Arthur Brackman

Media critics like myself often look back at the inspirational voices and mentors that went before. Here in the Internet age, a thousand flowers have bloomed in the form of web sites and specialized publications that look critically at media coverage. Not that long ago, in the age of the what the kids today call a time of "dead trees," printed publications, pamphlets and newsletters were the only "weapons" independent media voices could create.

Who can forget I.F. Stone's newsletter which took on the Vietnam War with four pages of well documented analysis every week? Who has not heard the name George Seldes who was called a "Witness to the Century" because of his weekly newsletter called "In Fact" that combined media criticism with reporting on unreported stories or news not in the news.

Now, to these two giants of journalism, we can add a third, a journalist and media visionary with his own claim for a place in the pantheon of critical voices that took on the media monoliths of an earlier time with a dose of hard truth and passionate polemic.

His name was Arthur Brackman, and as a co-founder of a company called Globalvision, I feel a special kinship with him.

Well before anyone ever mentioned the word globalization, Brackman, once a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, one of America's great newspapers, and later the owner of a world famous photo archive, had an idea for a weekly international newspaper. He visualized it as an widely distributed publication that could "do in print what the UN does in face to face confrontations., ie to supply a forum for the airing of divers viewpoints and interests and their resolution short of cosmic bloodshed."

He envisioned a newspaper that could be edited jointly by capitalist, communist, and neutralist editors to be printed in 5 languages and then air shipped throughout the idea.

He called it MAN, perhaps after the Family of Man, not as a gender specific outlet but as a universal organ for all mankind and, although he was in a pre-feminist age, women kind as well.

Brackman's hopes for a new global publication would founder on the shoals of inadequate finance but not before he has written to, and received endorsements from, some of the most prominent journalists, politicians, professors and policy makers of the age.

The list of encouragement came from the likes of Lord Bertrand Russell and Robert M Hutchins, journalists including Edgar Snow and Eric Severeid and Norman Cousins and James Wechsler.

And on and on. TV personality Steve Allen called it "brilliant" And it was. He saw it as an "embodiment of the spirit of science, inquiry, discussion and reconciliation In fused a media mission with a broader social one.

Arthur Brackman saw back in l963 how the world was becoming smaller. "MAN," he wrote, "is born into a world in which most problems are at bottom worldwide - all existing periodicals are parochial, ie. Their center of gravity is a nation, a political party, a sect or a class.

MAN shall devote itself to surmounting such provincialism."

Fast forward to the present, to the year 2002 and consider how much this impulse and vision is still needed, and how in just a few short years a global justice movement beyond all borders and boundaries has emerged almost as if his words conjured it into being. Brackman was not simply a utopian or well intentioned. He was also a businessman who knew how the world worked, and why the best of well intentioned schemes often founder.

"MAN is designed to avoid the plight of liberal, radical or esoteric journals," he wrote" which must go around periodically, tin cup in hand. It regards sound business practice and economic independence as the cornerstone of journalistic freedom.'

It was precisely this insight that guided my partner and myself in launching our media company, now in its fifteenth year. We have been able to sustain out work as filmmakers and journalists only because we implemented sound business practices and tempered our idealism with common sense and an openness to working with colleagues and other organizations.

Brackman's commitment to creating something wildly ambitious like MAN -a big idea to fill a big gap - came out of his work as a media analyst and critic.

In this respect, our own efforts now to launch a new international syndication company called Globalvison News Network follows this same path-studying, understanding and writing about the gaps and limits of our media system. The mediachannel.org that I edit is a global undertaking in this spirit. Our work in print, and with text on the web followed our realization that we lacked the means to create a new TV network which experts told us would cost at least $50 million to launch.

Ironically, Brackman estimated that his international newspaper, which would have served the cause of peace in the way the Wall Street Journal serves business, would need the same amount, $50 million. He understood the critical need for capitalization to mounting a sustainable venture.

Fifty years late, we are still chasing those same “50 big ones.” We fear we will not get there either. It still costs a lot of money to "get into the game."

More than fifty years ago, in l947, when I was but five years old, Arthur Brackman took his first steps on the path of independent journalism by creating an outspoken and feisty personal paper to critique the press.

He called it Propaganda. He didn't mince words.

Years after his death, Arthur's wife, Selma Brackman, walking in his own historic footsteps, would go on to create her own War and Peace Report, and a foundation by the same name. In an introduction to a self-published "Arthur Brackman Reader," she looked back at the first issues of Propaganda.

"In examining the initial issue of Propaganda from l947, I was startled to find so many statements that could have been written today such as "the media subverts democracy….He called on us all to "prepare a scaffolding from which to construct a better media so as to build a truer democracy, The country, the world, is ready, the need exists, the time is over due."

Brackman had published a dozen before going on a hiatus and then trying to bring MAN to life. When that failed, and when the Nixon Administration began to turn on the media in l972, he brought Propaganda back to go after Tricky Dick and his whole crew of deception artists.

.Selma tells a hilarious story of sending a copy of the newsletter to the Nixon White House in the spirit of fairness with a request for a response. To her and Arthur's shock, an official called from Washington and asked them in for a meeting to hear their views and try to win them over, just as the first stench of Watergate began to poison the wells of our democracy. I found it significant that one of Nixon's aides even wrote to Propaganda to deny that he had anything to with the shady practices associated with the Administration.

The publication had an impact. It could not be ignored.

Without my knowing it at first, and never knowing him, many of Arthur Brackman's convictions are none the less still guiding my work and the work of many of the 900 organizations involved in the media channel, a global project of the kind he would have approved.

He was born along time ago, nearly a century now, in l904. (He passed in l982). And yet his words and thoughts live on, not only in Selma's work but in the work of all the "children' in the trenches of media criticism he never knew who are carrying his mission on, analyzing the propaganda of their age and trying to serve the world community and democratic values the way he did.

Read Brackman's work for yourself in this collection. Note also that many of his ideas were scrawled in hand in small notebooks. There were no notebook computers then. I deciphered some of his original writing in a small notebook called "lesson assignment." Only he wasn't transcribing lessons but offering them.

You may not relate to the details of the specific idiocies he dissects or the now dated controversies that consumed him. He lived and struggled in another time, in the years of the cold war and the great ideological wars that divided the world in ways that look so inane today.

Think of him also as a builder and a man of ideas who boldly challenged the pretensions of his age-"the pseudo glamour and badges of self-importance." as he denounced them. He offered a vision that we still need to fight for. He wanted the media to become "a university of the public" He spoke of " the immensity of its mission."

We need to head Arthur Brackman's words and emulate his example---to speak out and speak up. And to remember that if we are able to harvest the occasional crops of real news about the world today, it was people like him who planted the seeds.

He demanded that we get the ball rolling for change. As we do so, let us honor his role. This truth remains: if we don’t like the news, we have to go out and make some of our own.

Danny Schechter is the executive editor of Mediachannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues network and the author of two books about the media, "The More You Watch The Less You Know"

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Excerpts from MAN

by Arthur Brackman

Greetings!

Propaganda in Newspapers is to be devoted to the study of propaganda, especially in newspapers.

It is the belief of the editor that this field has hardly been scratched. The work of men like Upton Sinclair, Silas Bent, George Seldes and others has been devoted on the whole, more to indictment than analysis. The one periodical which tackled the subject, Prof. Clyde Miller’s Propaganda Analysis, was short-lived. Propaganda in Newspapers (which shall call itself Pa.) hopes to surmount both disadvantages.

Cognizant of the pioneer work of these men, and also of the contributions of Prof. Leonard Doob, of Yale, of Allport, Smith, Lasswell, Cantril, Casey, Ferdinand Lundberg, Oswald Villard, Morris Ernst, Harold Ickes and others, Pa. proposed to build upon the rough critical scaffolding they have provided.

On the basis of their and its own findings, Pa. will seek to formulate principles for the understanding of the modern phenomena of journalism in the hope of enlisting and aiding others to carry forward this study.

Perhaps it is one of the most desperately kinds of inquiry in our democracy today.

In a newsletter devoted to propaganda, commentary on society is implicit in every line. For we are dealing here, not with accurately measurable materials but with matters of viewpoint, opinion, belief, interpretation, and with subjective elements which inescapability color even the baldest report. Family conditioning, group conditioning, and prejudices of every sort are not merely accidental factors which creep in , in discussions of propaganda, to deflect a writer’s aim, but such conditioning and such prejudices are, in the phrase popularized by President Roosevelt, of the essence.

Status

The defect of most writing on journalism had been what Alfred Korzybsky would call the Aristotelian approach, its non-dynamic approach. Most of it concerns itself with the necessary task of enumerating the lies of the press, or concerns itself with eulogies of the press, portraying editors and publishers as a group of villains in the same way that these gentleman usually portray union leaders and strikers…or…it concerns itself with eulogies of the press like that unctuous puff-book “The Newspaper” recently compiled by the New York Times staff in which newspapers are portrayed as marvelously responsive tribunals consecrated to the deeper purposes of democracy, which they are not.

While both of these standpoints have their functions, controversy about newspapers being essential to the health of journalism, the present writer contends that mere attack and defense are no longer adequate. For the attainment of the widest and deepest possible understanding of newspapers and propaganda, an understanding of the laws of their being and operation is needed. Pa. Poses some of problems involved.

The problem of newspapers is the problem of society itself, and it is fruitless to attempt to study newspapers without referring constantly to the society in which they function.

Such a task calls for employment of every available new finding of psychology, sociology, economics, and all other sciences.

The study of surface elements of journalism must give way to the study of real forces in process. The inquiry must be shifted from what newspapers say to an infinite number of other questions, such as why they say things, what forces and individuals influence them, how through generations of train and error, existing journalistic techniques were evolved; it is necessary to lay bare the complex springs of their functioning. New inter-relationships will ultimately be found among these vast complexes of forms and processes and only then will anything approaching real understanding be possible concerning a field in which most inquiry is still in a primitive stage.

Last Updated Tuesday, May 04 2010 @ 11:38 AM EDT