Toward an Uncensored Future

excerpted from the book

Unreliable Sources

a guide to detecting bias in news media

by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon

A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol Publishing Group, 1990

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On a warm spring day in 1988, we visited George Seldes, then 97 years old, at his home in Hartland-4-Corners, Vermont. The man I.F. Stone called "the dean and 'granddaddy' of us investigative reporters" stood slightly hunched on the porch of his modest brick house where he lived by himself. We were greeted with handshakes and a ready smile, as he ushered us inside. For the next six hours, he regaled us with vivid recollections of a remarkable journalistic career that spanned eight decades.

As a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, in 1921 Seldes went to Russia where he interviewed Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky. He covered the Soviet Union for two years until his stories about the suppression of non-Bolshevik revolutionaries got him ousted. A tireless freethinker, he spent two years in Italy before being thrown out because of his unflattering portraits of Fascist dictator Mussolini. He served as the Tribune's bureau chief in Berlin. And during the Spanish war in the 1930s-which he insists was not a civil war since Hitler and Mussolini aided General Franco with so many troops, tanks and planes-Seldes and his wife Helen wired dispatches to an East Coast newspaper chain. But the chain stopped running the Seldes' pieces after U.S. Catholic prelates who favored Franco called for a boycott by readers and advertisers.

That decade saw the rise of ad agencies which undermined ambitious plans for a magazine slated to be the first illustrated, mass-circulation American weekly "one step left of center." Seldes had been hired as one of the editors, but the magazine's support for progressive causes, such as the Spanish Republic's struggle against Nazism and fascism, displeased Madison Avenue, and a lack of advertising revenue killed the project.

Shortly thereafter, Seldes published Lords of the Press, a book filled with startling revelations about the corruption and political bias of American journalism. Not surprisingly, the book was shunned by mainstream newspapers and magazines. Undaunted, Seldes kept taking on the privileged and the powerful, including big-money interests like the tobacco industry. Beginning in the late 1930s, he vehemently denounced the American press for covering up the dangers of smoking while raking in millions from cigarette ads.

In 1940, Seldes started a weekly newsletter, In fact, the world's first regular publication devoted entirely to press criticism. During its ten-year life, circulation rose to over 175,000 -- with kudos from Eleanor Roosevelt, among others-before In fact was Red-baited to death by McCarthyites "who rode top saddle in the nation's press in those days," Seldes recalled. A few decades later, he was writing of that "imaginary institution called 'freedom of the press,' a phrase that means, or should mean, not only the right of the owners to publish without government control or Moron Majority censorship, but the right of the buyer of a paper to read hitherto suppressed news."

In his hundredth year, Seldes remained an American individualist in the best sense, combining an unpretentious, fiercely independent, intellectual ethic with an unwavering commitment to social justice. For us he was a living inspiration, someone who had supreme confidence in the power of ideas and the capacity of people to see through the hypocrisy of politicians and media pundits. Seldes never stopped believing that the essence of a democratic society is an enlightened, well-informed citizenry. And he continued to do his part by closely monitoring the press, even though he was well past the age when most would have retired. Toward the end of our conversation, he pointed to a stack of news clips and said, "There are too many to file. I can hardly keep up with them."

For Seldes, being skeptical of news media was nothing less than a civic duty. But the very nature of mass media in our society discourages such a critical disposition. Newscasts share a half-hour continuum with high-budget commercials that intersperse the con and the come-on, mixing messages whose net effect is to inculcate confusion and passivity. Taking in the world of the foreign crisis and the yellowed kitchen floor, heart-rending disasters and new cars, severe domestic ills and great light beer, TV viewers are conditioned to be passive about nearly everything that can't be purchased. While commercials emphatically encourage shopping sprees, television imparts little enthusiasm for grassroots activism, least of all for Americans who might endeavor to significantly alter a society with unforgivable extremes of wealth and poverty, a poisoned ecology and other festering injustices.

For hucksters marketing products as antidotes to the daily dose of "bad news," personal insecurity is a desirable trait, to be egged on and exploited ad infinitum, so that social life becomes a guided tour from on high, arranged by mega-media complexes that prey upon Americans who are glued to the Tube an average of 31 hours each week. ("Who is watching the direction of society, if we are all at home watching re-runs?" asked Ralph Nader.) Ubiquitous media beseech that we do little except keep watching, reading, listening...and buying. Excitement is reserved for, or at least associated with, spending money. One dollar, one vote: in mass media's gilded cage of "demogracy," some people are more affluent, and therefore more equal, than others.

Linguicide

The intersection of Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue is a heavily-trafficked zone, where lies and facts cohabitate as convenience and opportunism dictate. With reporters serving mainly as messengers for corporate PR reps and government officials who try to fog up reality, it's no wonder "the news" leaves so many people feeling confused.

The world according to mass media is not supposed to make sense; it is supposed to make money. When we watch news on television, Mark Crispin Miller has written, "we come to feel, not only that the world is blowing up, but that it does so for no reason, that its ongoing history is nothing more than a series of eruptions, each without cause or context. The news creates this vision of mere anarchy through its erasure of the past, and its simultaneous tendency to atomize the present into so many unrelated happenings, each recounted through a sequence of dramatic, unintelligible pictures. In short, the TV news adapts the world to its own commercial needs, translating history into several mad occurrences, just the sort of 'story' that might pique the viewer's morbid curiosity... And so we have the correspondent, solemnly nattering among the ruins, offering crude 'analysis' and 'background,' as if to compensate us for the deep bewilderment that his medium created in the first place."

The resulting renditions of the world-from special reports about earthshaking events to local TV news happy-talk-are disorienting, which suits backers of the status quo just fine. Confusion "keeps us powerless and controllable " psychotherapist Anne Wilson Schaef notes. "No one is more controllable than a confused person; no society is more controllable than a confused society. Politicians know this better than anyone, and that is why they use innuendos, veiled references, and out-and-out lies instead of speaking clearly and truthfully."

While sometimes echoing public skepticism or even disdain toward politicians, news media grant them continuous access-endlessly featuring, quoting, summarizing and propagating their opinions. As with histrionic wrestlers on TV, journalists and political players make various noises, encouraging viewers to mistake the embraces for mortal combat. But when the President wants reporters to jump for a story, they are much less interested in asking "Why?" than "How high?"

The symbiotic relationship between officialdom and the press has debased public discourse. We could call this process "linguicide"-the ongoing destruction of language as an instrument of meaning. Linguicide occurs when journalists say "tax reform" but actually mean huge giveaways to the wealthy. It occurs when an economic system dominated by gigantic monopolies is erroneously described as "free enterprise." Or when building new weapons of mass destruction is called "modernization" of a "deterrent." Or when a Central American government murders 50,000 of its own people, including priests and human rights monitors, but is routinely sanctified as a "democracy"-that, too, is an example of linguicide.

Ultimately, the denuding of issues is what linguicide is about: "news" as a hazy defoliant, stripping away substance. "Covering" current events, the media blanket is more opaque than translucent-smothering issues rather than ventilating them. Like the prisoners in Plato's cave who can see only flickering shadows on the wall, our picture of the world is filtered through the mass media and we are apt to mistake this distortion for reality.

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Media governance

... A central function of the American press is to keep legitimizing the country's most powerful institutions, as exemplified by that post-Bush-inaugural headline on the front page of the New York Times-"The People, the Thousands, Get a Look at Their House." In this respect, certain "noncommercial" news programs provided by PBS and NPR can be particularly insidious, posing as alternatives without really fulfilling that function.

In projecting elite opinion, the U.S. press plays a crucial role in molding popular opinion; it serves as a channel that converts the former, however imprecisely, into the latter. And while mass media can't always dictate our political and social attitudes, they never stop telling us what our views supposedly are-or should be. USA Today has popularized the royal "We" in news headlines-"We like..." "We support..." "We're happy about..." etc.-keeping the public informed about the outlooks that constitute being in step.

American media are perhaps best understood as institutions of governance that have broken new ground in addressing what Aldous Huxley described as "the problem of making people love their servitude." That so many of us take for granted the freedom and independence of the U.S. press is an index of the extent to which we've become accustomed to a subtle kind of oppression.

If we're looking only for hard-as-nails prohibitions usually associated with despotism, we may not recognize the spikes being driven by familiar forces. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky have pinpointed the dilemma in their book Manufacturing Consent: "In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest."

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Oligarchy made easy

"The news media in America do not tell the American people that a political whip hangs over their head. That is because a political whip hangs over their head."

So wrote Walter Karp shortly before his death in 1989. He named mass media's most forbidden topic: "In the American republic the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings-Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news."

What Karp called the "invisibility" of American political power is a ghostly shield guarding against exposure and deflecting critical attacks. Major media steadfastly refuse to acknowledge what underlies so many reported events-"the fact of oligarchy." When brought to light, specific abuses come across as episodic-perhaps attributable to corrupt individuals in high places, but not the result of overall corporate domination.

Eager to please their bosses in an era of staff cutbacks and bottom-line budget slashing, journalists are integral to the closed loops of social denial. Thus we hear precious little about the fact that one percent of the population in the U.S. owns nearly one-half of the country's wealth, and one percent of all industrial corporations in America account for nearly 90 percent of total sales. It is seemingly taboo for journalists to examine the implications of such figures.

"Financial accumulation is admired," political scientist Paul Goldstene points out. "That it influences politics is dimly understood and vaguely resented: that economic concentration is, in fact, political power is understood by modem liberals hardly at all." But it is surely understood by today's media owners and their wealthy corporate brethren. Beholden most of all to big business, mass media mystify who controls what, how and why, taking people on detours every day-away from clarity about power in our society.

As Ben Bagdikian observed, "Monopolistic power dominates many other industries, and most of them enjoy special treatment by the government. But media giants have two enormous advantages: They control the public image of national leaders who, as a result, fear and favor the media magnates' political agendas; and they control the information and entertainment that help establish the social, political and cultural attitudes of increasingly larger populations." This built-in institutional bias "does more than merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world."

Rather than probing the extent to which U.S. corporations influence foreign policy, American media typically cover political developments abroad (revolutionary movements, military coups, etc.) as if they were divorced from economics. On the home front, there is hardly any in-depth reporting about what has caused the widening gap between rich and poor, of which millions of homeless Americans are only the most glaring symptom. And when the roots of social ills are obscured, people have a tendency to blame the victim or look for scapegoats; inevitably this fuels xenophobia and racial hatred.

"There is a fundamental contradiction between a corporately owned press and a press fulfilling its duties as a critical social institution," said Alexander Cockburn. But reporters are loath to explore this contradiction, preferring safer controversies that usually amount to pseudo-tempests in media teapots.

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Democratizing the media

During a Nightline show in late 1989, Ted Koppel engaged in a bit of candor: "Is the news media reporting the news or simply playing the role of cheerleader? They call it pack journalism, instant consensus, the pied piper syndrome. Who sets the agenda for the American news media? Is it really a matter of independent news judgment or skillful manipulation by the White House?" Then came a frank admission: "We are a discouragingly timid lot. By we, I mean most television anchors and reporters and most of our colleagues of the establishment press... We tremble between daydreams of scooping all of our competitors and the nightmare of standing alone with our scoop for too long... People whose job it is to manipulate the media know this about us. They know that...many of us are truly only comfortable when we travel in a herd."

The herd of mainstream reporters is adept at steering clear of certain issues-most notably, the impact of concentrated corporate ownership on mass communications. Omitted, played down, painted in comforting hues, spun into benign shapes, above all, are basic facts about oligarchy and media power. On this subject, the traditional five "W"s of intrepid journalism-Who? What? When? Where? Why?-do not apply.

Mass media self-criticism may at times make salient points, but attacks on prerogatives of corporate ownership are almost never among them. Many pundits have played, in effect, "let's pretend"-that high-tech developments are not unfolding at the service of consolidated, centralized power. The best-selling predictions by futurist Alvin Toffler in the early 1980s discerned "a truly new era-the age of the de-massified media...instead of masses of people all receiving the same messages, smaller de-massified groups receive and send large amounts of their own imagery to one another." For good measure, Toffler contended that as a result "opinions on everything from pop music to politics are becoming less uniform."

But newer technologies like cable TV, which Toffler and others envisioned as forces for decentralizing mass media, are dominated by the same corporate clique. Although American citizens appear to be surrounded by an abundance of news sources, the range of cultural and political opinion deemed legitimate by information conglomerates is pathetically narrow. While paying lip-service to free speech and democratic values, modem-day press lords are, in Bagdikian's words, "just as ready as any dictatorship to suppress or de-emphasize news or entertainment that might seriously question their power."

It is no small irony that sizable outlets for dissident voices and alternative ideas are dwindling in the United States at a time when people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are infused with vibrant debate about restructuring their societies. In covering these momentous changes abroad, American media have been quick to highlight the failures of centralized economic and political power in Communist countries. But silence reigns when it comes to discussing negative aspects of concentrated corporate power in the United States.

We face a formidable task of reinvigorating the First Amendment and promoting glasnost in this country when the mass media are controlled by a handful of corporate titans concerned most of all with boosting their profits. It is a sad but telling commentary that Philip Morris, a mammoth cigarette company, could pay the U.S. government $600,000 (quite a bargain) to feature the Bill of Rights in a slick ad campaign designed to polish the firm's nicotine-stained image. "The freedom to say and think what we believe... That's our birthright," the commercial declared, thereby reducing the principle of free speech to an advertising gimmick.

Such a travesty underscores the need to reclaim the airwaves as a public trust. Lest we forget, commercial broadcasters do not own the airwaves; they rent them. According to the Federal Communications Act, a broadcasting license can be revoked if a network fails to serve the "public interest." But this stipulation is never enforced because powerful groups prefer that it not be enforced. The same is true for antitrust regulations which, if applied, could require a company like General Electric to divest itself of NBC, or a monopolistic newspaper chain like Gannett to part with many of its holdings.

There was a time during the radio days of the 1930s when the corporate media monopoly was seriously challenged by a citizens movement led by parent-teacher groups, college presidents, librarians, union leaders and ministers. Decrying the commercialization of the airwaves, the public interest coalition rallied around a Senate bill known as the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment, which would have nullified all existing station licenses and allotted 25 percent of broadcast channels to "educational, religious, agricultural, labor, cooperative, and similar non-profit-making associations." Corporate broadcasters responded with a massive lobbying effort and the bill was defeated on the Senate floor.

Unreliable Sources

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