The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [37]
While projecting the images of prosperity was easy, getting people to care about politics was more difficult—at least people who were not previously politicized. To that extent, Western broadcasting efforts included both entertainment and lifestyle programs (one of Radio Free Europe’s hits was Radio Doctor, a program that informed listeners about recent developments in Western medicine and answered specific questions from laypeople, exposing the inefficiencies of the Soviet system in the process). Banned music was frequently broadcast as well (one survey of Belarusian youths in 1985 found that 75 percent of them listened to foreign broadcasts, mostly to catch up on music they couldn’t get otherwise). In this way the West could capitalize on the cultural rigidity of communism, lure listeners with the promise of better entertainment, and secretly feed them with political messages. (Not everyone was convinced such a strategy was effective. In 1953 Walter Lippmann, one of the fathers of modern propaganda, penned a poignant op-ed, arguing that “to set up an elaborate machinery of international communication and then have it say, ‘We are the Voice of America engaged in propaganda to make you like us better than you like our adversaries,’ is—as propaganda—an absurdity. As a way of stimulating an appetite for the American way of life, it is like serving castor oil as a cocktail before dinner.”) “Politicization” and involvement in oppositional politics were thus by-products of desire for entertainment that the West knew how to satisfy. This may not have led to the emergence of civil society, of course, but it has certainly made ideas associated with the democratic revolutions of 1989 more palatable in the end.
The media’s roles in the cultivation of political knowledge in both democratic and authoritarian societies are strikingly similar. Before the rise of cable television in the West, knowledge about politics—especially of the everyday variety—was something of an accident even in democratic societies. Markus Prior, a scholar of political communications at Princeton University, argues that most Americans were exposed to political news not because they wanted to watch it but because there was nothing else to watch. This resulted in citizens who were far better politically informed, much more likely to participate in politics, and far less likely to be partisan than today. The emergence of cable television, however, gave people the choice between consuming political news and anything else—and most viewers, predictably, went for that “anything else” category, which mostly consisted of entertainment. A small cluster has continued to care about politics—and, thanks to the rise of the niche media, they have more opportunities that they could ever wish for—but the rest of the population has disengaged.
Prior’s insights about the negative effects of media choice in the context of Western democracies can also shed light on why the Internet may not boost political knowledge and politicize the fence-sitters, the ones who remain undecided about whether to voice their grievances against their governments, to the degree that some of us hope. The drive for entertainment simply outweighs the drive for political knowledge—and YouTube could easily satisfy even the most demanding entertainment junkies. Watching the equivalent of “The Tits Show” in the 1970s required getting exposure to at least a five-second political commercial (even if it was the jingle of Radio Free Europe), while today one can avoid such political messages altogether.
The Denver Clan Conquers East Berlin
If policymakers stopped focusing on “virtual walls” and “information curtains,” as if those are all that the Cold War could teach them, they might discover a more useful lesson on the entertainment front. The German Democratic Republic presents a fascinating case of a communist country that for virtually all of its existence could receive Western broadcasting. It would seem natural