Erstwhile journalist Bernard Sanders, later to become the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and then Vermont’s independent representative in the US Congress, offered this account of how orthodoxy masquerades as objectivity:
I did a documentary film about [the American Socialist] Eugene Debs. It depicted his role in the labor movement and his opposition to big business in this country. Every TV station I brought it to rejected the film on the grounds that it wasn’t objective; it didn’t show both sides. I gathered they wanted a plug for capitalism. Can you imagine if I had done a film celebrating the accomplishments of John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford—those stations would never have insisted on hearing the socialist side. They would never have complained about a lack of objectivity.3
Relying heavily on institutional authorities for much of their information, newspeople are disinclined to be critical of established sources. A random sampling of 2,850 stories from the New York Times and Washington Post found that 78 percent were based largely on statements by public officials. In Time and Newsweek 20 percent of the news column inches were given to the president alone.4 Studies of television coverage of foreign affairs find a general absence of views that do not coincide with the ones propagated by US foreign policy elites and the US government.5 Much of what is passed off as “objective news” is little more than the uncritical transmission of these precooked official opinions.
Whether or not they consciously recognize the ideological parameters within which they operate, journalists usually do not pursue the questions that rub against the ideological limits of their employers. These include: Why are wealth and power so unequally distributed between classes within nations and between developed and Third World nations? Why do corporations have so much power and citizens so little? Why is there so much underemployment, want, and economic insecurity in so many countries in which capitalism is said to be working so well? Why does the United States need a global network of military bases around the world? And why are US leaders hostile toward any nation that charts an independent course, one that might infringe upon the interests of multinational corporate investors?6 In their dedication to “objectivity,” journalists never come close to dealing with the realities behind such questions.
Objectivity means reporting US overseas involvements from the perspective of the multinational corporations, the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department, and rarely questioning the legitimacy of military intervention (although allowing critical remarks about its effectiveness). Objectivity has meant saying almost nothing about the tenacious influence exercised by giant corporations over Congress and the White House. “Objectivity is believing people with power and printing their press releases. Objectivity is not shouting ‘liar’ in a crowded country.”7
Objectivity means that reporters should avoid becoming politically active, and should keep their distance from their subject, while commentators, editors, and owners socialize, dine, and vacation with the political, military, and corporate leaders whose views and policies they are supposed to be objective about.8 During the 1980 elections, George Will was an active member of Ronald Reagan’s campaign team and helped Reagan prepare for his debates with President Carter. Without informing his audience of this, Will, the objective commentator for ABC News and columnist for Newsweek and the 'Washington Post, then praised Reagan’s masterful performance in the debates. Despite the conflict of interest and the fraud that might have been involved, Will suffered no sanctions from his employers.
Objectivity means that while reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, publishers and media corporate directors can also be directors of other powerful corporations, banks, universities, foundations, and think tanks. Objectivity means not reporting how these interlocking directorates represent a conflict of interest that might interfere with the directors’ judgments regarding news selection and selection of editors, managers, and reporters.9
The journalist Britt Hume urged that newspeople “shouldn’t try to be objective, they should try to be honest.” Instead of passing along the approved versions of things, they should attempt to find out if the officeholder or corporate representative or whoever is telling the truth.
“What [reporters] pass off as objectivity,” Hume concludes, “is just a mindless kind of neutrality.”10
Reflecting on the 1972 presidential campaign, former New York Times correspondent, David Halberstam, notes that “objectivity, which was “the basic rule of journalistic theology,” prevented the press from uncovering important deceptions:
So objectivity was prized and if objectivity in no way conformed to reality, then all the worse for reality. The editors were objective and they prided themselves very much on that. It did not bother them that almost everything else they did each day was subjective. Which 12 stories they put on the front page was a subjective decision. Which stories went on the inside page. Which stories were written and did not go into the paper. Which stories were never even assigned... .
So, in truth, despite all the fine talk of objectivity, the only thing that mildly approached objectivity was the form in which the reporter wrote the news, a technical style which required the journalist to appear to be much dumber and more innocent than in fact he was. So he wrote in a bland, uncritical way which gave greater credence to the utterances of public officials, no matter how mindless these utterances... .
Thus the press voluntarily surrendered a vast amount of its real independence; it treated the words and actions of the government of the United States with a credence that those words and actions did not necessarily merit.11
A point Halberstam himself overlooks: In its pursuit of “objectivity” the news media show uncritical favoritism not just toward government but toward the corporate business class, the sacred cow served by government.
If reporters play “dumber and more innocent” than they are, it is in selective ways. They may obligingly report whatever politico-economic elites pronounce, be it truth, half-truths, or lies, but they instantly resuscitate their critical faculties when dealing with dissenters or foreign leaders out of favor with the United States.
If, as I noted earlier, selectivity and subjectivity are unavoidable, does this mean we should just accept biases and distortions as inevitable? No, it means that rather than professing dedication to an unrealistic and poorly defined “objectivity,” we should strive for standards of fairness and accuracy—which are best achieved by questioning the self-serving assumptions of policy, by unearthing revealing background material, and by giving exposure to a wide range of dissident critics along with the usual establishment commentators. In this way the press would come closer to practicing the “democratic pluralism” it so strenuously preaches.
An important question is, on what basis is news selection made? Is it directed by a desire to give fair exposure to a broad spectrum of views, even seemingly unpopular ones? Or does it routinely downplay or distort some kinds of stories and opinions while giving sympathetic coverage to others? Is the selectivity one that struggles against the limitations imposed by time, space, and official manipulation? Or is it an ideological selectivity that uses these conditions as an excuse to stay away from more unsettling information and opinion? In the chapters ahead we will see that selectivity is not random but consistently serves the powers that be.
NOT ENOUGH TIME, SPACE, AND MONEY?
All sorts of vital issues go unmentioned in the news media. To try to cover everything that is happening in the world would be impossible, it is argued, because it would be too expensive and there is not enough newsprint space and air time available. Let us examine this argument.
The major media are vast news-gathering organizations with correspondents and stringers around the globe. AP, for instance, has a hundred reporters in Washington, D.C., alone. Despite these imposing resources, many revealing stories are broken by small publications with only a fraction of the staff available to the big media conglomerates. The startling news that the CIA was funding cultural,
academic, and student organizations was first publicized by the now defunct Ramparts magazine. Ralph Nader’s revelations about the unsafe nature of automobiles were ignored by the mainstream press and first began appearing in the Nation, a low-budget magazine on the liberal left. Journalist Seymour Hersh sent his account of the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese villagers by US troops to the little-known Dispatch News Service—after none of the major wire services would pick it up.12
Stories about hunger in America, the chemical poisoning of our environment, the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade, the obstructionist use of the veto by the US at the United Nations, the repeated violations of our civil liberties by government security agencies, including the FBI, the massive corruption and criminal conspiracies behind the savings and loan scandal, the ferocious wars of counterinsurgency and death-squad terrorism sponsored by the US in Central America and elsewhere, and other such revelations were uncovered by poorly financed radical publications or other small media long before they were picked up—if ever—by the major news organizations.
THE MEDIA CENSOR “PROJECT CENSORED”
Each year “Project Censored,” a panel of media critics, picks ten stories that have appeared in smaller publications but have been ignored by the major media and kept from the general public. Among the censored stories in recent years were: that the US cast the only negative vote in the United Nations against a resolution endorsing a treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons; that some leading US corporations had sympathized with and done extensive business with Nazi Germany during World War II; that nearly all chemical fertilizers used in recent years, amounting to $2 billion a year, were found to be worthless by researchers; that the US military supervised the massive aerial bombardment of civilian populations in El Salvador; that for more than a decade the US has supported the Indonesian military’s campaign of genocide in East Timor; that links exist between missing savings and loans funds, organized crime, and CIA operatives; that the Pentagon has a secret “black budget” used to conceal the costs of expensive and controversial military weapons; that NASA shuttles destroy the ozone shield.
The “Project Censored” report issued yearly by its director Carl Jensen from Sonoma State University, California, is itself almost entirely ignored by the corporate-owned media.
Regarding the broadcast media, twenty-two minutes of televised evening news (with eight minutes for commercials and station breaks) simply do not allow enough time for anything more than “snapshot-and-headline services,” it is said. Yet, despite such limitations, network news finds plenty of time for frivolous subjects intended to entertain rather than inform. If the evening news were expanded to one hour, this would not guarantee more depth coverage. If anything, the repetitious and evasive surface quality of television news would become more evident, and an hour more unsatisfying—as demonstrated by the local TV news shows that now offer hour-long programs. Time is not an ironclad determinant of content. In five minutes one could make devastating in-depth revelations and connections on any number of issues, but how often would a network news team attempt to do so?
News media supposedly have a penchant for stories that are simple and sensational and thereby easily grasped by a large audience. But there are many simple and quite sensational stories that remain untouched. For instance, in October 1982 the media gave sensational coverage to several deaths caused when someone slipped poison into Tylenol capsules that were later sold in stores. Yet these same media ignored the far greater number of deaths (ninety-seven abroad and twenty-seven in the United States) caused when Eli Lilly and Company marketed an “anti-arthritis pill” called Oraflex. The Food and Drug Administration allowed Oraflex to go on sale in April 1981 despite an FDA investigator’s earlier report indicating that Lilly was withholding data on the dangerous side effects of the drug. Here was a sensational story of mass murder and skulduggery, of possible corporate malfeasance and government collusion, yet the press did not bother with it. Why the difference in handling the two stories? The Tylenol killings seemed to have been the work of a deranged individual; the corporate manufacturer (and advertisers) could not he blamed—unlike the Lilly case. Therefore, the Tylenol story was not only sensational but safe, free of any criticism of the marketing ethics of drug advertisers and of big business in general.13
As noted in Chapter 1, some critics say the problem of superficial coverage rests with the journalists themselves. A president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Newbold Noyes, once remarked that reporters are “lazy and superficial,” habitually treating official events and reports as news “while the real situation behind these surface things go unnoted.”14 But is it really just a matter of laziness and inertia? Behind the superficiality of the news there stands a whole configuration of power and interest that makes the lazy, conventional way of presenting things also the politically safer, less troublesome way. Noyes seems to hint at this when he adds: “1 think the worst of our lazy and superficial performance today is that we of the press are allowing ourselves to be manipulated by various interests.” But again, it is not the laziness that is allowing the manipulation; it is the manipulative control that encourages and rewards the lazy, superficial (“objective”) approach.
Correspondents who report on Third World revolutionary insurgencies by ensconcing themselves in a luxury hotel, waiting for handouts from the US embassy, or from the military junta that is trying to destroy the insurgency, may be guilty of laziness; but they are also producing copy their editors and publishers find acceptable. When one of them does otherwise, he or she may run into difficulties. When Herbert Matthews reported the Cuban revolution directly from the field, offering detailed accounts of the popular support the guerrillas enjoyed and the early accomplishments of the revolutionary government, he was removed from the story by the New York Times. Matthews had unique access to the Cuban leadership. As he himself mourns: “Here was one of the rare phenomena of modern history—a social revolution of the most drastic kind on which I, and I alone, could report from the inside, as it went along. It was a golden opportunity for the New York Times. But I was muzzled!”15
Matthews was silenced on the Cuban issue because his reports were not sufficiently in step with the anti-Castro, anticommunist tidal wave that was flooding the media. Far from being lazy, he showed himself to be the go-getter par excellence, and for that he got into difficulties with his employers. If reporters hold back and allow themselves to be manipulated by vested interests, it is because they have learned that such behavior has its rewards, and a more challenging kind of journalism has its punishments.
Almost two decades later a Washington Post reporter, Alma Guillermoprieto, and another New York Times reporter, Ray Bonner, learned the same lesson. When they began producing stories for their respective newspapers about how the US-supported military in El Salvador massacred unarmed peasants, they were both pulled out of that country. Guillermoprieto was eventually let go and Bonner resigned, noting that his experience had a chilling effect on “many other reporters” who told him “I don’t want the same thing to happen to me. I’m going to be careful.”16
MAINTAINING APPEARANCES
How is it that the idea of a free and independent press persists in the face of strong hierarchical corporate controls—even among many members of the working press who should know better? We can answer that question by summarizing some previous points.
First, there is ideological congruity between many members of the working press and media owners. When reporters and editors look at the world in much the same way as their bosses, censorship becomes an intermittent rather than constant affair, something whose existence can be more easily denied.
Second, within the existing ideological consensus there does exist a limited range of views on what to do about domestic and foreign policy issues—which do not challenge the fundamental arrangements of power and wealth yet give an appearance of diversity.
Third, there is much anticipatory self-censorship practiced by reporters, e
ditors, and producers even while not admitted or consciously perceived by the practitioners themselves.
Fourth, the rewards and punishments designed to induce conformity also socialize people into the existing system. With one’s career at stake, it is not too hard for the newsperson to start seeing things the same way superiors do. Sanctions not only force conformity, in time they change people’s political perceptions so that the conformity becomes voluntary, so to speak.
Fifth, the more obvious and undeniable instances of coercion, bias, and censorship are seen as aberrations. Bauman notes that New York Times journalists who were critical of the newspaper’s handling of a particular story insisted that it was an isolated problem.17
Sixth, reporters and editors who say they are guided by professional integrity and journalistic standards of autonomy and objectivity have rarely, if ever, defined what they mean by these terms. “Professional integrity” remains largely unexplained and somewhat contradictory. For instance, an editor’s claim to having final say on what his paper prints would seem to contradict a reporter’s claim to independence in what he writes. Likewise, newspeople can cloak themselves in the mantle of objectivity only by ignoring the differences of perspective that make objectivity a highly debatable concept. In order to maintain a sense of self-respect and independence, many newspeople deny the realities of class power under which they manufacture the news. They deny the fact that, in the final analysis, the news is not what reporters report but what editors, producers, and owners decide to print or broadcast.
Inventing Reality Page 8