Inventing Reality Read online

  From time to time, out of political motivations or for reasons of radical chic, individuals may try to chill the business climate. On such occasions we try to set the record straight. ...

  So when it comes to the business climate, we’re glad that most people recognize there’s little need to tinker with the American system.7

  A prime-time television commercial, shown repeatedly in 1981, offered footage of a skier going down a mountain slope, as a deep, male, off-screen voice said:

  Freedom. We Americans have the freedom to choose. The freedom to take risks [skier leaps over a precipitous embankment}. The freedom to succeed [skier makes a skillful maneuver] and the freedom to fail [skier takes a mild spill into the powdery snow}. When government comes into our lives, things change. When people look to government for protection, they get protection but they lose some of their precious freedom [skier at the end of the trail, head bowed, moving along slowly, dragging his poles behind him].

  Just something to think about from the people at Getty.

  Business as a providential social force was the theme of a full page ad by Conoco Inc. in the Christian Science Monitor. It read:

  WHAT WILL CAPITAL BE DOING ON LABOR DAY?

  Working.

  Building new plants. Starting new businesses. Funding innovation and growth. Developing more energy to fuel the economy.

  Part of the capital that creates jobs comes from the earnings of American industry... .

  Throughout the economy, stronger earnings can provide the capital to create more and better jobs. So as we celebrate Labor Day, let’s not forget capital.

  It works, too.8

  American readers are not likely to be treated to an alternative view. No newspaper would run an advertisement pointing out that capital cannot build an industry, plant, or commodity without labor, and that when labor takes off, nothing is produced. Capital is the surplus value created by labor. “Putting one’s money to work” means mixing it with labor to create more capital. Purely on its own, without labor, capital is incapable of building a woodshed, let alone “new plants.” But the message we get is that capital creates, rather than is created.

  Business is also depicted as society’s Grand Protector. Defense companies spend millions in weeklies like Time and Newsweek and in the major newspapers to advertise their accomplishments in weaponry and to assure the reader that America’s defenses are growing stronger thanks to the military hardware produced by this or that contractor.9

  The murderous war waged by President Bush against a vastly weaker Iraq in 1991 was proudly hailed by defense corporations as an accomplishment of modern weaponry. In the afterglow of easy victory, Grumman ran a commercial on television (May 1991) that crowed: “A superior defense technology will reduce the risk to American military personnel... . And we have that technology.” Other military contractors ran ads thanking Bush for his supposedly superb leadership and the troops for their courage and devotion.10 The nuclear industry got in on the Gulf war by repeatedly running a TV commercial in the winter and early spring of 1991 with an off-screen voice that said:

  We rely on over 40 percent of our oil from overseas sources [quick shots of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar Qadafi, Middle East crowds demonstrating angrily, a raised arm waving an AK-47]. Which do you prefer? Nuclear energy or relying on unstable sources. [an up-close shot of Saddam Hussein], Nuclear Energy: You can count on it.

  Throughout the cold war, the defense contractors ran ads that contradictorily conveyed both alarmist and reassuring messages, in effect, saying: (1) The Soviet military has achieved superiority and is ever more fearsome and threatening; and (2) the United States has the best defense system in the world thanks to the devoted and patriotic efforts of corporate defense contractors.

  Cold war or no cold war, what the defense firms sell to the public is an ideology of American globalism, the need to continue spending hundreds of billions of dollars on weaponry in order to maintain a global military machine. The arms merchants invoke the menacing images of demonized foreign adversaries, then promise security through strength, assuring us that we can live safely as long as we don’t skimp on military spending.

  In regard to their own doings, defense contractors present benign facades: “Where science gets down to business,” says Rockwell, whose business is making the plutonium triggers for atomic warheads. “We bring good things to life,” says General Electric, who made such good things as the neutron generators that activate thermonuclear devices. “We’ll show you a better way,” says Honeywell, whose electronic components show nuclear missiles a better way to targets.11 “A leading manufacturer of fine products for America and the Free World” is how General Dynamics, a weapons producer, describes itself.

  Another area targeted by corporate propaganda is environmentalism. Industry has responded to the surge in ecological consciousness by spending millions of dollars in a campaign designed to convince the public that business has been caring for the environment. At the same time, the big corporations spent next to nothing on actual conservation and pollution controls. Were one to judge strictly from the ads, however, business does everything it can to protect the environment from industrial effusion and chemical toxins. An ad by Chemical Manufacturer’s Association shows an attractive woman being hugged by a smiling little girl. The woman is saying: “My job is managing chemical industry wastes. What I do helps make the environment safer today—and for generations to come.”12 Of the many similar ads that have appeared regularly on television and in various newspapers and news magazines, none alters the truth that private industry has a long and dreadful record of poisoning the environment with toxic waste.

  While big business spends lavishly to get its propaganda before large audiences, public interest groups, labor unions, and dissident organizations seldom gain access to mass media advertising, mostly for lack of the huge sums needed to buy television time and print space. As of 1991 a full-page “cause and appeal” ad in the weekday Washington Post cost $41,065 for one day, and in the Neiv York Times, $47,124— and both papers charge substantially more for Sunday.

  On the infrequent occasions when dissident groups muster enough money to buy broadcasting time or newspaper space, they still may be denied access to the media. Liberal-minded commentators have been refused radio shows even when they had sponsors who would pay. Scientists, politicians, celebrities, and political activists who have opposed the arms buildup, the threat of nuclear war, or US-supported military repression in Central America have been denied time spots and news space for their ads by the major networks and their affiliates and by major publications. A New York Times executive turned down one peace ad because he judged it not in the “best interests of the country.”13 Broadcasters and publishers can run any political commercial they want, no matter how emotionally raw and derogatory. And they can refuse to run any political message for any reason, or no reason at all, regardless of how factually accurate or important it might be.

  PUBLIC SERVICE FOR PRIVATE INTERESTS

  Not all air time is given to commercial gain. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires broadcasters to set time aside for “public service announcements.” The obligation is a vague one; the FCC has never denied any station its license for failing to live up to it, despite complaints from community and public interest groups. About 3 percent of air time, worth more than a billion dollars annually, is given to public service announcements. This free time, like the millions of dollars worth of free space donated by newspapers and magazines, is monopolized by the Advertising Council, a nonprofit corporation funded and directed by corporations, bankers, and network officials. Its board of directors reads like a who’s who of big business, with representatives from such major advertisers as Procter & Gamble, General Motors, General Mills, General Electric, and General Foods. A subcommittee of the Advertising Council, the Industries Advisory Committee (at one count composed of twenty-eight bankers and fifty-four major corporate executives), sets the ideological t
one for all advertising campaigns. No public interest groups are represented on the Council’s board.14

  The Advertising Council is the second largest advertiser in the world (behind Procter & Gamble). Since its formation in 1941, it has used more than $10 billion worth of free “public service” advertising donated by radio, television, newspapers, and magazines. While supposedly nonpartisan and nonpolitical, the Council’s public service commercials laud the blessings of free enterprise and urge viewers to buy US Savings Bonds. The ads tell us that business is “doing its job” in hiring the handicapped, veterans, minorities, and the poor—when in fact, business makes little voluntary effort on behalf of such groups. Workers are exhorted to take pride in their work and produce more for their employers, but nothing is said about employers paying more to their workers.

  Council ads offer cosmetic solutions to serious social problems, thereby trivializing the nature of the problems. Unemployment? It can be reduced with “better job training.” Crime? Lock your car after parking it and secure your front door. Hazardous and costly automobile transportation? Fasten your safety belts. Ecology and conservation? Do not litter. The Council’s slogan is “People start pollution, and people can stop it.” The ads blame pollution on everyone in general—thus avoiding placing any blame on industry in particular. The Council’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of 1983 was coordinated by the public relations director of Union Carbide, a chemical manufacturer and a major polluter.

  Throughout the Council’s diverse range of messages runs one underlying theme: Personal charity, individual effort, and neighborly good-will can solve any mess. Collectivist, class-oriented, political actions and governmental regulations are not needed in a land of self-reliant volunteers. The goal is to change individual behavior, not social conditions.

  With funds from the US Department of Commerce, the Advertising Council has launched campaigns—in the words of Commerce Secretary Frederick Dente—“to improve public understanding of our American economic system.”15 Along with television and radio ads, some 13 million booklets were distributed to schools, work places, and communities and reprinted in newspapers across the nation. These publications hailed the blessings of the private enterprise system, treating it as a mainstay of freedom and the source of unprecedented prosperity and progress. The booklets did take note of a few problems, one of them being inflation—whose primary cause was government regulation. The suggested solution was to keep the lid on wages and prices and roll back regulation. Here was corporate advocacy and propaganda disguised as education.

  The Advertising Council’s campaign seemed to have its intended effect on public opinion. From the 1970s to the 1980s, opinion polls showed a marked increase—from 22 to 60 percent—of those who thought there was too much government regulation.16 By the 1980 presidential campaign, “deregulation” became a widespread, ready-made theme utilized to advantage by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

  Those who wish to make occupational safety, unemployment, monopoly profits, and environmental protection the central issues of popular debate have no way of reaching mass audiences. The public-service air time that could be utilized by environmentalists, labor, consumer advocates, and other public interest groups has been preempted by a business-dominated Advertising Council that passes off its one-sided, ideological ads as noncontroversial and nonpolitical. One liberal member of Congress complained that the Council and the networks had corrupted the original intent of public service time by turning it into free media time for favored interests. “The Ad Council is a propagandist for business and government, and with staggering control of the media, it not only makes sure its own side of the story is told, but that the other side isn’t. The public has no meaningful access to the media.”17

  EVEN SPORTS AND WEATHER

  Not only news and advertising but even such seemingly neutral components of the media as sports and weather are part of the big sell. Elsewhere 1 have shown how media sports coverage is permeated with political bias.18 Suffice it to say here that whether it is network coverage of the Olympics or the hoopla that surrounds football games and professional wrestling, media sports propagate the virtues of nation-state chauvinism and militarism.

  We might recall how the Gulf war of 1991 was used as an occasion to inject militaristic hype into media sporting events. The televised NFL conference championship game between the Buffalo Bills and the L.A. Raiders began with Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel in parade dress uniform, carrying flags down the field as the crowd, bedecked in yellow ribbons, chanted “USA! USA!” The 1991 Superbowl football game on ABC seemed like a feature-length promo for the war, replete with a gigantic patriotic pageant, a stadium crowd waving flags and singing patriotic songs, and a taped appearance by President and Mrs. Bush. At half-time, Peter Jennings came on with an upbeat update on the destruction of Iraq.

  In the UCLA-Arizona basketball game (February 11, 1991), both teams had American flags sewn on their uniforms, as the announcer pointed out, “in support of our efforts in the Gulf”; so did just about every other basketball team in the country.

  The National Football League, in a joint venture with the Department of Defense, even saw fit to sponsor a sixty-minute documentary on “Operation Desert Storm.” Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films, put it this way:

  I don’t want to say that war is the same as football. But ... [the military] likes the way we have presented and mythologized pro football. The same spirit and ideology that football glorifies and inspires—discipline, devotion, commitment to a cause, unselfishness, leadership—is also the spirit necessary for a successful military endeavor... . You heard references to football throughout the war. President Bush even called it his Super Bowl.19

  Indeed, military personnel made the Gulf war sound more like a football game than a one-sided mass slaughter. To offer only a few of many examples: On January 17, 1991, a high-ranking officer observed on NBC: “Our team has carried out its game plan beautifully.” A few days later CBS interviewed a pilot who said: “We ran our first play; it worked great. We scored a touchdown.” When the ground war began, one infantryman exclaimed: “It’s kickoff time.” A US general explained the war s outcome: “You had a high school team playing in the Superbowl against the New York Giants and they got their ass whipped.”20

  While a case can be made readily enough about sports coverage, what complaints can possibly be registered against weather reports? The media’s greatest method of distortion is omission. We are misled not only by what is reported, but even more by what is left unsaid. There are catastrophic things happening with the weather, specifically ozone depletion and global warming. Some 2.6 billion pounds of ozone-depleting chemicals are emitted into the air every year. Some of the biggest polluters are military-industrial contractors who are also among the biggest TV advertisers. One of them, General Electric, owns NBC. Damage to the earth’s protective ozone layer causes skin cancer, cataracts, crop damage, and climatic aberrations.

  In addition, auto exhaust and other fossil fuel emissions act like a blanket to create and trap heat close to the earth’s surface, causing global warming. The six warmest years ever recorded were over the last decade, the warmest on record being 1990. We have discovered that the earth’s capacity to absorb heat from energy consumption is limited. We face an ecological crisis whose momentous dimensions we are just beginning to grasp. One effect of global warming is drought—from California to Vermont to Russia to New Zealand. Unless reversed, drought leads to starvation, as Africa is the first to know.21

  When the evening news tells us “what’s happening with the weather,” these catastrophic developments are not mentioned. “Weather” is defined in a limited way: cloudy and clear, cold and warm. The weather is reported the ways politics is reported: isolated daily particulars unconnected to the larger structural forces that help create them.

  Worse still, the ill effects of global warming and ozone depletion are actually celebrated by TV weather people, who opera
te by an unwritten code: sunny and warm are good, rainy and cold are bad. Weathercasters in various locales get absolutely rhapsodic over the strangely mild winters we have been having in recent years. They exult over the “beautiful spring fever weather” that now seems to come in January. We are told to “get out there today and catch some of these lovely rays.” Not a word about watching out for skin cancer. Not a worry about drought.

  Conversely, they frown when temperatures drop and January resembles January. We are told “the outlook is not good” when ram “threatens.” Another winter with very little snow? “That’s good news,” said one announcer in Washington, D.C., good for all of us except “you skiing fans.” Forget that snow is a major source of our water supply, that it shields the topsoil from the sun, helping it to retain its moisture. Forget that the scarcity of snow is making it increasingly difficult for forests in northern climes to renew themselves.

  In California, where a six-year drought threatens to devastate agribusiness, there is at least some belated awareness among weather reporters that endlessly sunny days are not good news. But even there, the reportage is misleadingly upbeat. Thus the rain that finally came to North California in early 1991 was cheerfully greeted as raising reservoir levels, with no acknowledgment of how dangerously insufficient such levels remain.

  On rare occasions, the threat of environmental catastrophe is obliquely acknowledged only to be denied. Thus TV weathercasters,

  who usually never mention global warming, were quick to assert that the record-breaking high temperatures for May 1991 in our nation’s capital were not an indication of global warming, since other parts of the country had been cooler than usual that same month and it all averaged out.

  During an ABC weather report in Washington, D.C. (August 5, 1991), an announcer asked if the increasing number of days with temperatures over 90 degrees was indicative of global warming. The weathercaster replied: “The record is too short. You’ve got to look over hundreds of years to get a perspective.”