Contrary Notions

by Michael Parenti

  So the major media switched to all-out assault. Hit pieces in the Washington Post and New York Times and on network television and PBS assured us that there was no evidence of CIA involvement, that Gary Webb’s Mercury News series was “bad journalism,” and that Webb was irresponsibly playing on the public’s gullibility and conspiracy mania. In effect, the major media exonerated the CIA from any involvement in drug trafficking. The Mercury News caved in to the pressure and repudiated its own series. Webb was demoted and sent away to cover suburban news. He soon resigned. Webb’s real mistake was not that he wrote falsehoods but that he ventured too far into the truth.

  It should be mentioned that both the CIA and the Justice Department conducted internal investigations that belatedly vindicated Webb’s findings, specifically that there were links between the CIA and drug dealers and that the U.S. government dealt with the drug traffic mostly by looking the other way.10

  LABELING

  Like all propagandists, mainstream media people seek to prefigure our perception of a subject with a positive or negative label even before anything of substance is said about the topic at hand. The function of labeling is to preempt substantive information and analysis. Some positive labels are: “stability,” “the president’s firm leadership,” “a strong defense,” and “a healthy economy.” Indeed, not many Americans would want instability, wobbly presidential leadership, a weak defense, and a sick economy. The label defines the subject without having to deal with particular actualities that might lead us to a different conclusion.

  Some common negative labels are: “leftist guerrillas,” “Islamic terrorists,” “conspiracy theory,” “inner-city gangs,” and “anti- American” (the latter applied to groups or leaders at home or abroad who criticize White House policy). These labels are seldom treated within a larger context of social relations and issues. Some labels the major media are not likely to employ are “class power,” “class struggle,” and “U.S. imperialism.”

  A favorite label used regularly by policymakers and faithfully repeated by media journalists and commentators is “reforms,” whose meaning is inverted, being applied to any policy dedicated to undoing popular reforms that have been achieved after decades of struggle. So the elimination of family assistance programs is labeled “welfare reform.” “Reforms” in Eastern Europe—in Yugoslavia, for example—have meant the dismantling of the public economy, its privatization at bargain prices, with a dramatic increase in unemployment and human suffering. “IMF reforms” is a euphemism for the same kind of bruising cutbacks throughout the Third World. As someone once noted, “reforms” are not the solution, they are the problem.

  “Free market” and “free trade” are other pet labels left largely unexamined by those who promote them. Critics argue that free-market and free-trade policies undermine local producers, rely heavily on state subsidies to multinational corporations, destroy public sector services, and create greater gaps between rich and poor nations and between the wealthy few and the underprivileged many in every nation. Such arguments are seldom if ever considered by the major media.

  A favorite negative media label is “hardline.” Anyone who resists free-market “reforms,” be it in Belarus, Italy, Peru, or Yugoslavia, is labeled a “hardliner.” An article in the New York Times used “hardline” and “hardliner” eleven times to describe Bosnian Serb leaders who opposed attempts by U.S.-supported NATO forces to close down the “hardline Bosnian Serb” radio station. The station was the only outlet in all of Bosnia that offered a critical perspective of Western military intervention and NATO bombings in Yugoslavia. The muting of this one remaining dissenting voice was described by the Times as “a step toward bringing about responsible news coverage in Bosnia.” Toward the end of the story mention was made of “the apparent irony” of using foreign soldiers for “silencing broadcasts in order to encourage free speech.” The NATO troops who carried out this task were identified with the positive label of “peacekeepers.”11

  It is no accident that labels like “hardline” are seldom subjected to precise definition.12 The efficacy of a label is that it propagates an evocative but undefined image lacking a specific content that can be held up to the test of evidence.

  TAKING IT AS A GIVEN

  Frequently the media accept as given the very policy position that needs to be critically examined. Whenever the White House proposes an increase in military spending, press treatment is limited to discussing whether we are doing enough to maintain U.S. global military superiority. Little if any attention is given to those who hotly contest the gargantuan arms budget. Most pundits and journalists take it as a given that U.S. forces must be deployed around the world, must maintain military supremacy at all costs, and must expend hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the doing.

  Likewise with discussions about Social Security “reform.” The media take as a given the highly dubious assertion that there is a serious problem with Social Security, that the program will be insolvent twenty, thirty, or forty years hence and therefore is in need of drastic overhauling now. The enemies of Social Security have been predicting its financial collapse for the last three decades or so—while the program has continued to produce massive surpluses that end up in the general budget to be spent on other things. A minor hike in the program’s tax ceiling would take care of any increased demand when the baby boomers start to retire. This point gets relatively little play.

  Social Security is a three-pronged human service: in addition to retirement pensions, it provides survivors’ insurance (up until the age of 18) to children in families that have lost their breadwinner, and it offers disability assistance to persons of pre-retirement age who are incapacitated by serious injury or prolonged illness. But from existing press coverage you would never know this—and most Americans do not.

  FACE-VALUE TRANSMISSION

  Many labels are fabricated not by news media but by officialdom. U.S. governmental and corporate leaders talk approvingly of “U.S. world leadership,” “American interests,” “national security,” “free markets,” and “globalization.” The media uncritically transmit these official images without any noticeable critical comment regarding their actual content. Face-value transmission has characterized the press’s performance in many areas of domestic and foreign policy, earning it such scornful nicknames as “stenographer for power” and “mouthpiece for officialdom.”

  When challenged on this, reporters respond that they cannot inject their own personal critical views into their reports. Actually, no one is asking them to. My criticism is that they already do, and seldom realize it. Their conventional ideological perceptions usually coincide with those of their bosses and the other powers that be. This uniformity of bias is perceived as “objectivity.”

  REPETITION AND NORMALIZATION

  In 2005, President Bush Jr. explained his method of exposition: “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”13 Indeed, an opinion that is repeated often enough has a better chance of winning acceptability than rarely heard contrary notions. Repetition helps to create legitimacy. Before the attack on Yugoslavia, various news sources ran unsubstantiated reports about mass killings. Because of the scarcity of evidence and unreliability of reports, the word “genocide” at first appeared in these stories infrequently and in quotation marks, indicating that such a sweeping and sensationalized term was being used tentatively. But once the word was in the air, and after repeated use, the quotation marks disappeared and genocide it was, almost always blamed on the Serbs, and through repetition established as a firm fact impervious to contrary evidence. Indeed, evidence became quite irrelevant and remains so to this day.14

  The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, resulting in the loss of almost 3,000 lives, was labeled “a war” several times that very day, by NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. Brokaw exclaimed what no politician had yet da
red to mouth: “This is war!” Other commentators and pundits quickly announced that Americans were going to have to surrender a goodly amount of their freedom in order to have more security, a theme that was picked up shortly afterward by policymakers. Thus do media spokespersons clear away safe ground upon which political leaders may venture.

  Throughout the autumn of 2002, a controversy raged within the country and across the globe as to whether the United States had the right to invade Iraq. Meanwhile the U.S. media normalized the idea of war by repeatedly running reports on the military preparedness that was taking place. “If we do go to war,” telecasters intoned, “these are the kinds of missiles that will be used with deadly accuracy” (accompanied by footage of a missile hitting its target). Day after day, the public was treated to reports about reservists being called up, fleets taking to the seas, air attack squadrons placed at the ready, troops running through desert maneuvers in Kuwait, and military supply lines being set up in the Middle East. The face-value reportage of military preparedness made war seem more likely and acceptable.

  SLIGHTING OF CONTENT

  Corporate news media give much emphasis to surface happenings, to style and process, and less to substantive issues. Accounts of major strikes—on those infrequent occasions the press attends to labor struggles—tell us that negotiations are stalled, how long the strike has lasted, and what scuffles took place on the picket line. Usually missing is any reference to the content of the conflict, the actual grievances that drive workers reluctantly to the extreme expediency of a strike, such as cutbacks in wages and benefits, loss of seniority, safety issues, or the unwillingness of management to renew a contract.

  Media pundits sometimes talk about the “broader picture.” In fact, their ability or willingness to link immediate events and issues to larger social relations is almost nonexistent, nor would a broader analysis be tolerated by their bosses. Instead they regularly give us the smaller picture, this being a way of slighting content and remaining within politically safe boundaries. Thus the many demonstrations against international free-trade agreements beginning with NAFTA and GATT are reported, if at all, as contests between protesters and police with little reference to the issues of democratic sovereignty and unaccountable corporate power that impel the protesters.

  FALSE BALANCING

  In accordance with the canons of good journalism, the press is supposed to tap competing sources to get both sides of an issue. In fact, both sides are seldom accorded equal prominence. One study found that from 1997 through 2005 conservative guests on network opinion shows outnumbered liberal ones usually by three to one, while leftist radicals were too scarce even to be counted.15 In sum, “both sides of a story” are not usually all sides. The whole left-progressive and radical portion of the opinion spectrum is amputated from the visible body politic.

  False balancing was evident in a BBC report that spoke of “a history of violence between Indonesian forces and Timorese guerrillas”—with not a hint that the guerrillas were struggling for their lives against an Indonesian invasion force that had slaughtered some 200,000 Timorese. Instead, the genocidal invasion of East Timor was made to sound like a grudge fight, with “killings on both sides.”16 The U.S.-supported wars in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s were often treated with that same kind of false balancing. Both those who burned villages and those who were having their villages burned were depicted as equally involved in a contentious bloodletting. While giving the appearance of being objective and balanced, such reports falsely neutralize their subject matter and thereby distort the issue.

  FOLLOW-UP AVOIDANCE

  When confronted with an unexpectedly dissident response, media hosts quickly change the subject, or break for a commercial, or inject an identifying announcement: “We are talking with [whomever].” The purpose is to avoid going any further into a politically forbidden topic, no matter how much the unwelcome comment might seem to need a follow-up query. An anchorperson for the BBC enthused: “Christmas in Cuba: for the first time in almost forty years Cubans were able to celebrate Christmas and go to church!” She then linked up with the BBC correspondent in Havana, who observed, “A crowd of two thousand have gathered in the cathedral for midnight mass. The whole thing is rather low key, very much like last year.” Very much like last year? Here was something that craved clarification. Instead, the anchorperson quickly switched to another loaded comment: “Can we expect a growth of freedom with the pope’s visit?”

  PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose once asked a guest, whose name I did not hear, whether Castro was bitter about “the historic failure of communism.” No, the guest replied, Castro is proud of what he believes communism has done for Cuba: advances in health care and education, full employment, and the elimination of the worst aspects of poverty. Rose fixed him with an unfriendly glare, then turned to another guest to ask: “What impact will the pope’s visit have in Cuba?” Rose ignored the errant guest for the rest of the program.17 Follow-up avoidance is a kind of damage control.

  FRAMING

  The most effective propaganda relies on framing rather than on falsehood. By bending the truth rather than breaking it, using emphasis and other auxiliary 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 buried within, lead paragraph or last), the tone of presentation (sympathetic or slighting), the headlines and photographs, and, in the case of broadcast media, the accompanying visual and auditory effects, and placement (lead story at the top of the hour).

  Newscasters use their own selves as auxiliary embellishments. They cultivate a smooth delivery and try to convey an impression of detachment that places them above the rough and tumble of their subject matter. Television commentators and newspaper editorialists and columnists affect a knowing tone designed to foster credibility and an aura of certitude, or what might be called “authoritative ignorance,” as expressed in remarks like “How will this situation end? Only time will tell.” Or, “No one can say for sure.” Trite truisms are palmed off as penetrating truths. Newscasters learn to fashion sentences like “The space launching will take place as scheduled if no unexpected problems arise.” And “Unless Congress acts soon, this bill is not likely to go anywhere.” And “Because of heightened voter interest, election-day turnout is expected to be heavier than usual.”

  STUFF JUST HAPPENS

  If we are to believe the media, stuff just happens. Many things are reported but few are explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and for what purposes. Instead we are left to see the world as do mainstream pundits, as a scatter of events and personalities propelled by happenstance, circumstance, passing expediencies, confused intentions, bungled operations, and individual ambition—rarely a world influenced by powerful class interests. Passive voice and impersonal subject are essential rhetorical constructs for this mode of evasion. So we read or hear that “fighting broke out in the region,” or “many people were killed in the disturbances,” or “famine is on the increase.” Recessions apparently just happen like some natural phenomenon (“our economy is in a slump”), having little to do with monetary policy and the contradictions between increased productivity and decreased buying power.

  “Globalization” is one of those things that the press presents as a natural (but undefined) development. In fact, globalization is a premeditated policy pursued by transnational corporate interests throughout the world to gain an unchallengeable grip on markets. “Free trade” agreements set up international trade councils that are elected by no one, operate in secrecy without conflict of interest restrictions, and enjoy the power to overrule just about all labor, consumer, and environmental laws and all public service regulations of signatory nations. Globalization establishes the supremacy of property rights over all other rights. What we are experiencing with GATT, NAFTA, FT
AA, GATS, and the WTO18 is deglobalization, greater concentration of politico-economic power in the hands of an international investor class, a global coup d’etat that divests the peoples of the world of protective democratic input.

  Social problems are rarely associated with the politico-economic forces that create them. We are taught to rein in our own critical thinking and not ask why things happen the way they do. Imagine if we attempted something different. Suppose we report that the harsh labor conditions existing in so many countries generally have the backing of the military in those countries. Suppose further that we cross another line and note that these military forces are fully supported and funded by the U.S. national security state. Then suppose we cross that most serious line of all and instead of just deploring this fact we also ask why successive U.S. administrations have involved themselves in such pursuits throughout the world. Suppose we conclude that the whole phenomenon is consistent with a dedication to making the world safe for free-market corporate capitalism, as measured by the kinds of countries that are helped and the kinds that are attacked. Such an analysis almost certainly would receive no circulation save in a few select radical publications. We crossed too many lines, going beyond the parameters of permissible discourse. Because we tried to explain the particular situation (bad labor conditions) in terms of a larger set of social relations (transnational corporate power), our presentation would be rejected out of hand as “conspiracy theory,” or “Marxist,” “paranoiac,” “cynical,” or some other negative label that puts a foreclosure on critical thinking and evidence.

  In sum, the news media’s daily performance under what is called “democratic capitalism” is not a failure but a skillfully evasive success. We often hear that the press “got it wrong” or “dropped the ball” on this or that story. In fact, the media do their job quite well. Media people have a trained incapacity for the whole truth.