Great minds...

I was amused to see that a couple days after Robert cited the Powell memo in his post about the Right Wing Media Machine, Joan Ryan of the Chronicle decided to mention it as well:

The Democrats need, in other words, their own version of Lewis Powell's famous 1971 memo to the United States Chamber of Commerce.

In it, the future Supreme Court justice laid out an ambitious plan to create influential academic and cultural institutions that, over the course of time, would reframe the public debate to be more in line with the Republican Party. From this plan sprouted the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Accuracy in Media and other conservative groups. It also gave birth to media outlets that spread the party's message.

Now, Ryan's knowledge of Reality TV clearly exceeds mine, since she couched her whole column in the context of some show called "Super Nanny." To make up for my lack of cable, I decided to actually check out the Powell memo everybody's talking about.

It's an impressive document (back then they worried that the Left threatened the Free Enterprise System! Those were the days, huh?), largely because it's impressive how many of his proposals were carried out. Here are a couple of examples:

Television

The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs (such as "Selling of the Pentagon"), but to the daily "news analysis" which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system.12 Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in "business" and free enterprise.

This monitoring, to be effective, would require constant examination of the texts of adequate samples of programs. Complaints -- to the media and to the Federal Communications Commission -- should be made promptly and strongly when programs are unfair or inaccurate.

and

Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen's views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to "consumerism" or to the "environment."

But one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination -- without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

I can't speak to what the reality was then, but I think it's pretty obvious that it's been a long time since American business had any reluctance to use its power...Read the whole thing. It's an impressive plan of action!