Inventing Reality Read online

  Reagan was immediately criticized by members of Congress, peace activists, and segments of the press for resorting to McCarthyite smear tactics to discredit the peace movement. An extensive investigation by a congressional committee concluded that there was “no evidence that the Soviets direct, manage or manipulate the nuclear freeze movement.”6

  The absence of evidence did not prevent some elements of the national media from joining in the red-baiting. On the eve of the antinuclear weapons demonstration that brought a million people to New York on June 12, 1982, the Wall Street Journal ran a major article attempting to link the US peace movement to the Soviet KGB. New York Times columnist Flora Lewis, without benefit of any evidence, concluded: “No doubt the KGB has a vast masterful network to spread disinformation among us.”7 In July the Times ran a three-part series alleging that the KGB had infiltrated the European peace movement. An anonymous “American intelligence specialist” was quoted as saying, “The question then will be how hard the KGB pushes. We know it has catalogues of shouters, marchers, street fighters, bomb throwers and killers it could turn loose.”8 This fantasy about agitator-killer “catalogues,” from an unidentified source, was treated by the Times as news that was fit to print.

  Both the left and right try to extend their influence into the political mainstream. The left, by mobilizing large numbers of people, hopes to gain greater visibility, win more adherents, and create a ground swell for social change. The right usually does not have that kind of popular support for its political agenda, there being no mass of people out on the streets demanding still more funds for the Pentagon, still more favorable banking laws for Chase Manhattan or wider tax loopholes for Exxon, no elderly agitating for cuts in medical care, no workers demonstrating for higher corporate profits and wage slashes. So the right attempts to channel popular grievances into noneconomic issues such as busing, school prayers, pornography, and abortion, issues that might cut into the support of progressive causes and candidates while strengthening conservative ones.

  The right is not seeking changes of a kind that burden or threaten the interests of the dominant corporate class. If anything, it advocates a view of the world that wealthy media owners look upon with genuine sympathy, unlike the view offered by left protesters. The centrist media is, in a word, more receptive to the right than to the left because its owners and corporate heads share the right’s basic feelings about free enterprise, capitalism, communism, labor unions, popular protest, and US global supremacy, even if not always seeing eye-to-eye with it on specific policies and certain cultural issues. In addition, the right has the money to buy media exposure and the left usually does not.

  The right influences the mass media by generating rightist themes in its ultra-conservative publications and then working these into the communication mainstream. The rise of the “KGB menace” in America provides an example of how the right feeds into the center. The first time I heard of this updated version of the Red Menace was when the conservative columnist M. Stanton-Evans, whom I happened to be debating at a college campus in 1980, announced that “KGB agents had infiltrated our American institutions” and were “walking the streets of our nation’s capital.” The claim brought skeptical smiles to faces in the audience, so outlandish did it sound. First germinating on the far-right fringe, then repeated again and again by right-wing propagandists like Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, the KGB charge began to slowly seep into the center. Through the process of repetition and dissemination it began to sound less outlandish. William Preston and Ellen Ray provide a good summary of how a determined right feeds a receptive center:

  A theme which is floated on one level—a feature item on VOA about Cuba for example—will appear within record time as a lead article in Reader’s Digest, or a feature in a Heritage Foundation report, or a series of “exposes” by Moss and de Borchgrave or Daniel James in some reactionary tabloid like Human Events or the Washington Times or Inquirer. Then they will all be called to testify by Senator Denton’s Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, repeating one another’s allegations as “expert witnesses.” After that they are given credibility by the “respectable” Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they are given the opportunity to write Op-Ed pieces for the New York Times or the Washington Post.9

  Not only are they given the opportunity to write guest pieces, but as we have already observed in the case of the KGB bogey, regular mainstream columnists like Flora Lewis begin referring to the KGB’s “vast masterful network to spread disinformation among us.”

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the right injected its message into a receptive center once again when it launched a campaign to purge academia of critical left viewpoints. For decades, left dissidents have criticized the university’s complicity with the corporate-military establishment, the class and income barriers to higher education, the racism and sexism of many university practices and curricula, the flow of foundation money that goes to system-supporting rather than system-changing research, the ideological orthodoxy of mainstream social science, and the politically repressive hiring and firing practices that have purged hundreds of left academics from faculty staffs. These criticisms of academia seldom if ever saw the light of day in the national media.

  In contrast, attacks launched by the right against the “politically correct” thought control, supposedly imposed by “multiculturalists,” feminists, radical homosexuals, and Marxists in academia, received an attentive response from the mainstream media. The rightist attack against the “new McCarthyites” was accorded cover stories in Newsweek, the New Republic, the Atlantic, and New York, and articles, interviews, and commentaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers.10 The received opinion is that academia is populated by left ideologues who push their “politically correct” line and tolerate no alternative views. In fact, the traditional White-male Western-capitalist perspective still dominates most academic departments and curriculums. But one would never know it from the flood of articles written by conservative White males. Under the guise of McCarthyism, the conservatives sought to impose a McCarthyite ideological conformism on the relatively few areas of diverse opinions that exist in academia. In that struggle, the media heavily favored the attackers over the attacked.

  POPULIST ELECTORATE, CONSERVATIVE OUTCOME

  By the 1988 election, the visible political climate created by government and media had shifted enough to the right so that Republican presidential candidate George Bush did not find it necessary to red-bait his liberal opponent Democrat Michael Dukakis. It was enough to liberal-bait him. Bush promised to be the “environment president,” the “education president,” and the “no-more-taxes president,” but said nothing of substance about any of those matters. Indeed, he refused to discuss issues during the campaign. He also misrepresented Dukakis’s position at every opportunity and generally ran one of the dirtiest campaigns in modern times—made all the more effective by the national media’s faithful and uncritical coverage. Thus in the notorious Willie Horton TV ads, Bush implied that Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, was soft on crime and was to blame for an overly permissive prisoner furlough program in his state—even though the program had been installed by the previous governor, a Republican, and was no more liberal than the federal program under which Bush served as vice president. Bush blamed Dukakis for the terrible pollution in Boston harbor even though the harbor was under federal jurisdiction and was the responsibility of the Reagan-Bush administration.

  WHEN POLLS AREN’T LIT TO PRINT

  In 1980 when a Harris poll showed that most Americans (including persons who had voted for Reagan that year) were diametrically opposed to the conservative views of right-wing groups like the Moral Majority, the media suppressed the results as unnewsworthy. The Harris poll is distributed to 200 newspapers across the nation, but this
particular poll appeared only in the Boston Herald American (December 5, 1980). When questioned about this, Carmen Hudson of Louis Harris Associates could give no explanation as to why material about such a topical issue had not been picked up by the national media.

  Based on Robert Dobrow, “Media ignores poll refuting right-wing claims" Workers World, January 2, 1981.

  For his part, Dukakis proved to be one of the more ineffectual and insipid candidates ever to run for president. His media delivery was wooden and lacking in content. He showed himself lacking any instinct for the jugular and incapable of countering Bush’s misrepresentations. Rather than proudly pointing to the historic liberal achievements of his party, he defensively shrank from being called a liberal and begged that there be no “labeling.” He and his Massachusetts staff repeatedly mismanaged the campaign, often succeeding in alienating Democratic organizations in other states. He ran television campaign ads that lacked clarity and punch. And he spent most of his time making banal assertions about his leadership qualities.

  Beginning the campaign with an eighteen-point lead in opinion polls, Dukakis had the advantage of an electorate that seemed ready for change after eight years of Reaganism. But within a short time he managed to fall well behind Bush in the polls. Only in the last two weeks did he belatedly introduce a populist spirit by advocating more equitable domestic programs and denouncing the privileges and powers of wealthy interests. These appeals began to rouse voters, but too little too late. Bush overwhelmingly defeated Dukakis.

  Overlooking the public’s belated populist responses, the exceptional ineffectuality of the Democratic candidate, and the lack of enthusiasm for both candidates that brought a record-low voter turnout, the press concluded that Bush's victory signaled yet another swing toward conservatism. While the media saw only conservative moods, an opinion poll in 1991 found people agreeing by an 84 to 13 percent margin that “in recent years the rich have been getting richer, and it’s been harder for middle income and working families to get by.” The polls showed majorities favoring national health care, more environmental protection, more occupational safety, and strong anti-recessionary action by government.11

  PUNDITS TO THE RIGHT

  One of the crucial factors controlling the limits of political awareness in the media is the growing number of conservative editorialists, columnists, TV commentators, and radio talk-show hosts who tell us what to think about the news. A rightist perspective dominates TV political talk shows like NBC’s “McLaughlin Group,” PBS’s “One on One” (with McLaughlin as host), CNBC’s “McLaughlin Show” (with guess who), William Buckley’s “Firing Line,” CNN’s “Evans and Novak” and “Capital Gang” (both featuring conservative newspaper columnist Robert Novak as host), ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley,” and PBS’s “American Interests.”

  The range of opinion on these shows and in the opinion columns of newspapers varies from far right to moderate centrist. In a display of false balancing, the right as represented by Robert Novak, William Buckley, John McLaughlin, George Will, and Pat Buchanan is pitted against the “left” as dubiously represented by Michael Kinsley, Sam Donaldson, and Mark Shields. The trouble is, these latter are mostly centrists with no real linkage to left causes and no left analysis, in contrast to the militant, right-wing ideologues they face. The “leftliberal” Kinsley has even written columns praising Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and defending the South African government’s resistance to one person, one vote. Donaldson has asserted that “Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet system is a terrorist system,” and has described Daniel Ortega as “the Nicaraguan dictator.”12 A genuinely left progressive analysis of US foreign and domestic policy is not to be found in mainstream commentary.

  Often the “debate” is between two conservative positions, as when, on CNN’s “Op-Ed Commentary,” conservative Morton Kondracke praised the Bush administration’s foreign policy while conservative Fred Barnes attacked the White House for not being tough enough, or as on “American Interests,” when a Reagan cabinet member, Weinberger, was paired with a Bush cabinet member, Mossbacher.13

  A CONSERVATIVE GLUT IN THE MEDIA, SAYS CONSERVATIVE

  The conservative Adam Meyerson, editor of the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, admitted that commentary in the “liberal media” is actually dominated by conservative columnists: “Journalism today is very different from what it was ten or twenty years ago. Today op-ed pages are dominated by conservatives... . We have a tremendous amount of conservative opinion, but this creates a problem for those who are interested in a career in journalism after college. ... If Bill Buckley were to come out of Yale today, nobody would pay much attention to him. He would not be that unusual ... because there are probably hundreds of people with those ideas [and] they have already got syndicated columns.” Extra! May/June 1989, p. IS.

  Despite all this, conservative media-watch groups like Accuracy in Media (AIM) continue to attack the press for being too liberal: that is, for not being as completely right-wing as AIM would want. AIM’s Reed Irvine has a weekly column that circulates in some hundred newspapers and a daily radio commentary that plays on seventy stations.14 Leftist and other progressives cannot hope for anything resembling that kind of exposure. Yet Irvine continues to charge that left views are heavily favored in the media.

  Scores of other right-wingers dominate the talk-radio circuits, including such political Neanderthals as Rush Limbaugh who reaches 1.3 million listeners on more than 340 affiliated radio stations. Limbaugh attacks “commie-libs,” “femiNazis,” “liberal Democrats,” “gays,” and other unpatriotic traitors who might utter a good word about labor unions or gun control or a critical word about the socio-economic status quo. Then there is Bob Grant whose right-wing and anti-ethnic comments, coming out of the greater New York area on WABC radio, reach late-night audiences across most of the land east of the Mississippi.15

  Right-wing organizations and media-watch groups like AIM are able to draw from affluent sources like the multimillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife (who has donated over $100 million to conservative causes in recent years), New York investment banker Shelby Cullom Davis, Richard Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, and multimillionaire Walter Annenberg. The John Olin Foundation gives over $5 million a year to right-wing causes.16 Big corporations like Du Pont and GE give millions more.

  The conservative Christian Broadcast Network brings in an annual $22 million from members around the country. Right-wing fundamentalist broadcasting is a $2-billion-a-year industry, controlling more than 1,000 full-time radio stations and more than 200 full-time TV stations, or about 10 percent of all radio and 14 percent of all television in the nation.17 There is also a Christian left in the United States composed of persons who advocate social reform at home, aid to the poor and homeless, and an end to US militarism and armed interventions in the Third World. But they lack the financial backing needed to give them any substantial access to media.

  HOW TO DISCREDIT PROTESTORS

  On those infrequent occasions the national media report popular protests, the coverage is usually scant and slighting. The Washington Post coverage of the May 1981 “March on the Pentagon” can serve as a case study of how the supposedly liberal press treats protests on the left.18 Buried in Section C along with local news and obituaries, the story, written by Mike Sager, seems more concerned with trivializing the protesters than with telling us anything about the content of their protests, about why they were out there in the first place:

  They marched carrying banners for their causes while licking ice-cream bars and taking pictures of each other with complicated camera gear... . Yesterday’s minions carried a few placards and repeated a few chants, but some also took time to eat picnic lunches, smoke marijuana, drink beer and work on their tans.

  (A “minion,” according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, is “a term of contempt” describing “a servile follower.”)

  Two fairly large photographs accompanying the story sho
w no one sunbathing or consuming picnic lunches, marijuana, beer, or ice cream.

  And the photos reveal not “a few placards” but what must be hundreds of placards and banners. To be sure, some of the participants may well have paused to refresh themselves—in a demonstration that continued for some seven hours under the hot sun. What might be questioned is why the Post writer treated these minor activities as central to the event, thereby suggesting a frivolous atmosphere that denies the protesters the seriousness of their concerns.

  We read that the demonstrators varied “from long-haired hippie hold-outs with painted faces to L.L. Bean—clad outdoorsmen to health-conscious joggers who had stopped by to witness the spectacle... . The demonstration took on a flea market atmosphere—something for everyone.” It was a “hodge-podge collection.” Even the headline proclaimed: “25,000 PROTESTERS MARCH FOR MIXED CAUSES.” The Post story assumed there was an incongruous mix of issues, when in fact the demonstration sought to link a range of domestic and foreign policies and make common cause against the government. Such linkage is easily misunderstood by a press that treats political issues as isolated, unrelated events.