Interview by Craille Maguire Gillies
Donald Gutstein is all for capitalism. He just doesn’t like the way it’s been done in the past 30 years and wants the propagandists, policy wonks and media to account for themselves. He is what was called a rabble rouser in the olden days and today is called, well, something else. Now the media critic and author of the new book Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy, talks to UL about abandoning a career in architecture, the problem with think tanks and how capitalism should really work.
+ It was a different universe when I was in school. Education was cheap, jobs were plentiful, nobody had to worry about what they were going to do with their lives. Now you need a career plan. We used to take a course because we were interested in the subject, not because it would help us get a job.
+ I wanted to make a difference for our environment, and I had a dream to design beautiful structures for people. But I found out that architects are just cosmeticians. By the time an architect gets a project, all the major decisions have been made by the planners, by the developers and financiers. Really, there wasn’t room to do much in architecture.
+ As a citizen activist fighting developers in Kitsilano, one of the things I had to do was find out about the developers. I kind of became an expert in research. I happened to know a faculty member in the SFU School of Communication who was teaching a research course, but she wanted to do something else. So I started teaching a documentary research course and worked my way into the field of communications that way. I don’t think you could replicate that [career trajectory] today.
+ Capitalism worked really well in Canada and the U.S. from the 1950s to the 1970s. The economy was growing, there was almost full employment, people had good wages and they could buy houses and cars. That was a great period in capitalist history, so Not a Conspiracy Theory is not an attack – it’s a critique of what’s happened since.
+ Capitalism works best when government is in control, when there’s proper regulation of some of its excesses. I mean, just look at what happened last year in the financial market; that pretty well happened because of deregulation over the past 20 years. So maybe it’s time to reinvent capitalism, but they need to know what to do in order to have capitalism actually solve people’s problems.
+ Repetition is one the key aspects of any successful propaganda campaign; so any kind of an index that [think tanks] can put out every year is excellent. I fault the media most for never laying out the relationship between think tanks and funding sources. Like, for instance, ranking hospitals as good and bad, like they do in British Columbia. It’s expensive to accumulate all of those statistics, and manipulate and analyze them. Who’s paying for those rankings? Who would benefit from those rankings? Nobody asks those questions.
+ The issues that the mainstream media give the most coverage, well, those are the issues that the public think are the most important and then become the issues that the decision makers turn to. It’s calculus. If a newspaper has a story on the front page for a few days, people will tend to think it’s an important issue.
+ The right to know is critical. You just need to know what’s going on, so you can make your own decisions. U
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