Inventing Reality Read online

  Government intelligence agencies supposedly dedicated to national security are just as often involved in propagandizing the American public. The FBI has planted stories in “friendly news media” designed to discredit the New Left and other democratic protestors.41 Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson routinely cooperated with the FBI when working on various stories. While writing for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Patrick Buchanan ran material that came directly from the FBI. After Buchanan left, the newspaper did not change its ways. Two days before Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, the Globe-Democrat ran an editorial supplied by the FBI calling King “one of the most menacing men in America.”42

  The Pentagon sends out hundreds of stories and canned editorials each week that are picked up by newspapers and broadcast stations across the country and presented to the public as trustworthy products of independent journalism.43 According to officials at the United States Information Service (USIS), the government has teams of propagandists in Washington who crank out stories that are wired daily to USIS’s 206 offices in 127 countries.44 Many of these news plants appear in the foreign press then return as “blowback,” that is, they are picked up by US correspondents abroad and transmitted to an unsuspecting American public.

  One of the most active news-manipulating agencies is the CIA, which turns journalists into agents and CIA agents into “journalists” in order to disseminate stories that support the interventionist policies of the national security state. One ex-CIA agent, Ralph McGehee, argued in a book he wrote that “the American people are the primary target audience of [CIA] lies.”45 Some 400 to 600 journalists have been in the pay of the CIA, and the actual number is probably larger. Some are paid for their undercover services, some are not. Some play an active role as agents in overseas events—then report on these same events as “objective” journalists.46

  CIA operatives have planted stories of Soviet nuclear tests that never took place and fabricated “diaries” and “confessions” of defectors from socialist countries. In the early 1950s a news story claiming that China was sending troops to Vietnam to help insurgents fight against the French proved to be a CIA fabrication.47 The agency induced the New York Times to remove a reporter, Sidney Gruson, from a story about the CIA-inspired overthrow of a democratic government in Guatemala because he was getting too close to uncovering the US plot.48 Stories about Cuban soldiers killing babies and raping women in Angola, concocted by the CIA, were planted abroad, then picked up by AP and UPI stringers for “blowback” runs in the US.49

  Many of the press’s paid agents have been media executives and editors.50 A reporter “may receive an assignment from an editor, who is on the CIA payroll, and never suspect for whom he is working.”51 At least twenty-five news organizations have served the CIA, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Hearst newspapers, the Scripps-Howard newspapers, US. Neivs & World Report, and the Wall Street Journal. Among the prominent news executives who knowingly have cooperated with the CIA are William Paley, chairman of the board of CBS; Henry Luce, late owner of Time Inc.; Arthur Hays Sulzberger, late publisher of the New York Times; Robert Myers, publisher of the New Republic; James Copley, owner of the Copley News Service; Barry Bingham, Sr., publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Norman E. Isaacs, its executive editor; Richard Salant, president of CBS News; and on the Washington Post alone, the following executives or senior editors: John S. Hayes, Alfred Friendly, Benjamin Bradlee, Chalmers Roberts, James Wiggins, and Philip Geyelin.52

  The CIA runs the biggest news service in the world with a budget larger than those of all the major wire services put together. In 1975 a Senate intelligence committee found that the CIA owned outright “more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes” and subsidized many more. A New York Times investigation revealed another fifty media outlets run by the CIA in the United States and abroad, and at least twelve publishing houses, which marketed over 1,200 books secretly commissioned by the CIA, including some 250 in English. As the Times explained it, these figures were far from the whole story.53 The CIA subsidized books on China, the Soviet Union, and Third World struggles, which were then reviewed by CIA agents in various US media, including the New York Times.54

  Supposedly such practices ceased after the CIA’s penetration of cultural and news organizations were exposed in the 1970s. In fact, there is evidence suggesting that the CIA continues to recruit from various professions, including journalism, that it subsidizes journalists’ trips abroad, that it still maintains hundreds of news conduits that feed disinformation to people at home and around the world, and that it funnels to ultra-right groups information that these groups then run in their newsletters and give to politically sympathetic newspapers.55

  The CIA in combination with the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and other intelligence agencies compose what is known as the national security state. Its influence over the media cannot be measured solely in its ability to plant favorable stories. In the name of “national security” the national security state enjoys a powerful ideological hegemony over major media organizations. Nothing seriously critical is reported regarding the covert actions and interventions abroad perpetrated by various agencies of the national security state. There is no debate on the fundamentals of US foreign policy and US global interventionism. There is neither extended discussion nor even passing recognition of the possibility that the United States supports imperialistic interests throughout the Third World to the severe detriment of the common people in many countries, and for the enrichment of that social class to which our top corporate, governmental, and military leaders belong.56

  The press will sometimes run a critical report about a business firm that illegally dumps toxic wastes. It will carry a story exposing corruption in an inner-city aid program. It might even criticize poor management within the Pentagon’s weapons procurement system. What the press is not likely to do is inform us of the economic class interests that underlie the US global military machine. It will not tell us about US involvement in the repressive counterinsurgency policies employed to make the world safe for profitable investment by multinational corporations.

  In sum, those who see the news as being the outcome of objective reportage by professionally trained, independent journalists are missing much of the picture. What passes for the “news” is a product of many forces, involving the dominant political culture and powerful economic and government institutions—all dedicated to maintaining an ideological monopoly, controlling the flow of information and opinion in ways that best advance their interests. That so many journalists fail to see this is evidence of how thoroughly they themselves are part of the news-manufacturing process.

  The Big Sell

  Much of our media experience is neither news nor entertainment. Some 60 to 80 percent of newspaper space and about 22 percent of television time (even more on radio) is devoted to advertising. The average viewer who watches four hours of television daily, sees at least 100 to 120 commercials a day, or 36,400 to 43,680 a year. Even if we have learned to turn away from the television set when commercials come on and pass over the eye-catching ads in our newspapers and magazines, we cannot hope to remain untouched by the persistent, ubiquitous bombardment.

  The media’s content, the news and entertainment, the features and “specials,” is the lure to get us exposed to the advertisements. (“Journalists,” said one press representative, “are just people who write on the back of advertisements.”1) The end is the advertising, the process of inducing people to spend as much money as possible on consumer products and services. Entertainment and news are merely instrumental to the goal of the advertiser. They are there to win audiences for the advertisers, to keep people tuned in and turned on. The objective is commercial gain, the sale of mass-produced goods to a mass market.

  The age of mass consumption came to the United States most visib
ly in the 1920s, interrupted by the Great Depression and World War II, then exploding upon us with accumulated vigor in the postwar era. With it came the advertising industry, called into being by the economic imperative of having to market vast quantities of consumer goods and services. Among the new products were those that enabled advertising itself to happen: the penny-press newspaper, the low-priced slick magazine, the radio, and finally the television set—all in their turn were to become both mass-consumption items and prime conduits for massconsumption advertising.

  Mass advertising has changed the shape of the media themselves, helping to concentrate ownership. The advertiser seeks the largest audience for the cheapest price, favoring media outlets with the broadest reach. With its greater profits and revenues, the giant news organization can spend more on salespeople and mass circulation promotion while charging proportionately less. Once smaller competitors are eliminated in a particular locale, the triumphant newspaper (usually chain-owned) then enjoys a monopoly market. This allows it to jack up its advertising rates and reap still greater profits. Mass advertising also helps to eliminate small businesses that cannot afford the mass circulation rates paid by big business. Thus in the media industry and business in general, mass advertising tends to kill competition rather than create it.2

  With mass advertising, the daily newspaper has grown to a bulky size. Advertising on broadcast media consumes an increasingly big chunk of viewing time. The cost of all this advertising is paid twice over by the public: first it is passed on to the consumer in the cost of goods and services; then it is deducted by the advertiser as a business expense, thereby shifting an additional portion of the tax burden onto ordinary taxpayers.

  Mass advertising has influenced the very content of the news media. As noted in Chapter 3, media owners are keenly attentive to the preferences of advertisers. Editors select stories not only with an eye to reader interest but for their appeal to advertisers. The real estate, fashion, food, and travel sections of any newspaper are often little more than promotional sheets for the real estate, fashion, food, and travel industries—who are among a newspaper’s major advertisers.

  Publications and television shows will try to upgrade their readership and viewing audience, that is, appeal to higher income groups that buy more goods and services and attract more advertisers. Delivering a different kind of reader or viewer sometimes necessitates a change in editorial policy.3 In any case, the determining factor is not reader subscriptions or viewers but the corporate advertisers who pay big bucks.

  THE CONSUMER IDEOLOGY

  The obvious purpose of ads and commercials is to sell goods and services, but advertisers do more than that. Over and above any particular product, they sell an entire way of life, a way of experiencing social reality that is compatible with the needs of a mass-production, massconsumption, capitalist society. Today the family and local community are no longer the primary units for production, recreation, and self-definition. Role models and emotional attachments are increasingly sought from those whose specialty is to produce and manipulate images and from the images themselves.

  People have always had to consume in order to live, and in every class society, consumption styles have been a measure of one’s status. But modern consumerism is a relatively recent development in which masses of people seek to accumulate things other than what they need and often other than what they can truly enjoy. Consumption is no longer just a means to life but a meaning for life. This is the essence of the consumer ideology. As propagated through mass advertising, the ideology standardizes tastes and legitimizes both the products of the system and the system itself, representing the commodity-ridden life as “the good life” and “the American Way.” The consumer ideology, or consumerism, builds a mass psychology of “moreness” that knows no limit; hence the increase in material abundance ironically also can bring a heightened sense of scarcity and a sense of unfulfilled acquisition.

  The consumer ideology not only fabricates false needs, it panders in a false way to real ones. The desire for companionship, love, approval, and pleasure, the need to escape from drudgery and boredom, the search for security for oneself and one’s family, such things are vital human concerns. The consumer ideology does something more pernicious than just activate our urge for conspicuous consumption; like so much else in the media and like other forms of false consciousness, consumerism plays on real human needs in deceptive and ultimately unfulfilling ways.

  One of the goals of advertising is to turn the consumer’s critical perception away from the product—and away from the system that produces it—and toward herself or himself.4 Many commercials characterize people as loudmouthed imbeciles whose problems are solved when they encounter the right medication, cosmetic, cleanser, or gadget. In this way industry confines the social imagination and cultural experience of millions, teaching people to define their needs and life styles according to the dictates of the commodity market.

  The reader of advertising copy and the viewer of commercials discover that they are not doing right for baby’s needs or hubby’s or wifey’s desires; that they are failing in their careers because of poor appearance or bad breath; that they are not treating their complexion, hair, or nails properly; that they suffer unnecessary cold misery and headache pains; that they don’t know how to make the tastiest coffee, pie, pudding, or chicken dinner; nor, if left to their own devices, would they be able to clean their floors, sinks, and toilets correctly or tend to

  MEANWHILE, SOUTH OF THE BORDER

  The sheer wealth and dynamism of American society clearly adds to Mexico’s vulnerability, but United States business interests also play a key role in the Mexican economy... . The message of the American way of life dominates Mexican television, not only through the daily fare of Superman cartoons or live broadcasts of American football games, but also through a style of advertising where American blonds are used to sell Mexican beer, and slick spots, prepared by American advertising agencies, expound the virtues of everything from Pepsi-Cola to the Ford Mustang... .

  A recent survey carried out by the National Consumer Institute showed that 85 percent of the children questioned recognized the trademark of a brand of potato chips but only 65 percent identified Mexico’s national emblem. In another poll, only 14 percent recognized the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, but 70 percent identified the symbol of a brand of cornflakes.

  Enrique Rubio Lara, the institute’s director, noted recently: “Advertising is not only encouraging the sale of totally superfluous goods, but it is also stimulating aspirations, values and models of life that are not the best for Mexicans.”

  Alan Riding, “Mexico’s Middle Class Turns to Disco and Burgers,” New York Times, January 13, 1982.

  their lawns, gardens, and automobiles. In order to live well and live properly, consumers need corporate producers to guide them.

  The corporate system knows what formulas to feed your infants, what foods to feed your family, what medication to feed your cold, what gas to feed your engine, and how best to please your spouse, your boss, or your peers. Just as the mass market replaced family and community as provider of goods and services, so now corporations replace parents, grandparents, midwives, neighbors, craftspeople, and oneself in knowing what is best. Big business enhances its legitimacy and social hegemony by portraying itself as society’s Grand Provider. 5

  The world of mass advertising teaches us that want and frustration are caused by our own deficiencies. The goods are within easy reach, before our very eyes in dazzling abundance, available not only to the rich but to millions of ordinary citizens. Those who cannot afford to partake of this cornucopia have only themselves to blame goes the implicit message. The failure is yours, not the system’s. The advertisement of consumer wares, then, is also an advertisement for a whole capitalist system, a demonstration that the system can deliver both the goods and the good life to everyone save laggards and incompetents.

  SELLING THE SYSTEM

  Along
with products, the corporations sell themselves. By the 1970s, for the first time since the Great Depression, the legitimacy of big business was called into question by large sectors of the public. Enduring inflation, unemployment, and a decline in real wages, the American people became increasingly skeptical about the blessings of the corporate economy. In response, corporations intensified their efforts at the kind of “advocacy advertising,” designed to sell the entire capitalist system rather than just one of its products. The spending on “nonproduct-related” advertisements more than doubled, from $230 million to over $474 million, showing a far greater growth rate than advertising expenditures as a whole. 6 Today, one-third of all corporate advertising is directed at influencing the public on political and ideological issues as opposed to pushing consumer goods. (That portion is tax deductible as a “business expense,” like all other advertising costs.) Led by the oil, chemical, and steel companies, big business fills the airwaves and print media with celebrations of the “free market” and warnings of the baneful effects of government regulation.

  Mobil Oil, probably the forerunner in this area, ran ad campaigns, with an annual budget of $5 million, to inform readers that Mobil “gave employment” to thousands of persons, contributed to charities, and brought prosperity to local communities. More significantly, as some of the Mobil ads note, business firms all across America do their part to create prosperity for all. One Mobil “Observations” column in the Washington Post put it this way:

  Business, generally, is a good neighbor, and most communities recognize this fact.