Inventing Reality
Page 1
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight WHOM TO BELIEVE?
CRONKITE AND OTHER CRITICS
CLASS, RACE, AND GENDER
IMAGE POLITICS AND CONSERVATIVE BIAS
MONOPOLY POLITICS
DO THE MEDIA MANAGE OUR MINDS?
BEYOND ORWELL’S 1984
“Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Man Who Owns One” A FAVORED FEW
INTERLOCKING CONTROL
MANY VOICES, ONE CHORUS
Who Controls the News? CALLING THE TUNE: OWNERS
CALLING THE TUNE: ADVERTISERS
ON THE LINE: EDITORS
SELF-CENSORSHIP: REPORTERS
THE RULING CULTURE
SUPPRESSING THE NEWS
Objectivity and Government Manipulation THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY
NOT ENOUGH TIME, SPACE, AND MONEY?
MAINTAINING APPEARANCES
IS IT ALL ECONOMICS?
GOVERNMENT MANIPULATION
The Big Sell THE CONSUMER IDEOLOGY
SELLING THE SYSTEM
PUBLIC SERVICE FOR PRIVATE INTERESTS
EVEN SPORTS AND WEATHER
Giving Labor the Business BUSINESS OVER LABOR
NICE BOSSES, CRAZY STRIKERS
THE INVISIBLE WORKER
“Liberal” Media, Conservative Bias CREATING A “CONSERVATIVE MOOD”
POPULIST ELECTORATE, CONSERVATIVE OUTCOME
PUNDITS TO THE RIGHT
HOW TO DISCREDIT PROTESTORS Ignoring and Undercounting
Favoritism for Rightist Demonstrators
Scanting of Content
Trivialization and Marginalization
The Media Fight the Red Menace ENTER THE RED MENACE
THE COLD WAR
THE CREATION OF JOE McCARTHY
RATIONAL HYSTERIA
TWISTS AND TURNS
CELEBRATING THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM
Doing the Third World THE VIETNAM APOLOGY
MURDER IN CHILE
STOMPING ON GRENADA
For the New World Order THE “TOTALITARIAN” SANDINISTAS
A DEVIL IN PANAMA
CELEBRATING THE MASSACRE OF IRAQ
Propaganda Themes AMERICAN VIRTUE AND “ANTI-AMERICANISM”
THE NONEXISTENCE OF IMPERIALISM
“MODERATE AUTHORITARIAN” REGIMES
EVIL, POWER-HUNGRY LEFTISTS
ECONOMIC “FAILURES”
DEMOCRACY IS IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER
“INFERIOR” PEOPLES AND THEIR HOPELESS WAYS
Methods of Misrepresentation SELECTIVITY AND DELIBERATE OMISSION
LIES AND FACE-VALUE TRANSMISSION
FALSE BALANCING
FRAMING AND LABELING
THE GREYING OF REALITY
AUXILIARY EMBELLISHMENTS
PLACEMENT
Culture, Control, and Resistance CAPITALISM AND CULTURE
THE LIMITS OF ORTHODOXY
CREDIBILITY AND THE “LIBERAL BIAS”
BETWEEN CONSPIRACY AND CULTURE
THE CONFLICT WITHIN
Appendix A Guide to Alternative Media MEDIA-WATCH PUBLICATIONS
ALTERNATIVE PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS
ALTERNATIVE BROADCAST MEDIA AND VIDEOS
BOOKS
Notes Chapter 1, From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight
Chapter 2, “Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Man Who Owns One”
Chapter 3, Who Controls the News?
Chapter 4, Objectivity and Government Manipulation
Chapter 5, The Big Sell
Chapter 6, Giving Labor the Business
Chapter 7, “Liberal” Media, Conservative Bias
Chapter 8, The Media Fight the Red Menace
Chapter 9, Doing the Third World
Chapter 10, For the New World Order
Chapter 11, Propaganda Themes
Chapter 12, Methods of Misrepresentation
Chapter 13, Culture, Control, and Resistance
About the Author
Inventing reality : the politics of news media
Parenti, Michael, 1933-
This book was produced in EPUB format by the Internet Archive.
The book pages were scanned and converted to EPUB format automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and is somewhat susceptible to errors. The book may not offer the correct reading sequence, and there may be weird characters, non-words, and incorrect guesses at structure. Some page numbers and headers or footers may remain from the scanned page. The process which identifies images might have found stray marks on the page which are not actually images from the book. The hidden page numbering which may be available to your ereader corresponds to the numbered pages in the print edition, but is not an exact match; page numbers will increment at the same rate as the corresponding print edition, but we may have started numbering before the print book's visible page numbers. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this book will be useful to you.
The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library and to promote universal access to all knowledge. The Archive's purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages, and provides specialized services for information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.
Created with abbyy2epub (v.1.7.2)
SECOND EDITION
MICHAEL PARENTI
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS
NEW YORK
Senior editor: Don Reisman
Managing editor: Patricia Mansfield-Phelan
Project editor: Suzanne Holt
Production supervisor: Katherine Battiste
Cover design: Michael Jung
Copyright © 1993 by St. Martin’s Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
76543
fedcba
For information, write:
St. Martin’s Press, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010
ISBN: 0-312-02013-9 (paperback)
0-312-08629-6 (clothbound)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parenti, Michael, 1933
Inventing reality : the politics of news media / Michael Parenti.
—2nd ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-08629-6 (clothbound)—ISBN 0-312-02013-9 (pbk.) 1. Journalism—Political aspects—United States. 2. Journalism— United States—Objectivity. I. Title.
PN4888.P6P37 1992 302.23'0973—dc20
92-50023
CIP
To the memory of Philip Meranto
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Peggy Noton, Gwen Glesmann, Sally Soriano, and Laura Cooley for the generous assistance they rendered at crucial times. My thanks to the St. Martin’s Press staff, especially my editor Don Reisman, Frances Jones, and Suzanne Holt for their efficient and thoughtful service in guiding the manuscript safely through hazardous editorial and production straits—and improving its quality along the way.
For their critical suggestions I wish to thank Earl S. Grow, The University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, and Edward C. Uliassi, Northeastern Illinois University.
Encouraging and helpful comments from interested readers, too numerous to mention, regarding the first edition of this book gave me much of the resolve to write this updated and, I think, improved version. For this they have my gratitude.
SECOND EDITION
From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight
For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the news media. Indeed, what we even define as an issue or event, what we see and hear, and what we do not see and hear are greatly determined by those who control the communications world. Be it peace protestors, uprisings in Latin America, crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of us know of things except as they are depicted in the news. Even when we don’t believe what the media say, we are still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They ^are still getting the agenda,defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or rejecTTThe media exert a persistent influence in defining the scope of respectable political discourse.
Be this as it may, growing numbers of people are becoming increasingly aware that the media are neither objective nor consistently accurate in their portrayal of things. There seems to be a growing understanding that we need to defend ourselves by challenging the misinformation we are fed. In this book I will try to demonstrate bow the news media distort important aspects of social and political life and why. The press’s misrepresentations are not usually accidental, not merely the result of the complexity of actual events and the honest confusions of poorly prepared reporters. While those kinds of problems exist, another kind of distortion predominates, one not due to chance or to the idiosyncratic qualities of news production or newspeople. The major distortions are repeatable and systemic—the product not only of deliberate manipulation but of the ideological and economic conditions under which the media operate.
One book cannot cover all that might be said about the media. I will concentrate on national and international politico-economic class issues, with some attention given to the racist and sexist biases in the media (dealt with in this chapter). I do not deal with the entertainment media and the many hidden ideological and political biases found therein. That subject is treated in my recent book Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment d In the pages ahead we will explore the way the press distorts and suppresses the news about major domestic and foreign events, the hidden and not-so-hidden ideological values, the influence of ownership, and the opportunities for dissent.
Rather than attempt a comprehensive canvassing of the news complete with statistical breakdowns and content analyses, I trace media performance along several basic themes, providing representative samples of how the press treats or mistreats a subject. A more systematic undertaking would have had the virtue of thoroughness and maybe increased precision of a sort, but it would have made for a very huge and dull volume. In any case, numerous systematic studies are cited and summarized in the chapters that follow.
This book concentrates on the more influential news media, specifically the three major networks: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), along with the New York Times and Washington Post (and their respective news services). These two newspapers, the Post and the Times, not only feed information to the public but to other news media as well. Occasional attention is also given herein to two newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and lesser publications and broadcast media. Taken together these various outlets compose what I alternately describe as the “major media,” the “mainstream media,” the “corporate-owned press,” the “US press,” the “national media,” or just the “press” and the “news media.” Throughout this book 1 use the terms news media and press synonymously to mean the printed and broadcast news organizations. It so happens that press is singular and media plural, but I mean the same by both.
The above-mentioned news organizations represent the higher quality establishment press, being more informative and less distorted than most of the other (more conservative) media. If this book has a bias in selection, then, it is in the direction of understatement.
WHOM TO BELIEVE?
If the media so preempt the communication universe, then how can we evaluate them? And who is to say whether our criticisms are to be trusted? In attempting to expose the distortions and biases of the press, do we not unavoidably introduce biases of our own? And if objectivity is unattainable, are we not then left in the grip of a subjectivism in which one person’s impressions are about as reliable (or unreliable) as another’s? To be sure, there is always the danger that a dissenting viewpoint of the kind presented in this book will introduce distortions of its own. The reader should watch for these. But this new “danger” is probably not as great as the one posed by the press itself, because readers approach the dissenting viewpoint after having been conditioned throughout their lives to the sentiments and images of the dominant society. Far more insidious and less open to conscious challenge are the notions that so fit into the dominant political culture’s field of established images that they appear not as biased manipulations but as “the nature of things.”
When exposed to a view that challenges the prevailing message, the reader is not then simply burdened with additional distortions. A dissident view provides us with an occasion to test the prevailing beliefs, open ourselves to information that the mainstream media and the dominant belief system have ignored or suppressed. Through this clash of viewpoints we have a better chance of moving toward a closer approximation of the truth.
In addition, we have the test of experience itself. Common sense and everyday life oblige us to make judgments and act as if some images and information are closer to the truth than others. Misrepresentations can be eliminated by a process of feedback, as when subsequent events fail to fulfill the original images.
There is also the internal evidence found in the press itself. We can detect inconsistencies among reports in the mainstream press. We can note how information that supports the official view is given top play while developments that seem not to fit are relegated to the back pages. Also, like any liar the press is filled with contradictions. Seldom holding itself accountable for what it says, it can blithely produce information and opinions that conflict with previously held ones, without a word of explanation for the shift. We can also learn to question what the press tells us by noting the absence of supporting evidence, the failure to amplify and explain. We can ask: Why are the assertions that appear again and again in the news not measured against observable actualities? We can thereby become more aware of how the news media are inviting us to believe something without establishing any reason for the belief.
Much of the evidence herein has been gathered from extensive and detailed studies produced by academic scholars and independent investigators. Also helpful has been the information provided in such dissenting publications as the Nation, the (New York) Guardian, Covert Action Information Bulletin, People’s Weekly World, Z Magazine, and the Progressive. Publications that are specifically designed to monitor the media, such as Lies of Our Times (published by the Institute for Media Analysis), Extra! (published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and Propaganda Review, have been especially helpful. In addition, there are the publications put out by public interest groups too numerous to mention, dealing with everything from environmentalism and tax policy to militarism and foreign policy.
Some readers will complain of this book’s “one-sidedness.” But if it is true that “we need to hear all sides and not just one,” then all the more reason why the criticisms and information usually suppressed or downplayed by the American press deserve the attention accorded them in the pages to follow. In any case, it can be observed that people who never complain about the one-sidedness of their mainstream political education are the first to complain of the one-sidedness of any challenge to it. Far from seeking a diversity of views, they defend themselves from the first exposure to such diversity, pr
eferring to leave their conventional political opinions unchallenged.
A former member of the Federal Communications Commission, Nicholas Johnson, once urged people to “talk back” to their television sets. We can talk back to all the media a lot better and demand a lot more only when we know how we are being manipulated and why we are being lied to. This book is an attempt at understanding how and why the media are the way they are so that we can better defend ourselves not only by talking back in the privacy of our living rooms but by organizing and struggling to become the active agents of our own lives and the creators of our own reality.
CRONKITE AND OTHER CRITICS
We do not have a free and independent press in the United States but one that is tied by purchase and persuasion to wealthy owners and advertisers and subjected to the influences of state power. Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Many people who hear about “a controlled press” think only of something that exists in other lands. If anything, the more conservative among them advocate greater restrictions on the US media, in imitation of the censorship they say they are fighting when they say they are fighting communism. Others who complain about the US news media’s shortcomings believe “our” press, for all its faults, is a free and independent one, certainly freer than in most other countries.
In this book I choose to investigate the US news media not by comparing them to the media of other countries, but by measuring them against their own assertions about being independent, objective, neutral, informative, balanced, and truthful. I will argue and try to demonstrate that in regard to the most crucial questions of political and economic life, the media do not, and cannot, live up to their claims; and I will try to explain why they fail to do so.