NPR’s Susan Stanberg, interviewing two Arab intellectuals, asked them to comment on an association in her mind: “Arabs and death.” They patiently explained that like everyone else, Arabs preferred life over death for themselves and their loved ones. Then she gave them another association: “Arabs and violence.” Stanberg was the citizen of a country in which 25,000 homicides occurred each year, along with millions of muggings, rapes, and assaults, a country that spent $300 billion yearly on the military and supported violent repression through much of the Third World, and which at that very moment was waging a murderous war against a vastly smaller and weaker Arab nation—and she was asking why Arabs were so violent.82
Methods of Misrepresentation
We have noted the media’s tendency to favor personality over issue, event over content, official positions over popular grievances, the atypical over the systemic. Supposedly these biases inhere in the nature of the media themselves, specifically, the imperfect practices of reporters, the visual nature of the camera, the limitations of time and budget, and the need to reduce a complex development into a concise story. Certainly these are real factors. But news production is not a purely autonomous process, responsive only to its own internal imperatives. As we have seen, many distortions are of a more political nature and reveal a pattern of bias that favors the dominant class interests and statist ideology. What we will look at in this chapter is not so much the content of propaganda themes as the methods by which they are packaged and presented.
SELECTIVITY AND DELIBERATE OMISSION
No communication system can report everything that happens in public life. Some selectivity is inevitable, and, by its nature, conducive to a measure of bias. Still we might aspire to standards of fairness and accuracy in reporting and try to develop a critical analysis of how and why the news is distorted. If the selection factor is determined principally by space limitations and the need to be entertaining, why are so many dreary news items (for example, visiting dignitaries at the White House, and vacuous official announcements) given consistently generous coverage, while many interesting and even sensational things are regularly suppressed? What is the principle of selectivity involved?
Why was the Tylenol poisoning of several people by a deranged individual (or individuals) big news, but the death of many more persons from unsafe drugs marketed by supposedly reputable companies not news? Why is a plane crash killing forty-three passengers headline news, while the far more sensational story of the industrial brown-lung poisoning of thousands of factory workers remains suppressed for years? Why does the press rapturously report the pope’s endless trips abroad, while ignoring the involvement of his priests in the struggles against imperialism—until the pope denounces them for their radicalism? Why are the relatively limited repressive measures of leftist governments given saturation coverage while the far more brutal oppressions and mass killings perpetrated by right-wing client states accorded only passing notice or ignored altogether?
Why did the Kurds, who were threatened by Iraq, get saturation coverage for two whole weeks in 1991, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, who were put at risk or slaughtered outright by US military forces, received almost no mention? Why did the media repeatedly denounce Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge of Cambodia as mass murderers in the 1970s, only to treat them with benign neglect when they became an indirect instrument of US policy in 1990—91 ?1
For over forty years the corporate-owned media slighted or ignored outright the issue of national health insurance because of its aura of “socialized medicine.” Only in 1990—91, as large corporations demanded relief from the astronomical costs of employee health insurance, did the media then begin giving the subject of national health insurance serious attention. It became an issue in the media when it became ideologically safe (but still controversial at the policy level).
There is nothing in the limitations of time and space that oblige the media to ignore third-party presidential candidates while assigning an army of journalists the agonizing task of having to file a “new” story every day of the campaign about major candidates who seldom say anything new. But there is something about progressive third-party candidates themselves, their attempts at raising questions about the capitalist state that makes them politically unsafe for national media coverage.
As we have seen through much of this book, the single most common form of media misrepresentation is omission. Many omissions involve deliberate decisions. With enough practice and with the influence of the dominant political culture, these decisions become almost automatic.
Lies often hide in the things left unmentioned. And sometimes the unmentioned includes not just particular details of a story but the entire story itself—even ones about major events. For instance, in 1965 the Indonesian army overthrew President Achmed Sukarno and embarked upon a murderous campaign to eradicate the Indonesian Communist Party and others, killing half a million people (some estimates are as high as a million) in what was the greatest genocidal action since the Nazi Holocaust.- Here was a sensational story if ever there was one, but it was three months before it appeared as a brief item in Time magazine and yet another month before it was reported in the New York Times—and treated as a salutory development.3 A Times editorial actually praised the Indonesian military for “rightly playing its part with utmost caution.”4
The press had little to say about the role of the CIA and the US military in arming and assisting the Indonesian generals, and nothing to say about the economic interests supporting the military coup, nothing about the abolition of Sukarno’s land reform program, the destruction of Communist Party libraries, clinics, cooperatives, and schools for the poor, the massive dispossession of peasants, the widening gap between village rich and poor, the post-coup influx of American, Dutch, and Japanese corporations, the growth of Indonesia’s national debt to foreign financiers, and the takeover of Indonesia’s mineral resources by foreign firms.
In 1976 the Indonesian military did an encore; it invaded East Timor to eradicate a government headed by the Fretilin, a popular leftist movement. The Indonesian army undertook a massive counterinsurgency campaign that brought death to some 100,000 persons. (Since 1980 the army has taken another 100,000 Timorese lives.) Here was another remarkable, sensational story the US media treated as almost nonexistent.5
It could be argued that places like Indonesia and East Timor are too remote to win the attention of an American press noted for its generally deficient foreign news coverage. In fact, during Sukarno’s reign, when Indonesia was taking an openly anti-imperialistic stance, it was subjected to abundant negative coverage by the US press. As for Timor, the New York Times index gave six full columns of citations to that obscure little island in 1975, as the Portuguese colonialists abandoned the island and the Fretilin populist movement was emerging victorious—a situation that concerned the White House and the CIA. In 1977, however, as the Indonesian generals’ war of annihilation reached awesome proportions, the Times index gave Timor only five lines.6 Politics rather than geography seemed to determine the amount of coverage.
When we see that news selectivity is likely to be on the side of those who have power, position, and wealth, we move from a liberal complaint about the press’s poor performance to a radical analysis of how the press fulfills its system-supporting function all too well.
LIES AND FACE-VALUE TRANSMISSION
Sometimes omissions are not enough and the press lends itself to the dissemination of outright lies. All lies involve some degree of omission hut they also contain deliberate embellishment. They not only suppress information, they create disinformation. Untruths that are repeated again and again in the major media soon take on a life of their own, to be passed on with little conscious awareness that a fabrication has been propagated.
But not all lying is second nature for the news media. Along with the transformation of falsehood into unconscious “fact,” there are still plenty of plain old deliberate lies that take conscious effort. Consider this
instance: A report from Indonesia by Gerald Stone in the London Times (September 2, 1975) found that the Indonesian government-controlled press was spreading false stories about widespread atrocities by Fretilin, the East Timorese popular force, as part of what Stone called “a purposeful campaign to plant lies.” But when Neivsweek prepared Stone’s story for an American audience, it had him reporting on the “devastation” and “bloodbath” caused by “the Marxist Fretilin party.”7 The magazine made it appear as if Stone had found the atrocity stories to be true when in fact he had found them to be false. In twisting Stone’s story around, Newsweek was guilty not of mere inaccuracy but of deliberate fabrication.
The major media not only go along with official disinformation, they readily launch their own energetic disinformation campaigns to buttress the policies of the national security state. During the 1980s and early 1990s, there were the mythical stories that the Soviets were bankrolling and directing a global network of terrorists, that they were engaging in chemical and bacteriological warfare in Laos and Cambodia, that they were behind a plot to shoot the pope, and that they knowingly shot down a Korean passenger plane that had supposedly strayed innocently into highly sensitive Soviet air space. There were also stories that the Sandinista and Cuban governments were involved in the drug trade and that a Libyan hit team had infiltrated the United States to kill the president. These and other scare stories were floated by US officialdom and given enthusiastic play by the corporate-owned news media.8
The press will go out of its way to promote an official disinformation story with embellishments all its own—as, for instance, did Marvin Kalb who argued, in two NBC television specials filled with imaginary assertions and improbable fabrications, that the Bulgarian communists and Soviet KGB were behind the attempt by Turkish fascists to kill Pope John Paul II.9 In 1991, during Senate confirmation hearings for a new CIA director, it came to light that the CIA had suppressed evidence suggesting that the Soviets were not linked to the assassination attempt. The media gave these startling revelations minimal play, being little inclined to remind the public of how they had hyped the false story about a “KGB-Bulgarian connection.”10
AFTER RETRACTION—THE LIE STILL GOES ON
Hours after the Chinese government crushed the student protest at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, an Associated Press dispatch reported that communist Vietnam and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua had endorsed the suppression. The story was completely bogus, as any skeptical editor might have suspected. Vietnam and China had been adversaries in a brief war and China was giving military aid to Vietnam’s enemies, the Khmer Rouge. China also supplied weapons to the Nicaraguan contras, the Sandinistas’ enemies, at the behest of US officials. These facts were not mentioned in the AP wire story that was picked up and amplified by networks and newspapers.
AP subsequently retracted the story. But, as usual, the US media gave the correction far less attention than the original lie. Months later, the disinformation hoax was resurrected by NPR’s senior news analyst Daniel Schorr, who blithely touted the discredited AP tale on the op-ed page of the New York Times and in his radio commentary, falsely claiming that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had endorsed “the massacre of prodemocracy students in Beijing.”
Adapted from Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990), pp. 140—141.
One way to lie is to accept at face value what are known to be lies, passing them on to the public without adequate confirmation or countervailing response. Face-value transmission has characterized the press’s performance in almost every area of domestic and foreign policy—as we have seen through much of this book. Without saying a particular story is true or not, but treating it at face value, the press engages in the propagation of misinformation—while maintaining it is being merely noncommittal and objective. When challenged on this, some reporters will argue that they cannot inject their own personal judgments into their reports. But no one is asking them to. In any case, they already do. My criticism is that the media seldom give us a range of information and views that might allow us to form opinions contrary to the official ones that permeate the news. No one is asking for more “advocacy journalism.” We already have quite a bit of that—and it is almost entirely mainstream and mostly conservative. What is needed is more content and broader context, the inclusion of facts that do not fit the prevailing ideology.
Consider how some simple facts would have changed this report: In 1985, at the time of the Geneva arms talks, President Reagan described himself as optimistic because “this is the first time [the Soviets] have ever publicly stated a desire to reduce the number of their weapons.”11 CBS news treated this incredible statement at face value, not bothering to point out that the Soviets had made repeated overtures to reduce nuclear and conventional weapons, including the previous year’s unilateral offer to decrease their intermediate-range missiles in Europe from 800 to 162. In this CBS report, the appearance of objectivity, as achieved through face-value transmission, prevailed over accuracy.
Operating in the dominant ideological mode, the media have no reason to disbelieve the lies handed out by the government. Why should NBC believe Russians or Libyans rather than American officials? The lie comes in the press’s automatic readiness to do face-value transmission, to act as an uncritical stenographer for the national security state, neglecting to question the sparsity or nonexistence of evidence and the implausibility of the claim, failing to seek confirming sources, overlooking contradictions in the story, asking few penetrating or debunking questions, and ignoring opposing testimony, facts, and interpretations.
It becomes evident that the media have been lying when, by force of circumstances, they suddenly are forced to tell the truth. Thus, for twenty-five years the US media portrayed the shah of Iran just as the State Department and the big oil companies wanted: a benevolent ruler and modernizer of his nation, a likable public personage—with nary a word about the thousands of people his SAVAK security police had tortured and murdered. When the Iranian students occupied the US embassy in 1979 and took American hostages, one of their demands was that the US media publicize the shah’s atrocities. For a short time, the American public was treated to a slice of truth, to testimony by persons who had suffered unspeakable outrages at the hands of one of the White House’s favorite client-state autocrats. We heard of parents and children tortured in front of each other, including one youngster displayed before the cameras, who had had his arms chopped off in the presence of his father. It left many Americans shocked, including members of Congress who, like the rest of us, had been taught by the media to think of the shah as an upright person worthy of US aid.
A dramatic example of media flip-flop is the treatment accorded President Ferdinand Marcos, the late dictator of the Philippines. For almost twenty years Marcos was portrayed in the press just as the US government wanted, as America’s staunch ally and defender of democracy. Nothing was said about the repressive, unpopular nature of his rule. By 1985, however, popular feeling against the political and economic oppression of Marcos’s twenty-year rule was running high in the Philippines. Even the Filipino military and business community had become fed up with Marcos’s corruption and family favoritism. US officials began to realize that the dictator might prove to be a liability, another Batista, Somoza, Duvalier, or shah of Iran, that is, a dictator who, instead of “stabilizing” his country and making it safe for corporate investors, was so unpopular as to become himself a catalyst for instability and popular rebellion. US officials decided it was time for Marcos to exit the public stage before things got too far out of hand.
During this time, specifically between early January and late February 1986, a remarkable awakening occurred in the US media. The New York Times suddenly discovered that the Marcos monopolies on cocoa, sugar, and other commodities were “instruments of exploitation and economic suppression.”12 Now for the first time in twenty years, the Times no longer described Marcos as a defender of demo
cracy but as a “tyrant.”13 Suddenly, the media ascertained that Marcos was not a World War II hero, that he had fabricated his war record, and rather than fighting the Japanese, he had been a Japanese collaborator.14 Suddenly the media also discovered that Marcos and his wife had been stashing vast sums of public funds into personal holdings, including investments in the United States.15 Reporting on Marcos’s 1986 election campaign against Corazon Aquino, NBC concluded that the election was marred by acts of fraud and violence “as all elections have been under President Marcos.”16 But why had not NBC, or any other major news organization, ever told us this about previous elections held under the Marcos regime? If the fraud and violence was known, why had it been kept a secret for twenty years? Only when Marcos had fallen from grace in Washington did the news media suddenly say things about him they never had thought of saying in the years before. By admitting to being privy to a truth long unspoken, the media demonstrated that they had kept it from us.
FALSE BALANCING
In accordance with the canons of good journalism, reporters are supposed to balance their stories, tapping competing sources to get both sides of an issue. However, as we have seen, even when statements from both sides are presented, they often are not accorded equal space, position, and frequency.
There are several types of news exposure. First, there is one-shot coverage: A story is reported once, usually without prominent play, passing almost unnoticed before large publics, caught only by those who are specially attuned to the item—if even by them. Then there is sporadic coverage: An item gets intermittent mention, appearing once or twice, disappearing, then reappearing weeks or months later for another passing mention. Finally there is saturation coverage: Something appears as a lead story on the evening news and the front page for days on end and is given the kind of emphasis and repetition that makes it a visible part of the political agenda. Information and opinions that are troublesome to the powers-that-be are most likely to get one-shot coverage—if any at all.
Inventing Reality Page 26