The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ affair that he had with an intern that, in turn, was a spin-off of a special counsel’s investigation of an unrelated matter. I posit this tawdry series of episodes that clotted the U.S. political stage during most of the 1990s as flak in search of a real scandal. The investigation originated with the contrived Whitewater investigations of a resort development deal in Arkansas in the late 1970s. Bill and Hillary Clinton lost money as the deal collapsed, in part due to an unscrupulous and erratic business partner (Conason & Lyons, 2000). In turn, their partner James B. MacDougal was later convicted of 18 felonies around his stewardship of a savings and loan institution.

      Fast-forwarding to the 1990s, Whitewater hypertrophied into “at least four separate but overlapping federal probes” into the Clintons, at a cost ←23 | 24→of $50 million (Qui, 2015). And the outcome of the high-powered investigatory efforts, contrived by the Republican Party opposition? While the drumbeat of flak insinuation echoed across news cycles for six years, the series of special counsels scrutinizing the Clintons came up empty handed on Whitewater—albeit, not for lack of time and effort. The special counsel’s final report in 2000 “concluded that there was insufficient evidence to show that either President Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had committed any crimes in connection with the Arkansas real estate venture that vexed his presidency through two terms” (Lewis, 2000, para. 1). Indeed, fifteen prosecutions occurred around MacDougal’s savings and loan—against grifters such as MacDougal himself and Clinton accuser/opportunist David Hale—as part of the 1980s deregulation-enabled crime wave in the savings and loan industry (Pizzo, Fricker, & Muolo, 1989); a wave on which the Clintons were not riding, but that crashed on them via the later political flak storm.

      The special counsel’s null finding in 2000 against the Clintons was no surprise. By 1996, the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters had “deposed 274 witnesses and held 60 days of public hearings, during which 136 witnesses testified” (Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters, 1996, p. 1). Under the direction of Chair Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, the Committee parsed approximately one million pages of documents submitted by the Clintons, the White House, federal agencies and witnesses. What did this massive sleuthing effort uncover? In a word, nothing: page 466 of the Special Committee’s Final Report pithily concludes, “The evidence demonstrated that no improprieties occurred in connection with any of these areas of inquiry” as concerned Whitewater and the Clintons.¹

      Investigations into Whitewater and related phantom scandals limped on for several more years after D’Amato’s committee came up with nil. Flaking to pretend a scandal is in motion can almost be as good as the real item; that is, when the charade generates news coverage that flags a “problem” with something as concerns the flak target. Scrutiny into Clinton was a matter of investigating a person to find a wrongdoing—in contrast with the normal procedure of investigating a wrongdoing to find the person (or people) who did it. In any event, the Whitewater pantomimes finally tripped onto the peepshow optics of sex scandal in which the sitting president had inappropriate relations.

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      In 2017, following the death of Roger Ailes, Monica Lewinsky described having been dragooned into the 1990s Clinton flak wars. Ailes was the head of the (at the time, fledgling) Fox News network when the scandal exploded in 1998—and he “made certain his anchors hammered” at the sex scandal, “ceaselessly, 24 hours a day” (Lewinsky, 2017, para. 2). At least one Fox executive posits that coverage of whether Lewinsky was a “tramp” heralded the tabloid circus that propelled the network from curiosity to powerhouse (Lewinsky, 2017, para. 8).

      Lewinsky, 24-years old when the scandal erupted, recalls that, “My character, my looks, and my life were picked apart mercilessly. Truth and fiction mixed at random”—but not in a college campus dining hall, but for the whole world and “in the service of higher ratings” (2017, para. 5). “No rumor was too unsubstantiated, no innuendo too vile” for Fox as it torched Clinton with Lewinsky as tertiary target (2017, para. 6). Lewinsky was concerned about being indicted and could not readily leave her house for fear of being pursued by a news media scrum. Not surprisingly, the young woman entertained thoughts of suicide. Lewinsky also observes that an online platform, Drudge Report, broke the news of the affair that then cascaded onto more mainstream platforms—a pattern still evident in which flak campaigns often originate under the radar. While the now-middle aged Lewinsky has gone on to a productive life, an extraordinary testimony to her character, what she experienced when flak against Clinton graduated into scandal presents a bracing vision of how devastating a harassment campaign can be.

      A Road Map

      Having briefly considered the phenomenal experience of being caught in a flak-to-scandal campaign, I will attempt a more fine-grained account of what flak is. This chapter’s efforts at fleshed-out definition will implicate flak’s relation to scandal; its scale; the contrast between flak-in-discourse and flak-in-action; the taxonomy of targets toward which flak is directed; and what flak is not (fake news, conspiracy theory, activism). At the same time, while this investigation is not a media effects study, flak’s mediated dimensions necessarily implicate audiences. Thus, the discussion begs the question of how audiences decode texts—as well as the question of how audiences are constituted in the twenty-first century in ways that dovetail with flak. A brisk history of post-World War II concepts of the audience, an indispensable element of a flak campaign, initiates the discussion.

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      Re-Inventing the Audience

      The State project of unlocking the secrets of the audience was present at the establishment of communication as an academic discipline within the Cold War environment (Simpson, 1994). Human cognition and behavior is embedded within embodied experience and an infinite regress of social contexts within social contexts; and, for this reason, the project of predicting and controlling audience behavior has long been a conundrum. During the Cold War, Bernard Berelson and collaborators acknowledged they came up short in ascertaining what moved the needle for an audience: “Some kinds of communication […] on some kinds of issues, brought to some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions, have some kinds of effects” (Berelson et al., quoted in Franklin, 2004, p. 207).

      In the same era, Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues venture a more definite account of the audience through their concept of reinforcement effect (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1969). They report that, during an election campaign, audience members seek out messages that confirm pre-standing predilections that “close the deal” for their vote. At the same time, the researchers conclude that audience members construct figurative walls to thwart discordant messages. In this manner, Lazarsfeld and colleagues posit audiences as actively parsing messages as well as being conditioned by social influences (e.g., co-workers respected for knowledge) situated between an audience member and the text.

      With the advent of Cultural Studies after the 1960s, audiences were endowed with further powers by academic observers of them. For cultural studies scholars, audience members were generally envisioned as active decoders in partly or globally rejecting mediated premises as, for example, primers for celebration of classism (Hall, 1993). Decoding models developed in the mid-twentieth were nonetheless grounded in a media environment with far fewer broadcast platforms. In the 1970s, audiences in the United States essentially had three television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) from which to forage for their nightly programming. As a result, researchers could assume heterogeneous audiences to the era’s dominant television medium that were exposed to similar content. When everyone—from school children to grandmas, from all regions and social classes—saw similar programming, it was easy to begin with the premise that different audience members decode Laverne and Shirley very differently.

      Beginning with the dissemination of cable television in the 1980s, mass broadcast audiences began to splinter, driven by the marriage of new ←26 | 27→technology to capitalist СКАЧАТЬ