Inventing Reality Read online

  The Post reporter accepted the unrealistic police estimate of the crowd at 25,000 (I write as a participant-observer of the event), making no mention of the 100,000 claimed by the march organizers. A counter-demonstration, counted by me at 100 to 110 people, was reported as 300 “clean-cut protesters” from “Rev. Moon’s Unification Church which is calling for US intervention in El Salvador to rid it of Russian and Cuban communist influence... .” (Here the Post accepted as established fact the Moonie charge that the Salvadorian revolutionaries were the puppets of Moscow and Havana. A less biased statement might have read: “to rid it of what the counter-demonstrators claim is Russian and Cuban influence.”) While the Moonies were only a tiny fraction of the people present, they and their concerns were accorded about one-fifth the story.

  At this same demonstration, speakers from a wide range of political groups made statements about US policies at home and abroad, yet nothing about these speeches appeared in the Post's rather lengthy article except for a few mocking lines describing one speaker’s plea for funds to pay the demonstration costs. Readers might easily have come away thinking they had exercised good sense in choosing not to participate in what must have been a rather inane, circus-like affair.

  The following are the methods used by the press to discredit leftist protests:

  Ignoring and Undercounting

  The press makes a regular practice of undercounting the size of demonstrations; “disparagement by numbers” is what one media critic calls it.19 The press regularly ignores the estimates offered by rally organizers and fails to make an independent estimate from the number of chartered buses, trains, and auto flow or from “grid” counting. Instead, reporters treat as accurate the “official” figures provided by generally unsympathetic police, while seldom raising a question about how they arrive at their estimates. However, on those rare occasions when a police count proves too favorable, the press is capable of conjuring a lower figure. Thus when the police reported that organized labor’s September 1981 protest march on Washington numbered 400,000, the Washington Post reported 260,000 and the New York Times put it at 240,000.20

  In 1991, hours before President Bush began his all-out air attack against Iraq, ABC did a brief report on domestic opposition to the impending war. All ABC’s Ted Koppel could find was a “small group” (his words) of people in Iowa and another in Berkeley, California, engaged in candlelight vigils.21 ABC ignored the large and dramatic demonstrations occurring that same day in the San Francisco Bay area in which 10,000 people shut down the federal building and 2,000 shut down the Bay Bridge, the latter action resulting in hundreds of arrests.

  A peace march in San Francisco on January 19, 1991, stretching from Dolores Park along the full width of Market Street all the way to Van Ness—about the length of ten or twelve football fields, easily 150,000 people—was reported by KRON-TV and CNN as 25,000.

  On January 26, 1991, peace advocates launched a massive march on Washington to protest President Bush’s Gulf war. Over a thousand buses filled to capacity with demonstrators from all over the Northeast, South, and Midwest rolled into the city. Tens of thousands of people came by car, Amtrak, and the Washington Metro. During the event itself, marchers tightly packed in broad uneven lines about sixty to seventy across, moving at a brisk pace, took about four hours to pass any given point. Organizers claimed 250,000. But the figure widely reported in the news was 75,000, provided by the unsympathetic Park Police. (It never would have taken four hours for 75,000 to march by.) Even worse were the early CNN reports, which noted that “organizers were hoping for 50,000 but they appear to be well short of that goal.”

  Large demonstrations against the US war in the Gulf took place throughout Europe and in Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. These also were ignored by the US media or mentioned only in passing with no counts given of the enormous outpouring. Much smaller anticommunist demonstrations the following week in Lithuania were accorded far more elaborate exposure, including long-range camera shots to show the crowd in its most impressive perspective— something that is almost never done for protest marches in the US.

  PROTESTS THAT MAKE A LOT OF NEWS

  One protest group was accorded unusually generous media coverage. Operation Rescue, an organization that supports compulsory pregnancy, blocked access to abortion clinics in Wichita, Kansas, during the month of August 1991, and engaged in a variety of intimidating and harassing acts designed to discourage pregnant women from getting abortions. The picket lines and arrests received saturation coverage in the mainstream media for several weeks, including daily stories that made the national wires and broadcast news, and special features on “Nightline” and other television and radio shows.

  While a majority of the public disapproved of the actions, the advocates of compulsory pregnancy were well satisfied. As one leader of Operation Rescue noted on NPR (August 30, 1991), the “civil disobedience” tactics had won the group new legitimacy and unparalleled national attention and had helped it recruit more activists than ever before.

  In fact, much of the credit should go to the media, who gave more attention and exposure to this one anti-abortion campaign in Kansas than they normally gave to prolonged antiwar campaigns across the entire nation—including ones involving civil disobedience and arrests.

  Favoritism for Rightist Demonstrators

  Generally, demonstrations at home and abroad get generous coverage only if they are directed against communist governments or support US government policy. The Polish “Solidarity Day” of 1982, a series of rallies in US cities in support of the anticommunist movement in Poland, was accorded prime-time publicity that began a week before the actual event took place. (Protest demonstrations get no pre-event publicity.) The actual turnout in support of Polish Solidarity was sparse, in most cities numbering only a few hundred. Yet the rallies were treated as major events, with front-page coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post and generous network television exposure. No mention was made of the disappointing sizes of the crowds.22

  Minimizing adjectives like “small” and “disappointing” are rarely if ever used to describe rallies that are anticommunist and supportive of US policy. Positive adjectives like “dedicated” and “massive” are hardly ever used to describe left protests, no matter how dedicated and massive they be.

  Large left protests can be dismissed as “disappointing.” Thus the huge Labor Day demonstration in New York in September 1981, estimated by marchers at 200,000 and by police at 100,000, was described in the Washington Post as a “disappointingly small crowd of less than 100,000 union workers.”23

  Various media conduits gave a few hundred counterdemonstrators at the January 26,1991, march in Washington only slightly less, the same, or sometimes more exposure than the vastly larger antiwar protest. NBC’s “Eye-Witness News” noted the event by doing a short special on the pro -war advocates. “As groups of [antiwar] protesters made their way across the Capital grounds,” said the announcer (a shot of scattered clusters, not the mass of marchers), “hundreds who supported the war gathered and marched down Constitution Avenue to LaFayette Park.” The rest of the footage focused exclusively on the pro-war advocates, including generous clips of their patriotic expressions and their criticisms of the antiwar protesters. None of the latter was heard from. The impression was that the pro-war rally composed of “hundreds” was more significant and maybe even larger than the “groups” that straggled across the Capital grounds. The hawks with their small numbers got all the exposure and all the sound bites. The doves with their hundreds of thousands could barely catch the eye of “Eyewitness News.”

  In San Francisco, a KRON-TV announcer summed up the massive demonstrations against the Gulf war that were taking place across the nation as follows: “The numbers of antiwar and pro-war protesters were about equal.”

  The “Desert Homecoming” victory parades in Washington and New York in June 1991, welcoming the troops home from the Gulf war, received week-long pre
-event promotional hype in the print and broadcast media and live full-day TV coverage. The turnout for the Washington parade was estimated by the sympathetic Park Police at 200,000, an exceedingly generous count judging from the great empty spaces on the mall and a sidewalk crowd along the route that was not usually more than two deep. Indeed, through most of the day, TV announcers noted that “thousands” had assembled, not “tens of thousands” and certainly not “hundreds of thousands.” Nevertheless, the 200,000 figure was soon dropped and by late afternoon “800,000” became the imaginary number heralded by the media.24

  The turnout for the “Desert Homecoming” victory parade in New York City a few days later was accorded the outlandish figure of 4.7 million by its promoters and the police. To achieve that number there would have to have been almost a quarter of a million people lining each of the twenty blocks of the route. Even the New York Times reporter noted that the count “appeared to be extravagant... . But it was in keeping with the hyperbole of the day.”25 So was the Times headline accompanying the story, which read in part: “MILLIONS ON BROADWAY ROAR A ‘WELL DONE’ TO GULF VETERANS.”

  Scanting of Content

  Almost never do the media give us the arguments and motives behind a protest demonstration, the reasons why so many thousands feel impelled to travel long distances to march for hours in the streets. The signs and slogans projected by the demonstrators are regularly ignored as are the speeches that deal with the grievances at hand. The event is depicted as something of a spectacle connected to little more than its own surface appearances and not as part of a democratic struggle over vital issues. Viewers might easily come away with the notion that the crowd is just a noisy bunch of malcontent or unpatriotic people, especially viewers who have been fed nothing but the official view of things.

  In fact, far from being an inchoate, mindless mass, antiwar demonstrations through their signs, slogans, chants, and speeches often reflect the passion and critical intelligence of informed people who care about what is happening in the world and in their own country. The media always seem to miss this story about the strength and vitality of democracy in the streets.

  Content is also scanted through single-issue reductionism. The indictments made against the policies that help foster poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, environmental devastation, capitalism, and imperialism are reduced to just one or two specific complaints by the press—for example, “end the war.” While the demonstrators are sometimes branded as extremists intent upon disrupting orderly society, the press reduces the truly radical content of their message to a minimal reformist demand.

  This dilution of the protest message can extend to characterizations about popular leaders. Thus the national media repeatedly tell us that Martin Luther King, Jr., was an outstanding civil rights leader but they fail to mention that he was also a strong critic of the American economic system, US foreign policy, and US militarism.26 King not only had a dream about racial brotherhood, he had something more dangerous than that—an analysis linking racism and poverty to class and power policies at home and abroad. So with Malcolm X, who is portrayed as a militant Black separatist but whose anti-imperialist ideas seem to have been forgotten. Not long after King and Malcolm began to link racial issues to class and economic conditions, they were assassinated.

  Trivialization and Marginalization

  As noted earlier in the discussion of the Washington Post's account of the May 1981 “March on the Pentagon,” the press regularly directs our attention to surface appearances and ignores the substance of the protest. In doing so, it is free to ascribe irrational and frivolous motives to the demonstrators, using selective details to make light of their dress, age, language, presumed lack of seriousness, and self-indulgent activities.27 The demonstrators are depicted as a deviant and unrepresentative sample of the American people, lacking in credible life-styles and therefore credible politics. “Social problem” or “crisis” no longer describes the wrongful conditions that provoke popular response. The popular response itself is now the crisis or the problem.

  Another way to marginalize a group is to portray it as violent and irrational, or linked to groups thought to be violent or in some way threatening. One TV announcer on January 18, 1991, dismissed the massive antiwar outpouring in San Francisco by saying “it has been discredited because of its violence.” The screen showed a police car burning and protesters throwing rocks at a building, then a woman who said she was very upset by the “violence.” As during the Vietnam War, so with the Gulf war, the media made no distinction between the massive violence perpetrated by US forces against an entire people and the relatively minor violence against property—except to treat the latter as a far more serious problem.

  In sum, the mass media are owned by large corporate conglomerates whose financial dominance gives them the means to control news content and limit the range of acceptable media opinion, injecting a bias against organized labor, antiwar protesters, socialists, environmentalists, feminists, ethnic minorities, Third World liberation struggles, and all progressive causes. If so, why do conservatives repeatedly complain about the media’s “liberal” bias? That question is treated in Chapter 13. 28

  The Media Fight the Red Menace

  Leftist governments and movements at home and abroad, who claim to support the have-nots as against the privileged and powerful, have been treated with a fairly persistent hostility by the US capitalist state and the national media.

  ENTER THE RED MENACE

  American anticommunist sentiment goes back to the nineteenth century when the press, joined by the pulpit, the politicians, the police, the professors, and the plutocracy itself, alerted the public to the dangers of syndicalism, socialism, anarchism, and communism—lumping all these radical tendencies together as one great danger to the American Way of Life.1 Any proposed departure from the capitalist social order was characterized as an end to all order and a descent into chaos, anarchy, and criminality. As early as 1880 Roscoe Conkling could hail President Ulysses Grant as an eternal foe of “communism, lawlessness and disorder.”2 Opposition to the privileged institutions of power and wealth was treated as opposition to America itself. Capitalism was called “free enterprise” and equated with true Americanism, while socialism was depicted as an alien virus infecting the American body politic.

  The mildest demands for change, the palest reforms on behalf of the disadvantaged, the most modest attempts by impoverished workers to improve wages and work conditions—all moves that would cut into the profits of owners—were denounced as communist-inspired. Labor struggles were portrayed as attacks on society itself. The great Pullman strike outside Chicago in 1894—in which 60,000 workers, led by Eugene V. Debs, ceased work along the Western railway lines in an orderly mass action—was greeted with shrieking headlines like “MOBS IN CONTROL OF CHICAGO” and “CHICAGO FACES FAMINE” and was dubbed the “Debs Rebellion.” At about that time, the New York Tribune “discovered” and alerted its readers to an “ANARCHIST PLOT TO BLOW UP THE CAPITAL.”3

  The propaganda war against the Red Menace intensified soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The specter of Bolshevism sent a shudder through the wealthy classes of the Western world. In 1919, a fourteen-nation expeditionary force, including British, French, and American troops, invaded the Soviet Union in what proved to be an unsuccessful campaign to overthrow the new Bolshevik government. The anti-Soviet campaign was quickly taken up by the press. Forgetful of who had invaded whom, the New York Times ran story after story about imminent Bolshevik invasions of Europe, Asia, and America, with headlines like “LENIN THREATENS INDIA” and “REDS SEEK WAR WITH AMERICA.”4

  As one historian describes it:

  Anti-Bolshevik testimony was played up in the columns of the nation’s newspapers and once again the reading public was fed on highly colored tales of free love, nationalization of women, bloody massacres, and brutal atrocities. Stories were circulated that the victims of the Bolshevik madmen customarily had been
roasted to death in furnaces, scalded with live steam, torn to pieces on racks, or hacked to bits with axes. Newspaper editors never tired of referring to the Russian Reds as “assassins and madmen,” “human scum,” “crime-mad,” and “beasts.” Russia was a place, some said, where maniacs stalked raving through the streets, and the populace fought with dogs for carrion.5

  During this same period, strikes swept the major industries of the United States. In the autumn of 1919 two million workers walked off their jobs, including 500,000 coal miners and 350,000 steelworkers. Immediately the press began to link worker unrest at home to the “Soviet menace” abroad with sensational headlines like “RED PERIL HERE,” “PLAN BLOODY REVOLUTION,” and “WANT WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT OVERTURNED.”6 A special Justice Department publicity bureau was set up to plant stories in newspapers about a Moscow-directed plot to overthrow the US government, issuing press releases with such headings as “U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE URGES AMERICANS TO GUARD AGAINST BOLSHEVIK MENACE” and “PRESS, CHURCH, SCHOOLS, LABOR UNIONS AND CIVIC BODIES CALLED UPON TO TEACH TRUE PURPOSE OF COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA.”7

  On January 2, 1920, under the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Justice Department, assisted by state and local police, conducted raids in twenty cities, arresting thousands of leftists, including many trade union militants. The New York Times hailed the “Palmer raids” with this headline: “REDS PLOTTED COUNTRYWIDE STRIKE—ARRESTS EXCEED 5,000—2,635 HELD.” The Times also ran an editorial that heaped praise on the government’s action and promised that the raids were “only the beginning” in the war against communism.8 The American public was bombarded with lurid press stories of an impending Red takeover. In truth, “the nightmare was not revolution but reaction, and it was real: the job had been done. Under the pressure of the combined forces of industry, government, and press, the major strikes had been broken, wages driven down, the open shop restored and the ranks of the unions decimated.”9