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Man Bites Watchdogs, Chicago Reader, November 15, 2002

"'This is actually a quite unique event,' said Sut Jhally, settling in at the podium. 'I thought this was going to be a progressive conference that put the analysis of propaganda at its center. In fact, it has turned into an example of the operation of propaganda itself.' Jhally had just insulted the people who'd invited him to Chicago to speak.

... Jhally's host was Chicago Media Watch, a grassroots organization haunted by mounting evidence that the American media are being taken over by a handful of massive corporations ... Jhally, a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, is famous for his studies of how advertising and marketing work on the public mind ... But Jhally had chosen a subject -- perhaps the only subject -- that actually does divide media progressives. He intended to argue that the Israeli government is brilliantly manipulating American public opinion against the Palestinians. And so CMW president Liane Casten had asked someone else to follow him to the microphone and give Israel's side. Jhally arrived at midday, got the lay of the land, and was so furious he promptly canceled his hotel reservation and booked a six o'clock flight back home. But he went through with his lecture. He told his audience he'd come to 'unpack' the American public's strong support for the Israelis, something he called 'the end result of perhaps the most powerful example of propaganda and public relations we can find in the world' ... The pressure on journalists to conform, he said, 'works in other ways as well. It also works when there is an event such as this, which, as I said, I thought was a left-wing progressive event in which you may actually open the debate in some way.' Apparently it wasn't. 'It's not often,' he said, 'I can
actually point and say, `Here it is, actually working' ... Jhally was telling his audience that this polarization serves the ends of the Israeli government: when any critique of Israeli conduct is regarded as a viewpoint so controversial that immediate rebuttal must be provided -- in the name of fairness and balance -- the critique is blunted if it's heard at all. 'No one wants to be controversial,' he said. 'So look around you and see how the propaganda system works. This is, in fact, the system in operation. It's kept a lot of people quiet. It kept me quiet a long time.'"