The rule that says journalists must present both sides of a story overlooks the fact that both sides may not be all sides. Important but less visible factors, extending beyond the immediate pros and cons of the issue, are habitually shut out. As we have seen throughout this book, these unexamined assumptions prefigure the limits of discussion about most domestic and foreign policy issues.
Even the insufficient rule of getting “both sides” often falls by the wayside. As noted in earlier pages, on almost any issue, official sources are heavily favored over sources that are critical of the official view. A study of National Public Radio’s evening news show “All Things Considered” found that administration sources outnumbered responses from non-administration sources by nearly two-to-one.17 The same is true of right versus left sources. Looking at NPR news programs, one critic concludes that right-wing spokespeople are often interviewed alone, while leftists—on the infrequent occasions they appear—are almost always offset by conservatives.18
Those who have position and wealth are less likely to be slighted in news reports than their critics, and they are more likely to be accorded adequate space to respond on the infrequent occasions they are attacked. The media are less energetic in their search for a competing viewpoint if it must be elicited from labor leaders, environmentalists, feminists, peace and disarmament advocates, communists, civil right supporters, Black or Latino protestors, Third World insurgents, American supporters of Third World insurgents, the poor, and the oppressed. Regarding media coverage of Africa, one critic remarks: “Even when American newsmen take the trouble to visit black Africa, they seem incapable of talking to ordinary people about what is happening to their country.”19 For instance, Time and Newsweek articles on the independence struggle in Namibia concentrated on the concerns of South African military commanders and officials in Pretoria, Geneva, and Washington, offering no statements from the Namibian revolutionaries or any other independence-minded Namibians.20
INEVITABLE SOURCES
My wife and I are throwing an unusual surprise party for a journalist friend of ours this month. We’re inviting every single unidentified “source” whose opinions appeared in a single day’s edition of the New York Times, the New York Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. We'll be catering for eightv-five.
The business community will be represented by such figures as “a trading manager for a Persian Gulf oil company,” “a spokesman for Merrill Lynch,” “a shipping source,” “an industry source,” and “one video dealer.” From the political community we will have “a western diplomat,” “a top agency official,” “a politburo member,” and several “senior administration officials.” They will be sitting at the same table as “a court spokesman,” “a former radical,” “two presidential spokesmen,” and “an administration realist.” We can’t wait to find out who he is.
Most of our guests will be the rich and the powerful, or those who do their bidding. ... In an attempt to keep the guest list at a reasonable size, my wife and I decided not to invite such shadowy figures as “many analysts,” “other economists,” “many sophisticated investment advisers,” “veterans,” or “those in the industry who believe.”
Joe Queenan, "The Phantoms of the Press,” Commonweal, February 26, 1988, p. 103.
What the press lacks in balance, it sometimes makes up for in false balancing, as when it tries to create an impression of evenhandedness by placing equal blame on parties that are not equally culpable. Thus, for years the news media ascribed the killings in Guatemala and El Salvador to “extremists of both the left and right” when in fact almost all the killings were done by rightist death squads linked to the military and the military itself.21 The false balancing created a false impression: A massive state terrorism against popular organizations was reduced to a gang war between leftist and rightist outlaws. False balancing also allows journalists to adopt a condemnatory view of all sides, both those who are fighting for and those fighting against, social justice. In this way the press manages to keep an equal distance from both falsehood and the truth.
Another way to stack the deck with false balancing is to employ a double standard in interviews. For instance, ABC’s “Nightline” host Ted Koppel, friend and admirer of conservatives like George Will and Henry Kissinger, has gained a reputation for asking probing inquiries. But he challenges viewpoints that veer somewhat leftward far more vigorously than those that stay snugly mainstream. Hostile probes can sometimes give a respondent the opportunity to offer clarifying arguments, assuming the person is up to the task and is allowed enough time. But the overall impression left by an antagonistic interview is that there is something highly questionable about the interviewee. Conversely, the effect of a friendly interview is to send a cue to the audience that the respondent is to be trusted and believed. Koppel is especially nonconfrontational— almost deferential—when interviewing his friend “Dr. Kissinger” and other notables from the national security establishment.
The media claim to give us balanced opinion by offering a diversity of sources, but such diversity is usually bogus. False diversity creates a misleading impression of open debate and pluralistic choice in the media. Thus on one ABC “Nightline” show, host Koppel introduced Richard Perle, as “the Pentagon hardliner,” against whom was pitted Richard Burt, “the State Department moderate.” Burt, the hardline cold warrior and cruise missile advocate, was considered a “moderate” by Koppel. And for even more diversity and balance, there was a third guest, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a Nixon hardliner and cold war stalwart. This “balance” through “diversity” allowed for no critical questioning of the White House’s foreign policy.22 In the major media, “both sides” of an issue sometimes are nothing more than two variations of what is essentially one side.
FRAMING AND LABELING
The most effective propaganda is that which relies on framing rather than on falsehood. By bending the truth rather than breaking it, using emphasis, nuance, innuendo, and peripheral embellishments, communicators can create a desired impression without resorting to explicit advocacy and without departing too far from the appearance of objectivity. Framing is achieved in the way the news is packaged, the amount of exposure, the placement (front page or back, lead story or last), the tone of presentation (sympathetic or slighting), the accompanying headlines and visual effects, and the labeling and vocabulary. Just short of lying, the media can mislead us in a variety of ways, telling us what to think about a story before we have had a chance to think about it for ourselves.
One common framing method is to select labels and other vocabulary designed to convey politically loaded images. These labels and phrases, like the masks in a Greek drama, convey positive or negative cues regarding events and persona, often without benefit of—and usually as a substitute for—supportive information. Thus, on CBS television news Dan Rather referred retrospectively to the Black civil rights movement and student antiwar movement as “the civil disturbances of the sixties.” How different an impression would have been created had he labeled them “movements for peace and justice,” or “movements against military intervention and for racial equality.”23
As with commodities, so with news, labels are unavoidable. But one should be alerted to false labeling or labeling that distorts and editorializes more than it informs. Other examples of such labeling:
• A news story in the Los Angeles Times described Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega’s denunciation of US policy as being “as strident as ever,” implying that Ortega was given to excessive and unjustified attacks.24 The report said nothing about US policy itself or about the content of Ortega’s criticism—which readers might not have found “strident.”
• A report in the Washington Post described a province in El Salvador as “guerrilla-infested,” rather than “guerrilla-controlled” or “prorevolutionary,” thereby reducing the insurgent populace to a kind of lice.25
• Throughout the 1984 press coverage of the Lebanon crisis, the press
incessantly referred to the “Soviet-made” antiaircraft missiles and other arms possessed by the Syrians and Lebanese. But at no time were the Israeli arms described as “US-made”—which they were. The impression left was that the Soviets were somehow the instigators in what was actually an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
• Moscow’s arms reduction overtures during the 1980s were repeatedly labeled unsympathetically as “the Soviet peace offensive,” “the Kremlin’s smile campaign,” and “Gorbachev’s disarmament thrusts.” ABC’s Barry Dunsmore opined that Moscow had adopted a friendly approach only because previous Soviet “strong arm methods” (unspecified) had failed to persuade the Western allies. The Kremlin’s peace overtures were just an attempt to “enhance [the Soviet] image in Western Europe,” warned Dan Rather of CBS, who noted that the US rejected as “not negotiable” a Soviet proposal for the mutual nonuse of military force in Europe. No lie was uttered here. The Soviets indeed did make the proposal, and the United States did reject it. But by labeling the Soviet move as “another peace propaganda pitch,” Rather let us know that the US rejection was the only sensible move—with no explanation as to why that was so.26
• Before his country crumbled from under him, Mikhail Gorbachev was described by WPAT radio in New York (October 22, 1986) as “Soviet boss Gorbachev.” WPAT would never refer to “US boss Bush.”
• Israeli authorities rounded up hundreds of Palestinian political leaders, administrators, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, and anyone else who might provide leadership to the Palestinian community, holding them in “administrative detention” for years on end, without charges. In effect, they were hostages to Israeli rule. But throughout 1991, the US news media invariably referred to them as “prisoners,” not hostages. Arab resistance groups, however, had no prisoners; they held only “hostages.” As of 1992, Israel held fifty-three UN personnel as hostages; almost all were Arab employees for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The US media never labeled them as hostages.27
• Who is and is not a “terrorist” in the media is a matter of politics. Leftist guerrillas with a wide popular base are often referred to as “terrorists.” Right-wing mercenaries, financed by the CIA, who attack unarmed villagers, farm cooperatives, clinics, and schools in countries like Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique are “rebels.” “State terrorism” is what leftist governments do to defend themselves against these rebels, never what the United States does to suppress popular movements in a score of countries.
• The South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), struggling to liberate Namibia from White South African occupation, was described as “a hardline Marxist movement” by the San Francisco Chronicle,28 No “hardline” labeling was applied in the story to SWAPO's opponent, the often murderous Pretoria government that colonized and plundered Namibia for thirty years.
THE GREYING OF REALITY
Much news media framing is designed not to excite or incite but to neutralize. While we think of the press as geared to crisis and sensationalism, often its task is just the opposite, dedicated to the greying of reality, blurring popular grievances and social inequities. In this muted media reality, those who raise their voices too strongly against the bland tide can be made to sound quite shrill.
Instead of neutralizing themselves as observers, reporters and editors are more likely to neutralize their subject matter, giving it an innocence it may not deserve. One way to do this is by applying gloss-over euphemisms and passive phrases. We have already noted how the New York Times reported that President Salvador Allende of Chile “died” in the Moneda Palace when actually he had been murdered there by the military.29 The Times turned the 1973 Chilean coup—in which tens of thousands were victimized—into a neutral event by using bland phrases like “the armed forces took power,”30 and telling us the “chaos” caused by the communists “brought in the military.”31
When men, women, and children in the villages of Morazan province were massacred by the Salvadoran army, the Times described it as “a military operation in which some 500 civilians reportedly died in El Mozote.”32 The Washington Post treated the Morazan massacre with sentences like “[A survivor] broke down only when speaking of what she said were the deaths of her children” and “Like so much else in the civil war that is wracking this tiny country, these conflicting accounts are impossible to verify.”33
The destruction of trade unions and other popular organizations and the many other acts of repression, murder, and torture by a fascist military regime in Turkey were described in the Washington Post as “controversial measures,” and as a “drive to restrict political dissent.” We learn that General Kenan Evren, the despot of Turkey, has a “down-to-earth approach” and involves himself in “the rough and tumble of everyday politics,” and that his “current crackdown” had “all but stamped out terrorism” as if his democratic opponents were terrorists and the Evren regime itself was not engaging in terrorism.34
Faced with a genocide in East Timor perpetrated by the Indonesian military, complete with widespread burning of crops and intensive aerial bombings of the countryside to starve out and destroy the population that supported the guerrillas, the Washington Post could neutralize as follows: “More than 100,000 islanders—one sixth of the population— died in the famine and disease brought on by the hostilities.”35 And “the warfare between the Indonesians and Fretilin forces further disrupted the fragile agrarian economy and caused heavy casualties.”36 The Indonesians did not starve out and massacre multitudes; the warfare impersonally “caused heavy casualties.”
Sixteen years after a democratically elected president was murdered in Chile, the New York Times's Shirley Christian was still glossing over the event with phrases like: President Allende “died in the course of the coup.”37 In 1991 the Washington Post reported that in El Salvador “deep hatreds” and the “killing of civilians ... has left some 75,000 dead”—a use of the passive voice that conveniently avoids telling us who did the killing. As for South Africa, we are told by the Times that a protest by Black squatters “led to clashes with the police in which eighteen people died.”38 What does “led to a clash” mean? Didn't the police open fire on the demonstrators? How is it the “people died”? Was it from heat stroke? heart attack? Or were they not killed by the police? The article does not tell us.
In another article the Times noted that “the Mozambican countryside has been devastated.” By whom? Was it not by the South Africanbacked mercenary RENAMO forces that for years deliberately wreaked death and terror upon the civilian population of Mozambique? According to the neutralizing Times, the devastation was “a result of the conflict” that pitted the “anti-communist” RENAMO against “the Marxist government.”39 On Angola, the Washington Post reported: “Scores of government health centers have been burned down in the countryside, apparently by the rebels.”40 If the word “apparently” had not been inserted, the report would have sounded less measured, less “objective,” but would have been more truthful. (The rebels were the right-wing UNITA forces that received $50 million a year in covert military aid from the United States.)41
Another way to neutralize the news is by scanting its content. We noted how the media are able to reduce political campaigns to a string of issueless, trivial pseudo-events, and feed us stories about labormanagement conflicts, political protests, and revolutionary and socialist countries without ever telling us much about their substance, about the interests and goals motivating the event makers. When political struggles are deprived of their content, as when positions taken in opposition to US policy are never explained in their substance, we are left with the presumption that the conflict is caused by an innately hostile adversary. By slighting content and dwelling on surface details, the media are able to neutralize the truth while giving an appearance of having thoroughly treated the subject.
AUXILIARY EMBELLISHMENTS
Through the use of various peripheral framing devices, a story can be packaged so as to influence our p
erception of its content. The most common accouterments in the print media is, of course, the headline. Not only can headlines mislead anyone who skims a page without reading the story, they can create the dominant slant on a story, establishing a mind-set that influences how we do read the story’s text.
Thus it takes a careful reading of a New York Times story headlined “American Flier Shot Down in Iraq Recounts Horrors after Capture” to realize that the pilot is not talking about how he suffered at the hands of his captors, but is voicing his regrets at having delivered death and destruction upon the Iraqi people.42
When the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control investigated drug-trafficking in Central America, the Washington Post ran this headline, “Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling.”43 It was false, according to the House committee’s chair, Charles Rangel (D.-NY). In a letter the Post refused to publish, Rangel wrote: “Your headline says we drew one conclusion, while in fact we reached quite a different one.” Rather than finding there was no evidence on contra involvement in drug smuggling, the committee actually determined there was a “strong need for further congressional investigation into contra drug allegations.”44
Another Post story, reporting that the income gap separating the rich from the middle class and the poor was wider than it had been in forty years, carried this upbeat headline: “Number of Poor Americans at Lowest Level Since 1980.”45
Inventing Reality Page 27