by Aaron Swartz
Second, it makes shocking points. I didn’t understand all of what it was saying at the time, but I understood enough to realize that something was severely amiss. The core of the film is a case study of Indonesia’s brutal invasion of the country of East Timor. The U.S. personally gave the green light to the invasion and provided the weapons, which allowed Indonesia to massacre the population in an occupation that, per capita, ranks with the Holocaust. And the U.S. media ignores it and, when they do cover it, inevitably distorts it.
Shocked and puzzled by the film, I was eager to learn more. Noam Chomsky has dozens of books but I was fortunate to choose to read Understanding Power, a thick paperback I picked up at the library. Edited by Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel, two public defenders in New York, the book is a collection of transcripts of group discussions with Chomsky.
Chomsky lays out the facts in a conversational style, telling stories and explaining things in response to questions from the groups, covering an incredibly wide range of topics. And on every single one, what he tells you is completely shocking, at odds with everything you know, turning the way you see things upside-down. Mitchell and Schoeffel know you’re unlikely to believe these things, so they’ve carefully footnoted and documented every claim, providing block-quote excerpts from the original sources to establish them.
Each story, individually, can be dismissed as some weird oddity, like what I’d learned about the media focusing more on posters than on policy. But seeing them all together, you can’t help but begin to tease out the larger picture, to ask yourself what’s behind all these disparate things, and what that means for the way we see the world.
Reading the book, I felt as if my mind was rocked by explosions. At times the ideas were too much, and I literally had to lie down. (I’m not the only one to feel this way—Norman Finkelstein noted that when he went through a similar experience, “it was a totally crushing experience for me. . . . My world literally caved in. And there were quite a number of weeks where . . . I just was in bed, totally devastated.”) I remember vividly clutching at the door to my room, trying to hold on to something while the world spun around.
For weeks afterwards, everything I saw was in a different light. Every time I saw a newspaper or magazine or person on TV, I questioned what I thought I knew about them, wondered how they fit into this new picture. Questions that had puzzled me for years suddenly began making sense in this new world. I reconsidered everyone I knew, everything I thought I’d learned. And I found I didn’t have much company.
It’s taken me two years to write about this experience, not without reason. One terrifying side effect of learning the world isn’t the way you think is that it leaves you all alone. And when you try to describe your new worldview to people, it either comes out sounding unsurprising (“Yeah, sure, everyone knows the media’s got problems”) or like pure lunacy and people slowly back away.
Ever since then, I’ve realized that I need to spend my life working to fix the shocking brokenness I’d discovered. And the best way to do that, I concluded, was to try to share what I’d discovered with others. I couldn’t just tell them it straight out, I knew, so I had to provide the hard evidence. So I started working on a book to do just that. (I’m looking for people to help, if you’re interested.)
It’s been two years now and my mind has settled down some. I’ve learned a bunch more but, despite my best efforts, haven’t found any problems with this frightening new worldview. After all this time, I’m finally ready to talk about what happened with some distance and I hope I’m now able to begin work on my book in earnest.
It was a major change, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
The Invention of Objectivity
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newobjectivity
October 19, 2006
Age 19
Big media pundits are always wringing their hands about how upstart partisan bloggers are destroying the neutral objectivity our country was founded on. (If there’s one thing pundits love to do, it’s hand-wringing.) Without major papers giving everyone an objective view of the facts, they insist, the very foundation of the republic is in peril.
You can criticize this view for just being silly or wrong, and many have, but there’s another problem with it: it’s completely ahistorical. As Robert McChesney describes in The Problem of the Media, objectivity is a fairly recent invention—the republic was actually founded on partisan squabblers.
When our country was founded, newspapers were not neutral, nonpartisan outlets, but the products of particular political parties. The Whigs had their paper, the Tories theirs, both of which attacked their political opponents with slurs that would make even the most foul-mouthed bloggers blush. This behavior wasn’t just permitted—it was encouraged.
You often hear the media quote Jefferson’s comment that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” However, they hesitate to print the following sentence: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.” In particular, Jefferson was referring to the post office subsidy the government provided to the partisan press.
In 1794, newspapers made up 70% of post office traffic and the big debate in Congress was not over whether the government should pay for their delivery, but how much of it to pay for. James Madison attacked the idea that newspaper publishers should have to pay even a token fee to get the government to deliver their publications, calling it “an insidious forerunner of something worse.” By 1832, newspaper traffic had risen to make up 90% of all mail.
Indeed, objectivity wasn’t even invented until the 1900s. Before that, McChesney comments, “such notions for the press would have been nonsensical, even unthinkable.” Everyone assumed that the best system of news was one where everyone could say their piece at very little cost. (The analogy to blogging isn’t much of a stretch, now is it? See, James Madison loved blogs!)
But as wealth began to concentrate in the Gilded Age and the commercial presses began to lobby government for more favorable policies, the size and power of the smaller presses began to dwindle. The commercial presses were eager to be the only game in town, but they realized that if they were, their blatant partisanship would have to go. (Nobody would stand for a one-newspaper town if the one paper was blatantly biased.) So they decided to insist that journalism was a profession like any other, that reporting was an apolitical job, based solely on objective standards.
They set up schools of journalism to train reporters in the new notion. In 1900, there were no J-schools; by 1920, the major ones were going strong. The “church and state” separation of advertising and reporting became official doctrine and the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) was set up to enforce it.
The entire foundation of press criticism was rebuilt. Now, instead of criticizing papers for the bias of their owners, press critics had to focus on the professional obligations of their writers. Bias wasn’t about the slant of a paper’s focus, but about any slanting put in by a reporter.
So that was the line of attack the house press critics took when the world of weblogs brought back the vibrant political debates of our country’s founding. “These guys are biased! Irresponsible! They get their facts wrong! They’re unprofessional!” they squeal. Look, guys. Tell that to James Madison.
Shifting the Terms of Debate: How Big Business Covered Up Global Warming
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting1
June 6, 2006
Age 19
In this series of blog posts, Aaron provided citations as links, many of which have broken since. Where the citations are broken, they have simply been elided, rather than replaced.—Ed.
[Here’s the first part of an article I wrote last year about how right-wing think tanks shift the debate.]
In 2004, Michelle Malkin, a conservative editorialist, published the book In Defense of Internme
nt. It argued that declassified security intercepts showed that Japanese internment during World War II—the government policy that relocated thousands of Japanese to concentration camps—was actually justified in the name of national security. We needed to learn the truth, Malkin insisted, so that we could see how racial profiling was similarly justified to fight the “war on terror.”
Bainbridge Island was the center of the evacuations; to this day, residents still feel ashamed and teach students a special unit about the incident, entitled “Leaving Our Island.” But one parent in the district, Mary Dombrowski, was persuaded by Malkin’s book that the evacuation was actually justified and insisted the school was teaching a one-sided version of the internment story, “propaganda” that forced impressionable children into thinking that the concentration camps were a mistake.
The school’s principal defended the practice. As the Seattle Times reported:
“We do teach it as a mistake,” she said, noting that the U.S. government has admitted it was wrong. “As an educator, there are some things that we can say aren’t debatable anymore.” Slavery, for example. Or the internment—as opposed to a subject such as global warming, she said.†
Florangela Davila, “Debate Lingers over internment of Japanese-Americans, The Seattle Times, September 6, 2004.
True, Japanese internment isn’t a controversial issue like global warming, but ten years ago, global warming wasn’t a controversial issue either. In 1995, the UN’s panel on international climate change released its consensus report, finding that global warming was a real and serious issue that had to be quickly confronted. The media covered the scientists’ research and the population agreed, leading President Clinton to say he would sign an international treaty to stop global warming.
Then came the backlash. The Global Climate Coalition (funded by over 40 major corporate groups like Amoco, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and General Motors) began spending millions of dollars each year to derail the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to help reduce global warming. They held conferences entitled “The Costs of Kyoto,” issued press releases and faxes dismissing the scientific evidence for global warming, and spent more than $3 million on newspaper and television ads claiming Kyoto would mean a “50-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax.”‡
PR Watch newsletter, Volume 4 Number 4, Fourth Quarter 1997 [PDF].
The media, in response to flurries of “blast faxes” (a technique in which a press release is simultaneously faxed to thousands of journalists) and accusations of left-wing bias, began backing off from the scientific evidence.‡ A recent study found only 35% of newspaper stories on global warming accurately described the scientific consensus, with the majority implying that scientists who believed in global warming were just as common as global warming deniers (of which there were only a tiny handful, almost all of whom had received funding from energy companies or associated groups).*
Ibid.
Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff “Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias,” FAIR, November 1, 2004.
It all had an incredible effect on the public. In 1993, 88% of Americans thought global warming was a serious problem. By 1997, that number had fallen to 42%, with only 28% saying immediate action was necessary.† And so Clinton changed course and insisted that cutting emissions should be put off for 20 years.
Cambridge Reports, Research International poll. “Do you feel that global warming is a very serious problem . . .?” Cambridge Reports National Omnibus Survey, September 1993, in Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (0290350, 039). USCAMREP.93SEP, R40.
U. S. businesses seriously weakened the Kyoto Protocol, leading it to require only a 7% reduction in emissions (compared to the 20% requested by European nations) and then President Bush refused to sign on to even that. In four short years, big business had managed to turn nearly half the country around and halt the efforts to protect the planet.
And now, the principal on Bainbridge Island, like most people, thinks global warming is a hotly contested issue—the paradigmatic example of a hotly contested issue—even when the science is clear. (“There’s no better scientific consensus on this on any issue I know,” said the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”)‡ But all this debate about problems has kept us away from talk about solutions. As journalist Ross Gelbspan puts it, “By keeping the discussion focused on whether there is a problem in the first place, they have effectively silenced the debate over what to do about it.”§ So is it any wonder that conservatives want to do the same thing again? And again? And again?
Warrick, Joby. “Consensus Emerges Earth Is Warming—Now What?” Washington Post, 12 Nov. 1997: A01.
Ross Gelbspan, “The Heat Is On,” Harper’s Magazine, December, 1995.
Making Noise: How Right-wing Think Tanks Get the Word Out
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting2
June 7, 2006
Age 19
Malkin’s book on internment was no more accurate than the corporate misinformation about global warming. Historians quickly showed the book badly distorted the government records and secret cables it purported to describe. As just one example, Malkin writes that a Japanese message stated they “had [Japanese] spies in the U.S. Army” when it actually said they hoped to recruit spies in the army.* But it should be no big surprise that Malkin, who is, after all, an editorialist and not a historian, didn’t manage to fully understand the complex documentary record in the year she spent writing the book part-time.
Greg Robinson, “Why the Media Should Stop Paying Attention to the New Book that Defends Japanese Internment,” History News Network, 9-9-2004.
Malkin’s motives, as a right-wing activist and proponent of racial profiling, are fairly obvious. But how did Mary Dombrowski, the Bainbridge Island parent, get caught up in this latest attempt to rewrite history? Opinions on global warming were changed because big business could afford to spend millions to change people’s minds. But racial profiling seems like less of a moneymaker. Who invested in spreading that message?
The first step is getting the information out there. Dombrowski probably heard about Malkin’s book from the Fox News Channel, where it was ceaselessly promoted for days, and where Malkin is a contributor. Or maybe she heard about it on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, a show hosted by a former Republican congressman, which had Malkin as a guest. Or maybe she heard it while driving and listening to Fox host Sean Hannity’s radio show, or maybe Rush Limbaugh’s. Or maybe she read a review in the New York Post (which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch). Or maybe she read about it on a right-wing website or weblog, like Townhall.com, which publishes 10 new conservative op-ed columns every day.
All of these organizations are partisan conservative outlets. Townhall.com, for example, is published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington, D.C., think tank. Most people imagine a think tank as a place where smart people think big thoughts, coming up with new ideas for the government to use. But that’s not how Heritage works. Nearly half of Heritage’s $30 million budget is spent on publicity, not research. Every day, they take work like Malkin’s that agrees with their ideological prejudices and push it out through the right-wing media described above (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, New York Post) and into the mainstream media (ABC, NPR, New York Times, Seattle Times).
They use a variety of tactics. Heritage, for example, publishes an annual telephone directory featuring thousands of conservative experts and associated policy organizations (The Right Nation, 161). And if looking up somebody is too much work, Heritage maintains a 24-hour hotline for the media, providing quotes promoting conservative ideology on any subject. Heritage’s “information marketing” department makes packages of colored index cards with preprinted talking points for any conservative who plans to do an interview (The Right Nation, 167). And Heritage computers are stocked with the names of over 3,500 journalists, organized by specialty, who Heritage staffers persona
lly call to make sure they have all the latest conservative misinformation. Every Heritage study is turned into a two-page summary which is then turned into an op-ed piece which is then distributed to newspapers through the Heritage Features Syndicate (What Liberal Media?, 83).
It all adds up: a 2003 study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the media watch group, found conservative think tanks were cited nearly 14,000 times in major newspapers, television, and radio shows. (By comparison, liberal think tanks were cited only 4,000 times that year.) That means 10,000 additional quotes of right-wing ideology, misleading statistics, distorted facts, and so on. There’s no way that doesn’t unfairly skew the public debate.
Endorsing Racism: The Story of The Bell Curve
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting3
June 8, 2006
Age 19
If you have any doubt about the power of the think tanks, look no further than the story of The Bell Curve. Written by Charles Murray, who received over $1.2 million from right-wing foundations for his work, the book claimed that IQ tests revealed black people to be genetically less intelligent than whites, thus explaining their low place in society. Murray published the 845-page book without showing it to any other scientists, leading the Wall Street Journal to say he pursued “a strategy that provided book galleys to likely supporters while withholding them from likely critics” in an attempt “to fix the fight . . . contrary to usual publishing protocol.” Murray’s think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, flew key members of the media to Washington for a weekend of briefings on the book’s content (What Liberal Media?, 94).
And the media lapped it up. In what Eric Alterman has termed “a kind of Rorschach test for pundits” (WLM?, 96), every major media outlet reviewed the book without questioning the accuracy of its contents. Instead, they merely quibbled about its proposed recommendations that the dumb blacks, with their dangerously high reproductive rates, might have to be kept in “a high-tech and more lavish version of an Indian reservation” without such luxuries as “individualism, equal rights before the law,” and so on. Reviewers proposed more moderate solutions, like just taking away their welfare checks (WLM?, 94).