Inventing Reality Page 4
FIXING THE RULES OF THE GAME
To insure impartiality on the public airwaves, Section 315 of the Communications Act requires stations to give equal time to legally qualified candidates if air time is granted to any one candidate. In 1959 this “equal time doctrine” was amended so as not to apply to coverage of “bona fide” news events, including on-the-spot interviews, documentaries, campaign appearances, political party conventions, and by the 1960s, debates between major candidates sponsored by organizations other than the media. In effect, broadcast media can give almost any kind of coverage to major candidates without putting themselves under an obligation to other candidates. Meanwhile, the print media are completely free to suppress news about independent and third-party candidates since they do not use the public airwaves and need no public license. To require them to give exposure to differing views has been judged an interference with their “freedom of speech.” The idea has not taken hold that newspapers are presumably performing a public information service important for the functioning of democracy and therefore should be under an obligation to the public to give some limited space to opinions other than those dictated by the prejudices of their owners and editors.
The press’s bias against candidates—especially progressive ones— who lack the imprimatur of the two major parties was demonstrated when it ignored the most dramatic race in the 1990 congressional elections. Running for Congress in Vermont as an independent with openly socialist leanings, Bernard Sanders won a landslide victory against a Republican incumbent. (Since Vermont has only one member in the US House of Representatives, Sanders’s election was a statewide victory.) Despite its dramatic aspects, the national media gave the campaign little notice before election day (in contrast to the rather uncritical saturation coverage accorded Klan-Nazi leader David Duke whenever he has campaigned for state or national office. Casting a belated glance at Sanders’s accomplishment in its post-election wrap-up, the New York Times tried to explain away his victory by noting that he “toned down his Marxist slogans” and ran an anti-incumbent campaign. The Times rarely describes Republican or Democratic campaign positions as “slogans”; they are more respectfully termed “stands” or “positions.”42 Actually, Sanders did not make incumbency the issue and did not “tone down” anything. He conducted a strongly progressive campaign calling for higher taxes for the rich, national health insurance, a stronger environmental policy, a curbing of the power of multinational corporations, and an end to military interventions abroad.
DO THE MEDIA MANAGE OUR MINDS?
The news may be manipulated by the media, but does that mean we are manipulated by the news? If it turns out that the press exercises only an inconsequential influence, then we are dealing with a tempest in a teapot and are being unduly alarmist about “mind management.”
Early studies of the media’s impact on voting choices found that people seemed surprisingly immune to media manipulation. Campaign propaganda usually reinforced the public’s preferences rather than altered them. People exposed themselves to media appeals in a selective way, giving more attention and credence to messages that bolstered their own views. Their opinion and information intake was influenced by forces other than the media, things like family, school, peer groups, work place, and community. The individual did not stand without a buffer against media impact. The press, it was concluded, had only a “minimal effect.”43
At first glance these findings are reassuring. People seem fairly selfdirected in their responses to the media and do not allow themselves to be mindlessly led. Democracy is safe. But troublesome questions remain. If through “selective exposure” we utilize the media mainly to reinforce our established predispositions, where do the predispositions themselves come from? In part, they come from the media. Furthermore, even the various other socializing agencies such as family and school are not immune to the climate of opinion created by the media. Thus at least some of our internalized political predilections derive from the dominant political culture that the press has a hand in shaping—and from earlier direct media exposure.
Because of previous media exposure, we are likely to resist opinions that depart too far from the conventional mainstream view. In such situations, our “self-directed selectivity” is designed to avoid information that contradicts the dominant viewpoint. If much of our information and opinion intake is filtered through our previously established mental predispositions, these predispositions are often not part of our conscious discernment but of our unexamined conditioning. Thus, rather than being rational guardians against propaganda, our mind-sets, having been shaped by prolonged exposure to that very same propaganda, may be active accomplices.
Furthermore, there are many things about which we may not have a predetermined opinion. Lacking any competing information, we often unwarily embrace what we read or hear. In those instances, the media are not merely reinforcing previously held opinions, they are implanting new ones, although these implants themselves seldom fall upon tabula rasa brains and usually do not conflict too drastically with established biases.
While people may not always be happy with what is in the news, they tend to believe what they hear or read. Surveys indicate that the media enjoy a widespread credibility among the public. One Gallup poll found that, far from being critically skeptical of news sources, respondents gave the major print and broadcast media high marks of 80 to 87 percent for believability.44
Recent evidence suggests that, contrary to the earlier “minimal effect” theory, the news media are able to direct our attention to certain issues and shape our opinions about them. One study found that persons exposed to a steady stream of news about defense or pollution came to believe that these topics were more important problems than previously thought.45 Other studies discovered that fluctuations in public concern for problems like civil rights, the Vietnam War, crime, and inflation over recent decades reflected variations in the attention paid to them by the major media.46
As with issues, so with candidates. We noted earlier that the inability to win press coverage consigns third-party candidates to the dim periphery of American politics. The power to ignore political viewpoints beyond the standard two-party fare is more than minimal, it is monumental. Media exposure frequently may be the single most crucial mobilizer of votes, even if not the only one.
One study found that the more people watched television news during the Gulf crisis of 1990-91, the more likely they were to support the US war effort—but the less they knew about the underlying issues. In other words, network news bolstered support for President Bush’s policy of war but was not a factor in informing people. The heavy viewers were poorly informed about things that were part of the public record, but had been given little or no airing. The great majority of the viewers did not know that Kuwait had been slant drilling into Iraqi oil reserves. Less than a third knew that Israel and Syria also occupied territory in the Middle East. Only 13 percent knew that the US had misleadingly told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 that it was neutral regarding Iraq’s dispute with Kuwait. But these viewers were well informed about the few facts that the news gave them. Thus 81 percent knew that “Patriot” missiles were used to shoot down Iraqi “Scuds.” And most of them believed that Iraq had gassed the Kurds. Thus they were not completely uninformed, only selectively and poorly informed.47
The press can effectively direct our perceptions when we have little information to the contrary and when the message seems congruent with earlier notions about events—notions that themselves may be partly media created. In this way the new information is a reinforcement of earlier perceptions. For example, while most Americans had never heard of Saddam Hussein before July 1990, they were prepared to fear and hate him on the basis of what government spokespeople and media pundits told them. But this image of Hussein was also persuasive to them because it was congruous with a longstanding climate of opinion older than the cold war, one filled with images of a world populated by evil, alien adversaries who threaten the Unit
ed States and need to be vanquished.
Reportage about seemingly distinct and diverse events have a hidden continuity and a cumulative impact on the public. To see this reportage as one of “minimal effect” because it merely reinforces existing views and does not change them is to overlook the fact that it was never intended to change them but was designed to reinforce the dominant ideology. The “minimal effect” is the intended effect.
Even if the press does not mold our every opinion, it does mold opinion visibility; it can frame the perceptual limits around which our opinions take shape. Here may lie the most important effect of the news media: they set the issue agenda for the rest of us, choosing what to emphasize and what to ignore or suppress, in effect, organizing much of our political world for us. The media may not always be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly successful in telling us what to think about.48
Along with other social, cultural, and educational agencies, the media teach us tunnel vision, conditioning us to perceive the problems of society as isolated particulars, thereby stunting our critical vision. Larger causalities are reduced to immediately distinct events, while the linkages of wealth, power, and policy go unreported or are buried under a congestion of surface impressions and personalities. There is nothing too essential and revealing that cannot be ignored by the American press and nothing too trivial and superficial that cannot be accorded protracted play.
In sum, the media set the limits on public discourse. They may not always mold opinion but they do not always have to. It is enough that they create opinion visibility, giving legitimacy to certain views and illegitimacy to others. The media do the same to substantive issues that they do to candidates, raising some from oblivion and conferring legitimacy upon them, while consigning others to limbo. This power to determine the issue agenda, the information flow, and the parameters of political debate so that it extends from ultra-right to no further than moderate center, is if not total, still totally awesome.
BEYOND ORWELL’S 1984
The news media operate with far more finesse than did the lacerating instruments of repression portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984. The picture Orwell draws of a Spartan barracks society with a centrally controlled electronic surveillance system barking exercise commands at a hapless, demoralized Winston Smith in his home, leaves no doubt in Winston’s mind and ours that he is being oppressed. Something quite different goes on with our news media.
The sinister commandant who tortures Winston lets us know he is an oppressor. The vision of the future is of a boot pressing down on a human face, he tells his victim. The ideological control exercised in the United States today is far more insidious. Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade. For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent. ... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions,” writes Herbert Schiller.49
If Big Brother comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.
“Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Man Who Owns One”
Freedom of the press, A. J. Liebling once said, is for those who own the presses. With rare exception, the nation’s “free and independent” newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and television and radio stations are owned by giant corporations. The media are not merely close to corporate America, they are an integral part of it. As such they manifest all the same symptoms: increasing concentration of ownership, big salaries for top executives, political conservatism, union busting, and a constant push for profits.
A FAVORED FEW
The pattern of media ownership shows a high degree of concentration. Eight corporations control the three major television networks (CBS, NBC, ABC), some 40 subsidiary television stations, over 200 cable TV systems, over 60 radio stations, 59 magazines including Time and Neivsweek, chains of newspapers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, 41 book publishers, and various other media enterprises.
The three major networks garner over 80 percent of all television advertising intended for a national audience. Of all the existing TV and radio stations, 80 percent are network affiliates. Six corporations earn most of the revenues in the publishing world. Four major studios control most of the box office gross on Hollywood films. Eight studios account for about 90 percent of US feature film video rentals. Five conglomerates own 95 percent of the music industry.1
During the 1980s, the media industry was one of the business world’s most active sectors when it came to multimillion-dollar mergers and acquisitions.2 In that decade, the number of corporations dominating all media shrank from forty-six to twenty-three. In 1981 there were twenty dominant firms in the magazine industry; by 1990 a few corporations, Time Warner, News Corporation, Times Mirror, and Hearst, controlled the lion’s share of magazine circulation. Giant newspaper chains like Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and Newhouse are gobbling up independent dailies at the rate of fifty or sixty a year and earn about 75 percent of all newspaper revenues in the country. Less than 4 percent of US cities now have competing daily newspapers under separate ownership.3
Through mergers, packaged news services, union busting, wage freezes, and staff cutting, the large media conglomerates have attained a rate of return on their investments that is double the industrial average.4 Consider the Hearst Corporation, whose empire includes scores of newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations, syndication productions (including King Features and Cowles Syndicate), and interests in cable stations and cable networks, real estate, printing, cattle ranching, and other businesses. In 1987 Hearst showed debt-free assets of $3.44 billion. Of the $215 million in profits made that year, $40 million were distributed to a relatively small group of William Randolph Hearst’s living descendants and the rest went for capital spending and acquisitions.5
The Hearst empire is easily matched by Times Mirror with its 20 newspapers and magazines, 50 cable TV systems, television stations and publishing houses, and $3.5 billion in revenues and $298 million in profits in 1989.6 Then there is Gannett Company with 84 daily newspapers, 16 radio stations, 10 television stations, and $3.3 billion in revenues with net profits of $364 million in 1989. 7
The Rupert Murdoch empire (News Corporation Ltd.) owns over 150 newspapers and magazines, 8 book publishing houses, including HarperCollins, a television network (Fox Broadcasting Company), satellite cable systems, and a major movie studio (20th Century Fox). Murdoch has substantial media holdings on three continents, including 67 percent of the newspaper circulation in Australia. During the 1991 recession, however, Murdoch’s expansionism threatened to undo him. Having borrowed some $8 billion to finance his acquisitions, he was having trouble meeting his debt payments. Usually he could come up with money by profitably selling off a few properties. But during a recession that offered few buyers and almost no lenders, Murdoch found himself in financial trouble.8
The buyout of Warner Communications by Time Inc. created Time Warner, the largest of all media conglomerates, with assets estimated somewhere between $25 billion and $30 billion in the magazine, book publishing, and movie industries. It also created an $11 billion debt and a financial crisis for Time Warner during the 1991 recession that was not unlike the one faced by Murdoch.9
GLOBAL MEDIA
Development and manufacture of the world’s
communications equipment are concentrated in the hands of a few giant transnational conglomerates, the biggest companies of the West’s military-industrial complex. They own most of the radio stations, printing factories, and television systems built in the world, and they produce more than 90 percent of the television sets and almost 80 percent of all radio sets sold abroad.
This corporate grip on the means of communication is matched by a similar control over the information that has flooded the world. The Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI), the two biggest US news agencies, alone transmit more than eight million words a day, while the seven biggest news agencies based in developing countries together produce only a tiny fraction of that amount.
In many Third World countries, the US and its closest allies control up to 90 percent of the news flow. As the Indian journalist A. Raghavan said: “The developing countries that have freed themselves from colonial political dependence are still saddled with information dependence.” As electronics and the use of computers develop, this dependence increases.
Assisting in this “information imperialism” are the US State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, the USIA, and the Voice of America, all of whom deluge the earth with their own peculiar brand of “information.”