Inventing Reality Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight WHOM TO BELIEVE?

  CRONKITE AND OTHER CRITICS

  CLASS, RACE, AND GENDER

  IMAGE POLITICS AND CONSERVATIVE BIAS

  MONOPOLY POLITICS

  DO THE MEDIA MANAGE OUR MINDS?

  BEYOND ORWELL’S 1984

  “Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Man Who Owns One” A FAVORED FEW

  INTERLOCKING CONTROL

  MANY VOICES, ONE CHORUS

  Who Controls the News? CALLING THE TUNE: OWNERS

  CALLING THE TUNE: ADVERTISERS

  ON THE LINE: EDITORS

  SELF-CENSORSHIP: REPORTERS

  THE RULING CULTURE

  SUPPRESSING THE NEWS

  Objectivity and Government Manipulation THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY

  NOT ENOUGH TIME, SPACE, AND MONEY?

  MAINTAINING APPEARANCES

  IS IT ALL ECONOMICS?

  GOVERNMENT MANIPULATION

  The Big Sell THE CONSUMER IDEOLOGY

  SELLING THE SYSTEM

  PUBLIC SERVICE FOR PRIVATE INTERESTS

  EVEN SPORTS AND WEATHER

  Giving Labor the Business BUSINESS OVER LABOR

  NICE BOSSES, CRAZY STRIKERS

  THE INVISIBLE WORKER

  “Liberal” Media, Conservative Bias CREATING A “CONSERVATIVE MOOD”

  POPULIST ELECTORATE, CONSERVATIVE OUTCOME

  PUNDITS TO THE RIGHT

  HOW TO DISCREDIT PROTESTORS Ignoring and Undercounting

  Favoritism for Rightist Demonstrators

  Scanting of Content

  Trivialization and Marginalization

  The Media Fight the Red Menace ENTER THE RED MENACE

  THE COLD WAR

  THE CREATION OF JOE McCARTHY

  RATIONAL HYSTERIA

  TWISTS AND TURNS

  CELEBRATING THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM

  Doing the Third World THE VIETNAM APOLOGY

  MURDER IN CHILE

  STOMPING ON GRENADA

  For the New World Order THE “TOTALITARIAN” SANDINISTAS

  A DEVIL IN PANAMA

  CELEBRATING THE MASSACRE OF IRAQ

  Propaganda Themes AMERICAN VIRTUE AND “ANTI-AMERICANISM”

  THE NONEXISTENCE OF IMPERIALISM

  “MODERATE AUTHORITARIAN” REGIMES

  EVIL, POWER-HUNGRY LEFTISTS

  ECONOMIC “FAILURES”

  DEMOCRACY IS IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER

  “INFERIOR” PEOPLES AND THEIR HOPELESS WAYS

  Methods of Misrepresentation SELECTIVITY AND DELIBERATE OMISSION

  LIES AND FACE-VALUE TRANSMISSION

  FALSE BALANCING

  FRAMING AND LABELING

  THE GREYING OF REALITY

  AUXILIARY EMBELLISHMENTS

  PLACEMENT

  Culture, Control, and Resistance CAPITALISM AND CULTURE

  THE LIMITS OF ORTHODOXY

  CREDIBILITY AND THE “LIBERAL BIAS”

  BETWEEN CONSPIRACY AND CULTURE

  THE CONFLICT WITHIN

  Appendix A Guide to Alternative Media MEDIA-WATCH PUBLICATIONS

  ALTERNATIVE PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS

  ALTERNATIVE BROADCAST MEDIA AND VIDEOS

  BOOKS

  Notes Chapter 1, From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight

  Chapter 2, “Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Man Who Owns One”

  Chapter 3, Who Controls the News?

  Chapter 4, Objectivity and Government Manipulation

  Chapter 5, The Big Sell

  Chapter 6, Giving Labor the Business

  Chapter 7, “Liberal” Media, Conservative Bias

  Chapter 8, The Media Fight the Red Menace

  Chapter 9, Doing the Third World

  Chapter 10, For the New World Order

  Chapter 11, Propaganda Themes

  Chapter 12, Methods of Misrepresentation

  Chapter 13, Culture, Control, and Resistance

  About the Author

  Inventing reality : the politics of news media

  Parenti, Michael, 1933-

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  SECOND EDITION

  MICHAEL PARENTI

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Senior editor: Don Reisman

  Managing editor: Patricia Mansfield-Phelan

  Project editor: Suzanne Holt

  Production supervisor: Katherine Battiste

  Cover design: Michael Jung

  Copyright © 1993 by St. Martin’s Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

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  For information, write:

  St. Martin’s Press, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  ISBN: 0-312-02013-9 (paperback)

  0-312-08629-6 (clothbound)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parenti, Michael, 1933

  Inventing reality : the politics of news media / Michael Parenti.

  —2nd ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-08629-6 (clothbound)—ISBN 0-312-02013-9 (pbk.) 1. Journalism—Political aspects—United States. 2. Journalism— United States—Objectivity. I. Title.

  PN4888.P6P37 1992 302.23'0973—dc20

  92-50023

  CIP

  To the memory of Philip Meranto

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Peggy Noton, Gwen Glesmann, Sally Soriano, and Laura Cooley for the generous assistance they rendered at crucial times. My thanks to the St. Martin’s Press staff, especially my editor Don Reisman, Frances Jones, and Suzanne Holt for their efficient and thoughtful service in guiding the manuscript safely through hazardous editorial and production straits—and improving its quality along the way.

  For their critical suggestions I wish to thank Earl S. Grow, The University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, and Edward C. Uliassi, Northeastern Illinois University.

 
Encouraging and helpful comments from interested readers, too numerous to mention, regarding the first edition of this book gave me much of the resolve to write this updated and, I think, improved version. For this they have my gratitude.

  SECOND EDITION

  From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight

  For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the news media. Indeed, what we even define as an issue or event, what we see and hear, and what we do not see and hear are greatly determined by those who control the communications world. Be it peace protestors, uprisings in Latin America, crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of us know of things except as they are depicted in the news. Even when we don’t believe what the media say, we are still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They ^are still getting the agenda,defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or rejecTTThe media exert a persistent influence in defining the scope of respectable political discourse.

  Be this as it may, growing numbers of people are becoming increasingly aware that the media are neither objective nor consistently accurate in their portrayal of things. There seems to be a growing understanding that we need to defend ourselves by challenging the misinformation we are fed. In this book I will try to demonstrate bow the news media distort important aspects of social and political life and why. The press’s misrepresentations are not usually accidental, not merely the result of the complexity of actual events and the honest confusions of poorly prepared reporters. While those kinds of problems exist, another kind of distortion predominates, one not due to chance or to the idiosyncratic qualities of news production or newspeople. The major distortions are repeatable and systemic—the product not only of deliberate manipulation but of the ideological and economic conditions under which the media operate.

  One book cannot cover all that might be said about the media. I will concentrate on national and international politico-economic class issues, with some attention given to the racist and sexist biases in the media (dealt with in this chapter). I do not deal with the entertainment media and the many hidden ideological and political biases found therein. That subject is treated in my recent book Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment d In the pages ahead we will explore the way the press distorts and suppresses the news about major domestic and foreign events, the hidden and not-so-hidden ideological values, the influence of ownership, and the opportunities for dissent.

  Rather than attempt a comprehensive canvassing of the news complete with statistical breakdowns and content analyses, I trace media performance along several basic themes, providing representative samples of how the press treats or mistreats a subject. A more systematic undertaking would have had the virtue of thoroughness and maybe increased precision of a sort, but it would have made for a very huge and dull volume. In any case, numerous systematic studies are cited and summarized in the chapters that follow.

  This book concentrates on the more influential news media, specifically the three major networks: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), along with the New York Times and Washington Post (and their respective news services). These two newspapers, the Post and the Times, not only feed information to the public but to other news media as well. Occasional attention is also given herein to two newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and lesser publications and broadcast media. Taken together these various outlets compose what I alternately describe as the “major media,” the “mainstream media,” the “corporate-owned press,” the “US press,” the “national media,” or just the “press” and the “news media.” Throughout this book 1 use the terms news media and press synonymously to mean the printed and broadcast news organizations. It so happens that press is singular and media plural, but I mean the same by both.

  The above-mentioned news organizations represent the higher quality establishment press, being more informative and less distorted than most of the other (more conservative) media. If this book has a bias in selection, then, it is in the direction of understatement.

  WHOM TO BELIEVE?

  If the media so preempt the communication universe, then how can we evaluate them? And who is to say whether our criticisms are to be trusted? In attempting to expose the distortions and biases of the press, do we not unavoidably introduce biases of our own? And if objectivity is unattainable, are we not then left in the grip of a subjectivism in which one person’s impressions are about as reliable (or unreliable) as another’s? To be sure, there is always the danger that a dissenting viewpoint of the kind presented in this book will introduce distortions of its own. The reader should watch for these. But this new “danger” is probably not as great as the one posed by the press itself, because readers approach the dissenting viewpoint after having been conditioned throughout their lives to the sentiments and images of the dominant society. Far more insidious and less open to conscious challenge are the notions that so fit into the dominant political culture’s field of established images that they appear not as biased manipulations but as “the nature of things.”

  When exposed to a view that challenges the prevailing message, the reader is not then simply burdened with additional distortions. A dissident view provides us with an occasion to test the prevailing beliefs, open ourselves to information that the mainstream media and the dominant belief system have ignored or suppressed. Through this clash of viewpoints we have a better chance of moving toward a closer approximation of the truth.

  In addition, we have the test of experience itself. Common sense and everyday life oblige us to make judgments and act as if some images and information are closer to the truth than others. Misrepresentations can be eliminated by a process of feedback, as when subsequent events fail to fulfill the original images.

  There is also the internal evidence found in the press itself. We can detect inconsistencies among reports in the mainstream press. We can note how information that supports the official view is given top play while developments that seem not to fit are relegated to the back pages. Also, like any liar the press is filled with contradictions. Seldom holding itself accountable for what it says, it can blithely produce information and opinions that conflict with previously held ones, without a word of explanation for the shift. We can also learn to question what the press tells us by noting the absence of supporting evidence, the failure to amplify and explain. We can ask: Why are the assertions that appear again and again in the news not measured against observable actualities? We can thereby become more aware of how the news media are inviting us to believe something without establishing any reason for the belief.

  Much of the evidence herein has been gathered from extensive and detailed studies produced by academic scholars and independent investigators. Also helpful has been the information provided in such dissenting publications as the Nation, the (New York) Guardian, Covert Action Information Bulletin, People’s Weekly World, Z Magazine, and the Progressive. Publications that are specifically designed to monitor the media, such as Lies of Our Times (published by the Institute for Media Analysis), Extra! (published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and Propaganda Review, have been especially helpful. In addition, there are the publications put out by public interest groups too numerous to mention, dealing with everything from environmentalism and tax policy to militarism and foreign policy.

  Some readers will complain of this book’s “one-sidedness.” But if it is true that “we need to hear all sides and not just one,” then all the more reason why the criticisms and information usually suppressed or downplayed by the American press deserve the attention accorded them in the pages to follow. In any case, it can be observed that people who never complain about the one-sidedness of their mainstream political education are the first to complain of the one-sidedness of any challenge to it. Far from seeking a diversity of views, they defend themselves from the first exposure to such diversity, pr
eferring to leave their conventional political opinions unchallenged.

  A former member of the Federal Communications Commission, Nicholas Johnson, once urged people to “talk back” to their television sets. We can talk back to all the media a lot better and demand a lot more only when we know how we are being manipulated and why we are being lied to. This book is an attempt at understanding how and why the media are the way they are so that we can better defend ourselves not only by talking back in the privacy of our living rooms but by organizing and struggling to become the active agents of our own lives and the creators of our own reality.

  CRONKITE AND OTHER CRITICS

  We do not have a free and independent press in the United States but one that is tied by purchase and persuasion to wealthy owners and advertisers and subjected to the influences of state power. Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Many people who hear about “a controlled press” think only of something that exists in other lands. If anything, the more conservative among them advocate greater restrictions on the US media, in imitation of the censorship they say they are fighting when they say they are fighting communism. Others who complain about the US news media’s shortcomings believe “our” press, for all its faults, is a free and independent one, certainly freer than in most other countries.

  In this book I choose to investigate the US news media not by comparing them to the media of other countries, but by measuring them against their own assertions about being independent, objective, neutral, informative, balanced, and truthful. I will argue and try to demonstrate that in regard to the most crucial questions of political and economic life, the media do not, and cannot, live up to their claims; and I will try to explain why they fail to do so.