A Theory of Flak as a Political Weapon

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brian Goss, whose interest is in flak as a socio-political force. This is influenced by the propaganda model of news media in the contemporary United States at the end of the Cold War. Media at the time were free from formal censorship, but several factors conditioned the performance of news workers, and this led to their allegiance to an overall (then mainly anti-communist) ideological positioning.

One of these factors is flak: a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside of news organisations. Flak comes into play when internal filters are insufficient, and is mobilised by outside groups in society, commercial entities, or political operatives. Such flak may or may not be immediately successful, but news organisations need to be mindful of the longer-term effects of such outside criticism – and today, flak has slipped the propaganda model leash to become a much more powerful force in its own right. Contemporary flak arguably affects the media far more substantially.

This is facilitated also by new and social media. While this has loosened the hold of the objectivity doctrine, it has also been conducive to the growth of flak campaigns, and enabled ideologically driven harassment towards organisations, individuals, and causes. There is now a crowded flak industry that seeks to monitor and control the mainstream media, producing ideologically radioactive flak especially against a range of prime targets – especially liberals, climate scientists, and other key ‘enemy’ groups.

Flak campaigns are rarely identified as such, however. What is flak, in the present context? It represents tactics and strategies for targetted harassment, and thereby distinguished from indiscriminate trolling; it is designed to impede the sociopolitical effectiveness of its targets by generating substantial public disapproval for them, based on spurious accusations that have very little relationship to the truth. Without better theory to describe such flak practices, there cannot be an antidote to these practices.