Inventing Reality

by Michael Parenti

  10. See the excellent article by Laura Fraser, “The Tyranny of the Media Correct,” Extra! May/June 1991, pp. 6—8.

  11. Economic Notes, July/August 1991, p. 9.

  12. Jeff Cohen, “Television’s Political Spectrum,” Extra! July/August 1990, pp. 1, 6-10.

  13. Ibid., p. 10.

  14. Tom Jenn, “Dogging the Press from Right and Left,” Utne Reader, March/April 1987, pp. 19-20.

  15. Tom Kamins, “Talk Radio Dial Twists to the Right,” Extra! May/June 1991, p.

  18.

  16. Karen Rothmyer, “The Mystery Angel of the New Right,” Washington Post, July 12, 1981; George De Stefano, “AIM: Coercing the Media Rightward,” L.A. Weekly, August 17-23, 1984, pp. 8, 10, 34.

  17. Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Bob Brewin, “God and Mammon in Washington,” Village Voice, February 14, 1984, p. 33.

  18. Washington Post, May 4, 1981.

  19. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, pp. 80—81.

  20. Washington Post, September 20, 1981; New York Times, September 20, 1981.

  21. “Nightline” ABC-TV, January 15, 1991.

  22. New York Times, January 31, 1982; Washington Post, January 31, 1982.

  23. Washington Post, September 8, 1981.

  24. Washington Post, June 9, 1991.

  25. New York Times, June 11, 1991.

  26. Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990), pp. 251-252.

  27. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, p. 27 and passim.

  Chapter 8, The Media Fight the Red Menace

  1. See William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire and the General-Welfare State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964).

  2. Matthew Josephson, The Politicos (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938), p. 284.

  3. Ibid., pp. 570, 577.

  4. Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News,” New Republic, August 4, 1920, p. 39. Lippmann and Merz studied New York Times dispatches on Russia from 1917 to 1920. They found that the paper’s reporters and editors accepted most of the propaganda they were fed by the State Department and Russian emigre organizations. From November 1917 to November 1919, the Times stated ninety-one times that the Soviet government was near its end or had actually reached its end. Actual collapse was announced fourteen times. The authors conclude, “From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster.”

  5. Robert Murray, Red Scare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), pp. 95—98.

  6. Ibid., p. 98.

  7. James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 29.

  8. Ibid., pp. 29—30; also Murray Levin, Political Hysteria in America (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

  9. Aronson, The Press and the Cold War, p. 30.

  10. John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).

  11. M. R. Montgomery, “The Press and Adolph Hitler,” Boston Globe Magazine, January 30, 1983, pp. 11 — 13.

  12. Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, 3d ed. (New York: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1972), pp. 320—321.

  13. Time, January 2, 1939, p. 13.

  14. Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, pp. 283—284.

  15. Ibid., p. 317.

  16. Ibid., p. 324.

  17. Ibid., p. 321.

  18. Aronson, The Press and the Cold War, p. 35.

  19. Ibid., p. 36.

  20. The above quotations from Business Week, New York World-Telegram, Chicago Daily News, and New York Herald Tribune are all taken from Aronson, The Press and the Cold War, pp. 35-37.

  21. Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 349.

  22. The discussion on Taft-Hartley is drawn from Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 348, passim.

  23. Ibid., pp. 350—370.

  24. Edwin Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 6.

  25. Aronson, The Press and the Cold War, p. 71.

  26. Ibid., pp. 77, 133-152; David Caute, The Great Fear (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), pp. 521—535.

  27. Bayley, McCarthy and the Press, p. 163.

  28. Ibid., pp. 173—175.

  29. See the remarks by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, New York Times, October 13, 1967.

  30. See the reportage and cartoons in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times “News of the Week in Review” throughout 1963-1965.

  31. Newsweek, August 29, 1977; also Time, January 15, 1979; James Sterba, “The Sense of Beauty Shriveled in China, Buds Again,” New York Times, March 18, 1981.

  32. New York Times, December 31, 1978.

  33. Washington Post, January 31, 1981.

  34. Time, November 22, 1982.

  35. Time, November 22, 1982; also the citations and discussion in William Dorman, “The Image of the Soviet Union in the American News Media,” paper given at a New York University conference on news media, March 19, 1983.

  36. See the regular and guest columnists that appeared through 1981 and into 1982 in the New York Times and Washington Post.

  37. See the Associated Press release, December 24, 1982.

  38. For instance, Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News reports of April 18, April 21, and June 30,1986.

  39. Normon Solomon, “Media Leaves No Room for Progressive Critique of Summit,” Guardian, June 15, 1988.

  40. Washington Post, May 31, 1988.

  41. Solomon, “Media Leaves No Room.”

  42. Philip Bonosky, “Lithuania: Where Did It Come From, Where is It Going?” Political Affairs, June 1990, pp. 3-11; and Philip Bonosky, “Nurturing Baltic Reaction,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, Fall 1990, pp. 17—20; Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 25.

  43. San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 1991.

  44. San Francisco Chronicle, September 7, 1991.

  45. “East German Women Face Loss of Rights in Democracy,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 12, 1991; “Foreign Godfathers of the Polish Press,” Democratic Journalist, July 1991, p. 8.

  46. Conn Hallinan, “Flungary for News,” Lies of Our Times, January 1991, pp. 19— 20; Peter Annear, “ ‘Swedish-Lifestyle’ Pans Out for Few Hungarians,” Guardian, May 22, 1991, p. 14. In East Germany the unemployment rate was as high as 30 percent: Washington Post, September 29, 1991.

  47. New York Times, August 29 and October 23, 1990. Only after the Hungarian premier made a public statement on the grave condition of Hungary’s economy did the Times acknowledge that there was trouble in the newly installed capitalist paradise; see New York Times, December 5, 1990.

  48. Hallinan, “Hungary for News,” p. 19.

  49. On the newly emerging corruption, see, for instance, Mary Battiata, “Top Polish Bankers Hit by Scandal,” Washington Post, August 14, 1991.

  50. Washington Post, September 26, 1991.

  51. NBC Evening News, July 29, 1991.

  52. New York Times, June 11, 1990.

  53. Beth Sims, “Is Eastern Europe Our Backyard Too?” Lies of Our Times, May 1991, pp. 18-20.

  54. New York Times, June 11, 1990.

  55. New York Times, June 12, 1990; also Ellen Ray, “If They Win, It’s Not Free,” Lies of Our Times, July 1990, p. 20.

  56. A telephone conversation with me, July 1991; see also Ray, “If They Win, It’s Not Free.”

  57. New York Times, October 16, 1990.

  58. Washington Post, September 18, 1990.

  59. Washington Post, September 26, 1991.

  60. Ibid.

  61. San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1991.

  62. San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1991.

  Chapter 9, Doing the Third World

  1. See the author’s The Sword and the Dollar (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1989) and the various citations therein.

  2. Julia Preston, “Killing off the News in Guatemala,” Columbia lournalism Review, January/February 1982, p. 35.

  3. Robert Cirino, Power to Persuade (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 63.

  4. Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (London: Quartet Books, 1975), pp 357-358.

  5. Ibid., p. 356.

  6. Ibid., p. 358.

  7. Dorothy Slater, letter to the author, March 23, 1986.

  8. Cirino, Power to Persuade, pp. 61—62.

  9. Knightley, The First Casualty, pp. 367—368.

  10. Ibid., p. 344.

  11. Norman Moskowitz, “Covering Vietnam’s Tenth Anniversary,” Daily World, May 21, 1985.

  12. James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); Andrew Kopkind, “The Press at War,” Ramparts, August/September 1975, p. 37.

  13. Oscar Patterson III, “An Analysis of Television Coverage of the Vietnam War,” Journal of Broadcasting 28 (Fall 1984): 397-404.

  14. William Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1988).

  15. TRB column, New Republic, April 25, 1975.

  16. James Reston column, New York Times, April 4, 1975.

  17. New York Times, April 21, 1975; also Anthony Lewis’s columns in the Times, April 24 and May 1, 1975; and Noam Chomsky, “The Remaking of History,” Ramparts, August/September 1975, pp. 30—35, 49-53.

  18. All the quotes in the above paragraph are from Roger Morris, Shelly Mueller, and William Jelin, “Through the Looking Glass in Chile: Coverage of Allende’s Regime,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1974, pp. 16-17. Some of the citations that follow are from the systematic and excellent study by John Leggett et al., Allende, His Exit and Our “Times” (New Brunswick, NJ: New Brunswick Cooperative Press, 1978).

  19. Morris et al., “Through the Looking Glass” p. 18.

  20. James Petras and Morris Morely, The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); also statistics provided by John Pollock and cited in Morris et al., “Through the Looking Glass.”

  21. New York Times, August 31, 1973; also Leggett et al., Allende, His Exit and Our “Times. ”

  22. Petras and Morely, The United States and Chile.

  23. New York Times, September 15, 1973.

  24. New York Times, September 12, 1973.

  25. Legget et al., Allende, His Exit and Our “Times,” p. 65.

  26. New York Times, September 12, 1973.

  27. New York Times, September 16, 1973.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Jose Yglesias, Chile’s Days of Terror: Eye-Witness Accounts of the Military Coup (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974).

  30. New York Times, February 24, 1980.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Miami Herald, February 21, 1979, and November 16, 1980; also Richard Rivers, “Shirley Yes, Christian No,” Lies of Our Times, May 1991, pp. 10-11. A few years later Christian was hired by the New York Times’s neo-conservative executive editor A. M. Rosenthal to write the same kind of Pinochet promotionals for his paper. See her reports in the Times from 1987 through 1991; also Jo-Ann Wypijewski, “Shirley Christian and the Times on Chile,” Lies of Our Times, January 1990, pp. 14-15.

  33. New York Times, August 8, 1984.

  34. New York Times, August 10, 1984.

  35. James Petras, “Chile and Latin America,” Monthly Review, February 1977, pp. 13-24; Cynthia Brown, “The High Cost of Monetarism in Chile,” Nation, September 27, 1980, pp. 271-275; Leslie Crawford, “Racketeering Allegations Leave Chile’s Army under Siege,” Financial Times, November 14, 1990, p. 8.

  36. New York Times, September 1, 1988.

  37. Washington Post, November 9, 1983.

  38. New York Times, November 6, 1983.

  39. ABC and CBS evening news reports, both October 26, 1983.

  40. Time, November 7, 1983.

  41. New York Times, November 6, 1983; also Village Voice, November 8, 1983.

  42. Newsweek, November 7, 1983.

  43. Time, November 7, 1983.

  44. Network television reports, October 27, 1983.

  45. New York Times, November 6, 1983; see the speech by Fidel Castro printed in full as a paid advertisement in the New York Times, November 20, 1983.

  46. ABC evening news, October 2.1, 1983.

  47. John Judis, “Grenadian Documents Do Not Show What Reagan Claims” and Daniel Lazare, “Reagan’s Seven Big Lies About Grenada,” both in In These Times, November 16, 1983.

  48. New York Times, November 6, 1983.

  49. Quoted in Village Voice, November 8, 1983.

  50. Christopher Hitchens, “The Case in Village Voice of the Menacing Runway,” Nation, May 29, 1982, pp, 649-651.

  51. “A Tottering Structure of Lies,” Sojourner, December 1983, pp. 4-5; also Michael Massing, “Grenada Before and After,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1984, pp. 79—80.

  52. Washington Post, December 4, 1984.

  53. New York Times, December 11, 1984

  Chapter 10, For the New World Order

  1. Joseph Collins, What Difference Could a Revolution Make? (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1982).

  2. Alexander Sukhostat, “Nicaragua—Defending the Revolution,” Political Affairs, December 1981, pp. 28-35.

  3. Ibid.; also Morris Morely and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987); Alvin Levie, Nicaragua, the People Speak (So. Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1987); Collins, What Difference Could a Revolution Make?; Peter Rosset and John Van Dermeer, eds., The Nicaragua Reader: Documents of a Revolution under Fire (New York: Grove Press, 1983). Laura Enriquez, Harvesting Change: Labor and Agrarian Reform in Nicaragua, 1979-1990 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Thomas W. Walker ed., Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nicaragua (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1991).

  4. ABC evening news, November 9, 1984; Washington Post, November 11, 1984. For an inside account of how the contra war was sanitized for the US public, see Edgar Chamorro, Packaging the Contras: A Case of CIA Disinformation (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987).

  5. Editorial comment, Extra! October/November 1987, p. 1.

  6. For instance, Charles Krauthammer described Nicaragua as “totalitarian”: Washington Post, January 11, 1985; and John Chancellor called that country a “client state of the Soviet Union”: NBC evening news, August 5, 1987.

  7. A rich source of information regarding the 1984 Nicaraguan national election is from Their Vote Decided, Report by the Committee of US Citizens Living in Nicaragua, Managua, c. 1985; see also Michael Parenti, “Is Nicaragua More Democratic Than the United States?” CovertAction Information Bulletin, Summer 1986, pp. 48-50, 52.

  8. New York Times, August 12 and November 4, 1984.

  9. Washington Post, November 4, 1984.

  10. New York Times, February 13, 1985.

  11. See Extra! October/November 1987.

  12. New York Times, February 20, 1990.

  13. New York Times, February 18, 1990.

  14. New York Times, February 26, 1990.

  15. See the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and New York Times, February 27 and 28, 1990.

  16. For example, Washington Post, February 2, 1990, and Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1990.

  17. Washington Post, February 2, 1990.

  18. These conclusions are based on an unpublished survey by Peggy Noton of ninetytwo articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times from February 18 to March 4, 1990.

  19. See New York Times, February 27, 1990.

  20. Midge Quandt, “Funding the Counterrevolution,” Nicaragua Monitor 13 (October 1991): 1, 10.

  21. Independent Commission of Inquiry on the U.S. Invasion of Panama, The U.S. Invasion of Panama: The Truth behind Operation “Just
Cause,” (Boston: South End Press, 1990); John Dinges, Our Man in Panama (New York: Random House, 1990); Chuck Idelson “Long-term Hanky-Panky in Panama,” People’s Daily World, May 16, 1989; “Panama, A Climate of Terror,” Labor Action, July/August 1990, p. 8; Andrew Zimbalist and John Weeks, Panama at the Crossroads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

  22. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 65—73; Tim Wheeler, Bushgate, The Inside Story of a Sordid Career, booklet published by People’s Daily World (New York: 1988); Seymour Hersh, “Our Man in Panama,” Life, March 1990.

  23. See, for instance, NBC evening news, May 10, 1989; “Nightline,” May 8, 1989. For a critical statement, see Jeff Cohen, “Panama Elections: Objectivity Takes a Beating,” Extra! May/June 1989, p. 3.

  24. Reuters dispatch quoted in an obscure paragraph in a New York Times story, December 17, 1989.

  25. See Eric Boehlert’s op-ed article in New York Times, January 17, 1990.

  26. Francis appeared on ABC’s “Nightline,” December 20, 1989.

  27. This criticism was made by Mark Cook and Jeff Cohen, “How Television Sold the Panama Invasion,” Extra! January/February 1990, p. 3.

  28. The Rather, Jennings, and Koppel comments were all on December 20, 1989.

  29. Independent Commission of Inquiry, The U.S. Invasion of Panama. It was not until a month after the events that the Washington Post (January 23, 1990) noted back on page A22 that the “cocaine” was tortilla flour.

  30. Oakland Tribune, January 5 and January 22, 1990.

  31. The New York Times (January 28, 1990) took notice only to give a Panamanian publisher and associate of Ford’s the opportunity to deny allegations linking Ford to money-laundering. Allegations linking Endara to drug-trafficking and money-laundering continued into the next year and were under investigation by the US Drug Enforcement Agency. The charges received little press attention; for an exception, see San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1991.

  32. See the “Special Report” of Labor Action, July/August 1990 (publication of the Labor Coalition on Central America, Washington D.C.); Clarence Lusane, “Aftermath of the U.S. Invasion: Racism and Resistance in Panama,” CovertAction Information Bulletin, Spring 1991, pp. 61—63.