Information as propaganda, a strategy started from the World War

Agnès Tortosa

Communication and information are in themselves key aims for the consolidation and the maintenance of the capitalist economy that controls the present society. According to the wise statement of the North American linguist Noam Chomsky, mass media have been constituted in a huge mechanism of propaganda which did its first induced agreement experiments of the population in the meanwhile of the First World War. In a short period of two months, mass media achieved that a mainly peaceful population of United States of America changed to defend the military North American intervention in Europe. The false images and narrations —edited and produced by the British secret services — of Belgian tortured, raped and murdered children had a relevant importance. Almost one century have gone by since then, but nowadays this practice is generalized and has become normal, and now it does not surprise anyone. This is the situation of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazian. In both extremes of the balance are the 24hours information channel in English, but edited in Moscou, Russia Today, absolutely controlled and directed by the Kremlin, and the all-powerful Fownews, the private television from United States with the biggest capacity of impact on tens of millions of voters who legitimize the interests of the economic oligarchy of the republican party. Both channels are considered the representatives of the values of journalism and guarantors with the right of information; both have a speech that pretends objectivity and count on experts analysts of any area, presented as impartial and who value the facts and address the positioning of the reality of its potential audience.

Standstill of information and images

This is the model of information and communication that becomes strong at the beginning of XXI. An all-powerful presence of big corporations that defend political, economic and well-off minority interests, with a huge dose of make-up and reiteration, and with a constant bombing of information whose effect on the observer is not the convincement but the disoriented, anesthetized, collapsed with so much information and images, without any mechanism of contrast, without capacity of reaction or criteria, and with a more accelerated and aggravating situation. If in 1916 it took them two months to change the public opinion of United States to legitimize their intervention in the Great War, now, in a bit more than one week they convinced that tens of millions of people defended the military occupation of a sovereign country as Iraq, its physic destruction and the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilian. It is also true that the close of ranks of the influenced people is more weak and uncertain, because the technology that has facilitated the informative control of masses has also generated self-defence informative mechanisms that can be spread quickly throughout internet and mobile phones, although the confidence that provokes the information that the receptor receives from known people has not been overcome by the new technologies.

BBVA and BSCH

Big banks, as the main controllers of the financial system of the worldwide capitalism, is alienated to all these processes and, specially, during the last two decades the “teledirection” of the corporations—which control the majority of writing, radio, TV mass media— has been imposed as one of its main objectives. This is a practice imported form the global strategy of leader companies in the information already found by the European and North American finance companies: News Corps, Viacom, AOL Time Warner, General Electric, Microsoft, Bertelsmann, United Global Com, Disney, France Telecom or RTL Group. In the case of Spain, the battle of interests between Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) and Banco Santander Central Hispano (BSCH) is outstanding. An interesting doctoral thesis of the Facultat de Ciències de la Informació de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, written by Núria Almirón, explains in details how parallel and coincident —in economic and personal fields— have been the trajectories of BSCH and PRISA Group, one of the communicative monsters that hoards the biggest control in the State. It drives the content of the following newspapers: El País, As, Cinco Días, El Correo de Andalucía and Diario de Jaén; the magazines: Cinemanía, Dominical, Rolling Stone y Gentleman; the radio stations: Cadena Ser, Antena 3 Radio, 40 Principales, Cadena Dial, M80 Radio, Máxima FM y Radiolé, the 100 local channel television: Localia TV, Digital Plus, Cuatro, CNN+ and Documanía; publishing companies such as Santillana, Aguilar, Alfaguara, Altea i Taurus, and the film productor company Sogepack. The late Polanco (patriarch of PRISA) and Emilio Botín (head of BSCH) always went together, with the same aims and almost always next to the socialist government of the moment. The apparition of the Mediapro group, also related to PSOE and the media of reference as Público and La Sexta, provoked the staggering of the socialist alignment of PRISA. The battle between both corporations for the rights of emission to broadcast the matches of the football league passed over the old aims of the political alignment.

The same story is repeated in the case of Vocento. This group gathers also tens of media, which in this situation receive finance and credits from BBVA, a bank anchored to the interests of Partido Popular. The newpapers ABC, El Correo, Diario Vasco, El diario Montañés, La Verdad, El Ideal, Hoy, Sur, La Rioja, El comercio, Las Provincias and La voz de Cádiz, the magazines XL Semanal, Mujer Hoy, TV Más, Mi Cartera de Inversión and Motor 16; the audivisual media Duch as Telecinco, Net TV, Flymusic, Punto TV, Onda 6 and Punto Radio.

El Periódico and La Vanguardia

Other corporations also gather informative poles with influence, specially in the Catalan sphere. Grup Planeta with Antena 3, Onda Cero, La Razón, AND and AVUI; Grup Zeta, (PSC), which incluyes El Periódico de Catalunya, has more media in important fields and with thematic extension: Sport, El Periódico de Extramadura, Ciudad de Alcoy, Diario de Córdoba, Periòdic d'Andorra, El Periódico de Aragón, La Voz de Asturias and Periódico del Mediterráneo. The magazines Equipo, Interviú, Tiempo or Viajar complete its group. Grupo Godó closes this list, with La Vanguardia and RAC1 as its main loudspeakers and the constant and faithful eternal presence of its financial gendarme, La Caixa.