies. At the same tirne, however, Gramsci does not lapse into voluntarkt conceptions of an abstract individuality or a one-sided idealism. For Gramsci, culture is the terrain of

Iarger social struggles, whether individual agents might perceive their moral and intellectual cornmitments as such or not. At the same time, however, it is also the medium through, and against, which individuals define themselves and give meaning to their lives. Gramsci, the young joumalist, put it well in 'Socialism and Culture,' a commentary published in the newspaper II Gndo in 1916:

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world.. . Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one's inner self, a coming to terms with one's own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one's own historical value, one's own function in life' one's own rights and obligations .... The fact is that only by degrees, one stage at a time, has humanity acquired consciousness of its own value and won for itself the right to throw off the patterns of organization imposed upon it by minorities at a previous penod in history. And this consciousness was formed not under the brutal goad of physiological necessity, but as a result of intelligent reflection, at first by just a few people and later by a whoIe class, on why certain conditions exist and how best to convert the facts of vassalage into the sipals of rebellion and social reconstruction. .. .To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to distinguish oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos, to exist as an element of order - but of one's own order and one's own discipline in striving for an ideal (1990: 10-13).

Established and challenging goups al1 seek cultural dominance or hegemony, as they struggle to win hearts and minds on culture's contested terrain. Efforts to influence the structure of moral and intellectual authority in society and in the Iives of agents are waged through diverse struggles, ranging from battles over church doctrine to school

CU~CU~U~to cultural criticism to family values as well as workplace and political socialization. But in al1 these diverse currents Gramsci viewed cultural power as key to future political prospects, creating mental preparedness. In his view cultural revolution precedes poIitical revolution. In this passage from the same tract Gramsci gives the example of the French Revolution, which he argues emerged out of the Enlightenment:

every revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of criticisrn, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses of men who are at first resistant, and then think only of solving their own immediate economic and political problems for themselves, who have no ties of solidarity with others in the same condition.. . The Enlightenment .. . gave al1 Europe a bourgeois spiritua1 International in the form of a unified consciousness, one which was sensitive to al1 the woes and misfortunes of the common people and which was the best possible preparation for the bloody revolt that followed in France .... The bayonets of Napoleon's mies found their road already smoothed by an invisible army of books and pamphlets that had swarrned out of Paris from the first half of the eighteenth century and had prepared both men and institutions for the necessary renewal (1990: 14).

In the diverse and constantly shifting zeitgeist of the time, Gramsci emphasizes that social struggles for cultural power between dominant and subordinate world views can take a wide range of forms. They can be subtle, highly developed or incoherent. They can be fused in a polarized clash of distinct camps with clearly oppositional identities or they can be rïddled with fragmentation, ambiguity and contradiction. But, for Gramsci, this cultural struggle for authority is the force motrice of history - at once both the struggle of individuals to actualize themselves and the struggle of conflicted social groups to assert their own shared interests. For Gramsci, an individual's shifting location in the structure of moral and intellectual authonty is a central element in the reproduction, resistance and transformation of social relations. By the same measure, individuals' moral and intellectual attachments are themselves dialectically conditioned by the ebbs and flows of the larger cultural movements of his or her time. By pIacing culture at the centre of hIs social ontology, Gramsci's theoretical framework transcended the reductionist economism of his day. 'The Revolution Against Capital,' published shortly after most of

Turin's established leaders had been arrested and Gramsci was appointed editor of 11

Grido in 1917, is an early theoretid statement of the young sociaIist7sbreak with

Marxist orthodoxy. He contrasts a 'living mamism' "which represents the continuation of

Gerrnan and Italian idealism" to that of Marx who, "contaminated by positivist and naturalist encrustations," set out a predetennined course requiring Russia to pass through advanced capitalist industrïalization before a revolution could evolve:

This thought sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts (civilization) a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic facts, judging them, and adapting them to their will until this becomes the driving force of the economy and rnoulds objective reality, which lives and moves and comes to resembie a current of volcanic lava that can be channelled wherever and in whatever way men's wilI determines (Gramsci, 1990:34-35).

Gramsci's break with traditional marxism also provided a rich conceptual legacy for contemporary social theorists. In fact, Gramsci's conception of the moral and intellectual order's critical role in the reproduction of social relations significantly anticipates contemporary sociologist Anthony Giddens' anti-functionalist conception of the duality of structure (Giddens, 1979). According to Giddens, "By the duality of structure 1 mean that the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that constitute those systems.. . Structure thus is not to be conceptuatised as a barrier to action, but as essentially involved in its praduction" (69-

70). To borrow Giddens' phraseology, Gramsci's scheme accounts for the intentional

conduct of social agents who are both knowledgeable and reflexive. For Gramsci, the

everyday common sense of these actors is therefore both the medium and outcome of

their social practices. Through an ensemble of concepts, Gramsci posits his own

conception of the duality of structure, proposing that personally meaningful practices are

predicated on unacknowledged conditions of action and also contnbute to unintended

consequences. This ensemble of concepts inchdes: articulation, common-sense, organic

intellectual, social bloc, hegemonic agencies and crises of authority. Each of these must

be explained in order to further elaborate hegemony theory.

In the Gramscian conception, the cultural practice of articulation Es the principle

means of organizing and animating the moral and intellectual spirit of an individual or a

larger society. It is how politicians forge emotional or rational connectiorns between

ci tizens and energize social or poli tical movements. Con temporary cultural theorkt

Lawrence Grossberg (1992) has defined the term as "the practice of linking together

elements which have no necessary relation to each other." Grossberg uses the foIlowing

example to illustrate: "while there is no obvious reason why a particular hair colour is

tied to a particular level of intelIigence, the notion of the 'durnb blonde' was a

particularly powerful articulation for many decades" (397)-

Another, more institutionatized example of the centrality of articulation struggles

in the social construction of reality is presented by conternporary media theonst Charlotte

Ryan (1991). According to Ryan, the 'news' is far from a disinterested, objective account of the facts. Instead, she emphasizes that news reports are the outcome of articulation struggles which she desctibes, in the mass media context, as "framing contests."

''Reporters and editorsf are bombarded by prepared, pre-packaged events aggressively marketed by sponsors who, be they establishment institutions or social movements, hope these events will carry their frames in media coverage. It is in competition among existing interpretations that frames ernerge and develop" (75). The powerful role of articulation strategies in shaping moral and intellectual authority relations is the reason that Gramsci's writings on the national question, regionalism, the Catholic Church, trade union culture and the arts are voluminous despite the fact that his principle interest was mmist. Far from his Stalinist conternporaries, Gramsci's thinking and poIitical activity was firmly grounded in the Italian way of life in al1 its chaotic complexity. Popular preoccupations, which others treated as trivial or inconsequential, were for Gramsci central in the stmggle for the hearts and rninds or common sense of the population. Indeed, perhaps the best example of Gramsci's emphasis on articulation strategy is to be found in his actual practice as a media-activist, and in particular in his capacity as editor of L'Ordiize Nrtovo, a Turin daily which he CO-founded. In the 1920 editorial 'On the L'Ordine Nrtovo programme,' Gramsci States that the paper's raison d'etre was to establish and develop factory councils that would eventually take over the factories of Turin. L'Ordine Nztovo itself, in other words, was fundamentally a vehicle for articulating the interests of the

Turin working class to a specific revolutionary strategy, to seize and take-over the city's productive apparatus.

For ourselves and Our followers, L' Ordine NL~OVObecame the 'journal of the Factory Councils.' The workers loved L'Ordine Nrtovo .. . and why did they love it? Because in its articles they rediscovered a part, the best part, of themselves. Because they felt its articles were pervaded by that same spirit of inner searching that they expenenced: 'How can we become free? How can we become ourselves?' Because its articles were not cold, intellectual structures, but sprang from our discussions with the best workers; they elaborated the actual sentiments, goals and passions of the Turin working class, that we ourselves had provoked and tested. Because its articles were virtually a 'taking note' of actual events, seen as moments of a process of inner Iiberation and self-expression on the part of the working class. This is why the workers loved L' Orclirze Nrrovo and how its idea came to be 'forrned' (1990:293).

Common sense, according to Gramsci, is a highly contingent and dependent

feature of a society @en the powerful roIe of articulation in shaping its worldviews.

Rather than reflecting what he referred to as 'good sense,' the conventional wisdom of the

day Iargely reflects the balance of forces engaged in assorted articulation strategies to

present their interests as knowledge. As Gramsci put it, "common sense is an ambiguous,

contradictory, and multifom concept, and .-. to refer to common sense as a confirmation

of tmth is nonsense7'(in Boggs, l984:209).

Gramsci's multi-polar politicai conception views the state as culturally forti fied

by agencies of socialization such as schools, families, church and factories, al1 of which

played their role in the transmission and reproduction of the established moral and

intellectual order but were each also sites of dissent, of conflict and of other possibilities

under the influence of organized elements. According to Gramsci's fluid and dynamic conception, willful political acti vity is central because cultural power can not merely be

sustained by the passive operations of powerful institutions. The established way of life also has to sustain its moral and intellectual authority against the insurgent efforts and authonty claims of challenging groups. In his time the established hegemonic agencies - particularly the church - generally served to legitimate elite power despite the agitations, pnncipally of trade-unionists and communists, to provoke a widespread crisis of

authonty. In the crisis of authority, ruling groups would lose their legitimate rîght to

govern, provoking in tum a crisis of legitimacy for the state. For Gramsci, this longrange

cultural revolution to establish a new moral and intellectual order throughout civil society

needed to precede the conquest of state-power, If, on the other hand, this emergent moral

and interlectual order was not wefl enough established to support revolutionary aims, it

would be vulnerable to rearguard actions from deposed elites or to foms of degeneration.

In this conflicted context, intellectuals play a key role in persuading people to join

or reject the dissidents, to conform to the established way of life or question i t. Gramsci

contrasts "traditional intellectuals," who merely accumulated and dispensed knowledge in

the scholastic sense, with "organic inteHectuals," who reflected and self-consciously Ied

their own social groups in cultural-ideological struggle. The first are engaged in the

reproduction and refinement of the official canon of the day, but the second are actively engaged in the practice of articulating and rearticulating elements of their social group's thematic universe to the conservative camp or to the emergent hegemony of rival cliques or the counter-hegemony of social blocs opposed fundamentally to the social hierarchy

(Friere,1973:218). Like missionaries, organic intelIectuals of both camps are recruiting the masses to established or oppositional worldviews.

While reductionist mmist conceptions might treat the ruIing and working classes as inert social forces, mechanistical ly loc ked in struggle by virtue of their class-belonging alone, hegemony theory reconceives the terrain of struggle radically. In the Gramscian view, social life is populated by rival social blocs defined more by their worldviews and active political orientations than by their class-belonging alone. According to the

Gramscian schema, one dominant social bloc shares a hegemonic moral and intellectual

worldview with its political base in a class core of citizens who most benefit from

unequal social relations. Other subordinate social blocs emerge from, but are ako not

reducible to class cores, in this case mostly citizens who least benefit from social

inequality- But while a Northern peasant or a member of the working class may be

objectively part of a subordinated population, this does not prevent their cooptation and

absorption by the dominant social bloc if its hegemonic agencies and intellectuals can

successfully articulate conservative themes which resonate with that individual7sgender,

family, religious, national or even class identity. In contrast to traditional marxists' one-

dimensional concept of "false consciousness," or the Frankfurt Schoo17sfunctionalist

dismissal of "mass culture," Gramsci highlights culture as a complex, dynamic field of

stniggle with its own historically and institutionally-specific structures and mechanisms.

According to Gramsci, it is on this terrain of struggle that people make and remake their

own identities, cultures and histories.

In the analysis of social and political movements, Gramsci's main contribution is

to emphasize the centrality and complexity of cultural power. Hence citizens gain a 'sense

of belonging' to identifiable social blocs by internalizing moral and intellectual principles

which resonate with their experience and identity. Intellectuals and hegernonic agencies play a key role in the articulation and rearticulation of elements of popular culture to these rival moral and intellectual principles and to the further elaboration of the social blocs which express and advance conservative or alternative viewpoints. This struggle for cultural power, in the Gramscian paradigm, lays the goundwork for social Iife generally and for politicai struggles in particular. CHAPTER 2)

PRISCEDENTS AND PARALLELS:

The Historical and Global Context of Communications Struggles

The structural transformations of Canadian political culture during the post-sixties penod - including social struggles to secure and control access to information, communications, and cultural power -- must be related to global market-restructuring and geo-politics. As Bmck and Raboy (1989) point out "communications and cultural industries are major links in the restructuring of world capital and power alignments now taking place" (8). In particular, hegemony analysis highlights the response of transnational corporate elites to the corporate legitimacy crisis provoked by the popular movement mobilizations of the late sixties and the early seventies. While this study will focus on the North Arnerican context in the post-sixties period, a brief overview of the global and historical communications context is therefore necessary to 'situate' the anal ysis.

In the Middle Ages, the church was the principal agency of mass communications

(Curran,1988:205-210). In fact, as Miliband has argued (1978), "the churches were the first mass media in history" (47). The church dominated the institutions of mental production, such as monasteries. There texts supportive of papal ideology were copied at the expense of texts that explicitly challenged the church's mord and intellectual leadership- In addition to dominating book production up to the 13th century, formal education was Iargely controlled by, and confined to, the clergy. "The papal curia had the largest collection of records and archives and the most sophisticated team of scholars and

polemicists in the Western hemisphere during the early and central middIe ages." They

disseminated papal propaganda across Westem Europe through the church network. In

addition, travelling friars, "who often combined their evangelical role with reporting 'the

news' to curious listeners, became an effective propaganda amof the papacy." The

development of ecclesiastical sorcery and ritual, including rites of passage, were

important means for imposing papal hegemony over the ovenvhelrningly iIliterate

population. Religious architecture alsa reflected careful attention to ideological messages.

"As Pope Gregory 1 commented, the i Iliterate 'could at least read by looking at the walls

what they cannot read about in books-"' Artists of the middle age were Iargely dependent

on church patronage, and were constrained by the ideological dernands and censorship of

the institution (Zohlberg, 1991: 175- 178).

As Curran notes, the cultural power of the papacy was carefully reinforced by conscious ideological work. RituaIs such as royal coronations were specifically designed to assert the preeminence of the papacy. With monarchs encircled by a population deeply under the sway of the church's God-given moral-authority, the Vatican was able to circumscribe and, through excommunication, even overcome the authority of monarchs,

The communications practices of the church reflected and reinforced class, gender, nation, and authority relations. Witches were burned at the stake, and holy wars sanctioned imperialist aggression. Those who used state-power and wealth to glotify and serve the church were provided with moral sanction and legitimation, while reluctant ruIers were tythed and the unco-operative were driven from power. Through its domination of the apparatus of knowledge production and mass

communications the church was able "to sain increased authority and power at the expense of adversaries with apparent1y infinitel y greater resources at t heir disposal." The role of the medieval church in complex political alliances aIso had global implications.

European missionaries, for example, assumed a leading and strategic role in pacifying indigenous populations as peripheral societies were penetrated by the trading and settlement companies of crown-sponsored mercantilism. The church's unique capacity for the communications domination of subject populations on behalf of imperial power played an important role in facilitating the advent of settler capitalism and the implantation of Christianized colonial cultures in the penphery. It was only in the latter middle ages, when the papacy's domination over knowledge and mass communication was effectively challenged, that the papacy's ideological ascendancy was broken and the

Dark Ages gave birth to the cultural upsurge of popular creative production known as the

Enlightenment.

As Curran (1982) details, the rise of paper as a cheaper, simpler and faster alternative to parchment in book production, the expansion of an an international book trade due to decreasing costs of production and swelling consumer demand due to the rise of mass li teracy were important technical conditions for the rise of enlightenment culture.

He also notes the introduction of printing with moveable metal type and the pnnting press were al1 deeply implicated in the transition from medievalism to modernity. Curran explains that press barons did not assume significant influence, however, until the nineteenth century when gowing circulations brought them an increased rneasure of political autonomy. He notes that "few papers sold more than 1000 copies before 1800, and many papers were heavily dependent upon politicaI patronage in the form of subsidies, sinecures, politically-tied advertising and information handouts" (210). Mass circulation, and the advertising revenues it brought with itr changed al1 that. As the social standing of press proprietors increased with their increasing influence, they were courted by political parties. Many entered partiament. Others were showered with titles and honours. The very structure of modem parliamentary politics was shaped by the press magnates, as their ability to assemble and orient a mass following took shape in the fonn of the early partisan press. As Curran puts it,

Ironically the development of the press in Victorian Britain played an important part in the creation of the modern party system. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the press forsed close ties with the parliarnentary parties and tended to be highly partisan in its political coverage. The expansion of this press helped to convert what had been, in effect, aristocratic factions in Parliament into politicai movements with a mass following (214).

The popular press was in the vanguard of the democratic revolution in pre-modem

Britain, as independent commercial publishers articulated a critical view of the aristocracy in favour of their own interests as merchants, tradesmen, printers, or booksellers. Journalists, mostly drawn frorn the petite-bourgeoisie, reinforced this opposition to the aiicien regirîze. In addition to their own non-aristocratie origins, publishers and journalists had the additional incentive of a broadening middle class audience to win over as readers. As Curran documents, the aristocracy marshalled considerable bamers to the popular press:

regulation of the news was one means by which aristocratic political ascendancy was maintained. Newspapers were subject to strict legal controls - the law of seditious libel, which was used at the discretion of the authorities against people suspected of cornmitting a seditious libel, and a legal ban on the reporting of parliament. In addition, taxes on newspapers, advertisements and paper were introduced in 17 12 mainly in order to increase the pnce of newspapers and thereby restnct their circulation (221).

As Curran explains, the swelling adveitising revenues dunng this penod helped commercial publishers persist against the old order's resistance, and to extend their constituency beyond the primary centres, to the regions. Curran notes, for example, that between 1714 and 1782, the number of local newspapers increased from 22 to about 50 titles. This, he argues, led to the flourishing of a broad-based "middle class political culture, centred on the clubs, political societies and coffee houses of provincial England."

Inevitably, however, this development was followed by efforts in the second haIf of the nineteenth century to finance a militant working class press as well(222). Once again the authorities attempted to suppress this new journalism. Curran details the introduction of

"the so-called secunty system (requiring publishers to place financial bonds with the authorities) in an attempt to exclude 'pauper' ownership of the press, and press taxes designed to pnce papers beyond the pockets of working class consumers" (225). As a result of determined efforts, including evading both the security system and taxation, and extensive organization by working class clubs to purchase newspapers, through their taverns or political and industrial organizations, "leading radical newspapers gained circulations far larger than those of their respective rivals throughout most of the period

1815-1855 ... Britain's first General Strike (1842) and the political mobilization of the working class, on a mass scale, in the Chartist Movement were symptoms of an increasingly unstable society in which the radical press had become a powerfully disrupti ve force" (225-226). During the twentieth century, of course, market forces drove an increasing bi-

partisan approach, as commercial proprietors sought an ever-broader readership and

advertising base. According to Curran, the decline of the partisan press under competitive

pressures frorn both the established pnnt, and now television, advertising markets led to a

progressive detachment of the mass media from the party system, and to an anti-partisan

posture among the dailies toward the late twentieth century. As Curran assess the

contemporary context in Bntain,

The commercialization of the press, the rise of TV as a bi-partisan political medium of communication, and the anti-partisan bias that characterizes some media political coverage, have al1 contributed to the marked decline of party Ioyalties and the increase in electoral volatility dunng the last two decades. In eroding the popular support for the political parties, the media are eroding the basis of Britain's stabIe political system during the penod of mass democracy (2 16).

The rise of capitalism, of course, brought with it the need to expand consumer markets, and the first experirnents in mass market advertising. Coupled with increasing lay literacy, the newspaper emerged as a powerful new element of the consumer culture that was reshaping national economies. Despite the fact that they were dependent on the advertisers of the emerging bourgeoisie for their revenues, inciependent newspaper proprietors were able to exploit a democratic communications opening as part of the rise of mercantilism and lay-literacy. The force of merchant capitaI disturbed other spheres of the social order. Through secular mass communications, in particular, a new ideological climate was elaborated. In fact, radical and labour papers flourished in response to mass

Iiteracy and the dislocations caused by the t-ke of the merchants and the trends toward secularization, urbanization, industrialization and the rise of the modem capitalist state which followed. WhiIe the church's conservative power diminished, the news became a central mediation in the social transformations of the modem period. A "newspaper war on Britain" (Kesterton, l967:vii), for exarnple, preceded the American revolution signaling the anti-colonial potential of the media. A long lineage of protest movements, including the suffragettes and the feminist movement, the abolitionists and civil rights movement, radical socialists and the labour movement, al1 established their own alternative media to attack the hegemony of the capitalist order. In the political tumult of the sixties, the New Left student press began to refer to itself explicitIy as an agent for social change. Like entrepreneurid capitaIism, however, independently owned newspapers and popular movement publications were systematically eiiminated or marginalized during the middle to late twentieth century by the competitive advantages exercised by capitalist media in monopolistic markets (Herman and Chomsky, 1988~3-4).

The bourgeois public sphere was gradually narrowed by the rise of the media monopoly and the public relations industry. Through modern communication strategies, commercial and politico-administrative interests became increasingly effective in the scientific pacification and manipulation of the population. Public discourse was increasingly shaped by products on a mass market with the media playing a key role in social reproduction in the new monopoly capitalist order. The new mass media played a key role in establishing the hegemonic moral and intellectual organizinz principles of the new order based on capitalist accumulation, the legitimation of the modem capitalist state, and of new forms of racial and sexual oppression such as occupational sex and race segreegation-While it had displaced the moral and intellectual basis of the church's authority, the corporate mass media soon became an important mechanism in securing the legitimacy of the corporate state. "The pnesthood told their congegations that the power structure was divinely sanctioned; their successors inform their audiences that the power structure is democraticall y sanctioned through the bal lot box" (Curran, l988:227).

According to Alex Carey "the twentieth century has been characterïzed by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy" (Chomsky, l994:89). Li ke the church and i ts hegemonic apparatus which secured papal authonty in medieval Europe, modem mass communications have played a key role in the retrenchment of corporate power, rnanipulating public opinion, marginalizing the population from decision-making and effectively minimizing democratic participation. The coordinating role of the capitalist state has implicated it deeply in this effort to constrain democracy. As Chomsky (1994) suggests, "control of its domestic population is the major task of any state that is dominated by particuIar sectors of the domestic society and therefore functions primarïly in their interest" (1).

Ewen (1982) has shown that advertising-based mass communication played a central role in socializing restless American workers into the emerging consumer culture of the 1920's. In this penod business management turned its interest from scientific management of the workplace to the control of consumer behaviour as well. Advertising became the propaganda of consumption as workers were conscripted into a process of

"ideological consumerization" (207). From the commanding heights of social control, the business elite too were transformed by the power of marketing and mass communication. As Ewen argues, the captains of industry became captains of consciousness. With the aid

of a rapidly expanding corps of marketing personnel, with their own rapidly widening

stocks of knowledge, struggIes for ideological hegemony entered a new stage of sophistication and complexity. It was the age of the scientific management of public opinion,

When the Great Depression of the 1930's once again challenged corporate power, a communications conter-offensive was launched by U.S. elites emboldened by the power of rnass marketing. It included media and cinema, promoting free enterprize as the

"American way." In addition to scientific methods of strike-breaking and human relations campaigns designed to discredit 'outside agitators,' the US- Chamber of Commerce distrïbuted over a million copies of its pamphlet "Communist infiltration in the US." at the close of the war. In 1947, the Advertising Council announced a $100 million campaign to 'sell' the American economic system to the public (Chomsky,1994:89). In

1961, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce launched its own campaign, "Operation

Freedom" to "rouse Canadians from apathy and indifference and inaction against the growing threats of socialism and communism" (Morton,1977:27).

The global dominance of U.S. hegemony, both through its cultural capitalism and its counterinsurgency interventions, rnake US. struggles particularly important. The effects of domestic communications struggles in the U.S., particularly since W,have global implications. This was most clearly demonstrated by the 'Vietnam Syndrome,' which reflected the incapacity of elites to effectively justify military interventions to the domestic population against an informed, aroused and organized popular opposition. This study focuses on the North Amencan corporate communications response to the most recent wave of anti-corporate sentiment in the late sixties and early seventies.

Given the dependent development of Canadian economic, political, cultural and social

Iife, it is instructive to note the extent to which this period was charactenzed by thought- control measures in the U.S.. As Chomsky (1994) notes,

A congressional inquiry was informed that by 1978, American business was spending $1 billion a year on grassroots propaganda. These efforts were supplemented by what Carey calls 'tree-tops propaganda,' targeting educated sectors and seeking to eliminate any articulate threat to business domination. Methods ranged from endowed Professorships of Free Enterprize in universities to huge propaganda campaigns against the usual run of targets: taxes, regulation of business, welfare (for the poor), pointy- headed 'bureaucrats' interfering with the creative entrepreneur, union corruption and violence, evil apologists for Our enemies and so on (93).

Canadian political culture is increasingly shaped by a continental free market and subject to the ideological predominance of US. and continental capital. Contemporary corporate propaganda carnpaigns are driven by "the industnal-financial-commercial sector, concentrated and interhked, highly class conscious, and increasingly transnational in the scope of its planning, management and operations"

(Chomsky,1994:93). In this new world capitalist communications order, Curran (1988) suggests that "the new priesthood of the modem media has supplanted the old as the principal ideologicaI agents building consent for the social system" (228). Indeed, Smythe

(1982) has argued further that "what has been distinctive about the capitalist mass media is their specinli&fztnctim of legitimiziny and directing the development of the social

system, " a role which -- due to their relative youth, is not yet generally appreciated" (3). Modem mass communications research emerged through massive U.S. military expenditures during WWII, enabling the discipline to take "decisive steps fonvard

(Simpson, l993:3 18). Communications research explicitly served wartime propaganda efforts but also helped lay the technical and practical groundwork for the achievement of

American post-war, geo-political strate@ objectives. As Chomsky (1994) notes, U.S. state and corporate elites were involved from 1939-1945 in extensive post-war planning efforts, pnncipally through the Council on Foreign Relations (83). The Marshall Plan "set the stage for large amounts of private direct investment in Europe and ushered in the emergence of the transnational corporation" (139). In fact, "American foreign direct investment (in plants and facilities) rose from $7 billion in 1946 to $78 billion in 1970"

(Mahoney in Angus,1988:40). Amencan post-war global planning also incIuded strategies to incorporate at a minimum the Western hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British empire to be dismantled dong with other regional systems and incorporated under US.control. Meanwhile the U.S. extended its own regional systerns in Latin America and the Pacific (ChomskyJ994: 184). To achieve post-war global hegemony, the USneeded both military power and advanced social control strategies.

The militarization of mass communications research in the interests of the ernerging US.-centred transnational corporate order was reflected in the rise of

'psychological warfare' in wartirne. According to William Donovan, the war-time director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency),

"'psychological warfare' was a full fourth amof the U.S. military, equal in status to the army, navy and air force." CrystaItizing as a distinct discipline between about 1950 and

1955, mass communications research was profoundly shaped by tens of millions of dollars funneled through front-groups by the CIA. In fact, by 1952,96 percent of al1 social science research funding in the U.S. was provided by the USmilitary

(Simpson,l993:3 15-334).

From its very inception as a distinct academic discipline, the research agenda of

American mass communications was inextricably tied to the development of U.S. governrnent psychological warfare and counter-insursency progams such as the Phoenix program in Vietnam- As early as 1965, the US.Information Agency installed a publishing centre in Vietnam, a TV system of 4 stations reaching 65 percent of the country, and a radio network covering 95 percent of the country. A news agency with correspondents across the country was organized and Hearst Metronome News was contracted to meet the Network's programrning needs (Mattelart, 1979:300).

More recently, the case of Nicaragua illustrates the forms of communications agression used by U.S. military strategists to destabiIize the national wiIl of foreign populations. La Prensn, an anti-Sandinista newspaper in Managua, for example, received funds from the U.S. National Endowment for Dernocracy. In addition to money received through the Agency for International DeveIopment, the CIA began financing La Prensa in

1980. Radio penetntion of Nicaraguan territory was another important part of the CIA's political war against Nicaragua. In addition to the Voice of America which reaches into the entire country with a high quality signal from Costa Rica, the CM funded contra stations including Radio Liberacion, Radio 15th of September, Voice of the UN0 and

Radio Miskut (FrederickJ98923-30). Advanced communication strategies have corne to play an integral role in the new doctrine of "low-intensity warfare" which "seeks to isolate, divide, and neutralize attentive publics who support revolutionary change." Perhaps the clearest example, however, of the institutionalized capacity of US. cornunications power to dominate target populations is the drarnatic growth of "psyops" (psychological operations) as an organized wing of the US. arrny. Three active and nine reserve battalions of psyops troops have been trained for this fom of warfare which is "directed at the destruction of hope itself." They are stationed at a permanent facility at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Each psyops group is organized and equipped to carry out a psychological war to help in the theatre of operations. Troops can be loaded quickly into aircraft and deployed rapidly to any part of the world. The resources of a strate@ battalion include a 50,000 watt AM transmitter, a mobile satellite earth station, and sophisticated monitoring equipment to receive al1 frequencies used by the other side. There is a mobile printing press capable of producing 800,000 colour flyers a day, professionai quality magazines, pamphlets, posters, even books. Attached to this is a state-of-the-art graphics and photo Iab. A tearn of writers can quickly develop written materials with any message. The specific message itself is designed by the intelligence section through public opinion surveys to uncover vulnerable messages with the maximum impact. The goups have enough translators and linguists to handle any language or dialect- Other equipment that can be flown in includes mobile film trucks, jeeps, pubIic address systems, remote sensing systems, and high speed data burst equipment (Frederick, l989:20-21).

In 1975, Canada was placed in 5th rank, ahead of Afghanistan, Guatemala, Iraq and Kuwait as a U.S. propaganda target (Mattelart,1979:303). The role of "development sabotage communication" against the Canadian public has yet, however, to be senously addressed. While the media are used as vehicles for this strategy throughout the world, with media operations ranking third behind economic destabilization and pararnilitary operations in the CM (Frederick, 1989: 19-30), the form and extent of covert operations against Canadian public opinion is beyond the scope of this work.

What is more clearly evident is the role of cross-border religious broadcasting in the growth of the Canadian Christian Right. As Sarah Diamond (1990: 162) has shown, missionary evangelism has provided an important vehicle for U.S- counter-insurgency efforts. "It is doubtful ... that countennsurgency efforts could be effective without the use of religion. Because the conduct of 'psychologïcal operations' relies on the successful interpretation and manipulation of a target population's deeply held beliefs and cultural practices, the functional use of religion simply must be addressed".

In the Phillipines fundamentalist religious cults have played an important role in the government's efforts to "create conditions which make it impossible for insurgents to organize-" Through the organization of anti-communist vigilante groups and the sponsorship of anti-communist conferences, groups like the World Anti-Communist

League, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and the Unification Church have helped to take the U.S.-backed, low-intensity conflict to the grassroots where anti-comrnunist propaganda carnpaigns have polarized local communities. Other groups such as the

"Mormons, the Moral Majority, the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Opus Dei of the

Catholic Church, have al1 been involved in major prcpaganda offensives airned at counterïng the growth of liberation theology" (Booker, 1992: 121-128).

The recnii tment of Christian fundamentalist groups into communications aggression originates in the U.S.'s response to the growth of liberation theology in Latin

America. In 1970, a special foreign poIicy commission, having lost confidence in the Catholic Church as an ally, called on the government to promote "an extensive campais with the National Secunty Counci 1 with the aim of propagating Protestant Churches and conservative sects in Latin America." One of the organizations leading the anti- comrnunist ideological offensive in the Phillipines is the political arm of the Unification

Church, CAUSA International. CAUSA has recei ved extensive US. govemrnent support in its efforts, including CL4 funding- "Since 1980, CAUSA has been active in Latin

Amenca, conduciing its ideological work primarily in South America; particularly

Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, and Bolivia where it has purchased newspapers, atong with radio and TV stations, and in Central America among the Contras when they were an active force" (Brooker, 1992: 127- 129).

Pat Robertson's organization, which vowed to convert 20 million in the former

Soviet Union by the end of 199 1, broadcasts regularly on Russian state television "due to strong relations developed with high-ranking individuals" (Gould,1992:6 1). New Right godfather Paul Weyrich, a CO-founderof the Heritage Foundation which has advised conservative Ieaders in the former cornrnunist bloc on how to convert their economies to capitalism, has also been directly involved with the rise of Boris Yeltsin. Weyrich, who is close to Robertson, is also a founder of the Free Congress Foundation. This group has

"sponsored numerous training sessions for Bons Yeltsin's organization," with the Free

Congress Foundation claiming it "trained the Yeltsin group in its efforts to win control of the Russian Republic" as well as advising them on how to best manage the media during the coup cnsis. As in the case of the Phillipines and Latin America, religious programming and organization appears to be playing an important role in integrating post-Soviet Russia into the U.S.'s new sphere of influence. In fact, executive director of National Religious Broadcasters, Ben Armstrong "conducted research that he later used

for a Ph.D. dissertation on the Soviet Union's attitude toward retigion." While director of

Trans World Radio (TWR) from 1958-1967 Armstrong "traveled through various target

areas of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union" in 1958, 1960 and 1963 to determine radio

listening habits. Diarnond notes Armstrong's "proficiency in the methodology used by

psycholo,oical warfare strategïsts" and suggests that he probably provided "expert

guidance to fellow broadcasters in the design and execution of anti-communist

propaganda" in his role at the NRB since 1967 @iamond,1990:41).

Like missionaries in an earlier penod who pacified subject populations through evangelization, and opened up communal societies to penetration and eventual destruction by mercantile capitalism, modem media-ministries are also playing an

important role in social control strategies during the present restnicturing of world

markets and power alignments. Religious programming gays a significant role both in the recolonization of peripheral societies and in the 'pacification' of interna1 colonies and domestic populations of the world-dominant societies (Diamond, 1990).

The most pernicious aspect of contemporary foms of communications domination, however, is the high level of elite coordination in communication. Upper- level interlocks between the Ieadership of Christian and commercial media capital, corporate think tanks, consewative parties, the rest of the corporate elite, the capitalist state and the culture industries Ied former editor of the Wnslzi~zgtonPost Ben Bagdikian

(1993) to wam of the rise of the "media-industrial cornplex" (1 1 ;Gitlin,1980:373). Herbert Schiller (1969; 1973; 1983; 1989) has noted that an extensive "disinformation

industry" has developed since the end of World War II.

The career of New Right global figurehead Ronald Reasan is iIïustrative. It was

General Electric, which went on to purchase NBC in 1986, that iaunched his career as a

national political spokesman in the fifties "to augment the corporation's support of right-

wing political movements" (Bagdikian,1992:209). Similarly, the career of Frank Stanton

exemplifies elite efforts in the US. to secure the "cornmanding heights of social control"

(Schiller,l989:6) by circulating cultural managers 'backstage' throughout the corporate-

military-state-academy system. During World War II, S tanton received a consulting

contract from the Office of War Information for communications research in the

department's psychological warfare program (Simpson,1993:320). At the time he was

also working as CBS president. Stanton was also a close friend of president Lpdon

Johnson (his wife's radio station was a CBS affiliate). Stanton regularly replied to the

president's persond complaints about the Network's coverage of the Vietnam war

(Gitlin,1980:275). He was called upon to head the Stanton Commission to review and

make recommendations for the re-organization of the USIA (Mattelart,1979:300), and

was chaiman of the Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporation, a top military research

think-tank (Gitlin,1980:276) which funneled millions of dollars from the CM to communications research projects (Simpson, 1993:334).

A similar example of inter-elite CO-operationis the role of the heads of the Hearst media-empire of newspapers, magazines, movies and newsreels and Tinle, Inc in transforming Billy Graham into an international figure. After William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce interviewed the obscure anti-communist preacher, and decided he was

worthy of their support in late 1949, Hearst sent a telegram to al1 Hearst editors: "Puff

Graham." W.R- Hearst Jr. sensationalized Graham's "either comrnunism rnust die or

Christianity must die" message as part of his personal commitment to advancing the anti- communist hysteria later created by his persona1 friend Senator Joseph McCarthy

(Bagdikian,l992:43-44). Luce and Hearst also helped lay the long-tem groundwork for a conservative youth evangelization offensive by Graham's organization Youth for Christ.

This combination of evanplical organization-building and mass media sensationalism helped to provide a critical impetus for the rise of religious broadcasting networks, and the next generation of media-activism and organizing by the New Christian Right

(Diarnond, 1990: 10-12).

The close contemporary relationship between the corporate elite and monopoly media resembles the structural linkage between church and state in earlier imperialist strategies. Just as the church helped establish settler capitalism and impose a dominant class-led Euro-Canadian 'national popular' culture, modem mass communications have diffused an American global culture, including anti-communist ChrÏstianity and neo- liberal economic precepts. Through a two-tier commercial and missionary media system, and a network of think tanks, intelligence agencies, public relations firms and cultural industries, ruling groups have been able to rollback the post-sixties gains of the popular movements and extend the conservative hegemonic frontier both at home and abroad.

The U.S. military's psyops communication strategies, the rise of corporate think- tanks, Christian broadcasting and increasing corporate media concentration have al1 provided important external resources to the New Right in Canada as it advanced the strategic interests of the continental corporate elite. Just as the Heritage Foundation promoted a shift from the US. policy of 'containing' communism to an aggressive position of global 'rollback' under Reagan, forces of the New Right on a global scale have also turned aggressively from containing working class and popular movement demands to rolling back wages, working conditions, the welfare state, and constraints on free enterprize, Like the changing form and intensity of anti-communist communications struggle under Reagan, this petiod has also seen drarnatic domestic propaganda campaigns on an international scale. National equivalents of the Heritage Foundation like the Adam Smith Institute and the Fraser Institute, for example, have worked with conservative parties and comprador elites to rollback social democntic gains in Britain and Canada. Just as Amencan conservatives have moved from an assault on communism to discrediting liberalism, the New Right in these advanced capitalist nations with stronger labour and popular movements has shifted its focus to sustained attacks on the limited gains of social democracy.

Within this socio-economic and ideological context, and before considering in detail the specific tactics and techniques of continental capital to launch this ideological and politica1 offensive against the domestic popuIations of the US. and Canada, a further elaboration of the theoretical foundation of hegemony analysis to be applied to the rïse of the New Right is necessary CHAPTER 3)

THE TKEORY AND STRATEGY OF HEGEMONY:

Gramsci Applied

Over the last two decades, the rise of the New Right has had significant and globaI effects, Whether under Thatcher's Conservatives in Britain, Reagan's Republicans in the

US., or Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in Canada, the structural and cultural transformations of the Western way of life have been both profound and lasting. Apart from the obvious changes in the relationship between, and the nature of, the market and state through privatization, deregulation and free trade, the New Right has also fundarnentally transformed the public sphere itself.

Successor administrations of opposed political stnpes have been compelled by the

New Right's legacy to follow on the development path set out by their revolutionary predecessors. The whole spectrum of political debate has been shifted dramatically to the right, with Britain's Labour governrnent, the U.S.'s Democratic administration and

Canada's Liberal leadership al1 moving to the right to accomodate the residuaI neo- conservative political 'common sense' within which they operate. As Grossberg has noted "If the new conservatism can accomplish its victory directly within the space of culture and everyday life, it wilI have already won the terrain on which any democratic state, no matter who controls it and with what ideology, must operate"

(Grossberg, l992:258).

At the centre of the nse and resilience of the New Right's revolution is their success in mastering hegemonic politics. In short, the New Right was as successful, and remains as successful as it is today, because they have waged a thoroughgoing cultural

revolution for moral and intellectual authority. Even as its political representatives have

been formally expelled from office, new political leadership can either adapt to the residual popular cultural capital of the new order by absorbing its principle ideological elements, or perish.

The rise of the New Right to cultural 1 ideological predominance, of course, has a structural base in the shifting means of communications. Technological advance, principally in service of corporate and state-power, has created exceptional conditions for the New Right7shegemonic offensive. In recent decades, sophisticated surveillance and marketing techniques for shifting opinion during electoral contests have emerged, with a significant effect on the contemporary practice of politics. Recent decades have also seen a growing apparatus of institutions designed to manipulate public opinion and constrain democracy through pnnt and electronic media themselves- Corporatism has been renovated through the proliferation of think-tanks, lobbying agencies, public relations firms and polling groups. These have increasingly monopolized strategic know ledge and communications power in the service of corporate and state agendas. Combined with tendencies toward commercialization and monopoly-ownership in the consciousness industries, state-directed capitalism under the stewardship of the competitive state has decisively expanded the scope of elite-planning, cultural management, and the disciplining of public life.

Gramsci's theory of hegemony provides valuable conceptual tools for making sense of the important role of hegemonic agencies, including the mass media, in this New

Right revolution and provides a significant advance over the classical Marxist conception of ideology. That position is neatly summarized in Marx's formulation that 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.' Marx explains this conception, commonly referred to as the base - superstructure model, this way: "The class which has the rneans of material production at its disposal has control at the same tirne over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it" (in Miliband, 1976: 163). Although this formulation arguably does describe the ideological predominance of dominant classes accurately, it does little to explain how class power is translated into cultural power. Rather than illuminating the histoncally and institutionally specific structures and mechanisms at work, the economistic emphasis of orthodox marxism relies on the determining role of economic relations 'in the final instance.'

Against this conception, Miliband has argued "it is rnuch more apposite and meaningful to treat the 'economic base' as a starting point, as a matter of thefirst instance" (1976:8). According to Miliband, ideofogical domination is an active effort, conducted through specific agencies rather than a predetermined or automatic outcome of a totalizing structural reality. As an alternative to the functionahsm of the classical rnarxist base - superstructure model, therefore, he invo kes the Gramscian conception of hegemony as a more practically adequate way of understanding ideologica1 and cultural dominance. According to Miliband, "'hegemony' is not simply something which happens, as a mere superstructuraI derivative of econornic and social predominance, Tt is, in very large part, the result of a permanent and pervasive effort, conducted through a multitude of agencies" (1976: 163). As Gitlin (1980) has noted, further, neither is hegemony a mechanistic, top-down effort: "Hegemony is done by the dominant and collaborated in by the dominated"(l0).

As Gramsci anticipated, the exercise of elite-power in the modem penod has increasingly shi fted from the coercive measures of the military-state toward the persuasive strategies of a dramatically expanded hegemonic apparatus. Specialized new institutions, such as public relations firrns and corporate think-tanks, have been designed to intervene in the complex web of sociai activities and institutional procedures in which thought and action are entangled. WhiIe designed to stabilize and manage the Iegitimation process on behalf of corporate elites in advanced capitatist societies, the success of these strategies depends on their ability to be sensitive and responsive to the thematic universe and desires of the people (Friere, 1973218).

As we see in the case studies which follow, the corporate-state-academy-media system now plays a leading role in the 'manufacture of consent.' This institutionalized capacity to fundamentally shift public opinion and public policy directions has enabled corporate and state managers to ovewhelm the relative autonomy of the university and mass media systems. This has also disabled mass movements in their efforts to inform themselves and to get their message out to the citizenry. By reducing the relative autonomy of the university and mass media systems as well as the state itself, the corporate elite has consolidated its control over the spectrum of thought as well as the exercise of political power in these societies.

In contrast with the rationalist conception of ideology in traditional Marxism, the

Gramscian concept of hegemony grasps a more expansive, cultural reality encompassing the whole world view and way of life in which its subjects are engaged. According to

Raymond Williams (in AppleJ979) "Hegemony is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assipnments of energy, our ordinary understanding of man and his world, It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices

appear as reciprocally conhing. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced [as a] reality beyond which it is very difficult for rnost members of a society to move in most areas of their lives" (5).

Far from the vanguardist rationalism of Leninist professional revolutionanes who merely seek to awaken workers to their class interests, as if, to paraphrase Sartre, they were born when they received their first pay-cheque, the Gramscian concept of hegemony recentres the analysis on the thematic universe of the subjects thernselves. This approach broadens the analytical scope of the theory from workplace struggles to the leading moral and intellectual role of the family, churches, schools and the media. As Miliband notes,

"the antagonism between the classes (assumes) many different foms of expression."

Class conflict is always "an economic, cultural/ideological, social and political phenornenon" (Miliband, 197698-29).

According to Gramsci, a class rnust first become 'hegemonic' in ideological and cultural terms before it can win state-power. As Laclau and Mouffe (1989) argue, in order to become a 'hegemonic class,' it must "articulate to its discourse the ovenvhelming majority of ideological elernents which allow it to become the class expressing the national interest" (195). A hegemonic class must articulate specific elements such as religion, tradition and national identity, which do not have a specific 'class-belonging,' to its 'national popular' discourse. Gramsci calls this process of articulating cultural and idelogical elements to a hegemonic class the 'war of position.' In the context of his own time and place, Gramsci identified 'The Southern Question' as the Italian working class's principle frontier in its war of position:

The proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses.. .understanding the class demands which they represent; incorporating these demands into its revolutionary transitional programme; placinp these demands among the objectives for which it struggles (1991:443).

In this conception, where a hegemonic class gadually expands beyond its class core into a broader 'social bloc,' ideology is viewed as the terrain "on which men rnove, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle" (Gramsci in Laclau and Mouffe, 1989:185).

In contrast to the short-term electoral struggles for state power, which Gramsci describes as 'wars of maneuver,' achieving intellectual and moral authonty within the terms of the hegemonic 'national-popular' culture requires a popuIar strategy of cultural expansion that shifts fundamental values and attitudes. As Miliband (1976: 167) notes, while parties of the Ieft have often relied on the economistic conception of ideology to their devastating strategic and political disadvantage, it is the conservative parties which have historicaliy been the most adept at hegemonic poli tics: "large conservative parties have not only been the parties of the dominant classes, of business and property, either in terms of their membership or their policies. In fact, one of the rnost remarkable things about them is how successfully they have adapted themselves to the requirements of

'popular politics ."' Michael Apple (1989:4) argues that the rise of the New Right is a classic example of the 'war of positionr described by Gramsci. "As both Reaganism and Thatcherisrn recognize so clearly, to win the state you must also win in civil society. As ... Gramsci put it, what we are seeing is a war of position. It takes place where the whoIe relation of the state to civil society, to the people and to popular struggles, to the individual and to the economic life of society has been thoroughly re-organized, where 'al1 the elements change."'

Forces of conservative restoration have paid careful attention to the long-term 'war of position' to transform attitudes and values. In addition to the parliamentarian emphasis on structural politics, lobbying and electoral contests, significant time, energy and resources have also been invested in building a conservative dual power in civil society.

In contrast to the 'war of maneuver,' the New Right7s 'war of position7 was charactenzed by its creative intellectual energies and organized efforts to win symboiic anthoriv, extending the limits of 'common sense,' challenging certain eIements while transforming others fundamentall y.

The New Right constructed a social bloc through an antagonism between a populist alliance of conservatives, corporate IiberaIs and bom-again Christians who support traditional values and free markets, on the one hand, and 'special interests,' the

'oppressor-state,' on the other. Well-financed and organized campaigns have affirmed elite residual traditions and institutionalized conservative syrnbolic authority, while discrediting the emergent cultural capital of subordinate populations who successfully asserted countervailing authority claims during the popular movement expansion of the sixties- Increasing pessimism about the future, distrust of political and business leaders, and declining confidence in social instititutions (including the mass media) have created favourable social conditions for these authoritarian populist mobilizations against

'liberalism.' Unlike the left, capital and the right have responded effectively to this 'crisis of authority-'

New Right demagogues such as David Duke and Ross Perot in the United States, and Preston Manning in (English-speaking) Canada, have captured popular feelings of resentment and frustration by articulating thern to a new organic ideoIogy which links the neo-liberal defense of the free market economy with the profoundly anti-egalitarian cultural and social traditionaIism of neo-conservatisrn. The New Right has shifted the

"ternis of political, economic, and cultural debate ont0 the terrain favoured by capital and the right" by working on popular sentiments, reorganizing genuine feelings and constructing a new common-sense that is based on "the hostilities of the working and lower middle classes toward those above and beIow them and is fueled as well by a very reaI sense of antagonism against the new middle class" (Apple,1989:5,15).

The right has renewed and renovated the conservative social bloc by rearticulating conservative themes to a sense of loss. "Behind the conservative restoration is a widespread sense of loss: of control, of economic and persona1 security, of the knowledge and values that should be passed on to children, of visions of what counts as sacred texts and authority" (Apple,1989:20). Their campaign has been to manage this creeping'crisis of authority' (Sklar, l98O), by rearticulating conservative values in the 'common sense' experience of everyday life. Through this strategy, conservative groups have built a gassroots base for the popularization of the new conservatism, According to Laclau and

Mouffe (1989),

An antagonism is thus constructed between two poles: the 'people,' which includes al1 those who defend the traditional values and freedom of enterprize; and their adversaries: the state and al1 the subversives (ferninists, blacks, young people and 'permissives' of every type). An attempt is made to construct a new historical bloc in which a plurality of economic, social and cultural aspects are articulated. Stuart Wall has pointed out, for example, how Thatcherite populism 'combines the resonant thernes of organic Toryism - nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism -- with the aggressive themes of a revived neo- liberalism - self-interest, cornpetitive individualisrn, anti-statism (170).

The cuItural invasion of everyday lived experience, and the colonization of common sense, by New Right articulation strategies decisively extended the conservative hegemonic frontier, constnrcting a comprehensive and pervasive new moral and intellectual order. Conversational discomfort about saying the 'right thing' is now connected to the tyranny of left-wing political correctness. This right-wing discourse provides the 'empowering' alternative possibility of rejecting critical, reflexive thinking as

'cultural repression,' and becoming a free (Le., conservative) thinker instead. Anxieties about the destabilized family are connected to the 'perrnissiveness' promoted by the left, particularly feminists and the gayllesbian communities, providing the 'empowering' option of retuming to traditionaI family (Le., conservative) values. The debt crisis is linked to state-overspending promoted by Ieftists, liberals, bureaucrats and 'special interests'. The New Right promotes an alternative ethic based on "balancing the cheque book," and "living within Our means." This fiscally-conservative alternative promotes personal responsibility and discipline for those groups who are dependent on the public purse, and the rewarding promise of tax-relief for the idealized average family. The anti- gun control lobby portrays the gun owner as the victim of an autocratie state that threatens personal freedoms (and property), while sheltering crirninals who should be punished.

According to Apple, "What has been accomplished has been a successful translation of an economic doctrine into the language of experience, moral imperative, and comrnon sense-

The free market has been combined with a populist politics" (1989: 12).

With the 'grassroots activism' of libertarian cultural vanguards like the National

Rifle Association in the US. or the National Asssociation of Gun Owners in Canada, for exarnple, right-wing parties and their backers can rely on an ultra-conservative 'dual power' in civil society to set the agenda for ruling parties. Govemments of al1 stripes are now, for example, forced by Taxpayers Associations to accomodate a 'stimulated' public demand to sacrifice health, education, and social progarns in favour of tax-relief.

Even governments of the liberal-left are captive to the New Right's agenda.

Modem statecraft in general tends to focus efforts almost exclusively on 'managing' day- to-day issues and maintaining state-power (the war of maneuver). Modem social democrats have also opted to distance themselves from historic allies like organized labour. By demobilizing its own base in civiI society, the liberal-left has effectiveiy sui-rendered the longer range war of position over fundamental values and priorities to the

New Right. As a result, the New Right cari shift the very terrain on which the maneuvres of the democratic state now take place. Through its virtually one-sided war of position, the New Right increasingly sets the agenda for public debate, shifting governments from active initiators, projecting their own independent vision and program into defensive and

dependant powers accouniable, as we will see, to the New Right7seffective 'manufacture

of consent.' The question of tax cuts, for example, is changed from 'whether?' or 'what

kind?' to 'when?,' 'how much?,' 'why not deeper?' and 'why not faster?.'

The New Right's "civil war of values" has therefore built a very powerful affective politics around highly-charged sites such as crime, minority rights, political correctness, the arts, and multicuIturalisrn over the years. The New Right has pursued these arnbitious, well-financed campaigns by building a network of parallel institutions. U.S. institutions such as Accuracy in Media, an offshoot of Accuracy in Academe, and the Parents' Music

Resource Centre are typical exarnples of modernized conservative strategies to regulate and control discourse in the public sphere. The continentalization of markets and culture promises to make these institutions an increasingly influential force in Canadian cultural and political life as well. In both the US. and Canada, flak from the organizations of the

New Right has constructed new limits on the penetration of cuItural and intellectual dissidents in the mainstream while extending the right's hegemonic frontiers. A neo-

McCarthyism uses latent class resentments against 'elitist' artists and left-wing intellectuals. David Trend (1993) notes that right-wing culture-hero Rush Limbaugh

"casts liberals as snobs who act as though 'the average American is an idiot -- stupid, ignorant, uninformed, unintelligent ... In just four years the pudgy talk-radio reactionary has built a smali empire -- with a radio show boasting twelve million listeners, a late- night television program, a newsletter read by 300,000 and a book topping the best seller chart for 6 months ... Limbaugh, who now appears regularly as a guest on news and variety shows, is credited with the ability to instantly shift public opinion polls" (2 1). The New Right has been able to successfully rearticulate themes from everyday experience to a conservative discourse and program, in part, because the corporate establishment has secured institutional supports, patronage networks, and expertise to support this cultural expansion. Right-wing culture specialists have also developed a strategic formula in which the creation of 'moral panics' (Barrat,1986:37-8) is used to set the agenda for public action. Since their positions tend to be logically consistent with the common-sense of a market-mIed society, and media-owners and editors are generally sympathetic to conservative social movements, these groups are able to pre-empt a progressive articulation of popular thernes and often have sufficient organization and resources to win frarning contests in the mass media (Ryan, 199 153-94).

The success of the New Right in regaining authority Iost to the popular and culturally expansive New Left and sixties counter-culture has been achieved through a two-pronged effort to build their own extra-parliamentary, 'dual power' in civil society.

First, capital and the right have reinforced the role of traditional hegemonic agencies such as the churches, media and schools which have typically iegitimated the worldview and way of life favoured by the conservative business sector through structural politics designed to reduce the relative autonomy of those institutions from elite-interests and conservative ideology. Second, new hegemonic agencies have been launched to further shore up and advance the authority daims of this elite. Through a wide array of business- funded, citizen front-groups, business think-tanks and a new family of business lobby groups more aggressive and effective than the old-line Chambers of Commerce and

Manufacturers Associations, the corporate elite sought to augment their economic extra- parliamentary power wi th a cultural extra-parliamentary opposition as weII. Irnplicit in

the new cultural politics of the New Right is therefore a new structural politics as well.

The U.S. and Canadian case studies which follow analyze these new hegemonic

agencies, as well as the intensification of corporatism, incorporating the educational order

and media into the the new moral-intelIectua1 order. The renovation and expansion of this

hegemonic apparatus was a necessary condition for the rise of the New Right, requirïng

nothing less than a media revolution.

The mass media play two specific and important roles in the struggle for

hegemony. First, they provide the stnictziral rnechanism for articulating resonant themes

to a broad popular audience, cultivating consensus around moral and intellectual

principIes and mobilizing public opinion in support of specific policies. Without waging

structural politics to gain access to this mass audience, a rnovernent is structurally confined to marginality.

Since the failure of editors and joumalists to share the cornmitment of owners and managers to this dominant ethos can undemine this effort, editors and journalists are often tarpeted for hegemonic recruitment and cooptation. Indeed it is quite common for influential joumalists to be invited into the social circles of wealth and power as honorary members of the power elite, despite their financial means. Take, for example, the case of

Econonzist editor Andrew Knight, whose influential position earned him a seat at the

Bilderberg Club, an elite roundtable of the world7srichest and most powerful despite what Conrad Black (1993) refers to disparagingly as "a rnodest salary and no accumulated means" (334). Although Knight played a key role in brokenng Black's purchase of the

Daily Telegraph, later became a chief executive who Black hoped "wouId quieten the lenders with his articulateness and self-confidence and the prestige he had earned at the

Econornist," Black also slurs Knight for his "imtating," "impenetrable arrogance" (346) in his memoirs. Black's biogaphy was written after Knight 'defected' to Black's rival

Rupert Murdoch .

Capturing the commanding heights of ownership and management, as well as gaining ideoIogica1 predominance in the newsroom, are of course necessary, but insufficient, conditions for the cultural expansion of a class core's discourse to a broader social bloc. A second necessary condition is the elaboration of a sufficiently persuasive ideologicaI1cultural program. The mass media, of course, are repositories for the most publicly articulate commentators on political affairs. These personnel are tarseted by hegemonic movements in order to encourage ideological succession among those who share residual elements of traditional consewative ideologies; to encourage ideological migration arnong the open-minded and confused; and to CO-optor neutralize those representing counter-hegemonic interests.

The structural and cultural imperatives of mass media predominance for hegemonic movements are expressed tactically and strategically in structura1 and cultural politics. Some of the concrete and specific strategies and devices deployed in these campaigns are welI documented. In 1986 Christopher Shaw, a Wall Street acquisition expert, told investors that the first reason they should buy newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations or book publishing firms was 'profitability.' The second was 'influence'

(Bagdikian,l992: 11). There is a significant public record of media proprietors who have testified to this reality (Bagdi kian, 1992; Barlow and Winter, 1997; B lack, 1993; Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Newman, 1982; Schiller, 1969; Siklos, 1995; Winter, 1990). In Ben Bagdikian's (1992) exhaustive U.S. study, he argues that "histoncally, media power has been purchased by those who wished it for their persona1 politicai ambitions ... Today, the desire of most corporate leaders is not to become the President of the United States; it is to influence the President of the United States" (10).

Perhaps the clearest example of the premium placed on newspapers as instruments of political influence today is Canadian newspaper baron Conrad Black- Black's biographers are in unequivocal agreement on this point. A college friend of Black's told

Richard Siklos (1995), for example, "Conrad has always had this great fascination with power. Newspapers -- quality newspapers, big newspapers -- are obviously closely associated with power and influence. The fact that he uitimately becarne interested in and involved with newspapers to that extent doesn't surprise me in the least" (40). His former professor Laurier LaPierre's view is more compelling still. He said "1 donftthink Conrad wants to be prime minister, but he really does want to be the power behind the throne and feels his money will buy him that ... He is one of the few people I know for whom attaining power is an all-consuming goal ...In the James Bond and John le Carre stories there is always some wierd genius who has a nuclear bomb and is threatening to use it to sanctify mankind. Conrad is like that: he wiII appiy his economic cIout politically to repress what he considers the moral wrongs of the world" (Newman,1982:272-273).

It is worth consulting the public record briefly to establish Black's self-conscious and purposeful status as what Gramsci called an "organic intellectual," both reflecting, expressing and leading the elabontion of his class's interests and ideology. Gramsci once described the organic intelIectua1 as "a philosopher convinced that his personality.. . is an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment." (in Boggs, 1984224) Black once told a biographer, "Avocationally, i'm a historian and

publisher. Fundamentally, 1 am an ideologist-,. 1 have this semi-romantic notion about

ideological questions. 1 guess there's a bit of the rnissionary in al1 of us" (Siklos,1995:69).

There is an ample and unambiguous documentary record of Black's class conscious and partisan use of the media (Black, 1993; Siklos, 1995). His investments in the right-wing intellectual cold war publication E~rcortnter,his ideological make-over of

Satt~~Niglzt, his direct forays into column writing for the Globe arzd Mail's Report on

Business and the Financial Post, his efforts to position himself as an articulate representative of his class's interests in the media, his repeated edi tonal interference on behalf of the New Right in his global chain of newspapers, and his ideological obsession to dominate and transform the Canadian media system in a New Right direction are al1 cases in point.

In Black's political cosrnology, capitalists' claims to inteIIectua1 authonty have been weakened by liberal and left-leaning journalistic and academic elites. As a result, they are the object of his significant and recumng scom (Newman, 1982: 196). They are also the target of his effort to usurp their power. He has cIear1y summed up the strategic situation, "Because intelIectuals ... dominate the power of the word, the conservative philosophy of capitalists has made a very poor showing in the recent history of ideas."

Whenever businessmen have tned to defend themselves with words, Black diagnoses,

"they have tended to bellow ultra-nght cliches like wounded dinosaurs, much to the amusement of the intellectual left. John Stuart Mill Iabelled the Conservative Party in

England the 'stupid party;' the truth is that until recently conservative ideas were so poorly articulated they simply weren't taken seriously" (Newman, 1983: 176). Black's mission is therefore two-fold: to expand his business and riches while also contnbuting to the prestigious restoration of conservative authonty. Rather than a conflict between his identities as proprietor and ideologue, he has captured significant synergies

from his business and political objectives. Black's mission is not simply the eccentric expression of an isolated individual. Rather, Black was an active participant and financial supporter of several leading New Right hegernonic agencies, conceiving, directing and expanding his own newspaper empire in concert with those class and political allies. In a

1988 speech to Canada's pre-eminent New Right think-tank, the Fraser Institute, for example, he praised the National Citizens Coalition, the Reform Party and the Fraser

Institute for their role in the New Right's hegemonic offensive: "1believe that slowly, quietly, almost imperceptibly, most of the values the Fraser Institute seeks to promote will achieve greater acceptance in Canada" (Barlow and Winter,1997:205). Black also credits his contacts with international business feaders for his vigour. "On my returns 1 realize how far 1 have moved from the diffident, derivative, envious mood of the country ... This almost as much as econornic reasons, is why 1 wanted to buy into

Southam" (BIack,1993:5 13). In short, BIack's mission coïncides with the strategic imperatives of the increasingly politically savvy investing and advertising classes.

In addition to the coïncidence of political and economic objectives in media investment, the public record also shows that in many cases newspaper proprietors and investors have actually been willing to forgoe profitability itself in the interests of exercising political influence. When Eddie Goodman (1988), for example, approached wealthy conservatives to subscribe investment in the launch of the Toronto Srut, he told them that their investment would support a pro-NATO, pro-Israel, anti-communist alternative to the left-leaning Toronto Star. He also advised them, he recounts, "that they should be prepared to write this one off, but that they would have a lot of fun losing their rnoney" (175)-

Through the control OF the flow of information, the corporate media have indeed become the prïnciple vehicles for the increasing concentration of power in advanced capitalism. Under the force of ownership and managerial direction, paid corporate advocacy advertising, and the pseudo-events and 'authoritative' sources of the wealthy and powerfui, journalists are generaIIy swept dong by the agenda-setting operations of well executed 'communications strategies.' This capacity to shape what people think about has been defined by Barat (1986). "The term 'agenda-setting' refers to a process whereby the tems of debate are fixed to suit the interests of the powerful. It should be stressed that setting an agenda does not prohibit al1 debate or disagreement - it merely sets the boundaries within which the debate takes place" (52).

News reporting also frequently relies on conventionai 'media frames,' such as the

'labour-management dispute frame' which generally depicts unions as greedy, self- interested and parasitic on the public good while entrepreneurs are portrayed as deservedly rich and semi-heroic benefactors to the common man (Herman and

ChornskyJ988; Bagdikian,l992).

The Iiterature on the media's role in agenda-setting, legitimation, gate-keeping and framing (Barat, 1986) demonstrate how important communications strategies have become to the power elite as they attempt to soften resistance, arouse moral panics and

Iead disciplined mobilizations of public opinion. As Ralph Miliband (1976) has argued "For indoctrination to occur it is not necessary that there be monopoIistic control and the prohibition of opposition; it is only necessary that ideological cornpetition be so unequal as to give a crushing advantage to one side against the other" (164).

The corporate elite's media have also relayed 'research findings7 produced by corporate think-tanks to a vulnerable public under the sway of objectivity ideology.

Editors play an important and conservative role in shaping news coverage through selective story assignments and editorializing. These editorial management practices signal 'appropriate' perspectives and 'important' issues to promotion-hungry joumalists and reinforce managerial leadership in the negotiation of media-frames. While the integration and imitativeness of the commercial media system leave news-making vulnerable to agendas set from outside the newsroom, corporate schooling and the organization of the newsmaking process do not equiy journdists for critical analysis-

Manageriai power, and the frequent lack of union protection, also leaves independent or dissident reporters vulnerable should they challenge dominant class hegemony, or the journalistic orthodoxy of editorial management which supports it.

Corporate media practices are cIearly a forrn of politicaI dis-enfranchisernent for the majority of the population who have, at best, token access to strategic information and the means of communication. As a result, corporate media have become the central vehicle in what Habermas (1973) has called "systematically-distorted communication," displacing the substantive processes of democratic popular will-formation in favour of a purely 'formai' democratic process. By undermining the public's capacity for sustained thought about historical processes more complex than a rapid sequence of discrete events people are Iess able to connect larger social processes to their own lives and interests. As

Wainwright has argued, "if democracy is redefined to involve the full development and expression of peoples' knowledge, then any social process by which knowledge is appropriated and society is made opaque are inimical to it" (in Albo,1993:121).

Corporate communications strategies have becorne increasingly sophisticated. The rise of new corporate hegemonic agencies designed to reduce the relative autonomy of the state has fundarnentally shifted the ideological terrain of civil society by providing the infrastructure for the systematic articulation and diffusion of a renovated, popular conservatism. At the same time, as the case of the Free Trade Agreement demonstrates, neo-corporatist arrangements are increasingly empowering economic elites to assume the responsibilities of an unelected government.

According to Shapiro (198557-72), the state needs to be understood in ternis of the agenda-setting power of capital. In contrast to the Iiberal-piuralist view in which the state is a neutral adjudicator of competing clairns, Shapiro argues that the modem capitalist state needs to be analyzed in terrns of its role in rationalizing and popularizing the corporate agenda. From this perspective, the state can best be understood as "the site of a continuous and active process in which the leading faction of the dominant class ensures the coordination of al1 those elernents cornposing the class and, at the same time, works to win the active consent of the dominated cIasses" (1985).

The integration and harrnonization of business and governrnent activities, particularly in setting the agenda for public opinion formation and organizing consent, increasingly characterizes the top-down, neo-corporatism of the state. The ultra- conservative and technocratic intelligentsia play an important role in corporate rationalization, a euphemism for top-down, social engineering. Take the recent example of pnvatization. According to Madsen Pirie, president of the Thatcherite Adam Smith

Institute, it was not up to political leaders to 'set the stage' for public acceptance of privatization. Responding to a question at an international symposium sponsored by the

Fraser Institute in 1987, he said "No, 1 think that's up to independent think-tanks. acadernics and media-commentators. The most important thing political leaders can do is to do it -- get a couple of examples of privatization off and nrnning so you can point to the success and encourage them to do more1' @iamantopoulos,l990:31).

Ernerging in tandem with the restructuring of world markets in recent decades is the nse of what MacKintosh (1993: 36-49)has called the "competitive state." According to this model, the state withdraws from direct intervention in economic life in favour of unleashing competitive market forces. This is typically achieved through privatization, deregulation and contractingout. In contrast to the 'developmental state,' which seeks an active and democratizing role in economic reconstruction, the competitive state favours market-based planning. "In national and international politics, the 'competitive ' model of the state is at present ideologically dominant. The World Bank actively discourages governments from deveIopmenta1 ambitions and promotes privatization and reduction of the state to no more than a 'safety-net' provider of public services within market-led economies."

The rise of this competitive state has had powerfully anti-democratic effects. In contrast to the participatory emphasis of progressive, developmental States on "actively encouraging new pressure groups among people who previously lacked the capacity to influence state structures", technocratic elites have developed advanced social controi strategies to subdue an 'excess of democracy' (Sklar,1980), including direct attacks on

'interest groups.' By yielding to elite-managed market-rational decision making and rolling back the participatory capacities of disadvantaged groups, the cornpetitive state expands the scope of corporate hegemony. When combined with the parallel concentration and centralization of information, communications and cultural power in the hands of the corporate elite, the evolution of the 'cornpetitive state' has created new possibilities for the manipulation of public opinion. As Raboy and Bruck have argued "an interest in the reproduction of the relations of subordination and consumption is not solely commercial and industrial, that is, a capitatist one. It is also hierarchical and managerial, that is, a statist one. The market and the state are not, as some would have it, natural antagonists; they are more like partners in an unholy alliance" (1989:iO). After all, in a nation which operates on the Iogic of capitalist relations, advice from capitaIists is the most Iogical advice for the state to follow.

The rise of the cornpetitive state has a historical precedent in the nse of corporatism, in which "political life was increasingly conducted as a private matter between the state and powerful corporate actors" (Sparks, l992:38 1). While classical liberalism held that a vigorous press places a check on the excesses of dite-interests and

'bad govemment,' Habermas claims that the withdrawal of active citizenship in advanced capitalism has its roots in the commercialization of the press since around 1830. Against this anti-democratic structural transformation or "refeudalization" of the public sphere,

Keane (1984) emphasizes Habermas's view that we are not "'by nature' apathetic, private, and apolitical beings. Current levels of disinterest in questions of power and politics and

the widespread inability (or willingness?) to deliberate, criticize, and effect decisions

actively through common involvements within autonomous public spheres -- a11 these

well known features of daily life under late capitalist conditions seem to him to be a

temporary and highly contingent consequence of a bureaucratie, disciplinary and very

unequal society" (154).

Another novel form of hegemonic institutionalization in this century which has

had an integral, and transformative effect on mass communications is the public relations

(PR) industry. Toget her wi th the dramatical l y accelerated rate of media concentration and

the formation of corporate think-tanks and lobby groups, the PR industry is playing a powerfully anti-democratic role in re-shaping contemporary Canadian political culture.

According to Joyce Nelson (1989), the modernization and extension of corporate

Canada's agenda-setting and legitimation apparatuses is rooted in the ernergence of the

PR industry at the tum of the century. Growing in tandem with multinational corporations and the mass media, 'PR' has become a tightly organized and formalized industry, tracking and managing public opinion on behalf of corporate and state power both domestically and in the third world.

The PR industry has not only attempted to manipulate media frames, but has helped shape journalistic conventions themselves. For one thing, PR strategies, such as the press tour, the press conference, the pre-arranged interview, and the press release, are al1 meant to inundate the press with appropriate information, forcing them into a re-active rather than an investigative role- Former White House press secretary, Leslie Janka called it "manipulation by inundation:" "You give them the line of the day, you give them press briefings, you give them facts, access to people who will speak on the record ...And you do that long enough, they're going to stop bringing their own stories, stop being investigative reporters of any kind, even modestly so" (57).

The press release is a good example of the reversa1 of the lines of control which has taken place in recent decades. The press release not only initiates the news process, it

'frarnes' the story, recommends official sources, selectively emphasizes information favourable to the issuer and screens out information unfavourabIe to the issuer's interests.

While it is tme, in the abstract, that journalists still have the opportunity to seek out other information or to ask further questions, the stmctural constraints of news deadlines and the limited availability of alternative sources often prevents this follow-up. Nelson reports that by the late 1940fs,it was already estimated that up to half of the reported news in radio and newspapers was based on press reIeases from PR departments and firms.

It has been well documented that corporate ownership and control of modem media systems influences news coverage in the interests of the statu quo

(Bagdikian,1993). However, individual corporations are also willing to pay handsomely for the abi1ity to shape popular perceptions of specific issues and events, developing a vast network of interna1 public relations and communications departments and external service agencies to which particularly contentious or delicate issues are contracted-out.

According to Nelson, "behind the media gatekeepers is another whole level of information-gatekeepers who are skilled in that most modern of projects, media relations and the making of 'reportable events"' ( 1989: 18). Through corporate PR campaigns, they are able to "establish the framework for the event, the language by which it will be discussed and reported, and the ernphasis to be maintained"(46). This 'business/media/PR triangle' provides the industry's clients with the institutional linkages and supports they need to set "the information agenda." "Issues management" is a growth area for the PR industry, forecasting issues that will aise for a Company and helping to develop a PR strategy.

Capital and the right have consolidated their capacity to maintain ideological and political dominance and leadership not simply through the ownership of, the restmcturing of, and influence over major media. It has also paid close attention to the inforrnational- cultural content for which those institutional structures act as channels or 'terrains of struggle.' In addition to constructing a hegemonic apparatus, a necessary but not sufficient condition for ideological predominance, the New Right has also made effective use of the mass media to create "affective alliances" that articulate segments of the public to aspects of the New Right's organic ideology. An affective alliance is defined by

Grossberg (1992) as a "particular seament or articulation of a cultural formation." He offers the exarnple of the "rock alliance," which includes "a variety of rnusics, images of style, forms of behaviour, talk, styles of dance, drugs, fans, etc," (397). Through mass media organizations, newsletters, conferences, public events, films, videos and books, the

New Right has provided conservative discourses that affirm and empower peopIe in everyday life, and organize and lead public opinion as well.

Similarly, through the strategy of moral panic (Barat, 1986:52;Grossberg, lgW), a climate of group-think or hysteria is often animated. Like the organization of vigilante groups which make it impossible for insurgents to organize in the periphery, the disciplined mobilization of right-wing populism can effectively close the public sphere.

Recent cultural struggles deploying the strategy of moral panic to stampede public opinion include the youth-culture panic led by the Parents' Music Resource Center

(PMRC), the political-correctness panic led by the US. Establishment Right, and the deficit panic which has consolidated a wide range of conservative groups in a frontal assault on Keynesianism and the welfare state. In addition to providing the support of civil society for specific legislative agendas (record labeling, cuts to 'speciat interests,' social spending cuts), the cumulative effect of the new conservatism's dominance of the public sphere is to transforrn the very terrain and terrns of political discourse.

The dual character of these mobilizations builds a more cornpetitive and authontarian political culture with each initiative, re-framing the parameters for acceptable public discourse in general. By mobilizing public attention toward an issue, and enforcing the appropriate framing, it is possible to create a controlled sphere and spectrum of debate. Barrat suggests that media-systems ''provide an illusion of 'openness as a fomm for competing points of view, but this is al1 circumscribed within an overall

'discourse' or agenda which sets the limits to what shaf 1, and more importantly, what shal not be discussed by society" (198653).The Christian and corporate media play critical roles in enforcing the discourses and frames of the New Right populism, thereby setting the limits for debate, As Bagdikian (1992) writes "while it is not possible for the media to tell the population what to think, they do tell the public what to think about" (xxviii).

In each of the cases cited above, moral panics and affective epidemics are constmcted, like the proverbial 'carrot and the stick,' to mobiiize popular support for decisions that have already been arrived at by economic and political elites. The unifying theme of this disciplined new conservative public opinion is a cornmitment to competitive and individualist solutions sponsored by well-financed and organized conservative social movements. Co-operative and egalitarian options remain largely the property of the left-intelligentsia. Where the Ieft failed to 'socialize' its counter-hegemonic organizing principles, however, the right succeeded. Although alternatives exist, the capacity of subordinate populations to socialize them quickly and persuasively to a mass audience does not. While the objective possibility for new public policy that would reflect the experience of natives, women or the young working poor and unemployed exists, the objective power to institute that policy does not exist, in part due to the commercial monopoly over the technical basis for constituting a public sphere and in part due to the left-intelligentsia' s structural confinement to universities and their cultural confinement to academic discourses which are not accessible to popular audiences.

According to David Trend (1993), the emergence of powerful, ideologically ultra- conservative popular movements demand that progressive groups "redefin(e) the very temtory and terrns of activism." By minimizing the importance of the media, Trend argues the left has defaulted the public sphere to New Right populism. He claims that "by narrowly defining politics as economics, the left also has allowed conservatives to take the initiative in battles over schools, librarïes, arts and even the language spoken in certain regions of the country." Trend concludes that the left's poIitical passivity reflects its economism and cultural elitism. The failure to participate effectively in the politics of mass media reflects the "Leninist legacy of the professional intellectual revolutionary who creates an oppositional public sphere apart from what exists." By abstaining from cultural politics, Trend argues that the left has increased its own margjnality and has undermined

its credibility, "By assuming that politics exists outside the talk, images and writing about

social issues, the power of information has been ceded to AT and T, and the Pentagon.

Moreover, this failure to effectivety engage the mass media has contributed to the

perception that the left, particularly its academic quarters, is out of touch with

'mainstrearnfconcerns" (9- 12).

With the succession of the generations this shifting balance of cultural power is

likely to tilt further to the right. For as 'public life' has declined in advanced capitalism

(Bookchin,l980; Keane, 1984), the media-dependency of children and youth, in particular,

has also increased. "The average child (in the US.) Iistens to 10,462 hours of rock

between the 7th and 12th grades, more time than he or she spends in school"

(Grossberg, 1992:6). This has developmental and socio-cultural implications. Prairie

teenagers, before the rïse to prominence of music-TV, already reported higher levels of

satisfaction from music than they did from dates or time spent with their boyfiends or

gïrlfnends. Music ranked ahead of friendships in Ontario and B.C.. Across English-

speaking Canada, youth claimed higher levels of satisfaction from their stereos than from

their mother, father or sports. Television nvaled and often outranked grandparents (Bibby

and Posterski, l985:32).

In contrat to discourses dominant on the left which demonstrate little popular resonance, the corporate rock industry has tapped the sense of isolation, boredom and powerlessness experienced by many of today's youth. In fact, youth subcultures are routinely constructed out of identifications with particular musical genres (punk, rap, heavy metal, gninge, alternative, etc.), and peer-status is often influenced by their familiarity with popular music. The rock formation provides youth with a source of ontological security against a meritocratic regime, at home, at school, in peer relations, and at work, which continually plays on their sense of self-doubt (Cobb and

Sennett, 1973). It also provides a source of instant 'empowetment,' and often rebelhon, against the disciplinary repression at work in these sites. It is this anti-authoritarian articulation which in large part accounts for efforts of the New Right populism to ally itself with the restoration of parental authority, forging a powerfut affective alliance to regulate the cultural consumption and behaviour of children and youth.

The structure of the Christian and corporate media plays an important role in the unequal distribution of cultural power and in constructing the terrain on which 'wars of position' will be waged- An inversion of institutionalized 'liberal' or 'secular-hurnanist' values through ultra-conservative alternative media counter-institutionalization can also fundarnentally rearticulate the terms and frames of the established media order7s hegemonic messages, pressuring the 'Liberal Media7 to shift right to deflect criticism of media-bias. Todd Gitlin has argued that the media-system is vulnerable to the agenda- setting efforts of conservative hegemonic agencies because the reporting of social conflict is interpreted in terms of dominant hegemonic principles. This systematically amplifies the persuasive powers of elite propaganda carnpaigns. "Discrepant statements about reality," on the other hand "are acknowledged -- but muffled, softened, blurred, fra,mented, donzesticated at the sarne time" (1980:270).

The news routines are skewed towards representin~demands, individuals and frames which do no&fundamentally contradict the dominant hegemonic principles: the legitimacy of private control of comrnodïty production; the legirinzacy of the national securiry stute; rhe legitimacy of technocratie e4xperts;the right and ability of authorïzed agencies to nzanage conjlict and make tlze necessary reforms; the legitirnacy of the social order seczcred and definad by the dominant elites; and the value of individualisnz as a rneasztre of social e-ristence,The news routines do not easily represent demands, movements and frames which are incoate, subtle, and most deeply subversive of these core principles. Political news is treated as if it were crime news - what went wrong today, not what goes wrong every day (27 1).

Mass media play a key role in authority stmggles between opposed hegemonic blocs because media-messages have the capacity not only to persuade but also to create

'authoritative' sources and discourses, Le., to establish moral and inteliectual authority relations. Media-control doesn't simply provide 'conjunctural' advantages to hegemonic groups seeking to sway public opinion in specific debates; it also provides the cumulative or 'organic' effect of systematically invalidating the experience and perspectives of non- hegemonic sources while re-affirming and retrenching the moral and intellectual leadership of hegemonic sources. According to Hogan, this political practice is "created by conflict over competing definitions of legitimate authority, that is, conflicts over the distribution of symbolic authority in society" (198352). Cultural capital stmggles waged by conservatives to restore the authonty of the residual elite traditions (Apple, 1979: 196) of histoncally dominant groups against the emergent cultural capital of newly powerful challenging groups are generally assisted by the hegemonic framing practices of conventional journalism. Accomodations to the selective traditions of news-gathering and officia1 history are often forced by counter-traditions, leading to what might be called

'programming accords' (Williams in Apple, 197923-24). Marginalized goups or oppositional perspectives, for example, will often be structurally accomodated within hesemonic framing of events through 'take-outs' or other editorial devices which incorporate dissenting views by submerging them within overall hegemonic treatments.

As Miliband (1976) notes, the inclusion of oppositional perspectives actually further legitimates the 'objectivity' of the medium (164).

Mass media messages not onIy ernbody and affim certain race, gender and class- linked cultural capitals as authoritative ('official sources,' generally rich white male professionals representing corporate and state power) as against others. These messages also establish the terrain on which further culturaI capital stmggles wilI take place. If conservative propaganda campaigns successfully discredit 'politically-correct' dissident intellectuals and 'special interest' spokespeople, then the daims of those groups will be suspect, particularly when they contradict establishment sources. While audience interpretation and resistance to mass media messages does take place at a local and individual level, the asyrnetrical power of media owners, managers and editors far outweighs individualized 'amchair protest' by virtue of the breadth and regularity of cultural diffusion which media control enables. Organized elite efforts to monopolize syrnbolic authority have led to the cultural dispossession of target-groups singIed out for propaganda carnpaigns. The liberal-left have borne the brunt of the New Right hegemonic offensive, including 'coded' criticisms of the 'politically correct,' 'special interests,' and

'union-bosses.' Other groups find themseives assimi lated into programming in such a way as to have their experïences and issues distorted in accordance with the hegemonic frames inherent in established journalistic conventions. Take, for example, the media's love affair with 'feel good human interest stories' such as that of the self-made black woman entrepreneur who pulled herself up out of welfare depertdency or its 'hard news' coverage which highlights minority criminality but seldom addresses issues such as unemployment, poverty or discriminatory hiring. The selective recognition of certain groups' experience, knowledge or honesty can have significant effects on subordinate groups' self-image and morale-

As Curran (1988) has argued, media-practices stigmatizing 'outsiders' such as youth gangs, drug addicts, left-wing and trade-union militants have had "effects comparable to hunting down and parading witches alIegedly possessed of the devil by the medieval and early modem Church. Moral panics have been created that strengthened adherence to dominant social norrns and encouraged a sense of beIeagured unity, transcending class differences in the face of a dangerous, extemal threat" (227). In addition, in the smeway that media frames harden into conventional wisdom through repeated exposure, so too does the selective negative and positive reinforcement of the cultural capitals 03different audiences lead to hardening of class distinctions.

Consistently preferential treatment for the authority of dominant groups' cultural capital will encourage seLf-doubt, lack of confidence, withdrawal or avoidance among non- dominant populatiions.

This hierarchy of cultural capitals, authority and political Ieadership is institutionalized through media market segmentation. British trade-union leader R. Todd, for example, has charged the 'tabloid revolution' with a "gradua1 disenfranchisement of ordinary people fram accuracy of fact, from the stimulation of debate and from discussion on the major serious issues of the day" (in Sparks,1992:279). As Sparks has noted, since the "quality press.-.is relatively expensive, sometimes hard to obtain and it demands quite a high level of cultural cornpetence in order to consume it" (ibid:285), the majority of

British "newspaper readers have to make do with the tabloid press, whose attention to

political and economic life is both intermittent and abbreviated" (ibid:281).

It has been argued in this chapter that the rise of the New Right over the last two

and a half decades can be understood as a classic example of a Gramscian 'war of

position.' In this interpretation, corporate elites and the conservative establishment waged

a cultural revolution against welfare state liberalism. By identifying key resonant themes

in popular culture and articulating them to a renovated, conservative political discourse

the New Right was able to effect a decisive cultural expansion of its social bloc. And by

negatively articulating widespread resentments to such pet New Right folk devils as 'tax

and spend liberals,' 'the politically correct,' and 'special interests,' it was equally able to

effectively disqualify the authority claims of its ideologïcal rivals, confining the liberal

left to the same marginal status previousIy resewed for right-wingers. Rather than a

conventionaI electoral bid for state-power, the New Right7swar of position would more

accurately be characterized as a protracted seige as it worked through established and new

hegemonic agencies, including the media, to provoke a 'crisis of authority' for the liberal-

left and to confine thern to a cultural quarantine on the margins of mass democratic

politics.

This effort to discredit corporate liberalism, succeeding it with a new

common sense, was both a structural and cultural enterprise. Culturally, the New

Right7seffort to influence public opinion depended on crafting a sophisticated strategy that included mastering the tactics and techniques of agenda-setting in which "the mass media provide cues to people, which they use in deciding the importance of an issue," prirning, in which "media coverage influences the criteria that people use in evaluating (public policy issues)" and framing of news coverage (Ryan, 199 1:25). Structurally, the PR industry, broadly defined to include corporate think-tanks and professional lobby groups - played a key role in the contemporary form and content of the New Right's effort to articulate a national popular culture. Without the wide range of efforts to influence established hegemonic agencies, particulady the mass media, and create new ones, both to emasculate the dernocratic state and to forcefully advance its issues and perspectives to mass audiences, however, this cultural practice wouldn't have had the necessary institutionai supports to sustain it.

To apply these general theoretical observations of the New Right phenornenon to specific historical instances we now turn to a closer analysis and cornparison of the rise of the New Right in the U.S. and Canada. CHAPTER 4)

A POPULAR 'REVOLUTION:

The U.S. Case

A closer look at the American New Right can help us understand the emerging

ways in which corporate interests have also captured public opinion and the public policy

making apparatus in Canada. This is true for two reasons. First, the U.S. has been, of

course, the leading imperial world power in the past century and the principal protaganist

in Canada's dependent development. Second, the New Right originated in the U.S.,

thereby 'setting the pattern' for subsequent development on a global scale. While the New

Right revolution swept the globe through the eighties, the pioneering efforts of the

Amencan New Right left a distinctive practical and political imprint on the shape of New

Right politics everywhere, and particularly in Canada.

Hegemony znalysis of the American New Right demonstrates how private power

both bypassed, and worked through, democratic institutions in the last two decades.

Through a sophisticated and strategic hegemonic offensive, the New Right direct1y

mobilized public opinion (gassroots cmpaigns), and lobbied media, church, school and state-elites (treetops carnpaigns), including promotin,a the 'contracting-out' of public policy-making itself. In the current penod of post free trade harmonization, sirnilar institutional arrangements in Canada are leading the Americanization of culture and politics. A clear understanding of Canada's political economy and political culture depends on a clear understanding of the cross-border social forces at work in the US.,

and the dynarnics of continentalization,

The transnational corporate elite have increasingly bypassed both the civil service

and efected officiais over the last three decades. This has been accomplished by

'contracting out' the development and promotion of public policy to a stable of

ultraconservative technocrats and professional ideologues, thereby enabling millionaires

to directly set public policy. By 1980, the Heritage Foundation had assembled an annual

budget of $4 million and a staff of fifty-five. Located only five blocks from the Capitol,

Richard Viguerie (1980) notes that "analysis and backgrounders on current bills are hand-

delivered to members of Congress - sometirnes within a day of their introduction," Its

quarterIy publication Policy Review, Viguerie claims further, had already "been quoted by

nearly every major columnist in the nation and used as the basis for thousands of

newspaper editorials" by 1980 (68).

In the vanguard of corporate-conservative think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation

was launched in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and Joseph Coors, who provided a start-up gant

of $260,000. Adolph Coors Co. claims almost $1-5 billion in assets, and posted a profit of

$22.1 million in the first six months of 1985 (Paavo, 1990:6). The connections of the

Coors family to right-wing pressure groups, think tanks and extrernist organizations in the

United States, and their promotion of sexist, racist and anti-labour policies, are well

known. "The Washiizgton POS~has reported that Joseph Coors made a donation of over

$75,000.00 to a Swiss bank account used by Oliver North to channel money from Iranian arrns sales to the Nicaraguan contras." The forma1 relationship between the Reagan administration and the Coors-funded Heritage Foundation 0reflects Coors' importance as part of an inner-circle of Reagan advisors who came to be known as his

'kitchen cabinet.' The HF produced Mandate for Leadership (editions 1 and II) providing the basis for a significant amount of Reaganite poIicy. Mandate for Leadership 1, for exarnple, contained some 1,300 specific proposals (10). Joseph Coors was one of the planners who initially conceived the Strategic Defense Initiative in the offices of the

Heritage Foundation in 198 1 (Bodenheimer and Gould, 1989: 126)- Donors to the

Foundation, which had a budget of $1 1 million in 1987, now include " 100 of the United

States' 500 largest businesses, such as the Chase Manhattan Bank, Mobil Oil, Fluor

Corporation, Gulf Oil, Getty Oïl, Bechtel, G..D. Searle and Co, and Readers' Digest

Association (Paavo, 1WO:6). "Without the political sophistication of Paul Weyrich and a handful of his associates and without millions of dollars from Coors and other rightist corporate executives, the New Right never would have gotten off the ground

(Diamond, l!BO:%).

Extending the neo-Iiberal organizing principles of transnational capital required considerable planning, organization, and funding on a global scale. As Marchak (199 1) details, organizations included the Mont Pelerin Society in Geneva, the Kiel Economic

Institute in West Germany, and the Club de l'Horloge in France. In Britain, New Right think-tanks included the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the

Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute of Directors and the Aims of Industry. In North

America, the ideological and professional support system for the New Right also included the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, the Thomas Jefferson

Foundation Centre, the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Society for Individual Liberty and the Fraser Institute (93). Neo-Iibenl think-tanks developed a scholarly program and research agenda for lobbyists and policy advisors, and communicated with each other and a broadening circle of New Right opinion-leaders through popular magazines such as Libertarian Review, Libertarian Fontrzz, the Individttalist, Public

Interest, Plain Tmth, Reason, Fraser Currents, and the Objectivist. Scholarly forums and the Institute of Libertarian Studies assisted the New Right in penetrating the traditional acadernic circles of the public university system.

The Heritage Foundation is at the world epi-centre of an ernerging US.-based network of ultra-conservative think-tanks. For example, the American Enterprise Institute had grown from 12 researchers to 150 scholars and staff by 1987, and the Hoover

Institution's endowment was over $70 million (Paavo,1990:7-12). By 1986 the budget of the Heritage Foundation had reached $10 million (O'Maolain, L987:365). The Heritage

Foundation "led the effort to shape a 'common international agenda' for the New Right, compiling, for example, a yearly Guide to Public Policy Experts." A Resource Bank was also established, according to the Foundation's 1984 Annual General Report, "to bring this non-Washington expertise into the policy-making process." In an Australian presentation, Heritage Foundation president Dr. Edwin Feulner made the distinction between electoral politics and policy politics. Ken Coghill recounts that by policy politics,

Feulner "means the 'tree tops' and 'gassroots' campaigns to influence public opinion and set the political agenda which American corporations now fund continuously between elections." Feulner contends "it takes an institution to help propagandize an idea -- to market an idea," Coghill notes that "this development renders virtuall y meaningless the long struggle to reduce the inherent advantage of political parties representing wealth and

privelege by limiting, and publicly funding, election expenses" (Paavo,1990:7-12).

In part, the New Right was the political vanguard of a worldwide US.-led elite

response to what the Trilateral Commission called the "crisis of democracy." According

to a 1975 Trilateral study, an "excess of democracy" had led to "the reduction of

governrnental authority" at home and a "decline in the influence of democracy abroad."

The report urges more "moderation in democracy" since the "effective separation of a

democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-

involvement on the part of some individuals and groups" (Huntington in Sklar,1980:38).

As Chomsky (1989) has noted, what this really means is that "the general public must be

reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political

debate and action" (3).

The Trilateral idea was promoted by Zbigiew Brzezinski, the elite council's

founding director and former national security advisor to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, starting with the 1970 publication of his book Benveen Two Ages: AnzericaS Role in tjze

Technetronic Era. He defined the technetronic society as "a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics -- particularly in the area of computers and communication" (in

Sklar71980:76).Brzezinski redefined the notion of democracy itself in such a way as to depoliticize fundamental decisions and restrict its field of application and lirnit political participation to an ever narrower arena. As Laclau and Mouffe (1989) note, Brzezinski proposed "to 'increasingly separate the political system from society and to begin to conceive the two as separate entities.' The objective is to remove public decisions more and more from political control, and to make them the exclusive responsibility of experts." Brzezinski argues, according to Laclau and Mouffe, that his libertarian democracy would be "democracy not in terrns of exercising fundamental choices concerning policy-making but in the sense of maintaining certain areas of autonomy for individual self-expression." WhiIe "the democratic ideal is not openly attac ked, an attempt is made to empty it of al1 substance and to propose a new definition of democracy which in fact would serve to legitimize a regime in which political participation might be virtually non-existent" (173).

The Trilateral Commission was officially inaugurated in July 1973 after about three years of advocacy, consultations and meetings with the corporate elites of Europe,

Japan, and the US. (SkIar,1980:79). It brought together representatives of multinationa1 corporations, including media-capital such as CBS and Time (Marchak, 199 1: 1 12), and politicians and military and intelligence leaders from each of these first world power blocs. Claiming that "history shows that every effective international system requires a custodian" (Sklar,1980:5), the Commission boasts that al1 recent U.S. presidents, vice- presidents, and heads of the C.I.A. have been Trilateral members. A precursor to

TriIateralism was the Bilderberg Club, founded in 1954 to bring together "heads of state and other 'influentials' from Western Europe, the US., and Canada." At this point "Japan had not yet earned its place in the so-called 'club of advanced nations."' According to one

Commission organizer, in 1971 Bilderberg member David Rockefeller "'was getting womed about the deteriorating relations between the US., Europe and Japan, and initiated the process which led to the formation of the Trilaterat Commission." Rockefeller was an executive committee member, Chase and the other Rockefeller

institutions alone are mong the largest holders of American network stock, with

substantial interests in al1 three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The rise of Trilateralism refiected a powerful convergence of the economic

interests of an international investment class, including media capital, eager to restructure

and retain power over a changing global system, and the eIaboration of a legitimating

neo-Iiberal political ideology developed by a new generation of academic and

professional intellectuals at the service of this class (Marchak,1991: 109). The attempt to

return to a traditional conception of liberty which emphasizes "non-interference with the

right of unlimited appropriation and with the mechanisms of the capitalkt market

economy" was led by right-wing economists like Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman.

According to Hayek, "democracy (is) essentially a means, a utilitarian device for

safeguarding interna1 peace and freedom." Conceptions of positive liberty, and therefore

enabling state-interventions like affirmative action or wealth distribution, were ruled out

by definition. For Friedman, capitalism is the perfect democratic mechanism. It is, he

argues, "the only type of social organization which respects the principle of individual

liberty, as it constitutes the only economic system capable of coordinating the activities of a great number of people without recourse to coercion" (172).

While Trilateral corporate elites assembled the resources and personnel necessary to elaborate the New Right agenda across the advanced capitalist economies, the standard for constructing a winning democratic politics was being developed by the American

New Right. According to Richard Viguenefs(1980) insider expose of that movement, the

New Right emerged in 1974 as a response to the stagnation imposed on America's conservatism by its adherence to a narrow electoralism. As he put it "liberals practised

coalition politics successfully while conservatives limited themselves to the Republican

Party. No wonder we were such a small minority." The New Right's remedy, of course,

was to launch an arnbitious hegemonic offensive to appeal to "the bIue collar, ethnic,

Catholic, and other social conservative Democrats," as well as the thirty eight per cent of

U.S. voters who claimed to be independent (115- 1 17).

The American New Right's political project was a radical break with politics as

usual. Establishing conservative rnajorities in both parties required a major effort toward

cultural and political realignment. This required hundereds of millions of dollars in

financing, the establishment of a wide range of new conservative hegemonic agencies,

and of course a sophisticated multi-issue struggle to restore conservative moral and

inte!lectual authority -- in the mass media, in the schools, in the church and throughout the revolutuionary new 'national-popular' culture.

Viguerie's direct mail Company played an important role in Iaying the financial groundwork for a viable hegemonic offensive. As a marginal political force, the New

Right needed to assemble both its constituency and the financing to reach, organize, train and support it in the field. As Viguerie recounts, direct mail is an advertising as well as a fundraising tool. "It is the advertising medium of the underdog. It allows organizations or causes that are not part of the mainstream to get funding. Direct mail is the advertising medium of the non-establishment candidate" (124). Through direct-mail fundraising, financed on credit against projected returns, the New Right was able to achieve a critical financiaI mass for further organization-building and development. In 1980 Viguerie claimed a conservative mailing list of 4.5 million, and projected he would expand it by another four million by 1983. According to Viguerie "without direct mail, there wouId be

no effective counter-force to liberdism, and certainly there would be no New Right"

(120).

Another function of the New Right's mastery of direct mail financing was to

effectively purchase the prïmary loyalty of elected representatives despite formai party

allegiances. With the assistance of the New Right, many candidates Iaunched their own

fundraising campaigns independent of their national parties. Senator Jesse Helrns, for

example, raised almost seven million dollars from over 190,000 contributors in his 1978

re-election campaip. As a result, Viguerie claims "the national Republican Party has

next to no ability to influence Helms." By 1980, Helms' operation, The Congressional

Club, had assembled a permanent staff of forty, swelling to 150 in an election year, and

an annual budget of five million dollars by 1980- With its own mailing operation and

printing shop, the Congressional Club backed thirty conservative Congressional candidates in addition to an independent expenditure carnpaign for Ronald Reagan ( 109).

As a political movement of the right, the new authontarian populism also moved to cash in on their cornpetitive fundraising advantage with corporate America. The New

Right's campaign to subscribe corporate contributions was an important tactic in their longer-term strategy to consolidate their natural class core behind their rearticulated new brand of popular conservatism. Business and association Political Action Comrnittees

(PACs) were targeted, with New Right organizations actively soliciting for conservative candidates that support free enterprise and national defense- Investor confidence was stmcturally advanced in March 1977 when then Democratic President Jimmy Carter introduced reform legislation that would provide for easier voter registration and public financing of Congressional elections. The New Right seized the opening to draw their corporate and wealthy supporters' attention to the importance of outspending the liberals and to the New Right's growing power, fidelity to business interests, and maturity. After the New Right provoked a scanda1 by producing dummy voter I.D. cards to demonstrate the potential for fraud in Carter's instant registration scheme, the entire plan was withdrawn by a publicly embarassed and politically intimidated administration.

While the New Right's viability depended on consolidating the ideological and financial support of its corporate class core, the new tendency also needed to consolidate the dispersed and diverse intellectual currents of conse~atisminto a coherent ideological and cultural worldview. William F. Buckley Jr. is widely recognized for his vanguard role in forging the intellectual foundation for the New Right. According to conservative historïan George Nash, Buckley's National Review helped to reconcile the di fferences between li bertarian, tradi tionalist and anti-communist conservati ves, forging an integrated neo-conservatism in which each tendency, despite assorted tensions, was able to live peacefully in one unified camp. This re-unification of formerly sectarian conservative intellectual currents created another necessary condition for the muscular assertion of conservative populism. In Gramscian terms, the neo-conservative accord between the three rival tendencies was based on a new minimum basis of unity. The New Right, intellectually, was based on a 'hegemonic equivalence' that accornodated the movements' philosophical differences but emphasized its overall unity of general outlook and interests. A conception popularized by Laclau and Mouffe (1989), Grossberg (1992) descnbes this mode1 of alliance as a structure in which "each group maintains its own identity and interests, but those interests are subsumed as expressions of a broader principle which articulates the different groups into a common unified structure of

interest" (373).

The New Right successfully articulated each traditional conservative segment of opinion to an aspect of their new discourse. This rearticulation of 'conservative'

incorporated traditional conservative elements from their traditional ideological enclaves into an expanding hegemonic frontier, and incorporated already-existing leadership elements, publications and organizations under New Right hegemony. Gramsci described this process of incorporating potentially hostile leadership elements into established, oligarchical structures as 'transforrnismo' (Boggs, 197650). The profound significance of this ideologïcal accord, however, is that it provided the moral and intellectual sanction of conservative intellectuals to the New Right as it challenged the Republican Party for the status of official agent of conservatism.

But even more importantly, articulating and incorporating these elements of residual conservatism created the necessary conditions for the increasingly mature New

Right vanguard to construct an 'articdated alliance.' According to Grossberg (1992), this

"is the most ambitious (alliance strategy) because it attempts to constnict a new common identity which both transcends and transforms the identities of the various groups" (375).

By enlisting the support of the conservative intellectual vanguard, the ernerging ranks of the New Right usurped the Republican Party's daim to Ieadership of the movement. It also positioned itself for a broad-based 'war of position' as the New Right harnessed the energy and detemination of a11 three traditional conservative currents. The narrow electoralism of officia1 RepubIicanism proved to be no match for the unified, renewed ranks of the culturally expansive new conservatism. The efforts of the New Right vanguard to prepare, stnicturally and culturally, for

their hegemonic offensive reached their most strategically sophisticated expression in

their four-pronged assault on the authority claims of the progressive - liberal bloc. The

New Rijht energetically nurtured and supported the establishment of a wide range of

single issue groups, multi-issue groups, conservative groups, bi-partisan conservative

coalition politics, as well as the practice of direct mail (Viguerie, L980: 103). This was a

significant strategic advance over Republican strategists who jealously discouraged

independent political initiatives. They viewed such efforts as detracting from the party's

own base of support and authority.

While several of the New Right's specific campaigns to articulate their project to

an expanding constituency are detailed later in this chapter, what is fundamental about

this extra-parliamentary approach is the goal: to bypass official politics by encircling the

state culturally. In Grarnscian terms, the New Right constructed its histoncal bloc by

building a 'dual power' outside the established domain of conventional electoral politics.

This strategy based in civil society was designed to undermine liberalism from the gound

up. Recognizing that state-power was circumscribed by predorninantly liberal popular

values and attitudes that were shaped by the popular ferment of the sixties, the New Right

embarked on a cultural revolution to shift those worldviews in a conservative direction.

Like the rnanrist factory councils, newspapers and correspondence schools, which

Gramsci described half a century earlier, the forces of conservati ve restoration established

modem structures and activities similarly necessary to affirm and empower everyday conservatives in their discursive and practical struggles against liberalism. Iust as the

New Left had largely drawn on young adults and disaffected groups to articulate their rebellion against the status quo and used the universities as their strategic base of

operations, the New Right targetted families, largely through the churches, to popularize

their conservative discourse in terms of their concerns for stability and security. The empowerment effect of working with citizens who felt atomized, alienated and powerless

by the operations of the distant and remote corporate state on issues that conventional political strategists would deem trivial was significant. This organic new ideoIogy fed the popular groundswell that was eventuaily to see Reaganism through two full terms and the

Republicans in office for three consecutive terms.

The New Right strategy also included an attempt to disarticulate conventional attachments between the progressive-liberal bloc and its traditionai constituents. As

Viguerie (1980) claimed, "The New Right is working hard to separate the very different concerns of the AFL-CIO officiais in Washington from those of union leaders and mernbers in cities and towns across the country" (218). In contrast to conservatives' traditional focus on econornic and foreign policy, the New Right also built a populist moral vanguard to capitalize on hot button issues like busing, abortion, pornography, education, traditional Biblical mord values, and quotas. As issues without a clear class character, investing them with affective energy diverted Americans from the traditional left / right, bottom / top, Democnt / Republican polarities, This offensive was key in breaking conservative politics out from the class enclave to which it had retreated, renewing it as a popular, culturaIly expansive political force with majontarian aspirations.

Viguerie (1980) States the disarticulation / rearticulation strategy clearly: "we feeI that conservatives can not become the dominant political force in America until we stress the issues of concem to ethnic and bIue colla Americans, bom-again Christians and Jews"

(24 1 - 242).

As Apple (1989) has argued, New Right populism was largely built on the popular sense of loss, confusion over moral and intellectual standards, or what Gramsci called a

'crisis of authority.' As New Right Senator McClure said "It is essential that conservatives provide leadership for those disaffected from the power structure or someone else will"

(Viguerie,1980: 1 15). The New Right was ready to lead Americans, structurally and culturally, through this period of npid change and shifting noms and values by articulating a new 'common sense' that reaffirmed and empowered ordinary Amencans with a renewed sense of clarity, purpose and confidence. Like a religious revival, the New

Right articulated a doctrine of good and evil in which only faith in traditional values could Save the nation. New Right leader Donald Lukens once commented that fundarnentalist Christians made excellent campaign workers because "they took their campaign cornmitment as a solemn personal responsibility" (162). In an eight month period leading up to Reagan's 1980 election, "New Christian Right organizations including the Moral Majority registered 2.5 million new voters" (161).

The New Right built their affective alliance with Christian traditionalists by developing new organizations such as the Religious Roundtable. An adaptation of the corporatist strategy deployed through the Business Roundtable, it asssembled 150 major

Christian leaders for quarterly two day meetings. Within this ensemble of Christian organizations, the New Right also worked hard to establish a vanguard group, the Moral

Majonty, to provide leadership to the emerging movement. Jerry Fal weIl was assisted by

New Right leaders Paul Weyrîch and Howard Phillips in the establishment of the Moral Majority (162). Weyrich successfully predicted that "farnily issues in the eighties could be

what Vietnam was in the sixties and environmental and consumer issues were in the

seventies for the left" (196).

While the role of evangelical Christians in the New Right coalition has often been

overshadowed by the role of capital, it is instructive to note the important role of this

constituency in mobilizing church congregations, just as traditional left wing movements

focused on the labour movement, both as an organizing base and a central nodal point in

their own parallet communications strategies. While Paul Weyrkh is recognized as a

godfather of the New Right in the US., and is clearly tied to corporate elite circles,

particularly through his leading role in founding the Heritage Foundation, he "stresses organizing the middle and working classes on religious and social issues instead of on economic issues" (Paavo,1990:6). This has proven to be an important terrain of struggle

for the American New Right. As Diamond reports "20 to 40 miIIion U.S. citizens claim to be 'boni-again' meaning that evangelical Chnstians are the largest minonty group in the country" (1990:vi). Weyrich played a leading role in building the "complex coalition of media ministries, political lobbies and missionary groups active in foreign affairs"

@iarnond, l990:45) known as the New Christian Right.

Weyrîch has played a leading role in shaping the religious right into a dynamic political force by fomenting moral panics over the decline of conservative authority and inciting affective epidemics toward key New Right issues. Weyrich conceived the name

'Moral Majority' and founded the organization of the same narne with tele-evangelist Jerry

Falwell. He has been a leader in the National Right to Life Cornmittee (NRLC), and the Life Amendment Political Action Committee (LIPAC) which seeks to elect pro-life candidates and defeat pro-choice candidates.

Joseph Coors CO-foundeda political action committee called the Free Congress

Foundation. Like Weyrich's Committee for a Free Congress, forrned to elect right-wing candidates to federal office, the Foundation provides financiaI assistance to conservative candidates. The Foundation trained over 7,000 workers for the Moral Majorïty, Phyllis

Schlafly's Eagle Forum and vanous anti-choice and anti-union campaigns modenheimer and Gould, 1989: f 12).

Abortion played an important role in the New Right electord strategy to unite conservatives of various ethnic and class backgrounds, and to mobilize millions of conservative Americans who had never before participated in politics. Organic intellectuals of the New Christian Right, including Weynch and Richard Viguerie, "the political technician who turned abortion into an issue that made the Christian Right a mass movement," "realized that the kind of sentiments aroused by the abortion issue could be used in the sarne way that the 'persona1 politics' of the sixties and early seventies had galvanized the feminist and progressive movements." "Feminists saw legalized abortion as a civil right, a necessary first step in the movement for womens' sovereignty over their own lives. From the opposite side, Viguene and his cohorts saw abortion as a syrnbol for sexual perrnissiveness and the humanist ethic which places individual moral decision-making over church and state authorities. Opposition to abortion could be used to spearhead an ideological assault on the entire feminist agenda and, by association, on

IiberaIism i tself' (Diamond, l99O:V). WhiIe Diamond has demonstrated that religious broadcasting has been the single most important factor in the growth of the New Christian Right, its mass communications system is highly diversified, including strong publishing capacities and circulation figures, While Christian anti-communism has a long history, the origins of the New

Christian Right as a specific new political force have in fact been traced to the 1974

"formation of Third Century Publishers, established for the purpose of promoting books and study guides designed to Iink a comprehensive political agenda with bom-again

Christianity" (49). Viguerie himself founded Conservative Digest in 1974. "Viguerie has often described his role as side-stepping the 'liberal establishment media' which, he feels, have systematicaIly excluded his version of right-wing populism from newspapers and airwaves" (58). One evangelical organization, Focus on the Farnily, apart from its radio broadcasts and book distribution, reaches over two million people through the organization's ten magazines. Each Focus magazine is targetted to a specific audience segment -- one for radio listeners, two for young children, three for teenagers, one each for parents, teachers and physicians and one for political activists. B y October 1980, the

Moral Majody Report's circulation was 482,000 (Diamond, l994:32-60).

Through the structurat and cultural politics of the New Christian Right, the New

Right was able to do sigificant2y more than 'incorporate' born-again Christians and significant Christain traditionalists into their hegemonic bloc. With an organized, culturally expansionist conservative Christian movement within its alliance, the New

Right was able to extend the hegemonic frontier beyond the Christian Right to a much wider constituency. One example is the New Right's success mobilizing an affective aIIiance of concerned parents around 'famil y values.' The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was founded in 1985 by four

Washington wives, including those of Senator Albert Gore and Secretary of State James

Baker. It claims that "too many of today's rock artists -- through radio, records, television

videos, videocassettes -- advocate aggressive and hostile rebellion, the abuse of drugs and

alcohol, inesponsible sexuality, sexual perversions, violence and involvernent in the

occult" (Grossberg,1992:6). The PMlRC has been in the conservative cultural vanguard,

leading a dnmatic attack on rock culture. By invoking traditional family values, the

PMRC legitimates parents' revulsion with youth taste-cul tures. It provides them with

rationalizing discourses and techniques to re-assert parental control and authority. The

empowement effects of restoring disciplinary authority in the home has been effectively

articulated to an authoritarïan politics based on the restoration of 'traditionat values' in the

public sphere.

By demonizing, and positioning itself in opposition to, popular youth culture, the

PMRC has aIso played an important role in constructing an affective epidemic. It is based

on 'parental leadership' to restore 'traditional family values.' Grossberg has defined this

concept: "like a moral panic, once an affective epidemic is put into place, it is seen

everywhere, displacing every other possible investment. But, unlike moral panic, such

epidemics are not always negatively chased." Whi le the PMRC has effective1y

institutionalized a moral panic, it has also created the need for a defense or a 'magical

solution.' Grossberg notes that "the most powerful affective epidemic in the

contemporary US. is organized around and across the family." The expansion of the

fundamentalist Focus on The Family reflects the dialectic through which mord panics (in this case, the 'generation at risk') feed affective epidemics (in this case, the restoration of the traditional farnily). With clear connections to the PMRC, Focus has institutionalized

the affective epidemic around the family, fundameritally transforming the tems of

political debate as social problems are reduced to family problems, and individual rights

and liberties are displaced by traditional îàmily values (Grossberg,1992:284-289).The

institutionalization and expansion of the PMRC and Focus provide one example of the

complex, conservative cultural politics which has disciplined public opinion, and

revolutionized civil society in recent years @iamantopouIos,l993: 11-14).

In a petiod of economic, social, and family crisis (Conway,1999), the New Right

diverted the widespread cnsis of authority to a moral panic over assorted folk devils

which they claim threaten the family. By constructing affective investment in the defense

of traditional farnily values, this movement has been able to extend the hegemonic

frontier to a broader defense of the 'Amerïcan way af life' against feminism and

liberalism. By appealing to Our craving for stability, order and security these forces have

constructed a powerful new affective epidemic that has narrowed the range of discourse

available in the public sphere and established the moral authonty of the New Right,

Just as the New Right vanguard worked closely with new religious conservative

organizations to establish the moral authority of the New Right, they also worked to build

up a dual power within the educational order to establish the movement's intellectual

authority. Their strategic conception, as articulated by Viguerie, however, is built largely on Gramsci's distinction between the 'traditional intellectual,' and the 'organic intellectual.' Gramsci's ideal-typical 'traditional intellectual' is a technical or academic rationalist who analyses from afar and above the realities of popular classes' everyday lives in a distant and remote think tank or university, speaking in a highly specialized dialect inaccessible to most ordinary people. By contrast, an 'organic intelIectua1' is a member of the popular classes who relates directly to their everyday concems and common sense, 'speaks their language,' and is able thereby to both reflect their problems and options, and lead their strategies.

The New Right, as we have seen, took exceptional measures to cultivate a professional cadre of traditional intellectuals. They staffed their think-tanks and produced the 'treetops propaganda' the New Right targeted to elite-opinion. But the New Right also worked hard to cultivate organic intellectuals at the movement's gmssroots. Just as

Gramsci had once argued for anti-fascist correspondence schools and factory councils, so too did the New Right's revolutionary vanguard adopt a decentralist and developmental strategy for empowering gassroots leadership and developing 'organised elements' within popular organizations. Liberals and the left were stranded by this populist strategy as they increasingly appeared to be the elitists, imposinz hierarchical political structures from above the realm of the popular classes' everyday lives. Viguene's distinction between

'spokesmen' and 'leaders' refiects the classical Gramscian distinction between the traditional and organic intellectual. Viguerie writes, "A leader will rnake things happen, he will start a new organization or a new magazine. He will cal1 meetings, suggest assiprnents, then call a follow-up meeting to review the progress ... for many years conservatives had spokesrnen but very few leaders" (1980239). Viguerie claims that "the level of cornpetence in conservative campaigns shot up dramatically" as a result of investment in gnssroots leadership training. New Right groups, including the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the National Political Action Committee, Citizens for the Republic and the Committee for Responsible Youth Politics organized about a hundred training schools and seminars in 1977 - 1978 alone (96).

The New Right's promotion of grassroots leadership, through its complex network of single issue and constituency groups, created a new base of popular participation or

'dual power' in civil society. In addition to attracting leadership elements to its expanding hegemonic bloc and incorporating single issue voters, the cultivation of organic intellectuals also extended the New Right's hegemonic frontier beyond this social bloc.

Just as the New Right was able to extend its moral authority beyond its Christian traditionalist base by constructing an affective alliance with concemed parents around

'family values,' a similar strategy extended the New Right's intellectrial authority well beyond its single issue and conservative constituencies. In large part, this was achieved by disarticulating the relationship between liberal - progressive intellectuals and the popular mass. By characterizing them as cloistered and snobbish, the New Right was able to discredit left and liberal opinion by definition. Just as the New Right's moral panic over a generation placed at risk by dissident artists drove concerned parents toward the family values discourse, the moral panic incited against politically-correct intellectuals drove resentful Americans toward the neo-conservative's 'cornmon sense' discourse.

The political correctness panic encouraged 'closet conservatives,' soft conservatives and the 'open-minded confused' to become affectively aligned with comrnitted conservatives in a backlash against the repressive elitism of professional elites, particularly state-bureaucrats and left-wing intellectuals. This articulation struck a chord among working and under-class families. It redeemed a persona1 sense of dignity and intelligence against a meritocratic class society which encourages non-elite populations to doubt themselves (Cobb and Sennett: 1973). One ultra-conservative goup,

Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform (C-FAR), used the moral panic over "PC tyranny" as a foi1 for the promotion of an emboldened racism. Declaring that Canada is "a nation of patsies?" C-FAR leader Pau1 Fromm calls on a few good men to 'stop apologizing' while

"weaklings tum and run" (Diamantopoulos, 1993: 11). From Rush Limbaugh to Jesse

Ventura, brazenly breaching the repressive noms of 'political correctness' became a new affective epidemïc.

The successful orchestration of the backlash against 'political correctness' in the

U.S. provides a revealing case-study in the workings of the New Right's agenda-setting apparatus. According to Laura Fraser, "the critique of the politically-correct was fathered by wrïters on the Establishment right, notably Allan BIoom (The Closing of the Anlericm

Mind), Roger Kimball (Tenrired Radicals), and .. . Dinesh D'Souza (iZliberal Edication)."

She also reports that "it was nurtured by such organizations as Accuracy in Academia (an offshoot of Accuracy in Media)." The president and several board-members of this group were members of the World Anti-Communist League. D7Souzaalso authored the biography of Moral Majonty leader and tele-evangelist Jerry Falwell (Diamond, 1990:60).

Since 1988, D'Souza has been on the payroll of the conservative think-tank, the

American Enterprïze Institute. Before that, he worked for a short penod with another right-wing organization, the Hentage Foundation until he was called upon to serve the

Reagan administration as a senior policy analyst focusing on domestic issues. While in university, D'Souza edited one of America's most conservative campus newspapers, The

Dan'nzocirlz Review. Along with dozens of other conservative campus newspapers, the Review is funded by the Madison Centre for Educational Affairs (MCEA). The Center itself, CO-foundedunder ir ts present name by Allan Bloom, is financed "by some of the nation's largest corporati~ns,including Mobil Oil, Dow Chemical, and Chase Manhattan

Bank. The foundations oE the conservative movement - Oh,Scaife, Coors, and Smith

Richardson -- also contribute to the MCEA." Through the Center's Collegiate Network, the MCEA's contributors support the work of 64 papers on 57 campuses. Support services include: a detailed manuail on starting and maintaining a conservative periodical; a monthly newsletter; free syndicated columns from such conservative heavyweights as

Walter Williams and ultra right-wing Republican leadership candidate Patrick Buchanan; al1 expense paid regional . and national conferences; and connections to over 60 right-wing think-tanks, magazines, amd organizations. In addition to the MCEA's Editonal Intemship

Prognm which places rigkht-wing student joumalists in media outlets such as Znsight magazine, NBC News, amd the New Reprrblic. it aIso sponsors the Students' Forum, an association of minority stiudents "who do not support the reigning radical agenda."

Closely linked, in turn, wZth the Madison Center is the National Association of Scholars

(NAS), also funded by prominent rïght-wing foundations. NAS has been described by the

Wall Street Jountal as "am organization leading the struggle to preserve acadernic freedom, currently under seige in our universities."

In addition to the campus-based offensive, the ideological trickle-down against political correctness to tallk-shows and mainstream U.S. magazines like the Atlantic, New

York, Tinze, Neivnveek, th1 e New Repriblic and then their Canadian counterparts and ideological subsidiaries lilke Macleans helped to tip the scales of North American political culture even further against the left intelligentsia, the popular movements, and their social projects.

The nature of the conformist backlash against political correctness needs to be understood in tems of the systematic and weI1-financed carnpaign for conservative restoration sponsored by capital and the right, and in tems of their institutional capacity for agenda-setting. Like the anti-comrnunist McCarthy hearings, this anti-PC backlash also needs to be understood as a modernized strategy for recalibrating post-Cold War political culture. By defining liberals and the left as a new "official enemy," such activists were less effective in pursuing new opportunities (the peace dividend, socialized medicine, war on poverty, extension of welfare state, employment equity, electoral finance reform, and so on). The threat posed to American values and academic freedom by the "PC thought police," forced Arnerican popular movements and left-intellectuals into next-to-impossi ble defensive maneuvers. As Barbara Ehrenreic h has suggested, the bogey-man PC is a "necessary illusion" to help dominant classes neutralize and contain domestic conflict. She writes "When Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and

Eastern Europe, 1knew there would have to be a replacement for it -- because the

Amencan right requires an evil, all-powerful ideological enemy. And so 1 waited, wondering what would replace the international Cornrnunist conspiracy" (in

Bennan, 1992333).

The PC debate, in short, heIped to pre-empt the development of a new student movement and neutralized an emerging radical intelligentsia. It helped consolidate campus conservatism by discredi ting non-Establishment in tellectuals and constraining the expression of dissenting views. It aIso served to build support on-campus for an intra-

institutional 'rollback' strategy that targetted womens' studies, multi-cultural

progamming, tenure-protection, and the so-called 'left-wing takeover of the universities.'

For the general pubtic, the pacification campais reinforced distrust of dissenting

intellectuals and created a favourable climate for restructuring their privileged haven.

In summary, the politicai correctness 'war of position,' like that of the affective epidernic around the family, had important consequences for expanding the New Right's hegemonic frontier. Part of a broader 'war of position,' these efforts were undergirded by important institution-buiIding activity. The New Right's extension of the conservative hegemonic apparatus in the post-sixties period has not merely introduced new institutions ont0 the terrain of hegemonic struggle; it has also had a significant and strategic impact on the activities and ideologies of those hegemonic institutions - other than the state -- that were already in existence. Corporate-hegemonic efforts in this penod have attempted to place sustained and systematic pressure not only on the state but on hegemonic institutions such as the schook and media as well. New conservative institutions such as

Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academe, for example, have focused on re-aligning the established and institutionalized practices of the mass media and educational orders with the new moral and intellectual pnnciples of elite interests.

In this chapter, hegemony analysis of the New Right in the U.S. has highlighted the role of corporate elites in launching year round and between elections propaganda campaigns. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in New Right think-tanks in order to elaborate a more comprehensive and systematic expression of their interests in recent years. Through a global network of elite roundtables, foundations, research institutes, scholarly forums and magazines, an ernergent New Right intelligentsia has identified broadly resonant themes and developed the grassroots propaganda materials necessary for constructing a coherent ideology and viable mass politics. It has also cultivated a neo-conservative ideological orientation arnong acadernic, media and state personnel through more detailed, technical applications of sectoralIy-specific public policy proposals or so-called treetops propaganda.

We have also seen that, domestically, the Amencan New Right, evolved specific hegemonic methods and mechanisms to provoke 'crises of authority,' both against the rival Republican-partisan faction of the conservative movement and against the welfare- state, liberal-hegemonic bloc. Arnong the innovations designed to build the moral and intellectual authonty of the New Right were direct mail, specialty media (Le., religious broadcasting), political segmentation (Le., the New Christian Right), single issue politics

(i.e., abortion) and coaIition politics (Le., family values movement).

The rearticulation of residual American conservative currents (Republicanism, libertarianism, social conservatism, anti-communism) into a synthetic and expansive new worldview and political movernent required a sophisticated and multi-pronged institution- building and ideological strategy, sensitive to the potential for articulated alliances, and for disciplined mobilizations of public opinion.

In contrast to the socially-emptied 'correspondence theory7 of traditional marxism's base-superstructure conception, hegemony analysis of the Amencan New

Right highlights the key role of hegemonic institutions and active political will and cultural practice in the rise to dominance of the New Right's moral and intellectual order.

Hegernony theory applied to this case increases sociological sensitivity to the actual, complex and diverse forces and mechanisms at work in the conception and development of the New Right phenomenon. It also provides a useful historical context for the emergence of the Canadian New Right, which although unique in political form and content, derived largely from the efforts and institutions which preceded it in the US. A SILENT REVOLUTION:

The Canadian Case

The Canadian New Left, including its 'underground press,' dramaticaIly weakened

corporate hegemony between the rnid-sixties and rnid-seventies (Kostash, 1980;

Vertuh, 1989). The successful articulation of an expansive New Left counter-hegemonic

bloc led, in turn, to elite efforts to shore up the public image of corporations operating in

Canada. Joyce NeIson (1989) has documented the tise of corporate public relations in this

penod as an attempt to reverse the negative perceptions of business held by Canadians. In

addition to the move toward corporate advocacy advertising, "the great corporate speak

out," as Nelson calls it, significant resources were put into building parallel institutions

designed to enhance the corporate sector's lorrg-term capacity to maintain dominance on

public policy questions. Rather than focus on controlling party-elites and the state

apparatus exclusively, new corporate strategies to encircle, place limits on, and influence

democratic institutions and the exercise of state-power emerged. This parallel institution building effort to shore up corporate hegemony in Canada reflected the structural, institutional and cultural reaIities specific to Canada, but was also part of the world-wide, elite response to the "crisis of democracy" during the hte sixties.

In Canada under Mulroney the neo-conservative hegemonic effort was largely rorporatist rather than populist in character. It was mainly a defensive effort to regain moral and intellectual authonty undemined by the popular ferment of the sixties and the upsurge of the centre-left NDP. WhiIe their Amencan counterparts launched a confident and assertive effort to build on their nation's traditional conservative majority, the

Canadian New Right faced a public ideologically resistant, even hostile, to its agenda.

The Mulroney Tories were roundly crïticised by British and US. neo-conservatives for

their cautious, plodding approach (Black,1993:390). The fact is, however, that Canadians

were as repulsed by the flamboyant and triumphalist manner of the Reaganites and

Thatcherites as they were suspicious of their reckless revolution against the post-war

accord between capital and labour. Proceeding cautiously with a "silent revoIution" was a

poIitically expedient strategy in the Canadian context (Winter, 1990).

UnIike their U.S. predecessors, the Canadian New Right confronted entrenched

resistance from a variety of fronts: a much stronger trade union movement, particularly in the public sector, that was formaily allied to a viâble centre-left political Party; distinctive social prcgrams (like medicare) and public institutions (like the CBC), which enjoyed broad-based popular support and were a source of national pride; a more democratic or

'deveIopmenta17 state, which funded a wide range of non-governmental organizations to encourage popular participation; and strong left populist traditions. A cornmitment to the

'preferential option for the poor' was well rooted in both Canadian Catholicism and

Protestant churches, whire the hucksterism and uncompromising extrernism of born-again evangelism was viewed with distaste by the more reserved Canadian populace. Finally,

Canadian nationalism had long been negatively articulateci to the menacing presence of its southern neighbour and its expansionist free enterprise ideology. Al1 of these factors militated against rapid expansion of the New Right's hegemonic bloc in Canada. While the 1988 free trade election signaled the Iarunch of a breathtaking

hegemonic offensive to continentalize the country's 'natiïonal popular' culture, these

structural reforms were largely introduced 'behind the baicks7 of the electorate. With

significant regional exceptions under Vander Zalm in B.=. and Devine in Saskatchewan,

and later under Hamis in Ontario and Klein in Alberta, the pre-free trade federal Tories or

'first wave neo-cons' led a fundamentally managerial and technocratic revolution in

Canada. The short-terrn success of this strategy, as we wriill see, also created the lori,-= tenn conditions for the Tories' federal collapse, creating a populist opening to the Right for the

Reform Party. In this complex series of regional advances and retreats, each of which conditioned and in tum was conditioned by the federal palitical situation, the New Right was able fundamentally to reshape the nation,

As McQuaig (1992) has explained, side deals extaending a foreign bank license to

Arnerican Express, and the introduction of a bill to overhiaul the country's generic drug laws were not part of the public free trade debate but secuired U.S. penetration of the

Canadian market in these critical sectors (159,207-212). INeither of these measures were put to the 'democratic test,' indicative of the New Right's - 'passive revolution.' Even with the Free Trade Agreement itself, the main election issue En 1988, the Tories adopted a fundamentally defensive rather than populist strategy. Th-is reflected the Tories' fear of an aroused, inforrned electorate. With a population historica-lly wary of U.S. interests and tending toward moderate reformism rather than laissez faire economics, the New Right in

Canada simply faced an ideologically and culturally more fortified population (Saul,

1997). Rick Salutin (in Winter, 1988) noted, as a conseqmence, that the communications strategy on the free trade agreement was profoundly anti-uiemocratic. Tt was based on arousing minimum necessary debate and maintaîning "communications control of the

situation." According to a document Ieaked from the Prime Minister's Office, the

Mulroney government's plan was to avoid substantive issues and concerns from the public in favour of a "selling job."

Our communications strategy should rely less on educating the general public than on getting across the message that the trade initiative is a go06 idea. In other words, a selling job. The public support generated should be recognized as extremely soft and li kely to evaporate rapidly if the debate is allowed to get out of control, so as to erode the central focus of the message. At the same time a substantial majority of the public may be willing to leave the issue in the hands of the government and other interested groups, if the government maintains communications control of the situation. Benign neglect from a majority of Canadians may be the realistic outcome of a well-executed communications program (Prime Ministers Office Memo quoted in Winter, 1988:46-47).

The country was, of course, deeply divided on free trade, but the consensus and solidarity of the nation's newspapers was tmly stunning. Only one daily nation-wide, the

Toronto Star, opposed the deal. While the opposed forces failed to defeat the ruling

Tories in the 1988 free trade election, Brian Mulroney, who registered the lowest public approval ratings of any Canadian prime minister in history, was forced from the party leadership before the next eIection but not before forcing NAFïA through the House of

Commons. In 1992, the Conservatives, then led by Kim Campbell, were swept dramatically out of office. The Spicer Commission revealed that the delegitimized administration had indeed lost "communications control" of the popuIation, albeit belatedly, and that the actual consequences of economic restructuring were at the nerve centre of popular discontent.

(Canadians) still look to their governments to insulate thern from international economic forces, despite the fact that Canadian governments, including the federal government, have been emphasizing the need to adapt and adjust to market forces. Privatization, dereguhtion, the Free Trade agreement, the Mexican trade initiative and reinforced attempts to achieve expanded GATT agreements are al1 cases in point. As a result, many [Canadians] feel betrayed and bereft and are confused and ana-- Part of this is due to their sense that traditional Canadian values are being usurped by market forces and that governments are doing nothing to deal with these (Spicer Commission quoted in Panitch, l993:4),

The 1988 free trade election in Canada provides an important case study in development sabotage communication. Continental capitalist organizations such as the

Business Council on National Issues, the Chamber of Commerce, front-groups like the

Canadian Alliance for Jobs and Trade, think-tanks likè the Fraser Institute and C.D.

Howe Institute and pressure groups such as the National Citizens' Coalition, were al1 mobilized along with corporate media outlets in an effort to neutralize popular domestic opposition. It was an onslaught difficult to resist, particularly given the continental character of communications domination in Canada. A powerful force in the nation's dependent communications and cultural development, this is even more true in the post free trade era as "culture is no longer available as a rationale for govemment intervention" and the state is mandated to withdraw infrastructural supports for Canadian culturd industries (Patrick, 1989: 105- 106). Canadians presently live in a cultural-informational environment which is dominated, not only by a highly concentrated Canadian media elite, but which is already flooded by the products of US. culture industries, from films to CDS to books and magazines.

The New Right's 'war of positions,' in Canada, like the U.S., has been orchestrated through parallel institutions such as the National Citizens' Coalition, the Business Council on National Issues, and the Fraser Institute. In additkon to promoting an intensified neo-

corporatism which has further incorporated social institutions, particularly the educationai

order and the media, into the new cultural-ideological-moral order, this infrastructure has

also enabled elites to directly popularize the renovated 'organizing pnnciplesf of the new

restructured political economy, creating a new 'naticrnal populaf culture. In January 1983

Tom d'Aquino, Chief Executive Officer of the Business Council on Nationai Issues

(BCNI) unveiled the Counci 1's "program of reconstruction." The corporate blueprint

called for "fundamental change in some of the attitudes, some of the structures and some

of the laws that shape our lives." The BCNI's new pnogram was to dismantle the "broad

consensus" behind "the greater priority that Canadims put on social welfare." "The

Canadian economy will have more difficulty compeaing with the U.S. if the private sector

has to support a government sector which has been allowed to get too far out of line" (in

McQuaigJ992: 114-1 15).

While the implantation of U.S. based moral-religious organization in Canada is

less advanced, extensive efforts have also been made in Canada to advance Weyrich's

strategy to organize around religious and social issues (Diamantopoulos:1994). Unlike the

U.S. context, however, opposition to the Free Trade Agreement, led by a stronger left-

nationalist alliance, lent the New Right revolution a =clex class and imperial character and

economic focus from the outset. Also, rather than a historic ally of Canadian

conservatism, the church in Canada has posed serious, intermittent threats to corporate

hegemony (Lind, 1994; Bleyer, 1993). Right-wing crirics of United Church theology, for example, frequently refer to it as 'the NDP at prayer, ' As the Business Council on

National Issues' Chief Executive Officer Thomas d'Aquino told the Toronto Empire Club in January 1983, the BCNl's "program of reconstruction" was a "'business response' to a

report highly critical of the power and concentrated wedth of the corporate sector by the

Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during the 1982 recession7'

(McQuaig: 1992: 1 13).

While concerted efforts to counter the justice work of left-wing Catholics and the

United Church have reinforced the links between Christian publications, such as the

Western Report newsmagazine goup, broadcasting, conservative foundations and conservative political parties, the growth of the New Christian Right in Canada was stunted by the residuaI culture of the social gospel and liberation theoIogy influences on mainstream Canadian Christianity. Nonetheless, the New Christian Right played a significant role in the rise of the Canadian New Right, Obvious exarnples include

Alliance Church members Preston Manning, Ieader of the federal Refom Party and former B.C. Social Credit premier Bill Vander Zalm.

It was in 1973, the same year that the Trilateral Commission and the Heritage

Foundation were launched, that some B.C. businessmen, headed by 1.P- Boyle, then a

MacMillan Blodel vice president, decided to counter the socialist rise in Manitoba,

Saskatchewan and B.C.. A year and a half later, the Fraser Institute was founded in

Vancouver. Capitalized by MacMillan Blodel, the Canadian Pacific conglornerate and 14 other corporate backers, the Institute had built a base of 450 contnbuting corporations, including media-capital, by 1987. According to the last list of corporate donors made public in 1989, more than haIf of Canada's one hundred most profitable corporations contributed to the Institute. Its 1996 board of directors incIuded Canadian press baron and New Right ideologue Conrad Black's wife Barbara Amie1 Black, who also published a regular column in the widely circulated Maclean's magazine, and his business partner and

Hollinger CE0 David Radler. With an annual budget of $2.35 million, 17% from directly foreign sources, and a staff of 22, the Fraser Institute places substantial agenda-setting capacity at the disposa1 of continental corporate power (Dobbin,1998: 182- 196).

Discussions within the Canadian Manufacturers' Association and the Canadian

Charnber of Commerce led to the Iaunch of another new corporate pressure goup in

1976. It would also counter the kind of charges leveled by the new left, the 'underground press,' the NDP1s'corporate welfare bums' campai@, and the Catholic Bishop's statement

(McQuaig,1992) by promoting positive coverage of business and re-establishing its moral and intellectual leadership. Modeled after the US. Business Roundtable, which was founded by 168 top CEO's in 1972, the Business Council on National Issues brought the

CEO's of Canada's major corporations together. Its 150 CEOs oversee 1.5 million ernployees and $700 billion in assets (McQuaig,1987: 192).

The new strategic alliances between state-elites and corporate elites that iargely defined the neo-corporatism of the New Right moved well beyond the simple circulation of political leadership through the revolving door of corporate directorships

(OIsen,1980:39). It included innovative institutional arrangements for joint research, such as the BCWfederal government study on Canada's cornpetitive strengths and weaknesses. It included the joint execution of communications strategies, such as the

Alliance for Jobs and Trade Opportunities collaboration with the Progressive

Conservative's free trade campai p.And it i ncluded sophisticated exercises in joint corporate / state direction-setting, such as the Corporate Higher Education Forum. That sectoral roundtable brought business executives, govemment representatives and univeni ty presidents, most of w hom also hold corporate directorships, toget her to set pnorities and policy for higher education.

In addition to creating the space and applying the pressure for political leaders to implement the New Right agenda, there has also been an important commitment toward the development of a stable of corporate technocratic intellectuais and an increasing move toward 'contracting-out' substantial aspects of the policy-making process itself. When the

Social Credit administration in B.C. introduced its July 7, 1983 budget and accompanying

26 pieces of neo-conservative legislation, for example, Michael Walker did not deny the

Fraser Institute's role in fomulating the govemment's approach. Instead he said "we told them what they should do in very specific terms based on Our work of the past 10 years"

(Diamantopoulos, l99O:S 1-25).

The sarne processes, as we have seen, are at work at the federal level. MichaeI

Waiker was also a trade advisor, for example, to former Prime Minister Bnan Mulroney and advocated that the federal govemment follow Margaret Thatcher's lead and introduce a poll ta, years before the unveiling of the GST (Paavo,1990: 10). An August 1988 policy paper prepared for the Business Council on National Issues (BCM) provided the basis for

Michael Wilson's September 1988 economic blueprint. The Fraser Institute hosted an international conference on privatizing crown corporations in the summer of 1987. In

1989, following a similar initiative at the conservative Washington think-tank, the Cato

Institute, the Fraser Institute sponsored a "conference on the Privatization and Deregulation of Canada Post" @iamantopoulos,l990:25). That was only one of eleven

conferences sponsored by the Institute that year (Dobbin,1998: 196)-

Corporate think-tanks have not only played an important role in influencing public

opinion. They have also worked in close CO-operation with the state-elite, helping to

integate and harmonize govemment and business activities. Like the Fraser Institute,

other class-based agencies have also worked to shape public opinion and public poIicy in

accordance with the interests of large-scale, typically export-oriented and often foreign-

controlled, private enterprize. Typically, they have worked to create "moral panics" (such

as global cornpetition or deficit hysteria) in which popular opinion is focussed on the

need for government action, and then the policy-options sponsored by the corporate sector

are promoted as magical solutions (free trade; cuts to health, education, and social

spending).

With the benefits of Canada's more dense social network of corporate directors

and much more concentrated mass media, the consent of the broader public for New

Right reforms has been in large part engineered 'from above.' In 1996, for example, the

Fraser Institute reported 3,108 references to the Institute in the media, a 5 1% increase over the previous year (DobbinJ998: 192). In the absence of popular research and mass

media capacities, the Canadian experience shows how difficult it is to contest corporate power to define what social problems are legitimate, and which state rneasures should be taken, even when counter-hegemonic movments enjoy broad public support. By maintaining corporate hegemony from campaign-to-carnpaign and issue-to-issue, public debate and the possibte elaboration of alternative ideologîcal worldviews or organizing principles was drarnatically narrowed by the New Right.

The debt panic was initially manufactured by the Business Council on National

Issues to starnpede public opinion behind a post-free trade harmonization agenda which would achieve the objectives of its 'program of reconstmction'. This included major reductions in social spending After the September 1984 election, Michael Wilson released an economic bluepnnt paper which, McQuaig notes "bore an uncanny resemblance to the BCNI's August 1984 proposals" (McQuaig,1992: 133). The hidden corporate agenda was quickly legitimated and transformed into an affective epidemic for deeper cuts, more cuts, faster cuts by a population which had been propagandized into a mass hysteria.

As McQuaig (1992) notes, Mulroney, "who had shrewdly kept quiet on the subject of deficit-reduction during his campai gn...quickly became a crusader after the election ...in speech after speech." The debt and deficit, it has been widely argued, are

'cover-terms' which provide the excuse for a thoroughgoing, IMF-style structural adjustment of the post-free made national economy, including its social programs. As

McQuaig argues "business had to tread carefully. Using a battering ram against something that enjoyed a 'broad consensus' of support was poor politics, and was likely to rdly the country to its defence. So a frontaI assault against social spending was out. What was needed was sornething that attacked from an unprotected flank, sornething that would lead to cuts in social spending without coming right out and saying so, something like ..,well ...the deficit" (1 19,124). The debt-panic and its constmcted solution, an affective epidemic for cutbacks, soon spread to the provincial and municipal jurisdictions as federal responsibilities were down-loaded, and transfer payments CUL Although the agenda was already set by the

BCNI, provincial governments developed their own framing strategies under pressure from an increasingl y active and organized conservative movement, particularl y

Taxpayers' Associations and the Reforrn Party, launched in 1987.

The message was clear that there was no alternative. Cuts could be modest or severe, but there had to be cuts. Taxpayers' Asssociations and Reformers played a dual role in cheerleading an insecure and distrustful public into 'getting even' with 'fat cat' politicians and 'lay about' public sector workers. The cuts could faIl on foreign aid, bilingualism or multiculturalism, appealing to social ambivalence based in cultural and linguistic differences; on social programs, appealing to resentment toward 'welfare-cheats' and single mothers; or on "special interest" groups. A favounte target was the progressive and politically militant National Action Comrnittee on the Status of Women, helping to construct an anti-feminist backlash rooted in stereotypes of extremism, personal experiences of cultural or intellectual elitism, and homophobia.

Unchecked by popular research, education and communications capacities, an authoritarian common sense was constructed on the basis of an inverted strategy of

'hegemonic equivalences' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1989). Under the rubric of "special interests," conservative campaigns were successful in weakening popular identification with victimized groups. Mutually-reinforcing cultural resonances between racist, sexist, classist and authoritarian discourses helped to consolidate the conservative social bloc. Once again the ruling Tory party resorted to what Murray Dobbi n ( 199 1) has cal led the

"TINA principle: there is no alternative., .This TINA argument was used over and over again during the 1988 federal election. We simply have no choice. The new world order demands that we do this and nothing else ... With rural post offkes - the post office has to make a profit. With VIA Rail -- we have nochoice: the country can't afford it. The GST -- we have no options. Time and again we have it hammered into us that this is the only way it can be. We just have to get used to it" (13).

The "necessity" of cuts which targeated those least able to defend themselves eroded the post-world war, sociai democratic accord in Canada. The ernpathetic and solidaristic identification of Canadians with those in need gradually withered under the force of " hard choices." Reactionary rationaaiizations intensified, fusing white liberal gui lt and a mean-spirited vigdantism. Canada was passing from a society of compassionate and collectivist commitments to a survivalist cwlture that was fraamented, divided and competitive. Powerless against the forces of fiscal responsibility, Canadians increasingly embraced a populist cynicism. As Grossberg (1992) argues in the Amerïcan context

"large segments of the population are depoliticized, demoralized, pessimistic and indifferent. In fact, the conservatism of the nation is being built on that pessimism and depoliticization" (148). With the strategic sophistication of its own brand of authoritarian populist cultural politics, the BCNI was winning its 'war of position.'

Finally, the rise to prominence of the Reform Party and Preston Manning provides an important example of the role of corporarie patronage networks and institutional supports on the Canadian New Right. Through extensive new forrns of hegemonic institutionalization, including a wide range of pseudo-populist, conservative citizens' action-groups from Taxpayers' Associations to pro-family groups, the conservative bloc has augrnented its economic power with a cultural extra-parliamentary opposition as well.

A measure of the effectiveness of this conservative cultural offensive is the rïse of the

Reforrn Party. Even after the electoral decimation of the ruling Tories, and the brief post- free trade gains of the NDP, it is the rïght which has retained the capacity to place Iimits on, and even set the agenda for, state-power.

As Murray Dobbin (199 1) has documented, Preston Manning spent decades preparing to advance the ultra-conservative politics of his father, former Social Credit premier of Alberta, Ernest Manning. Preston Manning worked cIosely with his father on the development of a new conservative party that would be national in scope and co- authored a book called Political Re-Alignnlent (PR) on this question. He also inherited his father's connections to rïght-wing groups and oil companies. In 1965 a group of

"influential and powerful Canadians," including R.A. Brown Jr., president of Home Oil, established the secretive National Public Affairs Research Foundation (NPARF).

Manning worked for NAPRF frorn 1965 to the end of 1968, drafting a policy paper for his father's govemment and researching his book. In November, 1967 just a few months after the publication of PR, Preston moved on to "a five month contract to be canied out at the high-tech research and production 'campus' of one of the largest military firms in the U.S ., TRW Systems Inc.." Manning studied TRW's application of general systems theory to the building of ballistic missiles." At this time one of the company's founders was applying the theory to social problems. Manning followed this secretive project with a "fact-findingtrip" to South East Asia to assess the American role in Vietnam (38). Dobbin notes that while one of the social applications of general systems theory was to "apply and adapt the analytical and management techniques of aerospace - and by implication, private capital - to the problerns of drug abuse, education and transportation," another was the development of 'rural pacification' strategies in southeast

Asia. "TRW Systems was not noted for this type of work, but it was certainly capable of carrying it out." While researching his book Dobbin was refused access to a copy of

Manning's study and notes that "questions about his TRW work and the connection, if any, to his Southeast Asian trip were among those Preston Manning refused to answer for this book." According to Lenny Segal of the Pacific Studies Center in California, "the title of Manning's paper certainly fits within the general description of what pacification was al1 about. But of course there were people who may have had altruistic points of view as well as those people who were very cynical and just saw it as a way of fighting cornrnunism" (38).

Soon after Ernest Manning's retirement in 1968, he created M and M Systems

Research Ltd., hiring Preston as the firm's main researcher. Dobbin notes this group's work, too, was cloaked in secrecy but suggests "it is likely that both Mannings did work for the provincial government on policy-development -- broadening out later to do more and more work for resource and energy companies in Alberta." In January 1970 a paper based on the military-industrial cornplex's tendering system was produced by the father and son team. Proposing a massive contracting out of public services, two versions were circulated. The business version was titled "A Strategy to Advance the RoIe of Private

Enterprize in Canada." The government version was called "A Strategy for Organizing

Resources to Achieve Social Goals." Manning's subsequent work with Manning Consultants Ltd. specialized in

planning, research, and public relations strategies for resource development and uti Ii ty

companies and governments. Manning's ties to the corporate elite were further developed

through research work on property rights and the constitution commissioned by the

Business Council on National Issues in 1978 and an earlier study in 1975 for the Canada

West Foundation (CWF) on Confederation. Together with the CWF's Stan Roberts, a

marketing analyst and former president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce who

broadened Preston's network of influence and secured a $100,000 contribution from a

millionaire associate of his, Preston Manning formed the Reform Association of Canada.

Emest Manning also CO-foundedthe National Citizens Coalition (NCC) in 1975

and remained on the Advisory Council for many years. The board of the NCC has

included chairs and members of the board of the CIBC, the Bank of Montreal, Goodyear,

Brascan, CP, Royal Trust, Bell Telephone, Stelco, Abitibi, Power Corporation and

MacMillan Blodel. With a 1991 budget of $2.4 million, the corporate pressure group has

bankrolled a series of key legal and public relations struggles. It successfully opposed two

attempts at progressive tax reform in 1969-1970 and in 1980. In 1984, it spent $700,000

fighting the National Energy Program and the Canada Health Act, and another $200,000

on a key court case to repeal Bill C-169, a bill intended to prevent third party election

spending. That victory allowed big business to spend millions in support of free trade in

the decisive last three weeks of the 1988 eiection. li-onically, the NCC also spent over half a million to prevent labour unions from spending members' dues for political purposes. A

1988 election campais billing NDP federal leader Ed Broadbent as "Very, Very Scary" cost the Coalition $840,000 (Dobbin, f 99 129-49,96-97). Through the corporate research and communications complex deveIoped in recent

decades a populist party of the right has thus been nurtured, funded, and promoted. It has

eventually unseated the centre-left New Democratic Party as the nation's 'third party' and

displaced the federal Tories on the right, Now serving as the Officia1 Opposition, Reform

seeks to absorb the Tones in its new United Alternative strategy. Despite the electoral

collapse of the federal Tories, media exposure For the rise of Reforrn and ideologically

indistinguishable P.C.Premiers from Ontario and Alberta have reinforced the corporate

agenda. Mike Harris, Ralph Klein and Preston Manning's authontarian populist politics

have placed an effective counter-veil on the centnst left faction of the LirberaI Party,

consistently subsuming calls for social reinvestment with the latest right-populist

affective epidemic, tax cuts. Like Mulroney and Chretien, Manning has earned the trust

and financial backing of the corporate elite through a life of corporate service. Unlike

Mulroney and Chretien, Manning has had a t-igorous ultra-conservative career-

sociaIization, and highly specialized training in the development of advanced politicai

strategy.

The short-term corporate response to the so-called left-wing takeaver of the public

universities in Canada was, as in the case of the Fraser hstitute, to bypass them. By

creating a parallel research and information apparatus that has been closely interlocked

with the political and economic elite, the corporate elite has successfully rnarsinalized the

Canadian research community. While traditional intellectuals struggle with increasing

teaching responsibilities and decreased funding for research projects, a privatized

research and advocacy network has been able to effectively set the public policy agenda, and to frame the debate on major policy questions. It is also important to understand, however, that a longer-tenn corporate objective is the re-incorporation of the entire educational order within the hegemonic structuring principles of the continental capitalist class. In the educational order as well, it is important to recognize that corporate continentalization has deeply influenced educational reform, with Canadian educational change reflecting the corporate agenda for U.S. education. In the same way that the BCNI is modeled after the U.S- Business Roundtabie, and includes members of US. transnational capital, and the Fraser Institute is modelled after American corporate think- tanks, including sponsors and board members representing U.S. transnational capital, it is worth noting the dependent development of the Canadian corporate elite's educational reform agenda. The Ieading vehicle for corporate structural politics in the educational order ha been the Corporate Higher Education Forum which is based on the American model, the American Business Higher Education Forum-

While the political correctness debate has worked through the media to create a more favourable public opinion environment for educational restructuring (i.e., a 'moral panic'), big business in the United States has also directly lobbied state representatives, particularly through involvement in corporatist arrangements such as the the American

Business Higher Education Forum (ABHEF). As Webb (198 1) has argued, their submissions to state-panets call for a closer integration of schooling into the needs of a corporate economy:

The reports contend that schools must serve the needs of business and call for doser links between schools and industry. As one report explained, 'We believe that businesses, especially in their role as employers, should be much more deeply involved in the process of setting goals for education in Amenca and in helpins our schools reach these goals'. The reports promise that the national economy will improve if business has a greater say in setting educational priorities- As one stated, 'If the business community gets more involved in both the design and delivery of education, we are going to be more competitive as an economy' (565-6). Clifton Gavin, chairman of Exxon corporation told the ABHEF that "it is up to us at the senior level to see that the job gets done... Given a clear signal from the top, things will happen." This 'top-down' educational reform project has been made possible through the agenda-setting power of the continental capitalist class. This is no surprise, given the nature and strategic importance of science to international competitive struggles. As

Guthrie and Pierce (1990) have argued, "modem science is now big business requiring enormous amounts of money and institutional development" (182).

While "both state poIicy proposais and mass media editorializing about education have placed increased emphasis on themes related to market-Iiberalism"

(Livingstone, 1988: 10) in Canada, recent experience shows that corporate and state- reform strategies have directly targetted the hegemonic assimilation of educational workers and students. Con ferences which draw honorary 'opinion-Ieaders' from dominated classes into a process designed to encourage thern to adopt the ideology of corporate and state leaders have become increasingly common in recent decades, an extended application of the PR industry's focus-group methods. Two significant attempts to 'bring the stakeholders on side' in nineties' educational-reform strategies, and to break down bureaucratie and social resistance were a secondary schools' con ference called

Reaching for Success and the National Forum on Post-Secondary Education. Each event brought educational administrators together to mobilize them in favour of a corporate agenda for educational reform. In response to the U.S.-led panic over educational decline articulated by conservative intellectual AlIan Bloom in TIze Closing of the American Mind, the corporate sector was depicted as the potential soIution, rather than the cause, of

the underfunding cnsis. Polling and propaganda directed at teachers were designed to

neutralize resistance and create an affective epidemic to open the school to the business

sector.

As Jim Turk (1985), then of the Ontario Federation of Labour noted, the corponte

sector has aggressively pursued its commercial and ideological objectives through the

schools in the last decade."The education system is going to be changed. The forces

pushing from the economic perspective are on the ascendancy, and they are marshaling

their forces mightily -- involving Company heads and first ministers. They are creating the

organization required to help achieve their agenda: industry-education councils and

Chamber of Commerce education advisory groups, for example. They are on the

offensive ideologically -- with prepackaged CU~CU~~from Junior Achievement, (and)

new programs in entrepreneurial studies" (18).

The nation's network of corporate think tanks and lobby groups did not develop

independently of the mass media. In fact, one of the corporate elite's key objectives was

to take a business perspective directly to the population using the media, in that way

bypassing and short-circuiting relatively autonomous investigative joumalists, as well as

independent researchers in the public universi ties. The Fraser Insti tute had already

published 44 books by 1987, and regularly releases its research and commentaries to the

media. In addition to direct influence through ownership of media, and corporate interlocks and advertising relationships with monopoly media, an incredible amount of money is spent every year on communications strategies and lobbying efforts. In fact by 1981, the Economic Council of Canada estimated that there were already approximately

three hundred business, professional and trade associations lobbying the House of

Comrnons every year. At that point they were already spending about $122 million per

year on lobbying, without counting the direct expenditures alIocated to iobbying by

individual companies. McQuaig (1987) notes that the resources of the three public

interest groups nation-wide who represent the interests of the poor, which amounts to

about $2 million, is less than one percent of what the business lobby spends (195).

The free trade election was not only a decisive moment in the New Right agenda

in Canada, it was also a critical test of their ability to effectively steer media-coverage. It

was "the largest lobbying and public relations effort in Canadian history." After the

Nationai Citizens' Coalition successfully had the section of the Canada Elections Act

which had previously regulated activities and spending by special interest groups smck

down, business front groups like the Canadian Alliance For Trade and Job Opportunities

were able to spend about "$56 million promoting the deal while anti-trade groups

probably spent about $5 million,"a spending ratio of about 10 to 1 (Nelson,1989:80,90).

Maintaining a dominant position on public policy questions required that the

corporate sector find new ways of consolidating media-power and countering anti- corporate sentiment. The public relations industry, the growth of 'issues management' and

'issues forecasting' expertise, corporate advocacy advertising, sophisticated polling and opinion-research strategies, and corporate think-tanks and pressure groups al1 assisted the continental corporate elite in realigning media-frames with the new attitude and reality of the BCNI's 'program of reconstruction.' The Fraser Institute, for example, employs a media archivist who researches only

TV coverage. Institute spokespeople deny that this is part of their sponsors' campaign to

privatize the CBC. (CBC radio does not se11 advertising and is therefore not a direct threat

to private broaclcasters revenues.) Like corporate-funded fellow-travellers in the U.S.,

such as Accuracy in Media, the Centre for Media and Public Affairs, and the Media

Institute, the Fraser Institute's findings indicate that the media is consistently biased in favour of labour and the Ieft. Typically, Fraser Institute student seminars begin with a

presentation citing this research. By discrediting what they claim are overIy liberal

mainstream media sources, the Institute hopes to soften-up students to their own

ideological message. Fraser Institute media studies arnount to little more than what

Herman and Chomsky (1988) have referred to as "flak:" negative feedback designed to

pressure producers to 'back off (26-28).

The 'Establishment PR crisis' of the early 1970's provided the fledgling Canadian

industry with an unprecedented boom as a "a whoIe rash of media training seminars,

media advisory counsellors and remedial media cnsis experts sprang up to provide

assistance to spokespeople under pressure" (Nelson,1989:54). This attempt at media-

grooming spokespeople to irnprove corporate Canada's image was accompanied by

another development, the direct purchase of corporate advocacy advertising. Nelson notes

that this was a controversial development. "Gene Maler, vice president of CBS

Broadcasting Group (said) that to accept corporate advocacy ads would 'allow a few

voices -- the voices of the affluent -- to set the agenda for national debate and to exert a

wholly disproportionate influence on the discussion of public issues in the broadcast

media"' (57). Canadian media critic Moms Wolfe reported that within a year from the Globe and Mail's decision to launch a campaign for corporate advocacy advertisin;, "as

much as 20% of the Globe's advertising now consists of advocacy ads of one form or

another" (59).

Psychographic polling is one of the PR industry's newer and most powerful

innovations. According to Nelson (1989), this new technology played a decisive role in

the '88 free trade election together with the lifting of restrictions on third party election

spending and corporate advocacy advertising. "At the centre of the melee," she writes,

"during a campaign in which one out of four voters changed their minds at least once, was

Tory polkter Allan Gregg." Without the sophisticated tracking techniques that had been

imported from Gregg's U.S. joint-venture partner and Republican PR strategist Richard

Wirthlin to target the "open-minded confused," the slim victory of the Tones would have

been unlikely.

Gregg's firm, Decima Research, has recentl y been purchased by WP,the huge parent Company that owns two big ad agencies (J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy) and the

largest independent PR firm in the United States, Hill and Knowlton. With the new business and political connections across the border and the huge psychogaphic data-base that Decima has built up through its annual DecimalMaclean 's poll, the continental corporate elite now have even more powerful means for managing issues and forecasting issues to be managed (Nelson: 80,82,94).

This chapter briefly reviewed some of the historïcal. structural. cultural and institutional similarities and diferences that define the rise of the Canadian New Right in contrast to the Amencan experience. Hegemony analysis suggests that the Canadian corporate elite adopted conventional American and international institutional means such as the Business

Roundtable (i-e., the National Citizens Coalition, the Business Council on NationaI

Issues), the corporate think-tank (i-e., the Fraser Institute) and front groups (i-e., taxpayers federations and anti-=un control lobby) to achieve ideological dominance in the domestic arena.

At the same time, however, Gramsci's theory also suggests significant divergences. It has been suggested that the corporatist fom and content of New Right politics in Canada has been conditioned by a less receptive national popular culture, a more denseIy networked and ideologically cohesive corporate eIite, a more concentrated mass media, and the existence of parties with organized social democratic elements.

While the logic of the Arnerican New Right's historical development, for example, dictated a strong reliance on alternative media such as direct mail and Christian media in its formative stages, the New Right arrived in Canada as a more developed and accepted body of ideas that were quickly adopted by the corporate elite, including the media and state elite. Rather than fomenting a bottorn-up, popular revolution as in the US., architects of the Canadian New Right's first-wave opted instead for a more gradua1 and top-down approach, in effect a passive revoIution. CHAPTER 6)

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

1 have argued that Gramsci's theory of hegemony provides a useful conceptual framework for the analysis of contemporary politics. In this case study, the theory was applied to the rise of the New Right in the U.S. and Canada, demonstrating the means and mechanisms through which this movement asserted its ideoIogical, cultural and political dominance- In the appendix the sigificant role of mass media, and newspapers in particular, is developed further in Iight of two historical contingencies: the increasing importance of the mas media as an agency of socialization; and the particular role played by Conrad BIack in the elaboration and expansion of the New Right project.

Recent developments further demonstrate the critical role of mass media in the persistence of New Right hegemony. On December 23, 1999, Canada's second lqest media chain, Sun Media Corporation, named former Tory Prime Minister Bt-ian Mulroney as its new Chairman. In addition to demonstrating once again the weII-documented interchange and overlap between the country's business, political and media elites

(Clement, 1975), this appointment also highlights further the conjoining of business interests and the New Right political project in the contemporary exercise of media- power. Sun Media Corp., which was acquired by Quebecor in January, 1999, presently claims 33% of total daily newspaper circulation in Canada with a presence in eight of

Canada's top ten markets. It sells more than seven million copies of its publications per week (Quebecor,2000). The current chairman of Forbes Global, and a past participant in the Bilderberg Club with a strong profile in American - Canadian diplomacy, Mulroney is well-placed to help expand Quebecor's frontiers further into the Amencan marketplace and beyond, Given his ties to Black, and the history of past joint-efforts between

Quebecor's principle shareholder, Paul Desrnarais, and Black the possibilities for joint- ventures between Quebecor and Hollinger to acquire major strategic holdings in the US., such as U.S.A. Today or a major rnetropolitan newspaper, are significant.

Another significant recent development is the April20,2000 offer for sale by

Conrad Black's Hollinger International of about a third of its 77 daily and 302 non-daily newspapers. This maneuver brings Hollinger7scorporate strategy in line with the industry-wide trend toward diversified multi-media holdings, discussed in the appendix.

It follows Thomson Inc.'s Febniary move to place al1 of its newspaper holdings, except the Globe and Mail, up for sale to re-focus corporate resources on merchandising specialized information via on-line databases. Hollinger has now moved to shed non- strategic holdings in secondary markets in favour of vertical integration, seeking electronic publishing portal partners in strategic primary markets. While the bulk of news reporting on this rnove focused on HolIinger7sforay into cyberspace, this may also be viewed as a move to build cash flow and stock prices for a major strategic acquisition, or a series of major acquisitions, in the U.S. market.

Black's latest move also illustrates the degree to which he is prepared to shed holdings in 'B' and 'C' markets to carry out his carnpaign to establish his flagship paper, the National Post, as Canada's leading national newspaper. Despite very profitable returns on the holdings now for sale, Black has made it clear that the National Post is not for sale despite the loss of $65 million in its first year and projected losses by the company of approximatel y half that figure for year two (Craig,7000). Rather than abandon the National Posr initiative, Black's move to liquidate secondary hoidings will enable Hollinger to write down a portion of the $5 billion company's $1.6 1 billion debt and reflate share value by buying back shares which have declined by a full 28 percent within one year (Reguly, 2000).

The move away from broad-based ownership toward a vertical re-focus on the most potentially lucrative franchises makes clear business sense as the company defends itself against local portal challenges to its revenues. However, national political considerations are also clear. For example, in addition to the National Post, Black also declared the Ottawa Citizen is not for sale. Located in the nation's capital, the Citizen not only provides an important information pipeline from Parliament Hill to the National

Post, it also exercises special influence over the local opinion environment of the federal capital and politicians. Black has lavished significant resources on this title while slashing expenditures in other markets.

Related both to the Mulroney appointment at Sun Media corporation, and the

Hollinger restructuring, is the 'third wave' of the New Right. In the first wave, as we have seen, the New Right ultimately carried out its federal agenda through a virtual pacification campaign conducted through an interlocked corporate elite that included the media elite. In the war of position for state-power, Mulroney received crucial financial support from Conrad Black as well as the assistance of Hollinger partner Peter White, seconded as Mulroney's tour manager. In the second wave, the New Right agenda received the support of the new Black daily empire across the nation, as well as from the Sun chain, particularly in Ralph Klein's Alberta and Mike Harris's Ontario. From a

Saskatchewan perspective, Black's purchase of al1 five of the province's dailies was paralleled by $75,000 in corporate donations to the Saskatchewan Party from Black companies (Marsden72000).

The Saskatchewan Party, which brought together members of the disbanded provincial Tory party and Reformers, was a test case for the 'Unite the Right' movement federally and a precursor to the Canadian Alliance. Flush from the success of resurgent conservatism led by Harris and Klein and the success of the Saskatchewan expenment,

Black's National Post has been a relentless advocate of the 'Unite the Right' movement from the front page of its inaugural issue. In an unpredented move the federal Tories have joined forces with the left in fiercely, publicIy and repeatedly criticising the newspaper for its favouritist coverage of the new political formation.

More recently the newspaper has embraced Canadian Alliance leadership hopeful

Tom Long, Long, a former Ontario Tory who refuses to disclose the narnes of his financial backers, has not only enjoyed the editorial favour of the National Post. He also has enjoyed a long-time relationship with Hollinger's Peter White. White played a key role in Mulroney's coup against deposed leader Joe Clark in 1983. He also played a key roIe in Long's defection from Clark's present-day Conservatives and his bid for Alliance leadership. In short, Conrad Black's inner-circle can taste the prospect of another federal electoral victory for the New Right within the next year.

Whatever financial interest there may be in seeing through the Natioizal Post investment, it is clear that there is also a strong political cornmitment to driving the Chretien Liberals from power. As with Black's back-room maneuvering to align the

Daily Telegruph, and the broader Tory press, with Margaret Thatcher's agenda in the

U-K., it is clear that Black's National Post and the Sun chain, now with Black's former protégé Brian Mulroney at the helm, can also be counted on to do their utmost to contribute to a Liberal electoral defeat. The fact that Black's bid last year for a peerage was thwarted by Chretien's office merely makes the political antagonism personal. But this is much more than a pdge match. This is a clear mobilization designed to cary out the unfinished business of the New Right7ssilent revolution in Canada - this time, as leadership hopefuls Tom Long and Stockwell Day have already demonstrated, at high volume.

The painfuIly obvious, and deafeningly unasked question which aises from this situation from a public interest standpoint is: what is to be done?

While the firesale of Black assets presents an unprecedented opportunity for democratic forces to restore independence to significant sections of the Canadian press, albeit from the margins of the national marketplace, it is clear that the left is in no position to take advantage of it- As a result, the more likely outcome is that ideologically indistinguishable chains such as Sun Media Corporation or its owner Quebecor will simply fiIl the vaccuum. With the defeat of the split run provision at the WTO there is one less obstacle to American ownership by chains such as Gannet Co. Inc. or Knight-

Ridder Inc.. Given the paucity of domestic buyers for the glut of Thomson and Black holdings now on the market and the strength of the industry lobby, fore@ ownership restrictions on Canadian newspapers are likely to be relaxed in any event, ushering in a further Amerîcanization of the medium, economically, cuiturally and politicalIy.

Another Iikely effect of this industry shake-out wiI1 be the further deepening of the segmentation of the market now well under way. NADBank trends show an increasing number of well-educated, upper income readers, who are most attractive to national advertisers, opting for quality national dailies (Le., the Globe and Mail and the

National Post) rather than local daily subscriptions. This leaves a shrinking, increasingIy unattractive audience share for the local dailies, reducing their competitiveness against other media and further accelerating the spiral of reduced editorial investment and disappearing readership. In a move reminiscent of Black's dismantling of the Argus empire, his 'bait and switch' from a broad-based chain of local dailies toward dominance instead of 'A' markets and upmarket readership nation-wide has set in motion a process of cannibalizing the decentralized newsgathering apparatus of formerly strong local broadsheets, and the national advertising market which once supported them, in favour of encouraging reader and advertiser migration to his flagship national daily. Most likely,

Slack, or new owners of his former holdings, will be left to formally reposition these 'B' and 'C' market publications downmarket as Sun-style shopper tabloids rather than traditional broadsheets. The consequences should be obvious: a newspaper market more sharply divided, nation-wide between information classes (Sun-style shopper tabloids for working class readers and prestige national dailies for the professional-managerial and ownership classes), and between regions as 'B' and 'C' market news coverage and perspectives disappear into the swamp of S un-style, downmarket local shopper tabloids and so-called national dailies re-focus on attracting and holding the most attractive 'A' market readers and advertisers. The emerging new segmentation of the newspaper

market, in other words, will thereby harden distinctions between 'information classes7

within communities as well as provoking an increasing 'information gap' and disparïties

in coverage between regions.

Finally, it must be said that the failure of democratic forces to effectively

anticipate or respond to these opportunities, given the severe consequences, warrant some

critical concluding commen ts.

Most fundamental, from a Gramscian standpoint, is the failure of the left to take

cultural politics seriously. Apart from isolated exceptions, 'the left' is largely in a

disciplined retreat hmpublic life. Whether it is the 'nesting and resting impulse,' or the

disenchantment of former sixties radical boomers, or the retrenchment of de-funded non-

governmental organizations, or the acadernic absorption of lefi intellectuals, or the

disconnection of the NDP, 'social' Liberals, and 'red Tories,' from the demoralized and

demobilized vestiges of once vibrant social movements, the left has largely retreated into

specialized and elf tist sects, speaking in increasingly moralistic rather than strategic

terms, and devolving into defeatist agents of cynicism rather than active animators of

hope. In Grarnscian terrns, the left has surrendered the 'war of position' to the right,

defaulting the capacity for cultural expansion and finding itself cornered to fight and lose

countless defensive battles. Instead, anti-social pathologies such as depression,

resigation, withdrawal, elitist cynicism and compuIsive political correctness have corne to characterize this increasingly dysfunctional subcuIture. While many left-fundamentalist ideologues blarne the NDP7sdrift into

accomodation with New Right common sense for the current crisis, this misses an

important point: if the left had not largely abandoned its own independent civil society-

based carnpaigns for cultural power it may have been in a position to open up the political

space and create the political pressure for the NDP to join in waging a viable war of

maneuvre against the New Right juggernaut- However ample and valid criticisms of the

NDP officialdom may be, more fundamental from a Gramscian standpoint is the

stagnation and atrophy of the broad left.

A meaningful cultural politics will need therefore to provide one foundation for

rebuilding a viable mass democratic politics. It will need to be self-critical of pst

mistakes and strive to attract new elements with a compelling identity and a hopeful

program. Another key ingredient will be a decisive strategy of economic engazernent that

does not simply leave the levers of economic power, by default, to the corporate elite.

While the Ieft presentfy abstains from market participation, again with isolated

exceptions, prefemng 'sheltered' employment in the beseiged and shrïnking public and

third sectors, the nght is able to monopolize the enterprising spirit and confidence that

once enlivened the CO-operativemovement and the CCF, for example, in this region.

While the Ieft's cultural orientation might be described as a 'forced march

backward,' its economic orientation - with established CO-ops,the public sector and

crowns in decline -- rnight more aptly be described simply as a 'sumender.' With virtually

no applied business understanding and an unsupportive cultural environment for growth- onented organization and movement building, the Ieft, once committed to socializing the means of production, now finds itself structuraIly confined to the margïns of the market and the public sphere. One might expect that a rnovement which owes such a huge debt to political economy would be engaged in a relentless 'bottom-up' search for new forms of work and community life. Instead the Ieft is ill-equipped to contest cultural power, underpinned as it is so profoundly today by the terrain of market struggle - a terrain to which it is averse and on which it is so far incompetent. It scarcely bears mentioning that the market is the favoured terrain of the capitalist. But as a consequence of surrendering this terrain of struggle, it is a rare left-activist indeed who is farniliar with the most basic elements of enterprise development such as business plans, marketing plans, financial statements and the like. This not only makes a mockery of the left7shistoric claim of taking control of capital, it also sheds some Iight, strategically, on why the left is presentiy so inadequately trained to contri bute to rebuilding organization in present conditions when the only avenue to cultural expansion rests outside the shrinking ranks of the academy, the union/ NGO sector, the established CO-opsector and the public and crown sectors, i.e. in the capitalist marketplace.

As for media strategy, on the very rare occasions when such a topic even arises in

Ieft circles, proposals tend to be most tragically iII-conceived, a reflection of the cultural and economic disengagement of the left from the real-world activity of Our times. The only such proposa1 1am aware of in the last decade is the occasionally repeated cal1 for a left-wing national daily newspaper, a project which anyone with the most basic understanding of the scale of investment required, and the structure of the market, would instantly recognize to be financidly insane. A more distressing development is the unfulfilled promise of the Council of

Canadians' Campaign for Press and Broadcast Freedom w hic h, organizer David

Robinson (1999) argued in a Campaign memo, floundered after the failure of a law suit

against Hollinger. That suit, which had no chance of success from the outset, was

designed to draw attention :O govemment inaction against newspaper monopoty.

Robinson says that after the predictable failure of this initial legal / political intervention

"we seemed to lose direction and equally important, financiat commitrnent" (1999). The

dead end of a legal reforrn strategy has aIready been touched on in the appendix. More

important is the question of whether this campaign could have been more effective with a

less narrow focus on advocacy and Iobbying the state, and with representation from

alternative media personne1 and the regions. While this is hrgely a matter of conjecture,

what is clear is that the campaign was fundamentally a fundraiser for the Council rather

than a serious initiative aiming to challenge media monopoly. This 'Greenpeace rnodel'

of direct mail canvassing around issues, coupled with the centralist, top-down structure of

the Council prevented the possibility of a grounded, focused and well-conceived strategy

with clear and achievable goals from the outset. While a detailed critique of the

'le,oislative route,' the campaign or the Council is beyond the scope of this work, it does

reflect, in common with the proposal for a national daily left-wing newspaper, a certain

significant obstacle to cuItural expansion located within the very commanding heights of

the 'official left' itself.

In part, the poverty of left thinking and organizing on media issues, and the ability of the right to monopolize strategic knowledge of such matters, reflects the failure of the academic left to develop a meaningful body of alternative media studies. In part, these experiences reflect the centralist, command-style bias of the nation's 'official left.' It also, however, refiects the decline of Ieft-wing political activity to the debased currency of a debating circle, endlessly engaged in presenting academic papers, forwarding e-mail petitions, exchanging letters in low circulation movernent publications, discussing feelings and persona1 politics in encounter-group style political meetings and in many other varied ways avoiding constructive engagement with contemporary public life. If, following on Gramsci, the key to the New Right's success has been in effectively focusing its political will in active, creative and strategic effort to change the worId, the key to the left's failure rests in its fragrnented focus, ics passivity, its confusion and its state of disorganization,

Changing contemporary political culture, and developing the meaningful media diversity such changes will require, first demands agency. The nature of the opposed forces dictates that agency will need to be constituted 'on the left,' just as the restructuring of the last two decades was led by a coherent and focused historical agent of conservatism, the 'New Right.' For the 1eft.to re-emerge as a senous historical force, however, it wil1 need first to undertake a serious self-criticism of its practices and a concerted re-focusing of its energies and resources, including a critical reassessment of the practices of cultural 'retreat' and economic 'sumender.' When, and if, a viable leadership group 'on the left' is abIe to regain the critical capacity for cultural expansion articulated by Gramsci, making a decisive break with the fossilized remnants of a bygone rnovement, it will once again be in a position to chanse the world. This, of course, is a

Iong-terni project which will require thousands of decentraIized initiatives, and an enabling strategic framework, which effectively contribute to and sustain an emergent duaI power. It will need to include new institutions and enterpnzes such as mass media outiets. Independent media options will both condition and be conditioned by such an active, willful political effort. References

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Cambridge University Press. APPENDIX A)

The New Right's Newspaper Revolution and the Rise of Conrad Black, an Organic

Intellectual of the New Right

As the case studies of the U.S. and Canada indicate, ownership, control and

influence of mass media have been a comrnon preoccupation for New Right political

strategists. In this appendix, the theoretical emphasis moves from the macro or structural

level of analysis to an institutional analysis of the Canadian newspaper system, and to the critical role of agency. It is argued that through his transnationalizing newspaper empire,

Conrad Black seeks to structurally consolidate and extend the New Right's hegemony not

only in Canada but abroad as well.

In contrast to the base - superstructure mode1 of traditional Marxism, this appendix once again emphasizes the active, political effort of the New Right to achieve their objectives. It is argued that the structure of newsmaking in the established order tends to preserve conservative principles and protect corporate interests. However,

following the emphasis of Gramsci and Miliband on the primacy of politics, it is argued that the successful renovation of worldview and rearticulation of interests required by the

New Right revolution also necessariiy depended on an active and concerted effort at media realignment with the frames and discourses of the resursent conservatism.

The mix of efforts by the New Right to restrain, rehabilitate or restructure media varies by nation. It also varies by region within nations. Neither is the reIative weight and importance of media in each of these disciplined mobilizations uniform. This appendix, therefore, focuses on the special case of New Right ideologue Conrad Black's rise to power as the country's pre-eminent newspaper proprie tor. hmediate implications for the

US., U.K., Australia and other countries are of course explicit in the fact that Conrad

Black is also at the centre of the world's fastest growing press empire with vested interests in each of those countries.

Basic New Right principles and policies first reached international opinion- leaders through elite journals and the financial press (Parsons,1989). Sipificant differences in ideological inflection evolved over time, reflecting the specific socio- cultural and institutional realities of different countries. In large part, the form and content of neo-conservatisrn in mass culture was shaped by the nature and structure of their domestic media. Mass media, after all, were the channek through - or around - which the

New Right message was inserted and popularized into rnass democratic politics.

In the U.K., the tabloid revolution played a central role in pushing Thatcher's economic modemization revolution fonvard (Curran and Sparks, 1991). On election day

1992, for example, Rupert Murdoch's Swz ran a front page hendline which read: "If

Kinnock wins today, will the Iast person to leave Britain please turn out the lights." On page three, usually reserved for a topless model, the Swz instead published a photo of an ugly, 300 pound woman, labeled "the shape of things to corne under a killjoy Labour government" (Schechter, 1997:355). Conrad Blac k's control of London's Daily Telegraplz,

"the traditional pipeline between the Tory party and the lawn-mowing classes"

(Siklos, 1995: 184), and the largest selling EngIish language newspaper in the world after the Wall Street Journal (ibid:9) was also significant. In his capacity as Chaiman, Black's support for Thatcher was "unambiguous" (BIack,1993:425), personally insuring that the Daily Telegraph supported the iron Lady during elections and occasional crises

(Sikios,1995:185). In his biography, Black also recalls the collusion of Sir David English,

Editor of the Daily Mail, in a special meeting called with Thatcher tacticians to defend her against a Ieadership challenge (B lack, l993:425). He aIso recounts Thatcher's comment to him: "We can't win without you, you know" (ibid:367). Black gIoats that

"The proverbial Tory press ... did a much better job of warning the people of the implications of a Labour victory than the govemment did." He also credits Labour leader

Neil Kinnock with "the truest words 1have heard from him: that the Tory press won the election." Conservative Prime Minister-elect John Major wrote to thank Black personally

(i bid:469).

In the U.S. context, Ben Bagdikian (1992) has chronicaIIed the role of the media monopoly in enforcing ideolo~icaldiscipline. In 1982, for exarnple, he notes that two popular television personalities Ed Asner, of the Lou Grant Show, and Walter Chronkite

"had their programs cancelled after each had made liberal public speeches that criticized an aspect of American foreign policy" (36)-And in 1986, he notes that General Electric, the same Company that launched Ronald Reagan's political career three decades earlier, became the owner of NBC (ibid:208 - 209). Heïman and Chomsky's (1988) farnous study of American foreign affairs news coverage concludes that US. mass media constitute a

"propaganda system." Finally, the Christian Right's alternative media apparatus infused

Reaganism with a distinctively evangelical and moralistic character missing from British neo-conservatism. As Diamond argued "What accounts for the movement's forward march toward power is its relentless organizing within churches, made possible by the network of Christian broadcasting stations, magazines and newspapers, unfettered by the mainstream press. If ever there was a movement that knew how to use alternative media and do grassroots organizing it is the Christian Right" (Diamond, 199429).

Concentrated daily newspaper ownership in Canada was key to the New Right's

'passive revolution-' In the US., direct mail, grassroots organizing through the churches, and Christian broadcasting were al1 used to arouse, infonn and incite the New Right's constituency. Similarly in Britain, the Tory press was transparently partisan in its populist opposition to Labour. In Canada, by contrast, private sector media elites - with the significant exceptions of the Srin tabloid chain and the Western Repon magazine group - were engaged in what would be more accurately described as ideological pacification, adopting an editorial tone of reasonable disinterestedness despite its own underlying and ovenvhelrning biases. Until Conrad Black's forceful entrance, economically and ideologicaIIy, into the frey, the watch word for conservative interests could have been lifted from the federal Tories free trade strategy: "benign neglect from a majority of

Canadiansn(in Winter,1990:46-47). Across the western economies, transnational media baron Conrad Black likely summed up the role of media best: -'If the small guy7sguardian is the media, then the small guy is in bigger troubIe than 1 thought" (Siklos,l995:398).

In Canada, the New Right's media message reflected elements of both the US. and the U.K. media-filtenng process. Like the U.K. mobilization, ideological and partisan

Tories Iaunched the first in The Stin chain of tabloid-style dailies in 1971 as a counter- weight to what they described as "the left-Ieaning" Toronto Star (Goodman,1988: 172).

The case of the Toronto Srtir is an obvious example of direct, politically strategic investment in the mass distribution popular press. As Tory insider Eddie Goodman recounts, he was approached by Peter Worthington while on annual vacation with the media-tycoon Bassett family to help set up a successor publication to the conservative

Toronto Telegram which was losing market share to the Toronro Star and the Globe and

Mail. Worthington wanted Goodman's fundraising help "to start a morning tabloid, racier than the existing papers, with lots of photos, centred on Toronto, an answer to the Star's left-leaning tendencies." Goodman agreed to pull together the approximately three miIIion dollars Worthington projected it would take to launch. Approaching his extensive contacts built up through his law practice and his career with the party (he is a past national party chairman), he claimed that one "strong reason" for helping to start the Srtn

"was that the three main founders, Creighton, Worthington and Hunt, wanted to publish an independent newspaper that would not bend to every left-wing cause that came along, and that would be strongly pro-NATO and anti-communist" (172). The new tabloid was clearly conceived as a counter-weight to the populist Toronto Star, and an agent for the promotion of a 'new wave' popular conservatisrn. Indeed, Doug Creighton, recently ousted Toronto Sun CO-founderand manager, once remarked that the newspaper7slaunch

"wasn't clouded by any kind of market survey" (McNellis, 1993:11).

The launch of the Sun chain, which subsequently expanded into the key Ottawa,

Edmonton and Calgary markets, and laid the groundwork for Conrad Black's National

Posr by acquiring the Financial Post in 1987 and taking it daily in 1988, paralleled the

New Right tabloid revolution in the U.K.. The Toronto Szrit challenge in Canada's largest market shored up the establishment press' emphasis on free market reforms while opening up space and pushing the spectrum and centre of debate further to the right. This pressured both the Toronto Star and the national daily, the Globe and Mail, to respond to this implicit challenge to their editorial direction with imrnediate nation-wide implications. Subsequent launches in the nation's capital and in Canada's con servative heartland, Alberta, also served to further weight news coverage in the right's favour, positively conditioning the political prospects for Tory Premiers Ralph Klein and Mike

Harris. Like the Toronto Star7Southam's Calgary Herald for example was ornce reputed to be too liberal by Canadian industry standards- As Conrad Black once noted, it was an

"anti-oil industry, anti-Ralph Klein, basically NDP newspaper in what has got to be the city in Canada least sympathetic to the NDP perspective" (Barlow and Winter-, l997:9O).

The amiva: of the Calgary Srin, followed by Black7sacquisition of the Southam Calgary daily were in large part, as we will see, designed to keep Calgary that way. The dramatic take-over of daily print news by self-avowed Thatcherite Conrad BIack in the +domestic market this decade has, of course, made a significant though somewhat late ccsntribution to the fom and content of the rise of the Canadian New Right. We will retum to this special case Iater in this appendix.

Cross-border evangelical broadcasting frorn the U.S. also reached fundamentalist

Christians in Canada with their own message of moral traditionalism. The amval on the scene of the National Post has also seen a drarnatic upswing in New Right thedogical politics-

Perhaps the most decisive aspect in the Canadianization of the New Risht agenda, however, is the fact that it is sancrioned, and in significant recent cases enthusÎiastically lad, by the gate-keepers of the most concentrated daily newspaper market in thpe developed world (Siegel, 1983: 11 1). As Clement has shown the Canadian corporate elite, including the media elite, is highly cohesive and class conscious. In fact, Standard Broadcasting, and the Southarn, Thomson and Sterling newspaper chains have each contributed funds to the New Right think-tank, the Fraser Institute @obbin,1998:192).

Already highly class conscious but more subtle and pragmatist than their evangelical or free market populist allies in the US. and U.K., the 'first wave' of the New Right in

Canada was characterized, as we have seen, by a distinctly corporatist character.

Concentration of ownership is taking place across global communications and cultural markets (Bagdikian, 1992)- The dramatic reduction in the number of Canadian cities with competing dailies, however, is of special significance due to the special role of these publications in the overall flow of information and in the media-system's news production process itself. The daily newspaper is the public's primary source of fact, as opposed to entertainment. Indeed, "it is the historic clairn of the newspaper press to be one of the central guarantors of political democracy" (Sparks, lgW278). As the "medium of record," the daily newspaper plays a significant role in setting the pattern for electronic media-coverage as well. Reporters in broadcast media, for exampie, often look to newspaper frames and sources to orient their own coverage of developing stories. As

Sperling (1991) notes, "Anyone who has worked in electronic joumalism will admit a) to paying very close attention to what is in the daily newspapers as a principal source of news and b) looking to newspapers for detailed background and analysis of stories that he/she may be following It should also not be forgotten that Canadian newspapers through their Canadian Press cooperative provide a good deal of the 'wire copy' used by radio and television stations" (18). As Curran and Sparks (1991) note further, "the mass media are not only one of the

major sources of information about society, but also one of the key sources for

interpretive frameworks, too" (227). National newspapers like the New York Times in the

U.S. or the Globe and Mail or Black's National Post in Canada play an important role in establishing the conventionai wisdom, not only for their readers but for editors and media-producers across the country w ho regularly read these 'benchmark' publications. In the case of the National Post, this function is particularly crucial since the official

Company line taken in this flagship publication not onIy sets a technical 'industry standard7 for news and opinion-making. It also sends clear ideological signals to management and promotions-conscious staff in Hollinger7s60 daily newspapers nation- wide. Taken as a unit, this overwhelming predominance creates an arena of acceptable media performance beyond which employable joumalists and editors are increasingly unlikely to uead. Lt is precisely this agenda-setting role and potential for political influence that attracts the attention of seIf-avowed ideologues Iike Conrad Black-

Wire services play an important and equally problematic role in delivering the

'whole tmth.' In 198 1, two Canadian Press editors totd the Kent Commission (Kent, l992), initiated by the Trudeau aministration as a response to public outcry against daily newspaper concentration, that "the news service edited its news about the media in ways to pIease major media owners" (Bagdikian, 1992:94). Before the wave of BIack takeovers in the 90s, he noted "The press service is bought by 110 newspapers, forty of which are owned by the Thomson chain. The two editors said that a news account of a Thomson paper strike was deliberately reduced to three paragraphs and that a speech by the president of the Ontario Federation of Labour criticizing the Thomson organization was kiIled. When a branch of Canadian government investigated to see if a series of birth defects in women employees of Thomson was caused by electronic terrninals used in the newspaper's plants, the wire service delayed the story for twelve hours until they saw what the Thomson paper wouid report about itself' (94)-

Fifteen years Iater, the influence of the Southarn chain over Canadian Press had increased considerably over Thomson's previous hegemony. Conrad Black consolidated his contrd over the service in June 1996 when Southam threatened to pull out, a move which would have devastated the organization. Instead, the organization made major concessions, including drastic cutbacks and the replacement of CP President David

Jolley. Jolley's successor was Sterling President Michael Sifton. As Barlow and Winter

(1997) note, Sifton was "a Hollinger empIoyee, who several months earlier, had proved his IoyaIty to Black by selling him his family's Saskatchewan Arrnadale chain and announcing a 25% cut in staff'(l8). Through CP, Black is therefore now able to reach beyond the 61 papers owned directly by his Southarn-Sterling-Hollingerchain to 41 of the remaining 45 dailies in Canada as well.

In addition to real reach which extends to "every (daiIy) newspaper in Canada but four," Barlow and Winter note that CP's Broadcast Newswire goes into 425 radio stations, 76 T.V. stations and 142 cable outlets nation-wide. Even the public broadcaster, often imagined to be an autonomous bulwark against the biases of the private broadcasters, is effectively now colonized by Black's influence through this service. In addition to the private broadcasters listed above, the Broadcast Newswire also reaches

CBC's 89 stations, 1,160 CBC rebroadcasters, 31 private affiliates and 292 affiliate rebroadcasters (7). A cntical analysis of the Canadian mus media system, therefore, must

address the leading role of the daily newspaper in gate-keeping, framing, and agenda-

setting for the whole mass media-system.

The continental newspaper market has been characterized by a dramatic and

alarming concentration of ownership in recent decades. "At the end of World War II," for

example, "80 percent of the daily newspapers in the U.S. were independently owned, but

by 1989 the proportion was reversed, with 80 percent owned by corporate chains"

(Bagdi kian, l992:4). Furthemore, "of the 1700 daily papers [in the U.S .],98 percent are

local monopolies and fewer than 15 corporations control most of the country's daily

circulation" (Schiller,1989:36). Bagdikian reports that while "more than haIf of al1

newspaper cities had daiIy cornpetition, typically 5 or 6 papers," "by 1986 of al1 cities

with a daily paper, 98% had only one newspaper management" (1992:74).

Trends in Canada have led to the elimination of an even greater proportion of

independent publications. While the number of dailies in Canada peaked at 138 in 19 13, with almost al1 of these being individually owned (Picard,1985: 107), "by the mid-eighties

Canada already had a higher concentration of ownership in the daily newspaper field than any other developed country" (Seigel, 1983: 1 11). While "the decline in the number of cornpetitive daily newspaper cities ...( is) a direct and inevi table result of pervasive economies of scale present in the newspaper business" (Litman, l988:25), the political implications of this situation are serious. According to the Kent Royal Commission on

Newspapers, "the special responsibilities of monopoly newspapers are awesome"

(KentJ98 1 :2l7). As Curran and Sparks (199 1) note, in conditions of informational and interpretive monopoiy, the viability of democracy itself is jeopardized. "A divergent interpretation depends upon the possession, in however fragmentary and unconscious a form, of a set of ideas and beliefs that enable one to make such an interpretation.. . (but) most people do not have ready access to an oppositional ideological tradition sustained by powerful institutions and groups" (227).

While media-owners do not detemine the specific contents of daily newspapers, chain-manasement often set forrnulaic policies whic h Iimi t local edi torial decision- making. This often favours the use of wire-services and inexpensive syndicated national columnists, for exarnple, as opposed to devolving resources for increased local coverage or the employment or development of local talent. Profit-maximization and the tendency toward monopoly tends toward an increasing homogenization of news-coverage, and the further reduction of diverse, competing perspectives. A 1996 study of the Regina Leuder-

Post, for example, concluded that "local news has been largely replaced with cheaper wire matenals" (in Barlow and Winter,1997:24) after its takeover by Black.

In the case of Winnipeg, where the cornpeting daily was closed in 1980 as part of a cartel agreement between the Thomson and Southam chains, research indicates that news became both more expensive and less substantial. Winter and Candussi (in

Picard,1988) report that "in 1979,49% of space constituted advertisements versus 63% in

1983. While advertisers paid much more, consumers also paid much more and got much less news both proportionately and in absolute terrns, for their money" (144). During that

4 year period, the study found a 5% increase in advertising revenue and a 67% increase in circulation revenue Ieading the authors to comment "the Winnipez market is being put through the wringer in pursuit of profit-maximization" (ibidA45). Cornpetitive pressures from electronic media have led to a further intensification of pressures toward commercialization and a sharp decline in newspaper readership. In the U.S. context, for exarnple, the number of newspapers sold daily per one hundred households, has plumetted steadily from 132 in 1930 to 72 by 1982 (Bagdikian, 1992:195).

While much is made of the separation of a newspaper's news and business operations, local editors are hired and fired by chain management and are ultimately accountable to owners. Hiring decisions, although generaIIy framed in terms of employers' concem with their professional judgement and a capacity for 'objectivity' and

'balance,' also reflect a basic degree of ideological compatibility and the acceptance of

'commercial realities.' As Black himself ha.admi tted, his newspaper companies hire editors who are in "general agreement" with him as a matter of policy, "to minimise internal fiictions" (in Siklos,1995: 320). His business partner David Radler is more blunt:

"Ifeditors disagree with us, they should disagree with us when they are no longer in Our employ" (Barlow and Winter, 1997: 135). While cases of outright editorial censorship are not common, this largely reflects the fact that hiring processes screen out dissenting joumalists and that journalists often censor themselves in line with institutional values, noms and organizational cuIture.While editors who have 'passed the test' often cIaim they have complete editorial autonomy, "a survey by the Arnerican Society of Newspaper

Editors found that 33% of al1 editors working for newspaper chains said they would not feel free to run a news story that was damaging to their parent firm" (Bagdikian,i992:3 1). Reporters, in turn, are hired by owner-appointed management based on sirnilarly veiled criteria of ideological cornpatibility and market-realism. News-frames are typically negotiated by reporters within a closed circle of editors and sources who are disproportionatety 'official' (Gith, 1980:274), These relations of concentrated ownership and centralized control, when combined with the top-down chain of command in the workplace, operate powerfully to weaken journalists' ties to the local community, particularly disadvantaged and oppositional groups, while strengthening their subordination and deference to the local structure of mhority and managerial power, on behalf of advertisers and owners. As an American study notes "many newspapers insist their reporters develop no ties to outside organizations which might affect their objectivity; yet no such precautions are taken for the more influential board of directors"

(Winter,1990: 111).

According to a 1971 survey of over 4,000 U.S. journalists, monopoly trends are further limiting the autonomy of individual journalists. While 60% of respondents claimed to have "almost complete freedom in selecting the stories they work on," that proportion shrunk to 48% in organizations employing over 100 persons. Similarly while

46% of joumahsts overall reported rnaking their own story assignments, only 36% working in large media organizations made the same daim (GitIin, l980:258). The Wall

Street Jozmtal reported that declining returns on media capital have further intensified these institutionalized patterns of 'seIective reporting' to protect shareholders and please advertisers. "With newspapers facing tough times financially Ijoumalists] see an increase in the tendency of newspapers to cater to advertisers or pull their punches when it cornes to criticizing advertisers in print" (Bagdikian,l992:xiii). lndependent local weekiies have provided the only effective alternative to the standardization and homogenization of news coverage in the monopoly dailies, These publications, however, have been increasingly targeted for imitation and takeover by the chains. In both the UtS. (Bagdikian71992:xvi)and Canada, publications which expressed some diversity of opinion and served otherwise marginalized audiences are being displaced by chah-owned publications which de-emphasize controversial political positions. Examples include Torstar's launch of eye weekly, a depoliticized knock-off against Toronto's independent and left-leaning NOW magazine and Southam's foray into urban alternative weekly publishing in the Edmonton and Calgary markets, against weeklies partially-owned by Vancouver's Georgia Srraight.

Since the WTO struck down the so-called 'split-run' provision, which extended tax deductions to advertisers purchasing space in Canadian-owned publications, in 1999 a significant irnpediment has also now been removed for American city magazine specialty publishers like Stem Publishing and New Times Inc. to go on a Canadian shopping spree.

With overall circulation of North American alternative weklies doubling to 6.3 million in the penod 1991 - 1997, this is clearly a growth industry with strong profit potential. By

1997, Stem Publishing owned New York's Village Voice, the Seattle Weekly, the Twin

City Reader, the LA WeekZy, Orange Corrnty Weekly and the Long Island Voice, to name a few. New Times Inc owned the PlzoenLx- New Tintes, SF Weekly in San Francisco, New

Times Los Angeles, and papers in Denver, Houston, Dallas and Miami (Walljasper,

1997). Current discussions of relaxed foreign ownership restrictions on American daily chain ownership could also mean that new competitors such as Knight-Ridder Inc and

Gannet Co. Inc. could use major Canadian dailies as launching pads, following the

Torstar strategy in Toronto and the Southam strategy in Edmonton and Calgary, to further undercut the potential for independent and alternative weeklies. The growing threat of

"McAlternative" urban weeklies has largely been obscured by recent upheavals in daily print ownership and convergence strategies, but it is a real and imminent threat to media diversity as weI1 as to Canadi an cultural sovereignty. Many urban alternatives have provided independent news, diverse views and have worked hard to build more vibrant civic cultures and local cutural 'scenes.' The pattern of corporate concentration on the other hand, is likely to Iead to an increasing reliance on syndicated copy, American sourcing and the increasing influence of head-office corporate and editorial values,

In the case of the Canadian Sun tabloids as well as many urban alternative weeklies, anti-establishment opinion is often more stylish, in line with marketing objectives, than substantial. Miliband's (1976) description of the British tabloids applies equally to these papers.

Many 'popular' newspapers.. . suggest a radical impatience with every kind of 'establishment,' however exalted, and a restless urge for change, reform, progress. In actual fact, most of this anaq radicalism represents little more than an affectation of style; behind the iconoclastic irreverence and the demagogic populism there is sinsular vacuity both in diagnosis and prescription. The noise is considerable but the battle is bogus (200).

in the communications and cultural industries, horizontal and vertical integration have led to the increasing concentration and centralization of wide expanses of cultural life that extend far beyond the daily, or even weekly, newspaper market. Rapid technological change has encouraged increasing mergers between computer, broadcast, telecommunications and entertainment media. The takeover of Maclean-Hunter by

Rogers Communications or the book retailing partnership between the Globe and Mail and Chapters exemplify widespread corponte strategies aimed at capturing new economies of scope and scale through synergy in production and distribution of information and cultural products. As Bagdikian (1992) explains, "In media corporations, synergy calls for material from one kind of a firm's owned media, such as magazines, to be reused in altered form in its other owned media, like books and television series.

Investors favour synergy because a company's newspapers and magazines can be used to promote the celebrities featured in its other products, like movies and television senes"

(xiii). This recycling of research and editorial 'inputs' reinforces cultural homogenization even further, both through increased imitation across the communications and cultural industries and by placing non-diversified media-holdings at a competitive disadvantage.

The increasing prevalence of joint-ventures with corporations not ordinarily involved in cultural production has contributed to an increasingly depoliticized, entertainment culture. In 1988, for example, Walt Disney Co. spent $45 million to make

Wlzo Frarned Roger Rçrbbit, and committed another $10 million to promote it. By signing advertising and promotional agreements with Coke and McDonalds Corporation, however, Disney captured about $20 million in extra ad exposure for the movie

(Schiller,1989:44). By floodinj the public sphere with campaigns designed to promote blockbuster Hollywood films and the product-lines developed and promoted in-tandem through fast food chains and other monopoly enterprizes, monopoly cultural capital plays a significant role in srnothering indigenous local productions and homogenizing continental and global culture,

The integration of Canadian newspaper capital into diversified corporate conglomerates is already far advanced. Although Conrad Black has gradualIy shed non- media holdings from his ownership portfolio, his ties to the non-media corporate elite are deep and long-standing and he remains firmly entrenched in the upper ranks of this social network. In terms of the direct integration of media holdings into conglomerates with non-media holdings, Hackett notes "the archetype is the Thomson family's corporate empire, which includes interests in wholesaling, retailing (Hudson's Bay, Zellers), real estate, oil and gas, insurance and financial and management services" (Hackett et. al., 1992: 12). A 1988 study found that Thomson's 10 member board is directly interlocked with 50 corporations including five financial and insurance companies, Shell Canada,

Hudson Bay Co., IBM Canada, and Abitibi Price Ltd. Thomson's 622 first-order indirect interlocks included Bel1 Canada, Chrysler Canada, Westinghouse, etc.. Ken Thomson himseif sits on almost 40 different boards (Winter, 1990: 113).

Wallace Clernent's 1975 study revealed that 69% of the members of the Canadian media elite "simu~taneouslyheld important corporate positions outside the media" (325).

In other words, the economic and media elite are Iargely the same people. Together, he concludes, they consolidate two key sources of power -- economic and ideologïcal, and form two sides of one class, the corporate elite. Picard (1988) concludes that "large scale capital in Canada is socially integrated in a denseIy interconnected network of directorship interlocks, and that high integration and multiple interlocks provide a base for inter-corporate CO-operationand social solidarity among directors" ( 110). Porter

(1965) found that the ranks of the media elite are typically inaccessible to non-

Establishment challengers. "Inheritance through kinship rather than social mobilization

[are] the principal rneans of recruitment to that group which owns the major mass media

instruments" (483-484)-

Picard (1999) has concluded that interlocking directorships have made directors of

media companies "indistinguishable frorn the corporate sector generally, and from each

other." In fact, his study reveals "at least 95 major indirect interlocks between [Southam

and Thomson], including on other media boards such as Baton, Rogers Cablesystems,

five different Maclean Hunter firms, TorStar and the Toronto Sun". This onolithic

ownership and control structure concentrates incredible media-power in the hands of the

corporate elite. Picard notes that "the cohesiveness of these pluralistic groups raises

questions about the potential for confhct of interest for individuals on several different

boards of directors. Of special concem here is the newspaper director who is on numerous

outside boards." For this reason, he cdls for the restriction of corporate interlocks, especially those in consciousness industries. Ralph Nader has made a si miIar proposal in

the U.S. context, calling for an outright ban on interlocks (109-1 15).

The media elite are highly class conscious, as their contributions to the Fraser

Institute have demonstrated (Dobbin,1998: 192). The Institute, which has a head office in

Vancouver and branches in Toronto and Seattle, is committed to redirecting public attention "to the role of cornpetitive markets in providing for the well-being of Canadians

...documenting ...the deterioration resulting from government intervention" (Palmer: l987:2O). Furthemore, the multinational Company that spearheaded the

formation of the Institute, MacMillan BlodeI, is directly interlocked with Southam News.

According to a L985 study, "Southarn Newspapers is well represented on the MacMillan

BlodeI board by Jean M. Southam and J.P. Fisher, chairman and chief executive officer of

Fraser Inc., wliose brother Gordon Fisher is president of Southam" (Rugrnan and

McIlveen, 198554). Fraser Institute commentaries appear reguIarIy in pubIications owned by media chains. Critics have xgued that media owners deliberately make their facilities available to the Fraser Institute to promote their own views under someone else's name,

According to a study of Globe and Mail coverage during 1994 and 1995 (Globe and Mai1,2/12/95:D2), the "rightist" Fraser Institute was cited a full 139 times, or more than once a week. Thatfs 3.5 times more often than the closest other think-tank, the CD

Howe Institute. CD Howe is described more moderately as "centre-right," suggesting something about the range of opinion in Globe and Mail anaIysis. Even that may be overstating the difference between the two institutions, however, since according to the

Fraser Institute's Michael Walker "they've corne around to our position." A compelling argument can be made, then, that the Fraser Institute is setting the research agenda for the

CD Howe Institute as well as setting the standard for public commentary with CD Howe merely making similar arguments after they have already earned public respectability, or making them in more cautious terrns. The Fraser Institute was also cited almost 8 times more often than the only think tank described as leftist, the Canadian Centre for Policy

Alternatives, which was only cited 18 times in the last two years, or about once every 6 weeks. It bears repeating that in 1996, the year afier this study was concluded, the Fraser Institute reported a 5 1% overall increase in its 'media-hits' (Dobbin, 1998: 193). This, of course, suggests that the Globe and Mail study - also comrnissioned before the launch of its cornpetitor from the right, the National Post - significantly underestimates the predominance of subsequent Fraser Insti tute exposure.

The unity of interest and outlook which weds Canada's New Right and the country's media elite together is nowhere more clearly personified than in Conrad Black, whom biographer Peter C. Newman (1983) dubbed "the Establishment Man," Certaïnly,

Black is no outsider to Canada's corporate elite. The son of brewery magnate George

Black, he succeeded his father on several boards, acquainting him at an early age with key players in corporate Cariada. His directorships included Cariing O'Keefe, Confederation

Life, the Canadian Xmperid Bank of Commerce and Argus, whose holdings included

Massey Ferguson, Norcen, Hanna Mining, Iron Ore Company of Canada, Dominion

Stores, Labrador Mining and Exploration, Standard Broadcasting and HolIinger Mines

(Siklos,1995:80 - 113).

In addition to being an earIy member of this densely interlocked, social network,

Black also had close, collaborative ties with other members of the media elite. The young

Black lived in the sarne neighbourhood and went to the same private school as the Eaton and Bassett farnilies, who jointly controlled the Baton television empire

(Black,1993:141). On March 15, 1978 Black and John Bassett hosted a luncheon at the

York Club for the Amencan evangelist, Billy Graham [Graham uses the Bassett's television facility to videotape his international crusades (Newman,1982:9 l).]. Paul

Desmarais, who briefly shared control of Southam with Black, is a Palm Beach neighbour

(Siklos,1995:3 17). Beginning with his newspaper business partners, David Radler and Peter White, on to his second wife, Former Toronto Sun Editor Barbara Amiel (Barlow and

Winter,1997: 179), Black has been careful to seek out ideological soulmates, He was also very careful to cultivate political position with the conservative political establishment. In his memoirs, Black (1993) calls former Tory Prime Minister Brian Mulroney an "old friend who helped him bust a union dive at his first newspaper, the Sherbrooke Record

(160-161). In addition to getting the future Prime Minister directorships with Labrador

Mining and Exploration, Standard Broadcasting and the Canadian Imperia1 Bank of

Commerce, Black donated generously to the young corporate lawyer's leadership bid.

While Black also contributed to the campaigris of future Mulroney cabinet ministers John

Crosbie and his future Finance Minister Michael Wilson, HoIlinger also picked up "Peter

White's bills as he traveiled and worked with the candidate " (3 12). In return, Mulroney arranged an honorary degree and an appointment to the Pnvy CounciI for Black

(Siklos, l995: 100). When Black was seeking a foreign buyer for Dominion Stores, he also benefited frorn the installation of Trudeau's successor as Mulroney "had a much more relaxed view of foreign ownership" (BIack, l993:X 1).

The emerging role of Black's newspaper empire in the New Rightrs 'second wave' in Canada and elsewhere may be compared in significance to the role of Richard

Viguerie's direct mail operation in getting the New Right7s 'first wave' off the ground in the U.S.. The significance of Black's rise to media power rests in the coincidence of his ability to influence opinion through Hollinger's over 500 titles and circulation of over 4.7 million newspapers world-wide by 1995 (SikIos71995:9),and his tvillingrzess, as a self- described "ideoiogist" (Si kIos, lW5:68) to use them. With a fondness for citing military analogies to his corporate and political battles,

BIack has named several of his companies after warships (Black,1993:327). He has also described the deployrnent of his holdings in ideological battIe with a consistent relish. In

kt, while Viguerie7scomparatively modest proprietorship may be a compelling comparison, Black's activities have also occasioned comparison to the aristocratie

American conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr.. Indeed, the significance of

Buckley's National Review on the intellectual formation and vocations of BIack should not be under-estimated. As noted in Chapter 4, William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review played a key role in the rise of the New Right. What is less well known, however, is the role Buckley played in the direction and content of the world's fastest growing press empire (Siklos, 19%). Not only has Black self-consciousIy and effectively emulated

Buckley's personal example as one of Canada's most quotable conservatives; he also used

National Reviav as the mode1 for his neo-conservative make-over of Saturday Nigtzt magazine (Black, 1993236; Newman,l982: 183-194). Significantly, Black intervened personally to hire Ken Whyte as that magazine's new editor (Si klos, lW3:379). Whyte was later appointed editor of Black's national daily, the National Post, in October 1998.

In 1985, Black appointed Peregrine Worthome, a friend of Buckiey's, who Time magazine once described as the 'British Buckley' (ibid: 146), editor of the S unday edition of the

Daily Telegrapk Black's proprietorial philosophy is to clearly brand his newspapers with his own particular ideological imprint. "Much the best course, in my judgement, and one that is followed by many newspaper companies, including ours, is to hire editors with whom the principal shareholder is in general agreement, to minimise interna1 frictions"

(Siklos, 1995:321). This policy, of course, led to resignations at Scrtrtrday Niglzt (Black,1993:386), as well as the Jentsalenz Post which was converted from a dovish to

hawkish publication virtualIy overnight. and a public outcry at the rightward lurch of

Fairfax newspapers in AustraIia (Siklos. 1995: 1l9,208,27 1). Buckley's personal influence on Black remains significant to this day. A frequent speaker and guest at Hollinger annual meetings and another frequent flyer on the international right-wing think tank circuit,

Black and his new wife Barbara Amiel Black flew to New York for supper with Buckley, his wife and John O' Sullivan, Buckley's successor as editor of the National Review and a close fnend of Barbara's, en route to their honeyrnoon at a Rockefeller cabin in Maine

(Siklos,1995:287).

Inheriting seven million dollars and a lucrative handful of corporate directorships and contacts from his father, Conrad Black rose quickIy through the ranks of the

Canadian corporate establishment. At 21, he was the youngest member ever of the exclusive Toronto Club (Newman,1982:41). He had acquired his first newspaper at 22

(BIack,1993:229). At 32, he was declared Man of the Year by the Globe and Mail's

Repofi on Business (SikIos,1995:68). He was the youngest CIBC director in history

(Black, 1993: l42), had published his memoirs by the modest age of 49 (Black,1993), was heading the fastest growing press empire in the world and launching a new national daily newspaper in Canada al1 by the age of 54. According to Black, however, it was at the age of 37, when he attended his first Bilderberg Club meeting, that his horizons expanded beyond the confines of Canada. Bilderberg was Black's first contact with several future

Hollinger directors and International Advisory board members. "Not having very satisfactory recollections of school days, nor being a very enthuusiatic or observant alumnus, Bilderberg has been the closest 1 have known to that sort of camaraderie," Black (1993) recounts. While forma1 inclusion in the inner sanctum of the =lobal corporate elite reaffirrned and renewed BIack's ideological cornmitment, the sudden expansion of contacts also extended the horizon of his ambitions. "It was from Bilderberg that Our cornpany's eventual vocation as an international newspaper organization arose," he claims

(279-280).

Just as Black's purchase of Satzcrday Night magazine in 1987. secured at a

Bilderberg meeting, commanded respect with the domestic elite, his acquisition of the

Daily Telegraph granted him the "stature to live the kind of life he had always envisioned for himself -- not just an acquaintance of the international elite, but one of them"

(Siklos,1995:157,173,385). It was also through Bilderberg that Black was approached with the Daily Telegraph proposition (Black,1993:334).

The acquisition of the Daily Telegraph, frequently referred to as the 'Torygraph' in Britain, also brought Black into the commanding heights of British conservative politics (Black,1993:417), According to former British Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher's senior foreign policy advisor Charles Powell, the first meeting of Black and

Thatcher was "Love at first sight -- in a political sense" (Siklos,1995: 157). Thatcher was the keynote speaker at Hollinger dinners in 1988 (Black, l993:39O) and in 199 1, She and her husband were among twenty guests at Black's wedding to Barbara Amie1 Black

(Siklos, 1995276,386).

Although Black's modest holdings in the U.S. didn't earn him the same familiarity with President Ronald Reagan, he admired him a great deal. In 1984, Black happily paid

$2,000 when the president spoke to a fundraising dinner at Palm Beach

(BIack, 1993:84,248,25 1). B lack had been spending winters in Palm Beach since 1978. Reagan travelled to speak to kindred spirits in Canada on the Hollinger company plane and addressed a Hollinger dinner in 1989 (Siklos,1995:211).

Black's interests in the US. gradually increased through American Publishing, which was launched in 1987. By 1995 it was ranked the twelfth largest U.S. chain by circulation and second Iargest when measured by the number of newspapers operated.

The Blacks had been spending an increasing amount of time in Manhattan before

American Publishing bought them a rent-free apartment there for US. $3 million in 1994.

This, combined with the purchase of a $1 million Chicago apartment for David Radler on the company tab, suggests that the U.S. will be the next target for major acquisitions by

Hollinger. As Black puts it, "In my position 1 move around according not exactly to what municipality I most like the public parks in, the theatres or the skyline. 1 go where my essential econornic interests lead." This theory is further supported by the make-up of the

Hollinger International Advisory Board, launched in 1990. A Bilderberg-style think-tank, it includes luminaries such as Margaret Thatcher, but also Americans Richard Perle, Paul

Volker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Brinkley, William F. BuckIey Jr., George Wi11 and

Henry Kissinger. The Board also includes former Canadian arnbassador to the US. Allan

Gottlieb (Siklos, 1995:228-229, 3 83-389). As Black describes his recruitment strategy,

"load (these boards) up with people who can be helpful to you ... I'm not just interested in trotting these people around" (E3 lac k, 1993:230).

Clearly, corparate ownership and controt of the mass media - particuIarty daily newspapers - has played an important role in the efforts of the corporate elite to build their agenda-setting and legitimation capacities in recent decades. As the New Right revolutions demonstrate, it is an important organizational fulcrum in the transformation of economic power into ideological and political dominance. Popular classes, their defense organizations and leaderships continue to ignore the politics of mass media, and the development of an alternative media strategy, at their peril.