Foundation for a Better Life: Critical Geography - Dissertation Example

?Foundation for a Better Life: Critical Geography [ID Advertisements often choose to present themselves in ways that simply can't be criticized, at least from a moral perspective. A company recently convicted of polluting describes their efforts to clean up the environment. Avoiding controversy and going for the moral, philosophical and legal lowest common denominator is an effective marketing tactic. This is what the US-based Foundation for a Better Life adverts do: They are in fact advertising for a particular, radical religious group, largely backed by a single individual, Phillip Anschutz. A critical geography of the advertisements reveal that, underneath the moralistic overtones and admittedly positive social messages, there is insidious propaganda and micro-politicking at work designed to advance specific partisan agendas. Having the moral high ground is of unimaginable importance in politics. Being associated with values has been a major success for the Republican party in America: Democrats can win an advantage in the perceptions of being able to handle domestic and economic issues, but the Republicans are associated with a strong moral compass provided overwhelmingly by traditional Christian values. This itself is an immense propaganda success. First of all, as Gallup has pointed out, in fact Republicans and Democrats are often dead-even in public perceptions of their values, and certainly Republican scandals have not helped the party in securing a consistent values victory: The fact that it is a political bromide that Republicans won the values war shows itself how good the Republicans have been in terms of presenting a mystique of a values-based party (2006, p. 526-527). “For example, the persistent claim that President Bush’s re-election was the result of a “moral values” revolt by Christians has been seriously overblown. After all, Bush actually received more votes (and a higher percentage of votes) from those who said terrorism was the most important issue than he did from those who identified moral values as the key to their electoral behavior” (Wise, 2005). To be clear, then: The commodity these adverts try to sell is values. They try to get voters and Christian viewers to associate themselves with conservative channels, and they are part of a political campaign. Their analysis in terms of critical geography has to be like political advertisements, which are also carefully controlled to be disagreeable to as few people as possible within the selected geography or micro-geography while energizing the base sufficiently. These adverts play well in heartland Republican America, red states away from the coasts. America as a space, both outdoors and indoors, city and country, is represented as a place of uniform and unchanging values; a Christian nation with a strong bedrock of decency. Second, a fact that we will return to, it is simply not the case that evangelicals or people with religious values vote Republican: White evangelicals do. Black evangelicals and devout Latina/o Catholics, as well as Jews and Catholics in general, far more strongly trend Democratic. “The racial voting gap was especially pronounced among evangelical Christians. This isparticularly important, given the inane pronouncements about how evangelicals were responsible for Bush’s victory. Fact is, only white evangelicals elevate their provincial moral concerns above classical conceptions of self-interest. Black evangelicals — a sizable group to be sure — voted against Bush by margins of at least four to one, despite often agreeing with conservatives on certain issues like abortion, gay rights or prayer in schools. But white evangelicals and “born again Christians” voted 78-21 for Bush, a huge increase from the 62 percent average received by the Republican candidate in the two previous Presidential contests” (Wise, 2005). In fact, the race gap is a far bigger gap in terms of predicting votes in American elections than the geographic, gender, and even class gap! Third: Democrats have values too (Lakoff, 2011). “[D]emocracy is about citizens uniting to take care of each other, about social responsibility as well as individual responsibility, and about work - not just for your own profit, but to help create a civilized society. They appreciate their teachers, nurses, firemen, police and other public servants. They are flooding the streets to demand real democracy - the democracy of caring, of social responsibility and of excellence, where prosperity is to be shared by those who work and those who serve” (Lakoff, 2011). The idea that a party that sold its country on multiple wars during its recent Presidency or is cutting the social sector is unambiguously more moral is another great propaganda victory. Democrats are behind in the evangelical field, but they have made efforts to cut the gap: “In fact, Democrats narrowed the Republican advantage among weekly churchgoers in the 2006 election, and a recent Pew survey found that the number of young evangelicals who identified themselves as Republican dropped by 15 percentage points, from 55 percent in 2001 to 40 percent today. Yet the exit polls and the media reports and the pundits have largely missed this story. They often fail to acknowledge that people of faith are and can be Democrats” (Daughtry, 2008). Indeed, this cutting of the evangelical gap helped to propel Obama to victory. All this is especially true in light of ambiguity over Christ and Christian values (Vance, 2004). “I am not sure why anyone would feel threatened by Liberalism as defined by the dictionary. They are apparently unaware or simply refuse to acknowledge the long history of liberals who have labored for the betterment of society and the furthering of God's Kingdom. The labor movement of the early twentieth century was aided significantly when major Christian denominations got behind it. No average American would have a fair wage today if it weren't for liberal Christians and labor activists” (Vance, 2004). Evangelical Christianity in America is of a very particular form that tends not to emphasize values that are unequivocally important in the Bible: Social service and welfare, avoidance of greed and the totem of personal consumption, etc. It is deeply ironic that Republicans have managed to present themselves both as the party of free big business that allows people to keep what they wish to spend on whatever consumer good they wish and as the party of Christianity, which historically has admonished people to avoid usury and live a simple life. This is not an American aberration, either: Early Protestants, as Weber famously argued, saved their wealth and were not ostentatious. All this background is vital for the critical geography of the “Foundation for a Better Life” adverts. These adverts are quite strange: They do not ask for money, they do not sell a product, and they don't even make a particular political point or PSA. They are not informing people about the risks of cigarette smoke, telling Americans to buckle up or asking them to clean up litter. One commercial features a black man helping a white recent husband to realize how important his marriage is to him and how to resolve conflicts after the younger man has had a fight with his wife. Another commercial features a black basketball team at a championship game, where one of the players touched the ball without the ref seeing it but told his coach anyways, emphasizing sportsmanship and honesty. A third has a high school lunchroom, where a new girl is ostracized but another girl moves over to eat lunch with her. Yet another has one student respond to a note in a classroom by writing back, “Let's not cheat”. They apparently emphasize simple values: Honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty, friendship, peace, conflict resolution. The content of the ads are so unoffensive and obvious as to be virtually unchallengeable: How can one say that it's bad for a husband to try to work things out with his wife or someone to be honest at a basketball game? But, of course, no one would sink hundreds of millions into a string of adverts just to peddle cliches. “Before long, a money trail was uncovered that led to Philip Anschutz, whom the BBC has described as having "a reputation as one of the hungriest of U.S. corporate vultures." Anschutz owns a vast empire of entertainment and communications holdings, including several sports teams and Qwest. He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party and GOP candidates, and his oil exploration corporation received permission from the Bush Administration to drill in Montana's Valley of Chiefs, an area which has been designated as an "Area of Critical Environmental Concern" and is sacred to many Native Americans” (Stolen, 2002). Unsurprisingly, FOX News, well-known for being on the conservative end of the American political spectrum, has been implicated in deceit over the Foundation. “Even when Fox is reporting on a completely innocuous story, they can't help themselves from lying. Fox & Friends ran a segment hosting one of their most prominent advertisers, the Foundation for a Better Life, and purporting to report "who's behind" the group, they hosted an unobjectionable, heroic woman who is featured in one of their ads. But, she's not "who's behind" the group; indeed, it doesn't even seem that she works for them. In fact, the actual people behind the group are right-wing, religious, anti-gay conservatives” (Berrier, 2010). The story featured Oral Lee Brown, a woman who on $45,000 a year is going to set aside money to pay for the college educations of an entire class of first graders. This is truly an amazing story, but Oral Lee Brown does not work for the Foundation, it's not clear if she actually endorses any of the Foundation's messages, she did not create or fund the commercials, and she only appeared in the one advertisement (Berrier, 2010). The sole source of founding for the Foundation (hereafter known as the FfBL) is the Anschutz Foundation. Anshutz is publicly opposed to gay marriage, teaching of evolution in schools, is associated with the Discovery Institute which seeks to undermine evolution, has backed lobbyists and groups against liberal policies, and backs the Media Research Council which opposes indecency in television. The Foundation is a specifically partisan group with a religious and political message that it disingenuously attempts to hide underneath all-inclusive rhetoric. One vital element of advertising is that what it doesn't say is often far more important than what it does. Advertising a pill that only treats headache symptoms, not its cause, will tend to lead advertisers to mention the strength of symptom relief; but another pill that might stop the actual cause, say blood flow causing a migraine, will play that up and admonish the other company for failing to do so. Cell phone adverts try to mention what the plan benefits are rather than acknowledge weaknesses: The AT&T ads responding to criticism of their poor coverage in America responded with irrelevancies such as claiming superior features and noting that they covered 99% of all Americans (which is not inconsistent with them having the weakest network). The Foundation adverts are famous not for what they say, which is generally totally agreeable, but for what they don't: Aside from offering standard bromides, they say nothing. Why spend millions to say nothing? In fact, it's what is not being said, the zones of silence, that define the advertisements. There are no advertisements funded by the group featuring a gay couple working out their problems. They talk about tolerance but don't feature an openly gay child coming out for the first time to his friends, family or classmates. The adverts try to create a moral universe, which excludes elements that those who back the ads and the political groups they are aligned with do not believe belong. This wouldn't work if the adverts focused on one or two issues, but by being comprehensive, the Foundation is able to make an appeal: “We have shown you all that is important in the moral world. If it's not here, it's because it doesn't belong”. But, of course, the adverts are far from non-political. The advert about a man solving problems with his wife cannot be understood except in the context of “family values” that seek to make heterosexual marriage the central institution once again and battle against swinging, singles, cohabitation, “shacking up”, polyamory, gay marriage, lesbian marriage, and numerous other cracks in the traditional nuclear family. “While some of the individual ads express positive messages with which few would argue (Mother Teresa and the phrase, "Reaching beyond yourself"), others are transparently pro-war (emergency workers raising the American flag in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the words, "No setback will set us back"). Though the Foundation's campaign was planned before the attacks on the East Coast on Sept. 11, it was "expanded upon" afterwards, according to the OAAA. The new additions are easily identifiable” (Stolen, 2002). Patriotic, jingoistic and nationalistic messages suffuse the ads. The ads cannot be understood out of a geographical-economic context, either. “ After Anschutz sold his railroad holdings, he retained the right to lay digital lines along the tracks; Qwest's new division, Qwest Digital Media, teamed up with Twentieth Century Fox, owned by the British right winger, Rupert Murdoch, to show digital screenings of Fox's "Titan A.E." last year. Put these two developments together and you get what Box Office Online speculates will be a nationwide digital delivery network. If the Foundation's "Pass it on" campaign is any indication of the content Anschutz plans to produce, then we're in for a lot more slick propaganda spread far and wide. When production, distribution and point-of-sale are under the control of one person or corporation like this, what you have is a vertical monopoly” (Stolen, 2002). The advertisements are not occurring in a vacuum: They are part of a broader attempt by conservative advertisers and groups to make money. Glenn Beck has famously said that he is not a journalist, but an “opinion guy” (Couric, 2009). The Fox combination of showmanship and news has been explosively successful. Beck himself borrows famously from Mormon doctrine: Even his famous tears are part of Mormon apostasy where the sincerity of a person is judged openly and where outbursts have power: “Crying and choking up are understood by Mormons as manifestations of the Holy Spirit. For men at every rank of Mormon culture and visibility, appropriately-timed displays of tender emotion are displays of power” (Brooks, 2009). The combination has been so successful that everyone else is doing it: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have managed to redefine news with their combination of satire and journalism; Bill Mahr made the McLaughlin Group-format hip, funny and edgy again; CNN personalities like Anderson Cooper are achieving immense attention and personality cults. The FfBL adverts are part of a broader war over the shape of news, advertising and large-scale political battle that is worth billions. The adverts are geographically centered in some kind of mythological American Midwest. The adverts use country music frequently, and their visual mythologies are drawn entirely from traditional imaginations of the 1950s. The students in the high school cafeteria bear no resemblance to modern fashion, instead some kind of hodge-podge of 1980s and 1990s fashion; but their clothes are unimportant as they are supposed to simply be archetypal stand-ins for bratty teenagers. There is, however, an important exception: Many of the adverts, as noted above, feature black men of honesty, intellect and experience. Doesn't this undermine the thesis of the FfBL as conservative mouthpieces? No. In fact, the adverts are closer to modern Minstrelsy or Uncle Tomhood than anything else. It is important to note that the positive depictions of African-Americans in these adverts is virtually unequivocal, and in fact often laudable given much of the base and crass racism on American television (particularly the treatment of Arabs, which the adverts do not do a good job addressing). The black man advising the younger white man is a loving family man and an experienced husband who has Morgan Freeman-esque wisdom on the topic of marriage and family life. However, note that this does play to a more recent American archetype of the wise old black man, itself deeply rooted in the Uncle Tom myth. Similarly, the black coach and black players are solid, good kids, even though the rest of the team doesn't want him to say the truth. The vignettes are all infantile in their content: They read like scenarios given to eighth graders. But the targeting of African-Americans is in fact slick politicking and advertisement sense. “In addition to the social benefits, research suggested there were financial benefits for advertisers who utilized actors with disabilities. Research has shown it was financially rewarding to include ethnic minorities as actors in advertisements (Pollock, 1997; MaCaulay, 1996; Fong, 1996). To be most effective, a commercial should include actors who represent the cross-sections of the target audience (Hoffner, 1996; Downs, 1981; Donaldson, 1981)” (Ganahl and Arbuckle, 2001). Blacks and Latina/os are important markets. FOX News and conservative stations in general, as noted above, tend to alienate even black evangelicals, who may agree with FOX and the Foundation on many elements of social policy like abortion or gay marriage but don't tend to be in step with the other elements of evangelical American Christianity like pro-corporate policies and cutting the social net. The Republicans have for decades lost the battle to bring in blacks and Latina/os. These adverts can be seen as economic and political peace offerings, depicting blacks positively as long as they follow the script of the old (or new?) America. They try to make it seem that blacks are already on board with conservative agendas. The ultimately goal of the adverts, though, is a simple one. They attempt to telescope universal or widely held values into Christianity, then telescope that into evangelical conservative Christianity. Non-Republican Christians are honest, loyal, kind, patriotic, etc. But the adverts try to associate irrevocably morality in general with the organisations and causes associated with those who fund it. Insofar as the adverts succeed, they are analogous to the standard claims of every politician come every election cycle to be family men (or women), deeply moral and courageous, principled, friendly, “a guy you'd like to have a beer with”. The adverts try to present the values of conservative Christianity in a way that demonstrates the inclusive elements. The problem, of course, is that people don't disagree with evangelical Christianity because they dislike loyalty or honesty; rather, they think that their social policies are bigoted, short-sighted, or actively stupid, inappropriate for a changing 21st century America. Thus, in a critical geography, the FfBL ads masquerade as being truly national, but they are not. They are red state messages to blue states. They are white Christian overtures to black Christians, an attempt to cross the rural-suburban to urban line. They alienate the perceptions of big city liberals, who might view the morality being peddled as quaint and antiquated (except for the parts like loyalty and honesty which everyone agrees with in theory but are much harder to implement in practice); atheists and agnostics, who might view the source of their values as suspect even as they embrace the values; unions, who might view more important values as equality, sharing, human dignity and the value of work; etc. In essence, the advertisements try to create a moral universe where the above either don't exist or are slavering lunatics and moral children or monsters. Critical geography thus helps expose the advertisements as “ examples of how geographers can gain a better understanding of how dominant classes set themselves and their icons up as examples to recognize and follow”: They are the mirror image of the hate-filled, lunatic fringe Jack Chick tracts (Craine, 2007). A critical geographic analysis of the advertisements unmask them as base political enterprises. Works Cited Berrier, J. 2010, “Fox Hides Anti-Gay, Right-Wing Background Of Foundation For A Better Life”, Media Matters, December 16, Available at: http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012160022 Brooks, J. 2009, “How Mormonism Built Glenn Beck”, Religion Dispatches, October 7, Available at: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/1885/ Couric, K. 2009, September 22, “Interview with Glenn Beck”, CBS News. Craine, J. 2007, “The Medium Has a New Message: Media and Critical Geography”, ACME, vol. 6. Available at: http://www.acme-journal.org/vol6/JCr.pdf Daughtry, L. 2008, “Hey, Pollsters: Democrats Care About Religion, Too”, Washington Post, January 26. Gallup, GH. 2008, The Gallup poll, Rowman and Littlefield. Ganahl, D and Arbuckle, M. “The Exclusion of Persons with Physical Disabilities from Prime Time Television Advertising: A Two Year Quantitative Analysis”, Disability Studies Quarterly, Spring. Lakoff, G. 2011, “What Conservatives Really Want”, Truthout, February 19, Available at: http://www.truth-out.org/what-conservatives-really-want67907 MaCaulay, A. (1996). Doing well by doing right: Two reasons why ads should include minorities, Marketing, 101, 10. Pollock, J. (1997). Racial minorities become visible: How the marketing business is changing to reflect the country. Marketing, 102, 13. Stolen, JD. 2002, “Big money behind "inspirational" billboard campaign”, The Portland Alliance, April. Vance, G. 2004, “Wasn't Jesus a Liberal?”, CommonDreams.org, Retrieved from: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1019-24.htm Wise, T. 2005, “What’s the Matter With White Folks?: Racial Privilege, Electoral Politics and the Limits of Class Populism”, LIP Magazine , Spring, March 23. Appendix Attached is the URL for forms indicating the connection between Anshutz and the Foundation: http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2006/841/529/2006-841529209-03689534-F.pdf Read More