Inventing Reality

by Michael Parenti

  First, one reason deviancy occasionally peeks through an otherwise orthodox mainstream press is that ideological control is not formal and overt, but informal and implicit. Therefore it will work with imperfect effect. Dissenting information will sometimes slip through. For example, one evening in January 1985, on the NBC evening news, Tom Brokaw noted quickly, almost furtively, that corporations are today paying a substantially smaller portion of the nation’s income tax than five years ago. No elaboration, no pie charts, just a two-line news item that seemed to have been slipped in—a one-shot coverage never to be discussed further. Similarly the print media sometimes carry revealing items, buried in otherwise standard stories, exceptional things that are likely to go unnoticed—except to the closely critical reader—because of their poor placement and lack of projective framing. The presence of such nuggets scattered here and there in the mountains of dross is what enables critics of capitalism occasionally to draw damaging information from the capitalist media itself. When detected as deviancies, these items are usually suppressed. A staff member of a local early morning radio news program in Washington, D.C., pointed out to me, “Sometimes the seven o’clock morning edition will carry an item or two that has some real zip. These run because the station manager hasn’t arrived yet. They’re cut out of the eight o’clock edition because by then he’s at his post. ... I wouldn’t say it’s a regular occurrence, but it happens once in awhile.”

  Second, sometimes editors run stories because they are unable to foresee their troublesome implications and unintended spin-offs. While the “blame-the-journalist” critics argue that distortions are caused by inadequate information and hasty preparation, I am suggesting there are times when haste and low information levels lead to greater revelations than would normally be allowed were reporters and editors better apprised of a story’s potentially discordant ideological effects. Even the best-informed newspeople cannot always anticipate the effects of their stories. A report on how a particular corporation is taking care of a toxic spill may be intended to show the firm’s socially responsible behavior and reassure the public, whereas it actually has the unintended but more accurate effect of revealing how big companies are poisoning the environment. Early news reports (1980-81) planted by the US government, about the growing effectiveness of guerrilla forces in El Salvador, while intending to alert the public to the emergence of a new communist menace, had the unintended effect of activating an anti-interventionist peace movement in the United States, causing officials in the Reagan administration to request that the press not give so much attention to the war in El Salvador.

  Third, serious differences sometimes arise among politico-economic elites on how best to advance their common class interests. These differences will be reflected in the news media. Thus while remaining supportive of the president’s jingoist approach to the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991, the press gave space and time to such elite critics as former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who called for a reliance on sanctions. To the extent such differences among elites are played out in the media, they add to the appearance—and substance—of diversity, if not on fundamental questions then on tactical ones.

  Fourth, when the press has an enduring interest in an issue, it is likely to be less compliant than usual—as with the question of protecting the confidentiality of its sources. If reporters are unable to guarantee confidentiality, they run the risk of having their sources dry up. Another area of conflict between state and press arises when reporters are victimized by state violence. Reports of widespread brutality by police, army, and federal marshals against antiwar participants in the 1960s were so thoroughly suppressed by the major news organizations that on one occasion protesters had to buy a page in the New York Times, which they filled with eyewitness accounts of violent mistreatment by authorities.3 But the police riot against antiwar demonstrators in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention did make the news in a big way—mostly because of the deliberate acts of police violence against members of the press.

  Likewise, the mass execution of young Nicaraguan males by Somoza’s national guard during the last days of his rule received little, if any, notice in the US media until ABC’s Bill Stewart was executed by guardsmen while covering the Nicaragua uprising. In the days that followed, the film of Stewart’s execution (taken by an American cameraperson standing a distance away) was played repeatedly on network news, and for the first time the American press also began mentioning that young Nicaraguans were being systematically murdered by the guard. The killing of foreign newspeople, as opposed to American journalists, is less likely to be accorded elaborate treatment. During the 1980s scores of foreign journalists were murdered or “disappeared” in Central America, but there was no discernible outcry in the American press. Had they been killed by leftist insurgents, they might have got more coverage.

  Fifth, journalists who believe they are autonomous professionals expect to be able to report things as they see them. If the appearance of journalistic independence is violated too often and too blatantly by superiors, this can have a demystifying effect, reminding the staff that they are not working in a democratic institution but one controlled from the top with no regard for professional standards as they understand them. To avoid being criticized as censors and intrusive autocrats, publishers and network bosses sometimes grant their news organizations some modicum of independence, relying on hiring, firing, and promotional policies and more indirect controls. They might show themselves willing to make an occasional concession so as to minimize the amount of overt intrusion.

  The idea of a free press is more a myth than a reality, but myths can have an effect on things and can serve as a resource of power. The power of a legitimating myth rests on its ability to be believed and not exposed as a sham. So at times superiors can be prevailed upon to make concessions.

  To offer an instance: After a year of unremittingly hostile reports about the leftist armed forces movement in Portugal, the New York Times agreed to run a guest opinion column by me that offered a more sympathetic view of the struggle in that country. The day before the column was to appear, top editor Abe Rosenthal intervened to suppress it. My inquiries brought only evasive responses from the opinion-page editors who had accepted the piece. Only after three months of telephone calls from me, reminding the Times editors that they were under an obligation to give their readers a glimpse of the other side, and after two updated rewrites by me, did the Times print it—the only 800 words the newspaper ever ran that contradicted the thousands of column inches that echoed the White House line. Somehow 1 had prevailed upon the opinion-page editor who had prevailed upon Rosenthal. Even then, the piece appeared only after Portugal had dropped from the news and was once more safely in the Western capitalist camp. And lest Times readers be unduly swayed, my guest column was accompanied by a hostile editorial denouncing the left in Portugal and calling for support of conservative ‘pluralistic” forces. So, on infrequent occasions, in limited, lopsided ways, the legitimating myth of “allowing both sides a hearing” can be used by dissenters to drive a wedge into a monopoly press that finds it difficult to practice within its own ranks the pluralism it so vigorously preaches to the world.

  The press is not totally immune to the pressures of those who struggle for a more egalitarian and peaceable world. It must make some adjustment to democratic forces as when the emergence of independent nations in Africa and Asia induces it to discard some of its more blatant colonialist, racist stereotypes. The emergence of the civil rights movement in the United States, which won the sympathy and support of large sectors of the public, brought dramatic shifts in media coverage of the struggle for racial equality and of African-American people in general—although it hardly ended racist reporting and stereotyping. Similarly, as opinion turned with increasing militancy against the Vietnam War, the press began to entertain criticisms about the feasibility (but not the morality) of the war. “As the ruling media brass and their advertisers began to realize tha
t no amount of lying or propaganda could turn defeat into victory,” and as they witnessed how the Vietnam conflict was causing a crisis within the United States, “media coverage began to shift, giving more prominence to those who called for a saner outlook.”4

  The greater the opposition is believed to be toward a leader or a policy, observe Paletz and Entman, “the more emboldened network correspondents are in their analysis.”5 The enthusiastic reception Soviet leader Khrushchev won from the American public when he visited the United States in 1959, favorably influenced the kind of media coverage accorded him.6 Likewise, as opinion turned against President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, the press delivered negative judgments upon him, “but only then—with his prestige and power in dramatic decline and his attempts at media manipulation more transparent than ever”; for it was then safe to do so.7

  Aware that active segments of the public are mobilized around an issue, the media must take account of that agitation, even if only to devalue and minimize it—as with most protest movements. Yet even in the course of doing this, the press ends up acknowledging in some limited way the existence of popular sentiments and mass movements.

  To add to the appearance of free and diverse discourse, the press allots a small portion of its time and space to the public itself. Radio call-in shows enable us to hear directly from listeners and provide opportunities for the brief airing of dissident viewpoints. Many of these talk shows, when running at prime time, are dominated by right-wing hosts or mainstream centrists who show only a limited tolerance toward leftist call-ins. Some shows quote from the letters of listeners and viewers, little of which deviates markedly from the standard opinion range. There are also guest opinion pieces by readers and of course the letterto-the-editor column found in many publications. Such meager accommodations are designed to create the impression of an open untrammeled communication between media and public where one does not exist. Furthermore, the letters columns and call-in shows provide as much opportunity for conventional, conservative, and ill-informed views as for any other. Yet they offer openings that progressive persons have sometimes utilized with effect. Even the letters that are not printed do get read and play a small part in pressuring the press.

  CREDIBILITY AND THE “LIBERAL BIAS”

  The press’s general class function is to help make the world safe for those who own and control most of the world, including the press itself. But the media also have a specialized institutional function, which is to present the public with something called “the news.” The news must be packaged so as to be (1) pleasing to press moguls and other politicoeconomic elites; and (2) informative and believable to the public. But these two functions are not always automatically reconcilable. The goal of the owning class, as Marx and Engels put it, is to present “a particular interest as general or the ‘general interest’ as ruling.”8 This indeed is what the press does, as I have tried to demonstrate throughout this book, treating a wide range of subjects from a ruling-class perspective but presenting this perspective as the objective, general one, as representative of things as they really are. But the press also must give the appearance of performing a public information service. To create such an appearance, it must make substantive concessions now and then to real public concerns, risking the legitimacy of the larger system in order to better secure its own.

  Mainstream press reports that challenge the official view are relatively few in number, lacking the kind of repetition and follow-up needed to create a persuasive and enduring climate of opinion around them. They are particularistic offerings linked to no generalizable critique, floating past us in the great tide of establishment news and commentary. While iconoclastic views may on rare occasions make their way into the news, the general thrust is never out of step for too long with the pro-capitalist, anti-revolutionary New World Order perspective propagated by the government.

  Political leaders, however, seldom appreciate the supportive function the media perform on their behalf. They see the press as merely doing its job when it pushes the official line, and as falling down on the job on those infrequent occasions it does anything less. Instances of relatively unfiltered information and critical commentary in an otherwise controlled (or self-controlled) information field are disturbing to policy-makers, who treat anything short of unanimous support for their undertakings as evidence of irresponsible and harmful media behavior. Expecting the press corps to be a press chorus, the political leader, like any imperious maestro, reacts sharply to the occasionally discordant note.

  There is also the question of “responsibility.” To be sure, the media V know how to be “responsible,” how to be as deaf, mute, and blind as the government wants. Journalistic responsibility should mean the unearthing of true and significant information. But the “responsibility” demanded by government officials and often agreed to by the press means the opposite—the burying of information precisely because it is troublesomely true and significant.

  Despite its best efforts, however, there are limits as to how much the press can finesse reality. These are the limits of propaganda itself, as Dr. Goebbels discovered when trying to explain to the German public how invincible Nazi armies could win victory after victory while retreating on both fronts in 1944 and 1945. To maintain credibility and audience interest, the press must do more than issue supportive reports about official policy—even if that remains its main activity. While seeing the world pretty much through the same ideological lens as government elites, the media also find it necessary to say something about some of the inescapable realities that corporate-political elites would prefer to leave unnoticed.

  Coverage of troublesome realities, even if essentially sympathetic to the policy-maker—as it almost always is—can itself prove troublesome. For years the press transmitted the official view of the Vietnam War, but the persistence of a costly conflict outweighed the upbeat predictions and anticommunist rationales manufactured by both the government and the media. The press could omit and distort what happened in Indochina but it could not totally ignore the awful actuality of the event itself.

  This effort by the media to make some minimal response to reality, even while attempting to invent another reality, sometimes educates the public in ways unintended by the communicators and unwelcomed by the policymakers. Rather than responding only to the manifest content, filled with images and arguments about how the United States is fighting tyranny and saving democracy, the public eventually picks up on the latent message: war, US involvement, death, destruction, more taxes, and the draft. Thus despite the best efforts of the Reagan administration at news-managing the Salvador story, and despite the active collaboration of the press, a majority of the public, according to most polls, still feared that El Salvador would become another Vietnam, opposed sending US troops and US aid, and said they would support young men who refused to be drafted to fight in Central America.9

  Now if the public does not support a policy, the administration concludes it cannot be because of anything wanting in the policy but in the way the media packaged it. Leaders are often tempted to blame the press when things go wrong with their plans or when policies fall into public disfavor. The press, as shown in the preceding pages, faithfully serves the official viewpoint, but it cannot always do so in just the Alicein-Wonderland way policy-makers might want while still retaining its own credibility as an information conduit and its effectiveness as an opinion manager. By the very act of going after the news—however superficially and narrowly—the press sometimes encounters the limits of actuality and therefore introduces elements of reality that may activate public resistance. Thus every administration has complained, in effect, that the press does not do its job. So President Reagan argued that the media should exercise “self-censorhip” and should “trust us and put themselves in our hands,” consulting with officials and holding back stories “that will result in harm to our nation.”10

  The press insists that it already does that very thing and that government official
s do not appreciate how cooperative it wants to be and can be. Leading journalists like James Reston of the New York Times have complained that the government has refused to take newspeople into its confidence on important matters even though they have demonstrated their trustworthiness by holding back on stories.11 While quick to proclaim its independence, the press is equally quick to remind leaders that it shares the same basic view of the world as do they and the same commitment to (and definition of) the national interest.

  In relation to the state, the press remains like the adolescent who wants both more input into family decisions and more independence from them. As usual, the press sees no contradiction between its professed dedication to “objectivity” (telling it like it is) and its professed dedication to “cooperation” and “responsibility” (suppressing troublesome stories). Political leaders, however, do see a contradiction and refuse to trust the press completely, even though they are willing to use it as much as possible. So the press remains the restive adolescent of a seemingly ungrateful parent—never totally independent nor totally trusted and denied both complete autonomy and full partnership.

  One critic observes that the Washington Post had “special arrangements” with the government officials who fed it information that gave it an advantage in reporting to the public. In exchange, the Post gave favorable treatment to the government’s position.12 To some extent all news organizations enter into this kind of exchange, trading some of their integrity for access to sources that help them carry out their newsgathering tasks. However, as just noted, there are occasions when the trade-off comes at too high a price, when government or business asks the press to swallow more than it can if it is to avoid appearing ridiculous—as when it was expected to report that we were about to win in Vietnam while the war continued endlessly, or that the 1991 economic recession was over when in fact it clearly was not. Were it to follow the government or corporate line on all such matters, the press would cast doubt on its own credibility as a neutral, objective social institution. So the media go along on most stories, but not all the time and sometimes not all the way.