The Unfree Flow of Information
excerpted from the book
Beyond Hypocrisy
by Edward S. Herman
published by South End Press, 1992
Limits on Free Speech
Free speech in the United States certainly exists in the sense
that dissent can usually be voiced without threat of violent reprisal
by the state, at least in "normal" times. For communities
of color, however, the threshold of the normal has been low and
the mildest dissent or even attempts to assert citizens' rights
have often been met with savage repression in the domestic application
of the "mere gook rule. " More generally, freedom of
speech has been limited by the fact that the state does engage
in systematic disruption, harassment, and violent repression when
dissent is seen as threatening, as in the Civil Rights/Vietnam
war era's "COINTELPRO" and other programs, and in the
frequent and sometimes large scale attacks on ethnic, labor, and
radical leaders and organizations over the years. Deployment of
the local, state and federal police, and national guard to quell
labor activism and impede labor organization was an outstanding
feature of the U.S. economic and political landscape from the
1860s to the Second World War.
Official and police opposition to labor organization was closely
tied to restrictions on freedom of speech. Contrary to ongoing
mythology, the First Amendment was largely inoperative and offered
little or no protection to dissidents threatening the established
order for roughly a century and a half after its incorporation
into the Constitution. The Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime
to utter or publish anything that brought high officials "into
contempt or disrepute. " The Sedition Act was never repealed
and was only overturned by the Supreme Court in 1964. Before 1860,
statutes in every southern state forbade speech or writing condemning
slavery, and these "were uniformly enforced by the courts."
In the post-Civil War era, the labor movement quickly focused
on gaining the right to free speech as "peaceful labor demonstrations
were regularly and often violently broken up by the police."
Harassment, arrests, fines and imprisonments by local and state
officials, and the use of police-protected vigilantes as enforcers
were common responses to labor organizing and dissident speech.
Advocates of women's right to vote, let alone birth-control, were
regularly attacked by local and federal officials with no obstruction
from the courts. In the early 1900s, Margaret Sanger and Emma
Goldman were frequency arrested and sometimes fined or imprisoned
for distributing leaflets with information on birth control. Newspapers
that offended the postmaster would include almost anything on
the subject of sex of women-were denied the use of the mails.
In 1917, women picketing the White House or protesting in a nearby
park seeking support for a constitutional amendment giving women
the right to vote, were arrested and jailed for obstructing traffic
or disorderly conduct.
The Espionage Act of 1917, an extraordinarily repressive piece
of legislation that literally outlawed criticism of World War
I, resulted in over 2,000 criminal prosecutions. Despite challenges,
none were reversed by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.
This almost completely repressive history began to change only
in 1919, improving slightly over the next 40 years, and then more
rapidly from the early 1960s. Progress came from energetic efforts
to expand the scope of civil liberties by social movements, especially
during periods of mass mobilization like the 1930s and 1960s.
Predictably, these enlargements of democracy were described as
"crises of democracy" by spokespersons of the permanent
interests. Even in the improved free speech environment of the
post-World War II era, however, there were important regressions,
most notably in the Truman-McCarthy years, when a new Red Scare
caused a quick retreat from the advances of the preceding decades.
An important accomplishment of this Red Scare was the purging
of many progressives from the communications system and the frightening
of those that remained into quiescence or noisy anticommunism.
This helped set the stage for global expansion in the name of
"anticommunism" and "containment".
The COINTELPRO activity during the Civil Rights/Vietnam war
era and the Reagan administration's multi-leveled "secret
war" of "low grade domestic terrorism" against
the opposition to its Central American policy showed the continuing
ease with which the government can threaten and undermine free
speech. Arguably, freedom of speech and organization conditioned
on its not being perceived as a threat by the establishment is
a very constrained kind of freedom. We are not talking about minor
constraints either: the steady attacks on the free speech of labor
organizers and striking workers from 1865-1960 had a profound
effect on the activities, growth, and ultimate character of unions.
Numerous labor organizations were destroyed through state actions
and connivance with employers. Many newspapers, journals, and
movement organizations were eliminated by advertiser boycotts,
by government, or government-supported vigilante intimidation
and attacks. The FBI's long and systematic efforts to disrupt
and destroy both the civil rights movement" and black community
activism took a heavy toll: Dr. James Tumer of Comell University
and the African Heritage Studies Association stated in 1974 that
the FBI's programs had "serious long-term consequences for
black Americans,. . .[having] created in blacks a sense of depression
and hopelessness." The COINTELPRO campaigns and the covert
war against the Central America antiwar movement were also substantial
operations.
As Donna Demac observed in regard to the 1960s,
"The social movements that arose during the period, which
sought to make fundamental changes in American society, were not
allowed to develop naturally; instead, many either died prematurely
or were subverted by infiltrators and provocateurs whose corrupting
influence succeeded in discrediting them in the eyes of the public.
As a consequence, it is impossible to know in what direction these
movements might have gone or what they might have achieved without
secret government intervention."
The tendency to stifle serious dissent has been aggravated
by a dominant U.S. culture that has never been tolerant of "deviance,"
as De Tocqueville pointed out back in the early nineteenth century.
This gives the state a freedom to repress upon slight and / or
fabricated provocation. It means also that informal and less severe
forms of reprisal can constrain dissent. Many Americans believe
in free speech as a principle, but deeply resent its application
in practice; after all, while the Soviet people have had reason
to complain, why should we who live in the land of the free and
the home of the brave? And as one respondent told the New York
Times, explaining his shift to Bush (Sept. 20, 1988): "Freedom
of speech is very important to me: we should be very proud of
this pledge [to the flag], as a nation, and able to take every
opportunity to say the pledge." Presumably anybody who doesn't
want to make frequent pledges to the flag doesn't believe in freedom
of speech. Dissidents who use freedom are abusing freedom.
The Market
Another very important and greatly underrated constraint on
freedom of speech is dissenters' lack of access to the mass media,
and thus to the general public. Their freedom is in an important
sense only a personal freedom with limited public and social significance.
Dissenters may have something important to say that the public
would find enlightening, but the "gatekeepers" are free
to keep them effectively silent. Of course, they are legally free
to start their own newspaper or to buy a TV network as the General
Electric Company did in 1985, and it is always possible (and occasionally
happens) that a major newspaper or TV station will give oppositional
viewpoints fleeting access. But an important feature of the U.S.
system of f free speech is the powerful structural limits to access
to mass media. In this market system of control, ownership is
concentrated in the hands of the wealthy and the agents of the
corporate establishment-the gatekeepers. Gatekeeper biases are
reinforced by the preferences and biases of advertisers, ~s their
natural gravitation to convenient and official sources like the
White House, Pentagon, and State Department, and their f ear of
negative feedback (flak) from bodies and groups that might threaten
their position.' Dissenters are excluded in the normal sourcing
and processing of news, so that freedom of speech is perfectly
compatible with systematic barriers to views that jar and threaten.
Reporters are forced to work within the limits imposed by the
market system in order to survive and prosper in the media organizations.
The market also works in other ways to assure that only proper
views can be heard. The General Electric Company not only owns
a television network, it funds and promotes a The McLaughlin Group"
of dominantly right-wing commentators on the Public Broadcasting
System, complementing other monied groups' funding of William
Buckley's "Firing Line," thus buying access to their
preferred views on a nominally independent network. GE, other
corporations, and related foundations also fund the American Enterprise
Institute, the Georgetown Center For Strategic and International
Studies, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and
scores of other allegedly "non-partisan" but ideologically
directed research institutes, who finance and publicize the work
of approved "experts. Accredited through these institutional
affiliations, these experts can then meet the demands of the media
for "non-partisan" and independent sources on subjects
like tax policy, poverty, the military budget and arms race, terrorism,
and the problems of building democracy in Central America, just
as the Advertising Council has provided Public Service ads to
fill the gap for mandated "public service" programming
on TV with ads nicely fitted to the demands of the powerful.
Market marginalization of dissent has been strengthened by
the increased centralization and commercialization of the mass
media. The rise of national TV markedly increased mass media concentration,
and the almost complete dependence of commercial TV on advertising
and its resultant extreme sensitivity to advertiser interests
(and the closely related growth and "quality" of audiences
and audience expectations) shaped it into an instrument readily
mobilized by government propaganda and virtually closed to dissent
by the defunding of public radio and TV forced much of this small
sector into the commercial nexus and further narrowed avenues
of access.
Despite these structural facts, it is frequently asserted
and has become a conservative cliché that the mass media,
especially network TV and the leading establishment dailies, are
both "liberal" and "adversarial" to established
authority. To a considerable extent this reflects infighting between
the various wings of the establishment, with the hard-line right
resenting any f actual presentations inconvenient to established
authority and policy (unless liberals are in power end making
gestures toward peaceful accommodation, in which case we are confronted
with "subversion" in government rather than in the media
and are witnessing "appeasement.") The business community
also generally wants system-supportive materials in the media
and business "news" that amounts to press handouts of
the relevant business firms. The Pentagon, White House, State
Department, local police departments, and conservatives also went
the media to serve simply as conduits for government officials.
Neo-conservative Michael Ledeen has complained: "Most
journalists these days consider it beneath their dignity to simply
report the words of government officials and let it go at that.
Ledeen is wrong: most are quite content to serve as a conduit,
but his statement illuminates the neoconservative view of the
role of the press in a free society! Others, like Reed Irvine,
openly demand that f acts which do not serve their cause be suppressed.
During the Gulf war of 1991, Irvine complained bitterly that the
media were not serving the Pentagon 100 percent and were reporting
facts that while true, were inconvenient to the war effort. Ledeen
and Irvine uphold the tradition of Peter Braestrup's Freedom House
study of Vietnam war coverage, which castigated the media for
failing to be sufficiently upbeat whatever the facts.
It is interesting to note that in early 1988 the Soviet press
was assailed by Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov for disclosing
negative facts about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which he claimed
"played into the hands of the West". The Ledeen-Irvine-Braestrup
equivalents in the Soviet Union would surely have supported Yazov's
claim that the Soviet press was too liberal and "adversary",
as his criticisms of the Soviet press fit their own for the U.S.
media with precision. But the "adversary" Soviet press
followed the party line on all essentials in 1985, just as the
U.S. mass media did in accepting that the United States sought
"democracy" in Nicaragua in the 1980s and that it entered
a war in the Gulf in 1991 to fight for the principle of non-aggression.
The Bush administration wanted to censor the media during the
Gulf war, not because they are adversaries, but for the reason
implicit in Yazov's critique of the Soviet media: namely, a greedy
desire to avoid anything inconvenient or negative.
The attacks leveled against the media as liberal and adversary,
although often expressing the true beliefs of the business-neocon
assailants, have the important effect of driving the media even
more closely toward the state party line and away from facts and
analyses that would call it into question. Claire Sterling may
put forward rhetorical, implausible, and untrue statements on
terrorism and the Bulgarian-KGB connection to the plot to shoot
the Pope in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the McNeil-Lehrer
News Hour, and CBS, but neither Reed Irvine nor government officials
will utter a peep of complaint. An Elliott Abrams on Nicaragua,
although representing a party line and a confirmed liar, is safe.
Dissidents such as Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn,
Diana Johnstone or Jane Hunterwould elicit cries of outrage on
the right; therefore, they are rare participants in public discussions.
At the same time, the continual outcry that the media are
liberal and adversarial establishes the claim as fact, so that
the very process that constrains the media further gives them
added (and totally unjustified) credibility as unbiased.
The Power Laws
The structure of power that shapes media choices and determines
who gains access also affects truthfulness in the mass media.
Those who have assured access can lie; the more powerful they
are, the more easily they can lie and the less likely it is that
their lies will be corrected. The higher the rank the more "credible"
the statement; the more credible the speaker, the greater the
freedom to lie.
This can be formulated in two laws: a "power law of access"
and an "inverse power law of truthfulness." The first
law says that the greater your economic and political clout, the
easier your access to the mass media; the less your power, the
more difficult the access. At a certain point on the declining
power scale, access falls to zero. The fall to zero is accelerated
if the message is discordant and would offend the powerful. The
second law says that the greater your economic and political power-hence,
access. The greater your freedom to lie; the smaller your power,
the less your freedom to prevaricate. The second law follows in
part from the first, as those who would be most eager to refute
the lies of the powerful are weak and have limited access, further
reduced by their discordant messages. Their messages can be ignored
without cost to the mass media (whose biases would incline them
toward avoidance anyway).
The media's gullibility and groveling before the powerful
occurs despite recognition by media personnel, in principle, that
governments lie. But in practice, when dealing with their own
government, especially in the area of foreign policy and the military-industrial-complex,.
media personnel abandon or shy away from critical analysis and,
frequently, common sense.
Propaganda Campaigns
Structurally-based bias and the power laws make the mass media
extremely serviceable f or system-supportive propaganda campaigns.
This all works very naturally as the proprietors, advertisers,
and government usually have parallel biases, and their experts
and flak machines combine to push the media in the same direction.
Thus the great Red Scare of 1919-1920 helped thwart a threatening
unionization of major industries; the Red Scare of the years (1948
1955) served to liquidate the old New Deal coalition end clear
the ground for an aggressive pursuit of U.S. global interests
under the guise of "containment" and protecting "national
security; and the Soviet Threat could be rehabilitated to provide
the rationale for the Reagan era stoking of the arms race and
a cover for the upward redistribution of income. In the latter
period, the terrorist threat, Kadaffi, the KGB-Bulgarian plot
to kill the Pope, and the "barbaric" Soviet shooting
down of Korean airliner 007 in 1983 could all be brought on line
in propaganda campaigns to reinforce the demands of the state.
In all of these cases the mass media collaborated with the
government to help engineer consent by means of propaganda outbursts
that were built, in whole or in part, on lies. They were also
built on Orwellian processes of doublethink: only selected incidents
that served the state were subject to propaganda campaigns (Libya
end Abu Nidal, not South Africa, Guatemala, Orlando Bosch, or
Luis Posada); only politically useful shootdowns of airliners
aroused indignation and stimulated concentrated media coverage;
and only selected cases of torture, murder, and aggression aroused
concern. Crucial to the process was the reliance on the powerful
and their accredited experts for information, and the exclusion
of contesting viewpoints by p dissidents and unaccredited experts.
UNESCO and the "Free Flow of Information"
In 1984 the United States withdrew from United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), on the ground
(among others) of its alleged threat to the "free flow of
information." In the standard formulation in the U.S. press,
UNESCO was said to be in favor of a New World Information Order
(NWIO) whose essence was "government control of the media"
and the "licensing of journalists"; whereas the United
States and its media were dedicated to unconditional freedom of
communications as a matter of high principle. This formulation,
a caricature of the real positions of the contending parties,
reflected an undisclosed conflict of interest on the part of the
western media, as well as remarkable hypocrisy.
For many years western media end news agencies have dominated
the international flow of news. Third World spokespersons have
long protested the biased portrayals of their countries in western
news and called for a two-way and balanced news flow. A more basic
Third World concern is the threat to cultural integrity and sovereignty
from the flood of western advertising messages and other cultural
products, as well as news. A number of Third World (and sympathetic
western) analysts contended that true independence and popular
mobilization for development are impossible without independent
national communications systems. Such concerns were accentuated
in the 1960s with the development of satellite communications
and remote sensing technologies. The former allows western programmers
to transmit news, ads, and entertainment entirely outside the
control of national governments. Remote sensing allows western
states to survey the mineral and other resources of lesser powers,
again resulting in a loss in control, power, and independence.
The official U.S. position, followed consistently in the U.S.
mass media, was that the only issues raised by a NW were "freedom
of the press" versus "government control. Freedom of
the press meant a commercial press funded by advertising. Might
an advertising-based press display a systematic bias based on
its restricted revenue source? Might it be affected by proprietary
wealth and interest? Might it reflect the national and corporate
interests of the home country and its leading multinational organizations?
How concentrated could the media become before it should be regarded
as "unfree"? These questions were never raised in the
U.S. mass media in their frequent reports and discussions of the
withdrawal.
A media worried about the effects of the NWIO on the free
flow of information should also be deeply concerned about constraints
on free flow on their own western turf. It is one of the ironies
of the U.S. and British withdrawals from UNESCO, however, that
they were engineered by governments notable for increased secrecy,
the curtailment of access to information, covert operations, deception,
and manipulation of the press. Demac points out that "From
its beginnings, the Reagan administration made little attempt
to disguise its preference for operating outside congressional
and public scrutiny; it quickly adopted an array of secrecy regulations
that reached far beyond those of previous administrations."
In addition to major restrictions on the free speech rights of
government workers and a sharp increase in the surveillance and
harassment of those opposed to government polices, the new administration
greatly expanded the classification and destruction of documents
it deemed sensitive. It even began the reclassification of documents
already in the public domain, a policy worthy of a Ministry of
Truth and consistent with its systematic lying and rewriting of
history.
Demac also notes the increased restrictions on foreign travel
of Americans and visits by politically deviant foreigners to the
United States, plus substantial efforts to control the flow of
messages, electronic and printed, to and from Cuba and other states.
Canadian films on acid rain and the effects of nuclear war were
forced to bear the label "propaganda." Fulbright fellowships
were cut back and politicized, the reduced funds redistributed
to straightforward government propaganda. Constitutional lawyer
Floyd Abrams remarked that the Reagan administration "acts
as if information were in the nature of a potentially disabling
disease which must be feared, controlled, and ultimately quarantined."
The Thatcher government was equally or more aggressive in
attacking dissident media and whistleblowers. Her movement's attitude
toward the free flow of information within Britain was described
in an off-the-record briefing to U.S. correspondents on Dec. 3,
1986 by Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister's press spokesman:
"There is no freedom of information in this country; there's
no public right to know. There's a commonsense idea of how to
run a country and Britain is full of commonsense people... Bugger
the public's right to know. The game is the security of the state-not
the public's right to know."
The U.S. mass media were never very disturbed by the Reagan-Thatcher
encroachments on free flow at home, nor did they ever point out
during the period of withdrawal from UNESCO the huge contradiction
between the Reagan-Thatcher devotion to free flow in UNESCO-related
areas and their antithetical policies at home.
Another oddity that might have struck an observer not well
indoctrinated with U.S. conceptions of freedom was the rise of
authoritarianism in the U.S. sphere of influence over the past
several decades. Attacks on the media in these countries went
well beyond "licensing" and other alleged evils of the
NWIO, and were received by the mass media with virtual silence
and lack of indignation. According to the Committee to Protect
Journalists, 94 journalists "disappeared" or were murdered
in Argentina from 1976-1982,21 were killed in El Salvador between
1980 and 1984, and 48 were killed in Guatemala between 1978 and
1982, almost all by governments supported by the United States..
Numerous papers were closed in these countries, and those that
remained open learned a lesson in free flow from the murders.
Similar developments occurred in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay,
and other states in Latin America in the period coincident with
the rising media concern over a NWIO (1973-84).
On the basis of principled concern over a free press and free
flow of information, it is hard to explain why the media would
be passionately concerned over "licensing" in a NWIO
that did not exist, but failed to rouse themselves over the murder
of scores of journalists in U.S. client states in the Third World.
The apparent contradiction is resolvable, however, if it is recognized
that repressive governments in Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala serve
a larger transnational corporate interest and do not interfere
with Associated Press and New York Times operations and material
interests. Thus, what appears to be an unaccountable inconsistency
can be explained, but the relevant principle is corporate access
and profit, not freedom of information.
*****
Beyond
Hypocrisy