Inventing Reality

by Michael Parenti

  This “relative autonomy” is what irritates and sometimes infuriates the more conservative elements of the ruling class, who complain of “liberal bias” whenever the media hint at realities that do not fit the conservative picture of the world. The press’s systemic class function is to purge popular consciousness of any awareness of the disturbingly exploitative, repressive, and violent consequences of capitalist rule at home and abroad. While it cannot perform that task thoroughly enough to satisfy all government and business elites all the time and maintain its own credibility as an autonomous institution, it does—as I have tried to show in this book—a far better, more skillful job than many elites appreciate.

  In the kinds of issues covered by the news, the centrist mainstream national media do sometimes seem almost liberal when compared to the narrow conservatism of most regional and local media owners, “persons of hard right-wing bias... .”13 These owners often see the national media as dominated by Eastern, liberal elites who are allegedly indifferent to, or even subversive of free enterprise and the patriotic virtues.

  While the news media never challenge the capitalist system, they do occasionally report things that seem to put business in a bad light. Media coverage of poisonous waste dumpings by industrial firms, nuclear plant accidents, price gouging by defense contractors, the bribery by corporations of public officials at home and abroad, and the marketing of unsafe consumer products usually just scratches the surface of these problems; but even these limited exposures are more than business elites care to hear and are perceived by them as an antibusiness vendetta.

  By treating business wrongdoings as isolated deviations from the socially beneficial system of “responsible capitalism,” the media overlook the systemic features that produce such abuses and the regularity with which they occur. The press is quite capable of seeing the systemic dimension to social problems when they emerge in noncapitalist systems. For example, the media treated the Chernobyl accident, occurring in the Ukraine in 1986, not as a major nuclear disaster that revealed the unsafe nature of nuclear plants but as the inevitable product of an evil, secretive Soviet system that put no value on human life (complete with false stories about thousands of deaths).14 This theme was reiterated over and over in a saturation coverage that lasted for weeks. In contrast, the media gave the near-meltdown accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 extensive coverage for only a few days, with never a hint that it might be representative of a capitalist system that puts private profits ahead of public safety.

  The worst industrial accident in history was nonnuclear, the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India, in December 1984, killing over 3,000 persons and seriously and permanently disabling many thousands of others. At no time was it treated as a reflection of how multinational corporations disregard safety regulations for profit’s sake. Nothing was said about the capitalist system that produced the accident—or produced the corporation that produced the accident. Three Mile Island and Bhopal were treated purely as isolated incidents—attached to nothing larger than the safety conditions of the particular sites that produced them. The aftereffects of Three Mile Island, the increased incidents of cancer and the contamination of farmlands, went largely unreported— unlike Chernobyl, stories about which continued to appear in the US media years after the event.

  When it comes to social problems in the United States or problems caused by the United States elsewhere, the press might criticize but it does not generalize. It will not extrapolate to larger systemic causes. The expose that treats a socially unjust condition as an isolated and atypical incident implicitly affirms the legitimacy of the system, just as the expose of the massacre of the Vietnamese village of My Lai by American troops established the false notion that such atrocities were rare deviations from higher standards by which the war was supposedly being conducted. Nevertheless, there were persons in the US Army command who saw the press’s exposure of My Lai as an attempt to undermine the war effort. Similarly with the business community: Any particular expose is seen as an attack on the integrity of the corporate system in general. What business wants is for these matters to be left entirely alone.

  But, as already noted, the press can ignore or distort social reality Uust so much before losing its credibility. People expect the news to say something about the major events that affect their daily life. Why are people out of work? Why do things cost so much? Why are we building so many nuclear missiles? Why is there so much pollution? Why must our sons register for the draft? That the media cannot ignore these questions does not mean they come up with revealing, truthful explanations. But there are limits to how reality can be brushed aside. As Peter Dreier puts it:

  As the nation faces the system’s contradictions at home and abroad, the media bring the “bad news.’’ ... Big Business gets part of the blame, but (as polls show—and the media reports), they share the blame with labor unions, big government, the President, the Congress, and the media itself. Still, the nation’s business and political leaders blame the messenger, rather than the system, for the nation’s crisis of legitimacy.

  Because business cannot expect to take a fundamental look at its own assumptions, and cannot see the systemic causes of inflation, unemployment, foreign policy setbacks, and so on, it blames the news media for distorting and simplifying these problems ... and attacks the media for its “emotional” and “sensational” reporting.15

  If reporters go too far too often in a muckraking direction, they are reined in, as we noted earlier. Yet limited leeway is allowed on some issues, mostly for the reason just mentioned: The press cannot completely ignore the realities that affect the daily lives of millions of people and hope to retain the public’s trust. A press that does nothing more than propagate a narrow, right-wing ideology, ignoring economic problems to give only sunny reports on the health of the economy and sing hosannahs to the blessings of private enterprise, a press that did not bother to explain away systemic injustices as the incidental flaws of a basically good system, would earn less criticism from conservatives but would not have much credibility in the public eye and would do a poor job of legitimating the existing system.

  In their hearts, many media owners would like to put an end to all critical information about business and other such issues, but they do not think they can go that far. It is not a matter of being unable to control their liberal reporters, which they can do well enough when they put their minds to it; rather, it is a matter of not superimposing a viewpoint that is so blatantly at odds with popular experience as to be rejected for being the propaganda it is. A press governed solely by the desire to avoid all critical news that might reflect negatively upon dominant class interests reveals itself as an obvious instrument of class domination, loses popular support, and generates disbelief and disaffection.

  In addition, it is not certain that corporate, congressional, and other political elites (other than the ultra-right) would be satisfied with an ultra-conservative propagandistic press, devoid of all accurate information and commentary (within a limited framework) on domestic affairs and world events. A press that was even more lacking in hard news and critical analysis than it is, presumably would be as unsatisfactory to the captains of industry and state as to any informed person who wished to “stay abreast with the events of the day.” An entire press presenting only ax-grinding stories and reactionary opinions in the manner of the extreme-right dailies would satisfy few.

  BETWEEN CONSPIRACY AND CULTURE

  The social institutions of capitalist society are the purveyors of its cultural myths, values, and legitimating viewpoints. To the extent that news producers—from publishers to reporters—are immersed in that culture, they may not be fully aware of how they misrepresent, evade, and suppress the news. Political orthodoxy, like custom itself, is a mental sedative, while political deviancy, like cultural deviancy, is an irritant. Devoid of the supportive background assumptions of the dominant belief system, the deviant view sounds just too improbable and too controversial to be treat
ed as news, while the orthodox view appears as an objective representation of reality itself.

  From this it might be concluded that what we have in the news media is not a consciously propagated establishment viewpoint but a socially shared established viewpoint, and that when radical critics complain of elite manipulation they, in effect, really are bemoaning the unpopularity of their own views. Reporters and editors are products of the same political socialization as are media owners and political leaders; and therefore they are just reporting things as they see them—and as almost everyone else sees them (including their audiences)—without knowingly misrepresenting anything. To argue otherwise, it has been maintained, is to lapse into some kind of conspiracy theory about a consciously manipulative, diabolic elite.

  Several responses are in order. First, it should be noted that there are conspiracies among ruling groups, things done in secrecy with the intent to sustain or extend power—as Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign against the left, the Iran-contra conspiracy, and the CIA’s daily doings have demonstrated. Just because some people have fantasies about conspiracies does not mean every conspiracy is a fantasy. Like most other cultural institutions, the media exercise their influence through overt means. Given the nature of the institution, it would be hard to imagine secret mass media. But there may often also be something secret, deliberately slanted, and politically motivated, about news production. Examples may be found in the unpublicized owner and advertiser dominance over news personnel and editorial content, the planted and fabricated information and suppressed stories, and the instances of government interference and manipulation.

  The existence of a common pool of culturally determined (systemic, nonconspiratorial) political values cannot be denied, but where did this common pool come from? Who or what determines the determining element in the culture itself? And can we reduce an entire culture, including its actively struggling political components, to a set of accumulated habituations and practices that simply build up over time?

  A closer look reveals that the unconsciously shared “established” view (as opposed to a consciously propagated elite “establishment” view) is not shared by everyone and is not in fact all that established. Major portions of the public, often majorities, do not support present levels of taxation, military spending, military interventionism, the cold war, the arms race, nuclear power, and various policies harmful to the environment, the poor, and to working people. In other words, it may be true that most media elites and political elites share common views on these subjects, but much—and sometimes most—of the public does not. What we have then is an “established establishment view'" which is given the highest media visibility, usually to the exclusion of views held by dissident sectors of the populace. The “dominant shared values and beliefs,” which are supposedly the natural accretions and expressions of our common political culture, are not shared by all or most—certainly not at the policy level—although they surely are dominant in that they tend to preempt the field of opinion visibility.

  Furthermore, there is evidence, some of it introduced in this book, that members of the working press itself do not automatically share the “universal” viewpoints of the dominant political culture but often have their stories suppressed, cut, and rewritten. Along with a harmonious blending of bias among reporter, editor, publisher, and sometimes audience, we have the deliberately coercive controls by owners, advertisers, political leaders, and the anticipatory self-censorship of their journalistic employees.

  In sum, media owners—like other social groups—consciously pursue their self-interest and try to influence others in ways that are advantageous to themselves. They treat information and culture as vital instruments of class power. Even if they never put it in those words, they try to keep control of the command posts of social institutions and the flow of symbols, values, opinions, and information. In a professedly democratic society, they may seek to minimize their use of coercion, preferring a willing compliance to a forcibly extracted one. Yet when necessary they are not hesitant to occupy the visible positions of power. Regardless of what their academic and journalistic apologists say on their behalf, they have no intention of leaving public discourse and mass communication openly accessible to an unrestricted popular development. Why recognition of these unexceptional facts should brand one a “conspiracy theorist” is not clear.

  Can it really be argued that elites have no power over the news organizations they own or finance? Or that if they do have power, they never use it? Or that they use it only in the belief they are fostering the common interest? Certainly all modern ruling classes justify their rule in universalist terms—and have a way of believing their own propaganda. But whether they think of themselves as patriots or plotters is not the point. No doubt, they like to see themselves as the defenders of American democracy even as they bolster their class privileges. Like everyone else, they believe in the virtue of their cause and equate the pursuit of their class interests with the pursuit of the national interest. Indeed, much of their propaganda is designed to treat these two things as coterminous.

  The question is not how they see themselves but how we see them. That a particular class has achieved cultural hegemony over the entire society does not mean it has created a democratic culture. Nor need we struggle with the question of whether the causal factor is “class” or “culture,” as if these terms were mutually exclusive; for class dominance both helps to create and is fortified by cultural hegemony.

  News distortion is both a product of shared cultural values and deliberate acts of disinformation. Political beliefs do not automatically reproduce and sustain themselves. They must be (at least partly) consciously propagated. And with time, yesterday’s propaganda becomes today’s “shared cultural values and beliefs.” Through unchallenged and ubiquitous repetition it becomes part of the conventional wisdom. Whether or not reporters and editors are deliberately lying when they talk of the noble intent behind US foreign policy is less significant than that they feel free to make such statements without checking the facts. It is bad enough that they circulate baldfaced lies; but it is even worse that they themselves usually believe them, partly because such beliefs are not a personal invention but are shared by almost all the opinion-makers of the mainstream press and partly because there are rewards for orthodox belief and penalties for skepticism.

  Misinformation is sometimes so widespread that the line between intentional and unintentional distortion is not always easy to discern, neither for those who transmit the untruths nor for those of us who try to detect them. Like everyone else, reporters and editors either sincerely share in the political ideology that makes it so easy for them to believe the news they produce, or they go along with things because they know on which side their bread is buttered. It is difficult to know at what exact psychological point an individual’s self-serving rationalization turns into sincere belief; but we do know there are variations among members of the working press, at least some of whom are consciously aware of the coercive controls exercised over them in the news hierarchy—even if proponents of pluralism deny the existence of such things.

  THE CONFLICT WITHIN

  If the dominant culture were a mystically self-sustaining perpetual motion machine, there would be nothing left for us to do but throw up our hands and wait for the natural, gradual process of change to unfold across the centuries. But neither history nor society works that way. In fact, there is an element of struggle and indeterminacy in all our social institutions and political culture. Along with institutional stability we have popular ferment; along with elite manipulation we have widespread skepticism; along with ruling-class coercion we have mass resistance.

  What has been said of the media is true of the law, the university, the church, political parties, science, and the state itself. Marx noted that the state has to involve itself “both in the performance of common activities arising from the nature of all communities” and the “specific functions”
that ensure ruling-class domination.16 Likewise, all social institutions of capitalist society have this dichotomous tension within them. They must sustain the few while appearing to serve the many, but to bolster that appearance, they must perform some popular functions or they will have no popular following.

  This brings us to Antonio Gramsci’s insight about how hegemony works to induce people to consent in their own oppression. Gramsci noted that the capitalist class achieves hegemony not only by propagating manipulative values and beliefs but by actually performing vital social functions that have diffuse benefits. Railroads and highways may enrich the magnates, but they also provide transportation for much of the public. Private hospitals are for profits not for people, but people who can afford them do get treated. The law is an instrument of class control, but it must also to some degree be concerned with public safety. The media try to invent reality but they must also sometimes admit realities. So with just about every cultural and social function: The ruling interests must act affirmatively on behalf of public interests some of the time. If the ruling class fails to do so, Gramsci notes, its legitimacy will decline, its cultural and national hegemony will falter, and its power will shrink back to its police and military capacity, leaving it with a more overtly repressive but more isolated and less secure rule.17