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Medialens Media Alerts <alerts wrote:Thu, 1 May 2003

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Medialens Media Alerts

 

Chaining The Watchdog

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

April 30, 2003

 

 

MEDIA ALERT: CHAINING THE WATCHDOG – PART 1

 

How Systemic Media Pressures Keep Us From The Truth

 

“The thoughts of wealth and glory that arise first are like poison ivy: they

harm merely by a touch, enchanting and paralysing the mind.” (Leaves of the

Heaven Tree, 11th Century)

 

 

Hell, The System Works Just Fine!

 

Gary Webb is a typical example of the kind of journalist who dismisses Media

Lens-style analyses as so much extreme conspiracy theorising. Webb was an

investigative reporter for nineteen years, focusing on government and private

sector corruption, winning more than thirty awards for his journalism. He was

one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize

for a series of stories on California’s 1989 earthquake. In 1994, he was awarded

the H.L. Mencken Award by the Free Press Association, and in 1997 he received a

Media Hero’s Award. Webb describes his experience of mainstream journalism:

 

“In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never

fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn’t get

any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises,

lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism

contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben

Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by

powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power

elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as I could tell. It +encouraged+

enterprise. It +rewarded+ muckracking.”

 

Alas, then, as Joseph Heller wrote, “Something Happened”:

 

“And then I wrote some stories that made me realise how sadly misplaced my bliss

had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as

I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned

out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I

hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.” (Webb, ‘The Mighty

Wurlitzer Plays On’, in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw – Leading

Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Prometheus, 2002, pp.296-7)

 

In 1996, Webb wrote a series of stories entitled Dark Alliances. The series

reported how a US-backed terrorist army, the Nicaraguan Contras, had financed

their activities by selling crack cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles to the

city’s biggest crack dealer. The series documented direct contact between drug

traffickers bringing drugs into Los Angeles and two Nicaraguan CIA agents who

were administering the Contras in Central America. Moreover, it revealed how

elements of the US government knew about this drug ring’s activities at the time

and did little, if anything, to stop it. The evidence included sworn testimony

from one of the drug traffickers – a government informant – that a CIA agent

specifically instructed them to raise money for the Contras in California.

 

The response to the first instalment of Dark Alliance was interesting – silence;

the rest of the media did not respond. Normally this would have been the end of

the story, but Mercury News had placed the report on its website, which was

deluged with internet visitors from around the world – 1.3 million hits on one

day alone. This attention generated massive public interest “despite a virtual

news blackout from the major media”, Webb writes. Protests were held outside the

Los Angeles Times building by media watchdogs and citizens groups, who

questioned how the Times could ignore a story of such obvious importance to the

city’s black neighbourhoods. In Washington, black media outlets attacked the

Washington Post’s silence on the story. It was at about this time, Webb writes,

that ”my reporting and I became the focus of scrutiny”. (p.305)

 

The country’s three biggest newspapers – The Washington Post, the New York Times

and the Los Angeles Times - focusing on Webb rather than on his story, all

declared the story “flawed”, empty, and not worth pursuing. Webb comments:

 

“Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the

hell out of a story by another newspaper.” (p.306)

 

Webb’s editors began to get nervous, 5,000 reprints of the series were burned,

disclaimers were added to follow-up stories making it clear that the paper was

not accusing the CIA of direct knowledge of what was going on, “even though the

facts strongly suggested CIA complicity”, Webb notes. Despite a lack of evidence

or arguments, the story was quickly labelled “irresponsible” by the media.

Ultimately, Mercury News backed away from the material, apologising for

“shortcomings” in a story that had been “oversimplified” and contained

“egregious errors”. Webb quit Mercury News soon thereafter.

 

As additional information subsequently came to light, Webb recognised that he

had indeed been in error:

 

“The CIA’s knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I’d ever

imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. The involvement

between the CIA agents running the Contras and drug traffickers was closer than

I had written.” (p.307)

 

Despite the press condemnation, Webb writes, the facts became more damning, not

less – but they were never seriously explored. Instead the story was permanently

tarred as “discredited”.

 

So why did the press turn on the story and on Webb himself?

 

“Primarily because the series presented dangerous ideas. It suggested that

crimes of state had been committed. If the story was true, it meant the federal

government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack

that coursed through black neighbourhoods in the 1980s... The scary thing about

this collusion between the press and the powerful is that it works so well. In

this case, the government’s denials and promises to pursue the truth didn’t

work. The public didn’t accept them, for obvious reasons, and the clamour for an

independent investigation continued to grow. But after the government’s supposed

watchdogs weighed in, public opinion became divided and confused, the movement

to force congressional hearings lost steam...”. (p.309)

 

Once enough people came to believe that the story had been exaggerated or

distorted, it could be quietly buried and forgotten.

 

This story resonates strongly with a query that was posed to us recently by one

of our close friends:

 

“If it’s really true, as you claim, that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed of

weapons of mass destruction [WMD] by December 1998, and that any retained WMD

was likely to be ‘sludge’, how come I didn’t read about this +anywhere+ in the

media before the war? How come +nobody+ talked about it? I just don’t understand

how this level of silence could be achieved.” (Friend to Media Lens Editors, The

Giddy Bridge public house, Southampton, April 17, 2003)

 

It’s a good point. Edward Herman explains:

 

" The readiness with which the media and intellectuals adapt to and serve their

leaders' rampaging surprises many who don't grasp the extent to which the

corporate media are a part of the imperial enterprise and structure, and how

naturally the intellectual community accepts and works within the parameters

fixed by imperial needs. If the structure of imperialism gives the United States

the power to impose its will in many foreign locales, its institutions and

intelligentsia will, as a matter of course, normalize and support the ensuing

projection of power. " (Herman, 'Nation-Busting Euphoria, Nation-Building

Fatigue', Z Magazine, December 2002)

 

In the above account, Webb provides an important aid to understanding how

“dangerous ideas” and “dangerous” journalists are filtered from the mainstream

media – a very heavy ‘stick’ awaits all who seriously step out of line by

exposing issues that are perceived as threatening by a wide range of

establishment interests. What is so important about Webb’s account is that he

worked courageously and honestly as a journalist for 17 years without the

slightest knowledge of the existence of this ‘stick’. This suggests to us that

journalists are indeed sincere in their belief that they are free and

independent. As Webb himself writes:

 

“I had a grand total of one story spiked during my entire reporting career... I

wrote my stories the way I wanted to write them, without anyone looking over my

shoulder or steering me in a certain direction.” (p.296)

 

This is the account we hear time and again from journalists, who often think we

are ‘completely over the top’ and ‘extreme’ in our views. Indeed, because we are

trying to draw attention to comparatively ‘hidden’ phenomena – such as the

‘stick’ that hit Webb – phenomena that are often invisible to them, journalists

assume we must be driven by some kind of mania: perhaps a deep hatred of

journalists, or an addiction to criticising people. In an interview, Channel 4

news reader, Jon Snow, told us:

 

“Journalists are lazy, they live in a goldfish bowl, they’re not interested in

breaking out and breaking this stuff [controversial stories] themselves. And it

isn’t because they’ve got the advertisers breathing down their necks – they

couldn’t give a shit about the advertisers – it’s because it’s easier to do

other things, where they’re spoon-fed... I can tell you if somebody rings me up

from Pepsi-Cola – and I must say I don’t think I’ve ever been rung by any

corporation, would that I was! – I’d give them short shrift!” (Interview with

David Edwards, January 9, 2001,

http://www.medialens.org/articles_2001/de_Jon_Snow_interview.htm)

 

We believe this complacent view would radically change if, as Webb writes, Snow

were to report anything “important enough to suppress”.

 

We believe, further, that journalists are selected on the basis that they are

unlikely even to attempt to report “dangerous ideas” of this kind –

troublemakers are quickly identified and filtered out as ‘committed’, ‘biased’

and ‘emotionally involved’. By contrast, successful journalists, with rare

exceptions, are happy to remain within the ‘acceptable’ parameters of debate,

echoing government opinions without challenge, presuming the essential

benevolence of state-corporate power, focusing on non-threatening problems,

interpreting crimes as mistakes, and so on.

 

It might seem odd that professional journalists should be so willing to conform.

But in fact much the same is true of +all+ professions, not just journalism, as

Jeff Schmidt, former editor of Physics Today magazine, writes:

 

“The qualifying attitude, I find, is an uncritical, subordinate one, which

allows professionals to take their ideological lead from their employers and

appropriately fine-tune the outlook that they bring to their work. The resulting

professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can

trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of

an assigned ideology. The political and intellectual timidity of today’s most

highly educated employees is no accident.” (Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A

Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that

Shapes Their Lives, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000, p.16)

 

 

You’re Nobody Unless You’re In Six Figures

 

Selecting for conformity and massive punishment are two of the ‘sticks’

distorting the mainstream media – there are also plenty of ‘carrots’ rewarding

disciplined behaviour.

 

Amid all the accusations and black propaganda directed at Labour MP George

Galloway last week, we learned one interesting piece of information – Galloway

has been earning around £70,000 a year for his column in the Daily Mail. For

most of us, this represents an awful lot of money for doing very little.

 

In an article in the New Statesman in 2000, Nick Cohen reported that Lynda Lee

Potter, also of the Mail, was thought to earn about £250,000, with nearly all

Mail columnists receiving £100,000-plus: " You're nobody here unless you're in

six figures, " a friend on the paper told Cohen (Nick Cohen, 'Hacking their way

to a fortune, the New Statesman, May 22, 2000). Most Fleet Street political

pundits earn a minimum of £70,000 and often far more.

 

The hosts of the BBC's main TV and radio news bulletins typically earn at least

£150,000 a year. A 'magic circle' of high-profile reporters, who are not

actually BBC employees but contractors, are able to turn themselves into

companies for tax purposes. Examples include a company set up for " artistic and

literary creation " by former Ten O'Clock News presenter Peter Sissons. Anna Ford

& Co was formed by the lunchtime news presenter, while former BBC1 News

presenter, Michael Buerk, set up Slipway Productions Limited, a company which

listed its business as " radio and television activities " .

 

The BBC's “attack dog” Newsnight interviewer, Jeremy Paxman – who " would make

the Weakest Link dominatrix look like Mary Poppins " , according to the

Philadelphia Inquirer (March 25, 2003) - also had a company, Cohen reported.

Cohen estimated that Paxman and Trevor McDonald (ITN) had salaries of between

£750,000 and £1m. Kirsty Wark, also a Newsnight presenter, had agreed a

£3.5m-plus package with the corporation to present and produce programmes for

the following three years.

 

Editors often earn far more, of course. Max Hastings told the Observer in 2000

that " money was an incentive " when he switched from a £185,000-a-year editorship

of the Telegraph to the £400,000-a-year editorship of the London Evening

Standard. When Jonathan Holborow was sacked from the Mail on Sunday in 1998, his

salary was reported to be £300,000. Journalists at the Independent say that

editor Simon Kelner receives about £250,000 - roughly £50,000 more than his

predecessors Rosie Boycott and Andrew Marr. As editor of News of the World,

Piers Morgan was on about £140,000 according to " conservative estimates " . After

moving to the Mirror, staff guessed his new package was worth somewhere between

£250,000 and £300,000.

The basic point is that the most influential and important mainstream

journalists are paid vast amounts of money to do what they do - tens or hundreds

of thousands of pounds is an extremely high level of remuneration for typing out

a few hundred or thousand words every week. It’s easy to understand why

competition is so fierce for this kind of work.

 

Imagine a situation where we are being paid, say, £100,000 to report, or

comment, for a major newspaper. We know that our media organisation is heavily

tied into the establishment through big business owners/managers and parent

companies, and through a range of connections with business and government -

stocks and shares, advertisers, think tanks, formal and informal links (elite

schools, clubs, societies, universities), revolving doors of employment, and so

on. And so we know (or perhaps sense) that pressures of the kind that quickly

destroyed Gary Webb’s career can easily and rapidly be applied to anyone who

‘rocks the boat’. And we know that to be tarred as ‘extreme’, ‘biased’, or

responsible for “egregious errors” can rapidly destroy our reputation in the

media industry. And as former CNN producer and CBS reporter Kristina Borjesson

writes, this is a career killer:

 

“It often has a fatal effect on one's career. I don't want to mix metaphors

here, but a journalist who has been through the buzzsaw is usually described as

'radioactive’, which is another word for unemployable. " (Borjesson, Into The

Buzzsaw, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.12)

 

This means the loss of a big salary together with its prestigious and

comfortable lifestyle. Journalists are naturally very keen to secure and

maintain long-term contracts with major media – freelance journalists are paid a

pittance – and so it is not at all hard to understand why they have an enormous

incentive to ‘play safe’ in their reporting.

 

As soon as the pressure is perceived to have eased off, editors and journalists

may well feel more able to discuss truths that might previously have been deemed

“dangerous”. In the aftermath of the Iraq war – and now that it doesn’t much

matter - a spate of reports have begun to appear in the media on the possibility

that Iraq never had any weapons of mass destruction at all. What is so

remarkable is that in the weeks leading up to the war – when such revelations

might have swung public opinion decisively against the war and might even have

brought down the government – such reports simply did not appear. Martin

Woollacott, for example, wrote in January of Iraq’s WMD:

 

“Among those knowledgeable about Iraq there are few, if any, who believe he

[saddam] is not hiding such weapons. It is a given. " ('This drive to war is one

of the mysteries of our time - We know Saddam is hiding weapons. That isn't the

argument', Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, January 24, 2003)

 

And yet today, Richard Norton-Taylor tells us in the Guardian:

 

“What is now clear, and admitted by all sides, is that whatever weapons of mass

destruction Iraq did possess, they were not a threat, not even to British and

American forces, from the time the UN inspectors went in.” (Norton-Taylor – ‘An

insult to British intelligence’, the Guardian, April 30, 2003)

 

But the point is that credible sources, all but ignored by the Guardian and the

rest of the media, were insisting that this was equally clear +before+ the war.

Even now, when the lack of an Iraqi threat is “admitted by all sides”, we find

(April 30) that former chief UNSCOM arms inspector, Scott Ritter, has been

mentioned in 12 articles in the Guardian/Observer this year out of 5,767

articles mentioning Iraq. Former UNSCOM chairman Rolf Ekeus has been mentioned

in two articles. Cambridge academic Glen Rangwala has been mentioned three

times. These sources have been casting very serious doubt on the government’s

claims about Iraqi WMD for many months, and even years.

 

We are not at all accusing journalists of dishonesty or self-censorship. In His

book Vital Lies, Simple Truths – The Psychology of Self-Deception, psychologist

Daniel Goleman describes the human capacity for “group think”:

 

“Instead of hiding a secret... the group simply cramps its attention and hobbles

its information-seeking to preserve a cosy unanimity. Loyalty to the group

requires that members not raise embarrassing questions, attack weak arguments,

or counter soft-headed thinking with hard facts.” (Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple

Truths - The Psychology of Self-Deception, Bloomsbury, 1997, p.183)

 

It is easy to imagine how political and economic pressures, both within and

beyond media corporations, act to promote a particular version of “cosy

unanimity” - one that discourages journalists from challenging important

interests on which media corporations are dependent, and of which they are a

part.

 

 

Part 2 will follow shortly...

 

 

 

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