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Demagogic and US Culture amongst the major . Rather than a return to the contentious ‘burden on speech’ of a Fairness Doctrine, decommodification is thus the most plausible Industries: A Long Tradition means of reducing US culture industry demagogy.

Paul K. Jones Introduction: demagogy, propaganda, populism Australian National University On November 24, 2015, editorialized against Pre-final version of article published in Australasian Journal of presidential aspirant Donald Trump’s ‘racist lies’ and related American Studies 35(1) (July 2016): 11-28 aggressive hyperbole.1 The Times placed Trump in a tradition of US Abstract demagogues who arise ‘every generation or so’. Precursors of

Frankfurt School conceptions of culture industry and demagogy are employed in a Trump named and comparatively cited were Joseph McCarthy and synoptic historical analysis of the relation between demagogy and US culture George Wallace. Passages of their speech were juxtaposed with industries. A recent New York Times editorial critique of Donald Trump’s similar statements by Trump. In a summary subheader, the editorial demagogy is placed in a ‘tradition’ of tension between US high journalism and board proclaimed, ‘It’s up to the media to confront demagogy with demagogy dating from the 1920s. This period saw the near simultaneous the truth’.2 codification of professional editorial newspaper ethics and the rise of broadcast demagogues like Father . The tradition reaches its most famous Those familiar with the pantheon of heroicized US journalists would conflict point in the now heroicized struggle between Edward R. Murrow and undoubtedly recognize here an allusion to Edward R. Murrow’s Joseph McCarthy. The state sought to redress the rise of culture industry exposure of Joseph McCarthy on his See It Now television program demagogy via communications regulation known as The Fairness Doctrine. The in 1954. Murrow’s actions in that instance have been widely latter’s demise enabled the 1990s return to prominence of demagogic speech provided byTheAustralianNationalUniversity within the culture industries. The article argues, however, that what was pivotal to celebrated as an exemplary ‘slaying of the dragon’ of demagogy, not this history was the facilitation of the commodification of mediated demagogic least in the recent filmic recreation, Good Night and Good Luck, and brought toyouby speech at the advent of broadcasting, a path apparently unique to the USA as a revered exemplary figure in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.3 CORE 2

However, like Murrow, The Times editorial did more than ‘confront has been applied to advertising and other forms of commercial demagogy with the truth’ by using orthodox journalistic fact- content of the culture industries.4 checking to expose spurious assertions as such. That much had So (demagogic) propaganda and culture industry do not stand in an already been achieved by its reporters in the days before the oppositional binary, as in the First Amendment’s binarization of editorial. Murrow and the 2015 Times editorialists went further. state and free speech. Rather, demagogic practice can be found on Their exposure of demagogy required identifying and demonstrating ‘both sides’ of state/culture industry. Indeed, crucial to this certain techniques of demagogic . Famously, Murrow did not liminality is the self-positioning of professional journalism within confront McCarthy directly, but presented an analysis of archive the culture industries, again exemplified by Murrow and The New footage to his viewers that demonstrated McCarthy’s techniques - York Times.5 For the 2015 Times editorialists, part of Trump’s such as unsubstantiable innuendo – as techniques. Murrow then success lies in his usage of social media, where ‘there’s no need to provided McCarthy with time for a pre-recorded right of reply, respond to questions about his fabrications’. Accordingly, ‘(t)hat which resulted in a set-piece demonstration by McCarthy of the very makes it imperative that other forms of media challenge him’. techniques Murrow had detailed. Likewise, it is the comparative identification of such rhetorical techniques that enabled The Times Journalism, or at least professional journalism’s norm of to place Trump as a successor to McCarthy and Wallace. accountability to verified ‘facts’, thus marks a key point of self- differentiation from demagogy within the culture industries. Of In US academic traditions, notably the fields of communication and course the term ‘culture industry’ dates from the rhetoric, such analysis and critique of demagogy is often articulated Horkheimer/Adorno usage in reference to cinema and radio via a conception of propaganda. This ‘propaganda’, however, is not broadcasting.6 It is the advent of audio-visual recording, editing, and restricted to actions of the state nor to state actors and aspirants (like broadcasting that ‘culture industry’ signals technically and those McCarthy and Trump); nor even to wartime or war-like technical innovations, certainly for Adorno, afford commodification. circumstances. Historically at least, this conception of propaganda 3

The Times’ current concern that social media provide a public space ‘Opinion’ and the rise of demagogy within the early US culture devoid of journalistic accountability norms has an antecedant in the industry moment of formation of US broadcasting as a new cultural industry Journalistic techniques of fact-verification and the related in the 1920s. At that time, not only did radio likewise pose a investigative critical exposure of nefarious political practices are technologico-communicative alternative to print publishing, its US usually traced to the canonical American Society of Newspaper regulatory configuration came to foster broadcast demagogy. These Editors’ Code of Ethics of 1922-23.8 In that text, US professional ‘radio demagogues’, as we shall see, are also routinely categorized journalism borrowed from positivism a confidence in ‘objectivity’ today as populists, and their demagogy drew the particular attention as a means of differentiating itself from other practices, including of Adorno and his colleagues, albeit primarily under the sign of propagandists. As Schudson has put it: fascism.

Following the recent work of Nadia Urbinati, I classify such …journalists not only sought to affiliate with the populism as ‘demagogic populism’. Against the grain of many prestige of science, efficiency, and Progressive contemporary US historians and analysts of populism, Urbinati reform but they sought to disaffiliate from the considers demagogic disfiguration a real, but not necessary, prospect public relations specialists and propagandists who for all populist movements. That is, demagogues have the capacity were suddenly all around them.9 to ‘capture’ all or some of a populist movement’s momentum, especially those that aim for legitimate governmental power.7 Journalism’s self-differentiation from ‘propagandists’ was more

difficult in the new medium of radio, where there was no comparable established tradition of journalistic practice.10 4

The chaotic early years of US broadcasting were succeeded by a understanding of a ‘marketplace of ideas’. It so insulated remarkable organizational arrangement. The regulation of opinionated speech from being rendered a commodity. broadcasting had become necessary in all nation-states, due to a The USA, in contrast, did pursue a literalist understanding of a phenomenon known later as ‘spectrum scarcity’. Since the analogue marketplace of broadcast opinion. Unlike the broadcasting systems radio spectrum was a finite resource, frequencies needed to be adopted in most comparable democracies, the US approach from allocated by a regulator. In the USA, that regulator was the Federal 1929 resolved the question of ‘public service’ requirements of Radio (later Communications) Commission (FRC/FCC).11 This broadcasters entirely via commercial ‘general public interest’ station requirement in turn necessitated licensing individual stations, a licences. Not only would advertising be the chief revenue source for practice that had no parallel in US newspapers. Different nation these licensees, but diversity of opinion would be achieved simply states attached different conditions to these licences. Common via the sale of airtime.13 Thus in the case of ‘opinion’ – rather than European practice established monopoly public service broadcasters news as such – US broadcasting initially elided a central normative (PSBs) like the BBC, funded by a flat-tax-like universal licence fee mediating role for professional journalism. The path then lay open that enabled a ban on advertising content and revenue. These PSBs for ‘raw’ opinion to be shaped as a commodity.14 developed well-resourced news divisions with charters committed to editorial independence that resembled those of the For Urbinati, a defining feature of demagogic populism, in political professionalization movement within US newspapers. However, theoretical terms, is its overvaluation of the ‘opinion’ over the ‘will’ these PSB charters also routinely prohibited editorialization (in the of a sovereign people as citizens within a . ‘Will’ here sense of newspaper leader-editorials) and required that broadcast refers to the election of governments and the configuration of opinion be balanced and/or mediated by journalistic formats like representative institutions, often as a separation of powers. panel discussions.12 In US terms, the PSB model enabled broadcast ‘Opinion’ refers to the ‘extrainstitutional domain of political opinionated speech to achieve circulation – but not via a literal opinions’ that broadly corresponds to most contemporary usage of ‘public sphere’.15 In successful democracies, following Urbinati’s 5

normative model, these two domains co-exist in balance. US broadcasting had barely commenced when the most influential Demagogic invocations of ‘the people’ usually seek to elide or over- of US radio demagogues, Father Charles Coughlin, launched his ride the domain of ‘will’, claiming that the latter’s mediating broadcasting career in 1926. Coughlin soon rose to prominence by institutions and separations of powers are inauthentic. gathering a vast audience as his weekly addresses became increasingly political. By the summer of 1930, he was networked by We might then add to Urbinati’s model a role for professional CBS, and by the mid-1930s his regular radio audience was journalism as an institution whose ideals speak to a comparable conservatively estimated at ten million and speculated to be the mediation within the domain of opinion. Whatever its failings, largest in the world .18 He was initially a supporter of FDR and the including a conflation of proprietor/publisher and editor/journalist, but became increasingly critical of both. He was later this was the intent of the various claims from the mid-nineteenth reported to be considering an alliance with Senator , century onwards that ‘the press’ constitutes a ‘fourth estate’ that himself an accomplished (radio) demagogue. Each had established a might itself represent opinion and so be considered ‘the voice of the social movement-like organization of dedicated followers who people’.16 gathered in large rallies: Coughlin’s Social Justice Movement and What was most unusual about the US culture industry configuration Long’s . Long seemed a likely challenger to FDR in this context was its effective institutional provision of a space, in in the 1936 election, but was assassinated in 1935. Coughlin then led the hegemonic commercial public service stations, where the formation of a Union Party that allied his own and Long’s (professional) journalism’s opposite – the overvaluation of former social movements.19 The Union Presidential candidate lost ‘unmediated’ opinion as such –might flourish on a potentially ignominiously in 1936, and Coughlin briefly retired from national scale. Ironically, this regulatory approach formally broadcasting. A more overtly anti-Semitic and fascistic Coughlin designated the weaker non-commercial educational and non-profit returned to the airwaves in 1938. In that year, he even republished 17 stations as ‘propaganda’ stations. the notorious and long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion document in his newsletter, Social Justice.20 Increased self- 6

regulatory actions by commercial broadcasters, among other We turn up in time of crisis; reasons, ended his broadcasting career in 1940.21 Coughlin then We play upon your feeling, continued to publish his views beyond his parish in his newsletter. We set your brains a-reeling,

We are seven active contrabanders, Responses to Emergent Culture Industry Demagogy We are seven clever propaganders.23 Within critical scholarly analysis of propaganda Coughlin, especially his later broadcast phase, became a paradigmatic case. Significantly, the Lees decided to close their Institute for Alfred and Elizabeth Lee’s now canonical The Fine Art of Propaganda Analysis once the USA entered World War II, since its Propaganda (1939) pursued a strategy of popular education of remit to assess ‘all propaganda’ dispassionately would have critical awareness of propaganda techniques that they termed conflicted with the war effort.

‘devices’. Coughlin was found to employ seven key devices, popular It is a surprisingly little known fact that among the admirers of the knowledge of which, the Lees thought, would alleviate the effects of Lees’ work were members of the émigré Frankfurt School. Both propaganda. Separating ‘the device from the idea’ would reveal Theodor Adorno and Leo Lowenthal used The Fine Art of 22 ‘what the idea amounts to on its own merits’. Propaganda as a model for handbook-like studies of demagogues

The Lees even composed a rhyme, ‘Snow White and the Seven that they undertook within the Institute for Social Research’s Studies Devices’, to be sung in schools to the melody of the dwarves’ in Project (SIPP). Adorno also referred to the Lees’ 24 ‘Heigh Ho’ song from Disney’s 1937 film, Snow White & the Seven handbook frequently in related writings. Funded primarily by the Dwarves: American Jewish Committee, SIPP aimed to identify and analyse domestic anti-Semitic proto-fascism. Unlike the Lees’ work, SIPP Oh, we are the seven devices, 7

continued its research on demagogy after the USA went to war. The Frankfurt analyses, in contrast to both the essentialist Wider social prejudice was also its object.25 conception and the Lees’ work, tied ‘propaganda’ and demagogy together more closely, but then tied both of these to the culture However, the SIPP demagogy studies hardly considered the US industry. The result, in Adorno’s words, was a conception of public a ‘Snow White’ like that in the Lees’ rhyme. As Adorno put demagogy as ‘a kind of psycho-technics’.29 it: ‘The devices pointed out in McLung Lee’s book on Father Coughlin … are only elements of a much farther-reaching pattern of SIPP’s demagogue was a modern figure, not even necessarily a behavior.’26 skillful orator of the assembly. He – consideration of the prospect of female demagogues is a significant lacuna – did not persuade by The Lees’ emphasis, as we have seen, was on techniques of applying the classical techniques of oratory to an issue of the day, propaganda, which they evidently regarded as shared by nation- nor by developing an orthodox political programme. Rather, he states at war, public relations, and domestic demagogic figures like consistently worked with ‘an amazing stereotypy’ of agitational Coughlin, who were ‘playing with fascism’.27 This technicism themes. The demagogue was thus a narcissistic opportunist who was usefully moved the discussion away from the still-prominent best understood psychoanalytically while the stereotypy of the essentialist conception of the demagogue as an exceptional figure techniques, as initially identified by the Lees and extended by SIPP, driven by a lust for power. As Adorno reflected in 1968: lent themselves to culture industry standardization. The opinions of the demagogues are by no means As Adorno notes in the quotation above, the demagogue differs from as restricted to the lunatic fringe as one may at his audience primarily by degree – in his capacity to articulate first, optimistically, suppose. They occur in succinctly using verbal aggression. Indeed, it is the performance of a considerable measure in the utterances of so-called mode of disinhibited hysteria that elicits a rapport with the “respectable” people, only not as succinctly and audience.30 This dynamic was assessed within SIPP as irrational in aggressively formulated.28 that it did not operate cognitively, but – in contrast to essentialist 8

models of the demagogue – neither did it rest on a binarization of a dangerous victims if fully mobilized – rather than merely dismissed correspondingly essentialist conception of ‘emotionalism’ to account with elitist disdain. for demagogic success. Moreover, the titular deceit motif is also indicative, for Adorno at The key psychoanalytic dynamic of that rapport for Adorno, least, of a sympathetic dialogue with American democratic norms. Horkheimer, and Lowenthal was based in paranoia and projection. In later writings, Adorno certainly stated this explicitly.31 It would The psychotechnics of demagogy relied on thematics that portrayed seem that, to some degree, the SIPP researchers were prepared to social relations as entirely interpersonal ones. In other words, and speak to, but not embrace, what I would call a ‘liberal exposure’ consistent with Urbinati’s more recent conception, demagogic framework. Consistent with the Lees’ work, and indeed The Times speech so seeks to elide all forms of institutional mediation. Beyond editorial regarding Trump, this framework posits a good cognitive this, and once institutional and systemic social relations are elided, citizen who is susceptible to rational argument and always-already the paranoia/projection dynamic can fixate on the alleged capable of rational judgement. Present this citizen with sufficient conspirators. information, so this critical logic goes, and demagogic power, understood as deceit, collapses. The complexity of this model may seem at odds with some of the titular forms SIPP employed: Prophets of Deceit, ‘Enlightenment as For Adorno, there is a prominent counter-example to this liberal Mass Deception’ and so on. So, again, a risk arises of an over- exposure strategy (or ‘truth propaganda’, as he calls it): the case of reliance on an unexamined notion of rationality pitted against the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion document. Its continuing irrationality of demagogic mobilization. There is no question that the survival and circulation – including, as we have seen, by Coughlin – use of an irrationalism that exploits mood states forms the core SIPP despite its exposure as a fake (by The Times of London) is sufficient charge against the demagogues. However, their audiences are evidence for Adorno that ‘truth propaganda’ is an inadequate typically regarded sympathetically as victims – albeit potentially counter-demagogic strategy.32 9

Pathological Tradition or Populist Dissidence? populism, Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion, even Coughlin’s anti- Semitic demagogy is relocated as merely ‘a populism of fools’.37 Now, notwithstanding The Times’s identification of Trump’s demagogy as the reiteration of a generational pattern, to suggest here This revisionist orthodoxy provides the background to Urbinati’s that Coughlin’s demagogy forms part of a long demagogic populist 1998 observation that while European populism is routinely marked tradition within the culture industries remains controversial. ‘bad’, mainly due to its associations with fascism, US populism seems to endure as almost necessarily ‘good’.38 For decades, American historians have debated a similar thesis, most associated with the work of Richard Hofstadter. Drawing openly on Yet parallels between the two are certainly discernible. If recent the SIPP research, Hofstadter and his collaborators argued in the European developments are dominated by the rise of new formations 1950s and 1960s that Coughlin had rearticulated – and so changed that seek to render proto-fascist positions ‘respectable’ within multi- the emphasis of – key thematics from the US Populist movement. A party electoral systems, the US narrative is well-known to be one of line, albeit a crooked one, could thus be drawn from the Populists to a steady shift towards the Right by the Republican Party, driven in McCarthy.33 Hofstadter famously named this tendency ‘the paranoid part by demagogic figures. Trump can be readily located within such style’ in US politics.34 developments.

Hostadter’s historian critics misinterpreted the chief ‘target’ of his More recent revisionist research, still positioned against Hofstadter, suspicions (Coughlin) and mounted a defence of the Populist has emphasised the grassroots character of this Republican movement as such.35 This defence of the legitimacy of Populism – transformation from the early 1960s through to the emergence of a and its Progressivist legacy – was extended to Coughlin and Long Reaganite ‘populist conservativism’.39 who, in Alan Brinkley’s much-lauded work, were rechristened In an important recent corrective to the terms of this enduring ‘dissidents’.36 Demagogy disappeared from the revisionist debate, Heather Hendershot has highlighted the role of minor but vocabulary, and in what remains the definitive work on US influential post-McCarthy cold war demagogues who proliferated 10

until the beginnings of the Reaganite ascendancy in the 1970s.40 As established a bridge between Coughlin’s solo purchases of discrete in Europe, their positions were regarded as too extreme for the packets of radio broadcast time – funded by listener donations – and respectable New Right. Yet they nonetheless contributed to the the contemporary format of ‘aggressive talk radio’. rightward shift. My titular ‘long tradition’ thus relies on the slow development of Hendershot’s key insight is the underestimation of the significance what Adorno and Horkheimer saw as a two-sided merger of of the role of broadcasting in all these developments.41 But this propaganda and cultural industrial form. Arguing from the case of claim does not refer to the routine acknowledgement of the rise and advertising in the 1940s, they pointed to the US broadcast culture very gradual decline of mainstream network television’s influence industry’s dependence on advertising for revenue but equally to on political communication in electoral politics since the televising advertising’s role as propagandistic cultural form (in the broad of election debates. Rather, she refers primarily to the curiously critical sense of this term introduced above).43 In the case of this pivotal, but initially marginal, role of broadcast radio in the tradition of demagogic speech, a comparable convergence point was rightward shift. Hendershot’s ‘ultras’ – ultraconservative or not reached until the 1990s when an important shift occurred in extremist demagogues – resumed elements of Coughlin’s practices mediated demagogy’s other liberal nemesis, regulation. on a smaller scale. While others of their ilk did not use radio, those researched by Hendershot used it in highly strategic ways and as a result were more successful and enduring.42 Culture-Industrial Demagogy Unbound?

Moreover, radio provided not just a forum but a consolidating form The surfacing of Trump’s demagogy vindicates a predictive warning to what appeared from a radio-blind perspective to be a disparate issued within the last writings of the First Amendment and media- array of eccentric egoists. Small independently owned stations regulation scholar, C. Edwin Baker. Baker developed an entire scheduled these figures in succession. Even Hendershot doesn’t ‘democratic safeguard’ model of democracy to address what he draw out the full implications of her insight here. For her ultras thus called ‘the Berlusconi effect’ and its risk of ‘demagogic power’. 11

Unlike most theorists of populism, he saw definite risks for US need not require a baron-like directive but merely the banality of democracy – indeed all democracies – in the precedent set by that cost-effectiveness. European case.44 Certainly Trump shares with Berlusconi not only a Moreover, the key figures in this culture-industrial demagogic disinhibited mode of demagogic rhetoric but also the willingness to tradition – from Coughlin to Limbaugh – have tended not to pursue convert vast reserves of economic capital into a personal grasp for political power for themselves but instead sought to move close to the highest political office.45 those in power while claiming to act as a representative of popular Yet such a model of demagogic media power is a somewhat limited opinion. To this extent they constitute a more direct populist one, even if it does account for real threats. It relies on what is in challenge to the fourth estate conception of opinion representation many ways a nineteenth-century model of the ‘politicallly minded than to political office-holders as such. They also threaten the press owner’, i.e. a proprietor-publisher baron who subordinates professionalist ‘social responsibility’ ethic within US network journalistic professionalism and editorial autonomy to the use of broadcast journalism that, as Baker reminds us, was one means of publications for personally preferred political goals.46 Undoubtedly redressing the informational consequences of concentrated broadcast that figure has survived and meets the demagogic tradition in media markets, especially in television.47 Murdoch’s US Fox News. Historically, such self-regulatory professionalization of broadcast The SIPP studies laid the ground for the recognition that demagogy journalism was coupled with stuttering attempts to redress the rise of could also become a cultural industrial commodity administered by a broadcast demagogy more directly, including the use of overt shareholder corporation, rather than the family businesses typical of content regulation. Coughlin presented an ongoing problem to nineteenth-century press barons and their successors. The format of nascent US broadcasting corporations (notably CBS & NBC) and to aggressive talk radio is, in this context, economically self-sustaining the FRC/FCC, whereby his notoriety continually presented in that its production costs are low. As a result, it has tended to managements with spotfires of controversy. replace local news services. The rationale for its expansion thus 12

The NBC network, dominant at first, moved early to delimit locally regulators – sought to achieve balance across a schedule by based figures like Coughlin by refusing to sell airtime ‘for guaranteeing a right of reply to contentious opinion. Broadly, these discussion of controversial issues religious or otherwise’ and by were the same norms of ‘balance’ that professionalizing newspaper insisting, from 1928 onwards, on only dealing with central or editors advocated but were here applied to licensee-proprietors. national agencies of major religions.48 The CBS network could not Perhaps most notably, the right-of-reply principle was not only afford to practise NBC’s regulatory position on sale of airtime and invoked by Murrow in his conflict with McCarthy but was also one attracted many religious broadcasters, including Coughlin. ‘(A)s a he knew from his previous development work in broadcast editorial result of its battles over Coughlin’, and following an attempt to policies as a CBS news executive.52 ‘delete objectionable material’ from one of Coughlin’s speeches in 1931, CBS moved to the NBC policy regarding the sale of airtime The Fairness Doctrine remained the dominant US regulatory and cancelled Coughlin’s contract.49 He then ‘cobbled together his framework from 1949 to 1987. McCarthy exploited it and similar own network’ from independent stations.50 Finally, in 1939, the FCC rules to gain television airtime.53 It was used, at times very National Association of Broadcasters, which represented cynically, by the Kennedy administration to silence the ultras in the independent stations as well as network affiliates, adopted a self- 1960s.54 The Reagan administration effectively ended the Fairness regulatory code requiring panel discussion of all controversial Doctrine in 1987 and, it is widely agreed, so opened the doors to the matters. It was less an enforceable directive than ‘a means of giving rise of aggressive talk radio in the 1990s, leading to the 250% squeamish stations a reason to deny’ contracts.51 Coughlin’s radio expansion of this format in the USA between 1990 and 2006.55 career finished when his existing contracts expired in 1940. Scholars now refer to the ‘echo chamber’ of a conservative media establishment, with talk radio at its core, that arose during the 1990s The FRC/FCC moved towards European regulatory practice by as ‘mainstream’ broadcasting of the Fairness Doctrine era and its banning all editorialization in 1940 and then shifting to its famous news programs lost hegemony. This formation continues to define Fairness Doctrine, which – like the panel model adopted by the self- itself against the ‘media elite’ of those who still practise the liberal 13

norms of professional neutrality.56 The commodification of Horkheimer and Adorno saw an opportunity instead in the differing demagogic speech is thus complete. industrial and regulatory configurations of the broadcasting and cinema sectors of the culture industry. They planned to use the less My long tradition has thus been an episodic one. While regulation consolidated field of cinema for their own (unfulfilled) counter- interrupted its development, the crucial moment, in my view, was demagogic action.59 the early facilitation of demagogic speech, not as the broadcast of speech as such but as an emergent program form in a system that Similarly nimble perspectives regarding the contemporary cultural hegemonized the commodification of airtime. Baker disagreed with industries may become necessary to complement the approach of the Fairness Doctrine on standard First Amendment principles, but such newspapers as The New York Times. The most pertinent did more than most such scholars to recognize the contributing role general lesson this tradition offers to those who seek to counter of a political economy of speech markets to such First Amendment demagogic speech in the culture industries is the need to find deliberations. He also recognized that the replacement of spectrum appropriate means to delimit it, not by censorship, but by its scarcity with digital abundance reconfigured, but did not solve, this decommodification. dilemma.57 Indeed, contemporary demagogic ‘ultras’ tend to be multi-platform practitioners.58

The New York Times is of course correct in seeking to revive the liberal exposure strategy as each demagogue arises within electoral politics, and its concern that such anti-demagogic journalistic norms are absent or weak in the horizontal post-broadcast forms of digital media are pertinent. But cultural-industrial demagogy, as Adorno warned, is not always so susceptible to ‘truth propaganda’. 14

1 The Editorial Board, "Mr. Trump’s Applause Lies," The New York Times, 6 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: November 24 2015. This editorial came shortly after Trump’s unverifiable claim Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford that he had seen on television ‘thousands and thousands’ of people in an ‘Arab’ University Press, 2002); Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected community in New Jersey cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991). 2 This byline was only used in the app edition of The Times. 7 Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People 3 George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Good Night, and Good Luck [Screenplay] (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014). It is important to (N.Y.: Newmarket Press, 2006); Edward R. Murrow et al., The Mccarthy Years, state at the outset that Urbinati’s and the Frankfurt School’s conceptions of Edward R Murrow Collection (United States: Docurama : New Video Group,, demagogy introduced below, and indeed the critical propaganda analysis to which 2005), videorecording, 1 videodisc (ca. 114 min.): sd., col. & b&w ; 4 3/4 in., I connect it, are not completely congruent. Crucially, unlike Adorno and NVG-9717 New Video Group. Aaron Sorkin et al., The Newsroom. The Complete Lowenthal, Urbinati insists on the relevance of the classical analysis of demagogy First Season (Burbank, CA: Home Box Office: Warner Home Video,, 2013), because she sees the present as further marked by a form of plebiscitory and videorecording, 4 videodiscs (ca. 610 min.): sd., col. ; 4 3/4 in., 4000037303 spectatorial ‘audience democracy’ which resembles the role of the crowd in Home Box Office. The ‘dragonslayer’ metaphor is sourced from: Thomas Patrick ancient Rome. ‘Audience democracy’ in turn derives from the influential politico- Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, Mccarthyism, and American theoretical work of Manin: Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Culture, Film and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4 J Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of 8 Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960, 3d ed. (New Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); York,: Macmillan, 1962), 726-27. Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, Sixth ed. 9 Michael Schudson, "The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism," Journalism (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2015). 2, no. 2 (2001): 163. 5 A measure of the complexity here is the fact that US State Department runs an 10 It is worth noting here how little continuity there is between scholarship on ‘US Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists, aimed at mentoring international journalism’ and that on US broadcast journalism. The latter tends to be the domain journalists, and has issued an illustrative pamphlet which highlights Murrow’s of historians of broadcasting rather than those of journalism per se. There is a challenge to McCarthy as one of his exemplary achievements. See: decided tendency, very notable for example in Michael Schudson’s much-cited http://eca.state.gov/files/bureau/factsheet_edwardrmurrow-2014.pdf work, to equate the history of journalism – and its current crisis – with the history of newspaper journalism. Another example would be Mott’s much-cited history 15

21 Donald I. Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio which reduces broadcasting to an appendix-like final chapter outside its main (New York: Free Press, 1996), 224. linear narrative, even in its 1962 edition: Mott, American Journalism: A History, 22 Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A 1690-1960. Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 11 Paul K. Jones and David Holmes, Key Concepts in Media and Communications, 1939; repr., 1), 24. Some identified devices relate to the contemporary critique of Sage Key Concepts (Thousand Oaks, Calif. ; London: Sage, 2011), 80-85. advertising practices (e.g.‘testimonial’) while several anticipate formulations 12 T. Gibbons, Regulating the Media (Sweet & Maxwell, 1998). better known today via semiotics. ‘Transfer’ resembles Roland Barthes’ ‘rhetoric 13 Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the of the image’ analysis while ‘band wagon’ and ‘just plain folks’ resemble semiotic United States, 4th ed. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2014). analyses of ‘modes of address’. Cf Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," in 14 David Goodman’s recent history of this period of US radio addresses both the Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1978). propaganda concerns of the 1930s – rightly emaphasising that such analyses rarely 23 Lee and Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's regarded audiences as ‘passive’ - and the regulatory framework I have begun to Speeches, x. sketch here and which is elaborated further below. Curiously, Goodman’s 24 Theodor W Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' emphasis on the ‘civic ambition’ of radio policies – here the presentation of Radio Addresses (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Theodor W. diverse opinions to citizens via diverse programming – overlooks both the degree Adorno, "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," Psychoanalysis to which this policy facilitated the demagogues’ entry into radio and how the later and the Social Sciences 3 (1951); Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets phase of FRC/FCC content regulation was an attempt to contain those of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, 2d ed., Studies in demagogues (see final section of this article). Likewise, journalistic professional Prejudice (Palo Alto, Calif.,1949). norms play no major role in this narrative. Hilmes in contrast emphasises those 25 Its most famous ‘output’ was The Authoritarian Personality which produced a demagogues but also regards the regulatory contraints placed on Coughlin as an controversial ‘F-scale’ predictor of susceptibiity to fascist demagogy. Here I draw inhibition of the speech of an ‘unwashed’ minority. David Goodman, Radio's primarily on the demagogy studies, which were mostly conducted earlier, but also Civic Ambition : American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (New rely on some of Adorno’s related and later writings. On the controversial York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History reception of The Authoritarian Personality, see Martin Roiser and Carla Willig, of Broadcasting in the United States, 144. "The Strange Death of the Authoritarian Personality: 50 Years of Psychological 15 I refer here to the Habermasian conception of the domain of opinion formation and Political Debate," History of the Human Sciences 15, no. 4 (2002). Cf via information and deliberation, ideally independent of market and state. Jürgen Theodor W Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York N.Y.: Harper Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a & Row, 1950). Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 26 Theodor W Adorno, "Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda," in Anti- 1989). Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (Madison, : International 16 The fourth estate metaphor has impeccably British origins but there have been Universities Press, 1946), 135. significant attempts to tie it to First Amendment principles – cf L. A. Scot Powe, 27 Lee and Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's The Fourth Estate and the Constitution: Freedom of the Press in America Speeches, ix. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 260ff. 28 Theodor W. Adorno, "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in 17 Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States. America," in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. 18 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Donald Fleming; Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Depression, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1982), 119. 1969; reprint, 2012), 364-65. 19 David H. Bennett, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the 29 Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Union Party, 1932-1936 (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1969). Addresses, 8. Adorno certainly saw these psychotechnics (detailed below) 20 Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse Univ Pr, 1965), operating within cinema, popular song and (radio) soap opera but not universally 193ff. 16

36 Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great so. The Frankfurt position was decidely not, as Goodman has recently glossed it, Depression. that ‘American mass culture was indistinguishable from propaganda’. Rather, with 37 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, Rev. ed. the exception of advertising, these were noted only as tendencies within specific (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 132. culture-industrial forms. Demagogic speech was the ‘core’ case from which 38 Nadia Urbinati, "Democracy and Populism," Constellations 5, no. 1 (1998). Adorno developed such comparative comments about particular instances within Urbinati reprises this position into a more open disagreement with that body of the culture industry. A more indicative contemporary example would be the work that ‘represents populism as reclaiming politics on the part of ordinary comparison drawn by The Times’ television critic between Trump as demagogue people against an elected elite that concentrates power’ in Democracy Disfigured: and Trump as reality TV participant on The Apprentice. Ibid., 44; "Anti-Semitism Opinion, Truth, and the People, 133. and Fascist Propaganda," 134, 31; Goodman, Radio's Civic Ambition : American 39 E.g. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s, 85. James Poniewozik, "Trump’s (Princeton University Press, 2002). Campaign Classroom: Reality Tv," The New York Times, October 10 2015. 40 Heather Hendershot, What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing 30 Adorno, "Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda," 131-32. Prophets of Deceit Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, included limited ‘field notation’ of audience reactions in face-to-face demagogic 2011). public addresses. Lowenthal and Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the 41 Hendershot’s general complaint is that these figures were treated as Techniques of the American Agitator, xvi, 150, 28, 63, 78. ‘propagandists’ rather than ‘media producers’. This is certainly the case with 31 Adorno, "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America," 367-68. Hofstadter and his colleagues but not so of SIPP (whose influence on Hofstadter 32 "Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation," in Studies in Leadership: she does not mention). Ibid., 13. Leadership and Democratic Action, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner (New York: Harper & 42 The key figures researched by Hendershot include H.L. Hunt, Dan Smoot, Carl Row, 1950), 429-30. McIntire and Billy James Hargis. For a contempoary analogue see: Jane Mayer, 33 The key text to which Hofstadter contributed is the collection edited by Daniel "‘Bully Pulpit: An Evangelist Talk-Show Host’s Campaign to Control the Bell in 1955 and republished in a second edition in 1964; Daniel Bell, ed. The Republican Party’," The New Yorker, no. June 18 (2012). Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated, 2nd ed. (Garden 43 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, City, New York: Anchor, 1964). 132-33. In tying advertising to propaganda in its demagogic sense, Horkheimer 34 Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Harper’s and Adorno were still moving broadly within the empirical terrain of the US Magazine 229, no. 1374 (1964); The Paranoid Style in American Politics and tradition of liberal propaganda critique. Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). While another of Hofstadter’s categories, 44 C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership ‘pseudo-conservative’, is well-known to have been derived from Adorno, Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2006); C Edwin Baker, "Viewpoint ‘paranoid’ curiously has not been so recognized for its SIPP linkages. While Diversity and Media Ownership," Fed. Comm. LJ 61 (2008); "Press Performance, Hofstadter’s SIPP source may have beeen The Authoritarian Personality, another Human Rights, and Private Power as a Threat," Law & Ethics of Human Rights 5, likely candidiate was Prophets of Deceit, which follows the paranoia/projection no. 2 (2011); "Media Concentration: Giving up on Democracy," Fla. L. Rev. 54 model closely, as it is that text that initially drew Hofstadter to consider the (2002): 906ff. rhetoric of some Populist figures in such terms. Cf The Age of Reform (New York: 45 A key difference of course is that Berlusconi’s rise via a new party was partly Vintage/Random House, 1955), 60-93. See especially section II, ‘History as enabled by the collapse of both major established Italian political parties. Paolo Conspiracy’, and its notes to pp. 72-73 and 80. Mancini, Between Commodification and Lifestyle Politics: Does 35 In an anticipation of Brinkley’s and especially Kazin’s work, Canovan’s much- Provide a New Model of Politics for the Twenty-First Century? (Reuters Institute cited book on populism blithely recounts that Hofstadter’s critique tried to ‘tar the for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford Oxford, 2011). Populists of the 1890s with the McCarthyite brush’. Margaret Canovan, Populism 46 Jean K Chalaby, "No Ordinary Press Owners: Press Barons as a Weberian Ideal (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 184. Type," Media, Culture & Society 19, no. 4 (1997). 17

Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest; Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah 47 Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters, 18. Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility 48 L.M. Benjamin, The Nbc Advisory Council and Radio Programming, 1926- (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 79. The 250% figure is dervived 1945 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 62. Stewart M Hoover and from: Project for Excellence in Journalism., "The State of the News Media 2007, Douglas K Wagner, "History and Policy in American Broadcast Treatment of Talk Radio," Project for Excellence in Journalism,, Religion," Media, Culture & Society 19, no. 1 (1997). http://stateofthemedia.org/2007/radio-intro/talk-radio/. 49 L.M. Benjamin, Freedom of the Air and the Public Interest: First Amendment 56 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Rights in Broadcasting to 1935 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 154; Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, University Press, 2008); Jonathan M. Ladd, Why Americans Hate the Media and 142. How It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 50 Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 142. 57 Baker, "Viewpoint Diversity and Media Ownership." 51 Ibid., 144. 58 Cf Jane Mayer’s emphasis on the multi‐platform presence of her ‘talk radio’ 52 A.M. Sperber, Murrow, His Life and Times (Fordham University Press, 1986), demagogue case‐study. Mayer, "‘Bully Pulpit: An Evangelist Talk‐Show Host’s 278. Campaign to Control the Republican Party’." 53 E.R. Bayley, Joe Mccarthy and the Press (University of Wisconsin Press, 59 On the planned SIPP film,‘Below The Surface’, and its possible influence on 1981), 191. Hollywood portrayals of anti-Semitism, see David Jenemann, Adorno in America 54 Hendershot, What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 106-48. On Adorno’s view the Public Interest, 14ff; Fred W. Friendly, The Good Guys, the Bad Guys, and of this project as an alternative ‘vaccine against ’ to that of ‘truth the First Amendment : Free Speech Vs. Fairness in Broadcasting, 1st ed. (New propaganda’: Adorno, "Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation," 433-34. York: Random House, 1976). 55Berry and Sobieraj mark another wave of content deregulation from 2000 which has heightened this tendency. Hendershot, What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War