Why The Media Lie

[Guest guest]

Why the Media Lie

The Corporate Structure

Of The Mass Media

Part One

 

By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

 

On 11th September, in the space of an hour and a half, the United

States faced a sample of the same brand of terrorism that has been

inflicted on vast swathes of the world's population throughout the

twentieth century by its own military forces. The destruction of the

World Trade Centre and the explosion that racked the Pentagon, left

America in shock and on high alert.

 

It was not long before the perpetrators of the attack had supposedly

been discovered. Osama Bin Laden and his international terror

network, Al-Qaeda, was blamed, and the Taliban was pinpointed as

a " government " harbouring Al-Qaeda. A war on Afghanistan was

justified, along with an unlimited militarisation of US foreign

policy, which has gone on to focus on key strategic regions of the

world as potential targets of US intervention, and thus the expansion

of US hegemony.

 

The official story around 11th September espoused by the US

government and propagated by the mass media contains innumerable

anomalies and discrepancies. Some of these will be discussed in the

second part of this paper. In this part, we will focus on the

principal reason why the official story should be doubted by the

public: the fact that the media amounts to a propaganda machine for

elite interests.

 

The Independent Media: A Myth

 

For those who have inspected the facts, it is clear that the mass

media has failed to generate genuine public awareness of the nature

of Western policy. Majid Tehranian, Professor of International

Communication at the University of Hawaii and Director of the Toda

Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, points out that:

 

In their scholarship, William Appleton Williams, Noam Chomsky,

Richard Falk, Ramsey Clark, Ali Mazrui, and other critics of US

foreign policies have provided an abundance of evidence to support

the charges on the counter-democratic role of the United States in

much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.1

 

In an extensive study of the US-UK special relationship, British

historian Mark Curtis, former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute

for International Affairs in London, finds that:

 

Mutual Anglo-American support in ordering the affairs of key nations

and regions, often with violence, to their design has been a

consistent feature of the era that followed the Second World War...

Policy in, for example, Malaya, Kenya, British Guiana and Iran was

geared towards organising Third World economies along guidelines in

which British, and Western, interests would be paramount, and those

of the often malnourished populations would be ignored or further

undermined. Similarly, US interventions overseas – in Vietnam,

Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, etcetera – were

designed to counter threats to the Western practice of assigning the

Third World to mere client status to Western business interests.

British and US forces have acted as mercenary – and often extremely

violent – mobs intended to restore `order' in their domains and to

preserve the existing privileges of elites within their own

societies.2

 

Development specialist Dr. J. W. Smith, who is Director of Research

for the California-based Institute for Economic Democracy, is even

more explicit:

 

No society will tolerate it if they knew that they (as a country)

were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since

WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more their

economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to

restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and

recognising that this has been standard practice throughout

colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centres of

capital from 1945 to 1990... While mouthing peace, freedom, justice,

rights, and majority rule, all over the world state-sponsored

terrorists were overthrowing democratic governments, installing and

protecting dictators, and preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights,

and majority rule. Twelve to fifteen million mostly innocent people

were slaughtered in that successful 45 year effort to suppress those

breaks for economic freedom which were bursting out all over the

world... All intelligence agencies have been, and are still in, the

business of destabilising undeveloped countries to maintain their

dependency and the flow of the world's natural wealth to powerful

nations' industries at a low price and to provide markets for those

industries at a high price.3

 

It is obvious that the media has failed to accurately portray the

real nature of Western foreign policy to the public. The question is,

why does the media conform to the dubious agenda of the government

and corporate elite?

 

The answer lies in an analysis of how the media works. Probably the

most thorough analysis is Manufacturing Consent, written by two

leading US academics, Edward Herman (Professor Emeritus of Finance at

Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania) and Noam Chomsky

(Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT).4

 

The principal reason to begin with this study is that it contains

arguably the most thoroughly researched and empirically verified

model of the media available. Herman and Chomsky's landmark book is

recommended by America's leading national media watchdog, the

Washington D.C.-based research group Fairness and Accuracy In

Reporting (FAIR). The Grand Rapids Institute for Information

Democracy (GRIID), affiliated to the U.S.-based Community Media

Centre (CMC) also recommends the book as an " essential resource for

media literacy " .5 The Oxford-based research and publishing group

Corporate Watch describes the study as " one of the most incisive

critiques of the media's role in society " .6 The respected journal

Publisher's Weekly gives the following review of Manufacturing

Consent:

 

Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument

that America's government and its corporate giants exercise control

over what we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that

they contend make the national media propagandistic – the major three

being the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media's close

links to and often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of

information from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers

show how TV, newspapers and radio distort world events… Extensive

evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment against

the guardians of our freedom is substantiated. A disturbing picture

emerges of a news system that panders to the interest of America's

privileged and neglects its duties when the concerns of minority

groups and the underclass are at stake.

 

Indeed, according to the leading US media scholar Robert W.

McChesney – Research Professor in the Institute of Communications

Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Sciences

at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – any significant

attempt to comprehend the structure and operation of the mass media

must begin with Herman and Chomsky's study.7 He observes that:

 

This book promises to be a seminal work in critical media analysis

and to open a door through which future media analysis will follow…

Manufacturing Consent is a work of tremendous importance for scholars

and activists alike… Each chapter is meticulously researched and most

draw heavily on the authors' earlier works in these areas.8

 

All this provides ample reason to understand Herman and Chomsky's

model of the media.

 

A propaganda model does not entail a grandiose conspiracy theory.

Rather, it is based on analysing the politico-economic influences on

the mass media, and the extent to which those influences condition

the media's reporting tendencies in accord with the interests of

power. The model can be described as a `guided free market' model,

arguing that the media's reporting is dominated by the same factors

that guide corporate activity: the maximisation of profit. A

propaganda model of the media asserts that the media is fundamentally

conditioned by the profit-orientated activities of corporate elites.

As US media scholar Professor Robert W. McChesney observes:

 

Herman and Chomsky quickly dismiss the standard mainstream critique

of radical media analysis that accuses it of offering some sort

of `conspiracy' theory for media behaviour; rather, they argue, media

bias arises from `the preselection of right-thinking people,

internalised preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the

constraints' of a series of objective filters they present in their

propaganda model. Hence the bias occurs largely through self-

censorship, which explains the superiority of the US mass media as a

propaganda system: it is far more credible than a system which relies

on official state censorship.9

 

Filter 1: Elite Ownership

 

Herman and Chomsky's model describes five `filters' that limit what

the media reports in accord with governmental and corporate

interests. Professor McChesney observes that:

 

Only stories with a strong orientation to elite interests can pass

through the five filters unobstructed and receive ample media

attention. The model also explains how the media can conscientiously

function when even a superficial analysis of the evidence would

indicate the preposterous nature of many of the stories that receive

ample publicity in the press and on the network news broadcasts.10

 

The first filter consists of the size, concentrated ownership, owner

wealth and profit-orientation of the most dominant mass media firms.

Media ownership involves enormous costs, which imposes rigid limits

on who is able to run a media entity, even a small one. To cater to a

mass audience, a media organisation must be a fairly sizeable

corporation. Consequently, it will be owned either directly by the

state, or by wealthy individuals. In 1986, out of 25,000 US media

entities, a mere 29 largest media systems accounted for over half the

output of newspapers and for the majority of sales and audiences in

magazines, broadcasting, books and films. These massive media firms

are profit-orientated corporations, owned and controlled by wealthy

profit-orientated people, which are also " closely interlocked, and

have common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and

government " .11 Because they are often fully integrated into the stock

market, they become subject to powerful pressures from stockholders,

directors and bankers to focus on profitability. This means that they

are united by a basic framework of special interests, even though

they remain in competition:

 

These control groups obviously have a special stake in the status quo

by virtue of their wealth and their strategic position in one of the

great institutions of society [the stock market]. And they exercise

the power of this strategic position, if only by establishing the

general aims of the company and choosing its top management.12

 

Major media corporations thus tend to avoid news that questions the

status quo in terms of the actions of the wealthy: If media entities

are owned by profit-orientated corporations that have a vested

interest in maintaining the status quo, those corporations are

clearly not going to employ individuals who question the status quo

to run their media entities. McChesney observes:

 

Many of these corporations have extensive holdings in other

industries and nations. Objectively, their needs for profit severely

influence the news operations and overall content of the media.

Subjectively, there is a clear conflict of interest when the media

system upon which self-government rests is controlled by a handful of

corporations and operated in their self-interest.13

 

A large amount of the information the public receives is controlled

by a very small number of media sources. Freedom House records that

within states, out of 187 governments, 92 have complete ownership of

the television broadcasting structure, while 67 have part

ownership.14 Ownership of the world's media sources is growing

increasingly concentrated. Thousands of other sources do exist, but

in comparison, their influence is negligible. The leading US media

analyst Ben Bagdikan – former Dean at the Graduate School of

Journalism at the University of California, and a winner of almost

every top prize in American journalism including the Pulitzer –

noting that despite more than 25,000 media entities in the US

only " 23 corporations control most of the business in daily

newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures " ,

concludes that this endows corporations with the extensive power to

exercise influence over " news, information, public ideas, popular

culture, and political attitudes " .15

 

The result is that a total of 12 corporations dominate the world's

mass media. US media and communications expert Dr. Dean Alger –

former Fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics

and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of

Government – lists this `dominant dozen' as follows in order of

power: Disney – Capital Cities – ABC; Time Warner – Turner; News

Corporation; Bertelsmann; Tele-Communications (TCI) – AT & T; General

Electric – NBC; CBS Inc.; Newshouse/Advance Publications; Viacom;

Microsoft; Matra – Hachette – Filipacchi; Gannet.

 

Leading journalists have commented on the implications. Journalist

and former top editor of the Chicago Tribunal, James Squires,

describes the concentration of media-ownership in profit-orientated

corporations:

 

In its struggle for relevance and financial security in the modern

information age, the press as an institution appears ready to trade

its tradition and its public responsibility for whatever will make a

buck. In the starkest terms, the news media of the 1990s are a

celebrity-oriented, Wall-Street dominated, profit-driven

entertainment enterprise dedicated foremost to delivering advertising

images to targeted groups of consumers.

 

Richard Clurman, who was for years a leading figure in Time magazine,

observes:

 

As the news media became bigger and bigger business, the innovative

traditions led by creative editorial dominance began to erode... The

media had grown from a nicely profitable, creative business into a

gigantic investment opportunity. It was becoming harder to think of

them as different from any other business in free enterprise America.

 

Doug Underwood – former reporter for The Seattle Times and the

Gannett News Service, now Professor of Communications at the

University of Washington – also confirms the drastic corporatisation

of the media:

 

It's probably no surprise that in an era of mass media conglomerates,

big chain expansion, and multimillion dollar newspaper buy-outs, the

editors of daily newspapers have begun to behave more and more like

the managers of any corporate entity.16

 

The elites who dominate the various institutions of society share a

common set of values and associations linked with their generally

wealthy position as members of a highly privileged class. These

elites include the decision makers over politics, investment,

production, distribution; members of ideological institutions

involving editorial positions, control of journals and so on; those

in managerial positions, who manage corporations and have similar

roles. These different elite groups all interpenetrate one another in

accord with their shared values and associations. Furthermore, due to

their common social position, they are largely socialised into the

traditional values that characterise their wealthy class. This has a

significant impact on their outlook on the world, and consequently

their attitude towards political affairs.17

 

In Britain, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) constitutes an

obvious example. The board of governors on the BBC tends to be drawn

from the ranks of the `great and good' and to mirror the predominance

of the upper middle classes in the ranks of political life in elected

and non-elected positions of power…

 

Of the eighty-five governors who have served in the first fifty years

of the BBC's history, fifty-six had a university education (forty at

Oxford or Cambridge) and twenty were products of Eton, Harrow or

Winchester. The political experience of Board members has come mainly

from the House of Lords although there have been nineteen former

MPs.18

 

Bob Franklin, Reader in Media and Communication Studies at the

University of Sheffield, observes that abundant documentation proves

that the elite " uses its privileged access to media institutions to

produce programming which is partial and supportive of a particular

class interest. " Franklin refers to the series of Bad News studies by

Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG), offering ample evidence " of a

systematic skew in the reporting of certain kinds of news. " 19 In

their first study, the Glasgow scholars concluded that " television

news is a cultural artifact; a sequence of socially-manufactured

messages which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions of

our society. " In a later study titled More Bad News, they found that

television news reporting " consistently maintains and supports a

cultural framework within which viewpoints favourable to the status

quo are given preferred and privileged readings. " 20

 

Former Editor-in-Chief David Bowman of the Sydney Morning Herald thus

confirms that " having thrown off one yoke, the press should now be

falling under another, in the form of a tiny and ever-contracting

band of businessmen-proprietors. Instead of developing as a diverse

social institution, serving the needs of democratic society, the

press, and now the media, have become or are becoming the property of

a few, governed by whatever social, political and cultural values the

few think tolerable " .21 " The danger " , he elsewhere observes, " is that

the media of the future, the channels of mass communication, will be

dominated locally and world-wide by the values – social, cultural and

political – of a few individuals and their huge corporations. " 22

 

The mass media also broadly restricts the ideological orientation of

its staff, the result being that the media becomes largely

ideologically subservient to the assumptions and interests of the

elite. Bob Franklin notes that this is because, editors are simply

workers – albeit at a high grade – and, as such, remain subject to

the discipline of proprietors...

 

It would certainly be difficult to persuade an editor that

proprietors are no longer in control of their newspapers. A

succession of editors from Harold Evans to Andrew Neil acknowledge

the power of proprietors in autobiographies which invariably detail

their prompt removal from the editorial chair following a

disagreement with the owner... Proprietors' power to `hire and fire'

makes them formidable figures, but they also control all aspects of a

newspaper's financial and staffing resources.23

 

Media expert Ben Bagdikan acknowledges the dictatorial control over

public life entailed by the increasing concentration in corporate

ownership:

 

In an authoritarian society there is a ministry, or a commissar, or a

directorate that controls what everybody will see and hear. We call

that a dictatorship. Here we have a handful of very powerful

corporations led by a handful of very powerful men and women who

control everything we see and hear beyond the natural environment and

our own families. That's something which surrounds us every day and

night. If it were one person we'd call that a dictatorship, a

ministry of information.24

 

The extent of the power that elites have over the media can be

grasped when we recall that even Western intelligence agencies

control the press. For example, an internal committee of the CIA

reported in 1992 that:

 

We [i.e. the CIA] have relationships with reporters [that] have

helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence

success stories. Some responses to the media can be handled in a one-

shot phone call.25

 

Former CIA Director William Colby went further, admitting: " The

Central Intelligence Agency owns anyone of any significance in the

major media. " 26

 

Consequently, the legitimacy of elite interests are presupposed by

the mass media in terms of a general all-pervading set of

assumptions. Since these assumptions are rooted in the elite

ideology, the mass media, owned by a corporate elite, is generally

unable to fundamentally question that ideology. Bob Franklin thus

concludes that " while it is possible to cite cases where the media

have toppled the powerful, there is a greater body of evidence to

suggest that their role is more typically to serve as a source of

support. " 27

 

It is therefore not surprising that debate within the media is

largely restricted to the assumption of Western governmental and

corporate benevolence, the belief in the viability and legitimacy of

the status quo. Dissent that stretches beyond these limits by

choosing to question the very assumptions adopted at the outset by

the media, will be neglected. Certainly, due to the sheer mass of

news it is also predictable that the odd dissenting report may filter

through – but the substantial majority of reports will " serve as a

source of support " for elite interests.

 

As the American political scientist Michael Parenti writes, the

result of corporate ownership of the media where staffing will be

especially restricted to those who conform to the ideological

requirements of corporate power, is that journalists " rarely doubt

their own objectivity even as they faithfully echo the established

political vocabularies and the prevailing politico-economic

orthodoxy. Since they do not cross any forbidden lines, they are not

reined in. So they are likely to have no awareness they are on an

ideological leash. " 28 A propaganda model clarifies the institutional

structure of the media that prevents criticism of elite policy from

receiving little in-depth critical analysis by the mainstream media.

Permissible dissent then becomes powerless, unable to question the

ideological framework upon which the elite dominated social

structures are based. The result has been noted by media analyst W.

Lance Bennett:

 

The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and

is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response

to these messages... Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of

political power and reduced popular control over the political system

by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain

confusion among the public.29

 

Filter 2: Elite Funding

 

The second filter noted by Herman and Chomsky, related to the first

filter, is advertising. Professor McChesney notes that

advertising " has colonised the US mass media and is responsible for

most of the media's income. " 30 The growth of advertising has meant

that newspapers and other media sources have a primary source of

funds other than their selling price. This means that the media's

reporting tendencies can be influenced through the withdrawal or

offer of economic support. Since the mass media is largely financed

through advertising, it becomes financially dependent for its

existence on advertising revenue from corporations. All forms of

media have to ensure that their advertising profile is high to retain

corporate investment in advertising, and thereby to retain a source

of funds. This is ideally achieved by becoming ideologically

appealing to an audience with a high buying capacity: i.e. members of

the elite and generally members of the wealthiest classes. Newspapers

that are attractive to advertisers are able to lower their price

below the cost of producing them, due to advertising revenue.

 

Advertisers, of course, constitute corporate sponsors. This means

that newspapers that fail to attract such corporate sponsors, are

more likely to be either marginal or non-existent. Additionally, a

newspaper will be more favourable to advertisers if it is biased

towards the assumptions and values of a wealthy readership. With

newspapers having become so dependent on advertising to exist and

flourish, corporate sponsors effectively retain a significant control

over which newspapers survive, what they choose to report, and how

they do so. Consequently, newspapers unattractive to advertisers can

be undercut – without a good source of funds from advertising, their

prices tend to be higher, reducing sales and reducing profit by which

to invest in improving saleability (via quality, format, promotions,

etc.). Such newspapers can therefore be effectively marginalised – in

some cases, driven completely out of existence.

 

In their authoritative history of the British press, James Curran and

Jean Seaton conclude that the growth in both advertising and capital

costs were critical in eliminating the popular radical press that had

emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. They record

that " advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority since,

without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically

viable " .31

 

These two filters mean that the mass media is institutionally

structured to be subservient to the corporate elite. It is at once

directly owned and thereby structurally controlled by that elite, and

indirectly influenced by financial pressures from corporate sponsors

related to advertising. The mass media as an institution is

intrinsically subservient to corporate ideology. As Professor Edward

Herman states, " capitalists control the media and they do so to

maximise profits " . What does this entail? Herman explains:

 

The main element in corporate ideology is the belief in the sublimity

of the market and its unique capacity to serve as the efficient

allocator of resources. So important is the market in this ideology

that `freedom' has come to mean the absence of constraints on market

participants, with political and social democracy pushed into the

background as supposed derivatives of market freedom. This may help

explain the tolerance by market-freedom lovers of market-friendly

totalitarians – Pinochet or Marcos. A second and closely related

constituent of corporate ideology is the danger of government

intervention and regulation, which allegedly tends to proliferate,

imposes unreasonable burdens on business, and therefore hampers

growth. A third element in the ideology is that growth is the proper

national objective, as opposed to equity, participation, social

justice, or cultural advance and integrity. Growth should be

sustainable, which means that the inflation threat should be a high

priority and unemployment kept at the level to assure the inflation

threat is kept at bay. The resultant increasingly unequal income

distribution is also an acceptable price to pay. Privatisation is

also viewed as highly desirable in corporate ideology, following

naturally from the first two elements – market sublimity and the

threat of government. It also tends to weaken government by depriving

it of its direct control over assets, and therefore has the further

merit of reducing the ability of government to serve the general

population through democratic processes... [P]rivatisation yields

enormous payoffs to the bankers and purchasers participating in the

sale of public assets.32

 

These ideological positions become implicit assumptions pervading

permissible political discourse within the media. It is therefore

extremely rare to find these principles being subjected to

fundamental critical examination by the corporate-owned media.

 

Filter 3: Elite Information Sources

 

The third filter constitutes the sources that the mass media

routinely relies on for news. Because the media needs a steady and

reliable source of news, resources are focused where news can be most

easily acquired. Unfortunately, central news terminals of this type

happen to be the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department,

as well as business corporations and trade groups. The importance of

such organisations as news sources is because they possess the

greatest resources for public relations and promotional material.

Consequently, " the mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship

with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and

reciprocity of interest " .33 Alternative media entities established by

human rights organisations and other groups are thus marginalised.

The public then receives news and analysis that fundamentally

conforms to the elite ideology, and facts largely cannot be

scrutinised free from the assumptions of that ideology. News is thus

filtered in accordance with what is suitable to the requirements of

elite power and its interests. McChesney explains:

 

The media rely heavily upon news provided them by corporate and

government sources, which have themselves developed enormous

bureaucracies to provide this material to the media. They have

developed great expertise at `managing' the media. In effect, these

bureaucracies subsidise the media and the media must be careful not

to antagonise such an important supplier. Furthermore, these

corporate and government sources are instantly credible by accepted

journalistic practices. Anti-elite sources, on the other hand, are

regarded with utmost suspicion and have tremendous difficulty passing

successfully through this filter.34

 

For example, the US Air Force publishes 140 newspapers per week,

issuing 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases per year. Other

government-related institutions produce a similar proportion of

information. This massive amount of news produced by the state and

corporations provides the media with `facts' that easily acquired and

inexpensive. Herman and Chomsky observe that:

 

To consolidate their pre-eminent position as sources, government and

business-news promoters go to great pains to make things easy for

news organisations... In effect, the large bureaucracies of the

powerful subsidise the mass media, and gain special access by their

contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring the raw

materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that provide

this subsidy become `routine' news sources and have privileged access

to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may

be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.35

 

The impact of this, as Mark Fishman affirms, is that:

 

News workers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as

factual because news personnel participate in upholding a normative

order of authorised knowers in the society. Reporters operate with

the attitude that officials ought to know what it is their job to

know... In particular, a newsworker will recognise an official's

claim to knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible,

competent piece of knowledge.

 

" This amounts to a moral division of labour: officials have and give

the facts " , which are therefore beyond question, however tenuous or

absurd, while " reporters merely get them " from the bureaucratic

elite.36

 

Filter 4: Elite Flak

 

The fourth filter Chomsky and Herman refer to is `flak': the negative

responses to a media report in the form of letters, phone calls,

petitions, speeches, legal and parliamentary action, among other

methods of complaint. One of the most significant forms of flak

already discussed is the withdrawal of advertising revenue, which in

itself can be sufficient for editors to review their product. This

form of flak can lead to the entire elimination of a media source

that is unfavourable to corporate sponsors and their interests. Flak

can also serve as a deterrent to producing certain kinds of programme

or story, and can even prevent reporters from investigating

particular issues because of how unlikely it is that such stories

would be published. Business organisations often come together to

form organisations devoted solely to the mass dissemination of flak,

by which to impose immense pressure on the media to follow the

corporate lead.

 

In the US, the conservative media organisation Accuracy In Media

(AIM) is a clear example of this – formed at the instigation of

various giant corporations with the view to impose flak on mainstream

media sources who may occasionally produce a piece questioning the

legitimacy of elite ideology in some way. As McChesney comments,

right-wing corporate `flak' producers such as Accuracy in Media [act]

to harass the mass media and to put pressure upon them to follow the

corporate agenda…

 

This filter was developed extensively in the 1970s when major

corporations and wealthy right-wingers became increasingly

dissatisfied with political developments in the West and with media

coverage… While ostensibly antagonistic to the media, these flak

machines provide the media with legitimacy and are treated quite well

by the media.37

 

One of the most potent disseminators of flak is the government itself

due to its enormous resources. Compared with such corporate power,

the ability of other organisations representing the poor, the

oppressed or the environment to pressurise the media is dwarfed.38

 

Filter 5: Elite Ideology

 

Since the corporate ideology dominates the media by way of being

almost institutionally assumed, all ideologies that are in

fundamental opposition to the corporate ideology must similarly be

institutionally assumed incorrect: the fifth filter. Nationalist

social movements around the world that threatened the international

capitalist system under US hegemony were construed as totalitarian

Communist movements. The final filter is thus the ideology

of " anticommunism " , a stance that has become integral to Western

political culture. According to McChesney: " Anticommunism has been

ingrained into acceptable journalistic practices in the United

States, to the point that even in periods of `detente' it is fully

appropriate and expected for journalists to frame issues in terms

of `our side' versus the communist `bad guys', " even when Communism

is not the real `threat' at all.39

 

We can recall evidence for this when we compare the orthodox

interpretation of the Cold War espoused by most academic and media

commentators with the fact that there was no global Communist threat.

Major covert operations, such as the installation of the Shah in Iran

after the elimination of the democratically elected government of

Mussadeq, or the intervention in Nicaragua to overthrow the popular

Sandinista Front, were undertaken on the pretext of preventing the

violent rise of totalitarian Communism and protecting the

independence of local populations. Herman and Chomsky observe: " When

anticommunist fervour is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in

support for claims of `communist' abuses is suspended by the media,

and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources " .40

 

Conversely, when journalists or editors challenge the prevailing

anticommunist orthodoxy, they " must meet far higher standards; in

fact standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the

natural sciences " .41 This filter is, however, not limited to

anticommunism – rather it is related to the prevailing pretext for

Western policy at the time. After the collapse of the Soviet Union,

the noble fight against the non-existent international Communist

threat could no longer be pinpointed as a pretext for Western

military operations that had been undertaken for far more familiar

reasons of economic domination. Hence, it has been replaced by other

diverse ideological threats to be similarly exaggerated, distorted or

even fabricated. A particularly pertinent one in the present day is

the alleged threat to the United States and the West due to Islam and

global Islamic terrorism.42

 

The fifth filter is essentially synonymous with the elite ideology,

since it is in the context of this ideology that social movements and

ideas in opposition to the dominant ideology are interpreted within

the media. Other elements of the final filter will therefore include

the benevolence of one's government, the universal merits of private

enterprise, the benign character of corporations and their

activities, and so on. All of these inherently imply the demonisation

of the perceived threat to US hegemony with respect to these aspects.

 

In the second part of this paper, we will discuss in further detail

the new alleged threat that has come to the fore, particularly in the

aftermath of 11th September: the threat of Islamic terrorism in the

form of Osama Bin Laden's " Al-Qaeda " .

 

Footnotes:

 

1. Tehranian, Majid, `A Requiem for Realism?', Peace & Policy, 3:1,

Spring 1998.

2. Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since

1945, Zed, London, 1995.

3. Smith, J. W., `Simultaneously Suppressing the World's Break for

Freedom', Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-

First Century, M. E. Sharpe, New York, Armonk, 2000. Excerpts of this

study can be found at Institute for Economic Democracy,

www.slonet.org/~ied. In his Killing Hope, former State Department

official and investigative journalist William Blum confirms an even

larger number of direct deaths than that produced by Smith.

4. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam, Manufacturing Consent: The

Political Economy of the Mass Media, Vintage, London, 1994.

5. FAIR, www.fair.org; GRIID, affiliated with CMC, www.grmc.org,

www.grcmc.org/griid.

6. `The Media', Corporate Watch magazine, Issue 5 & 6.

7. McChesney, Robert W., `Introduction' in Chomsky, Noam, Profit Over

People, op. cit.

8. McChesney, Robert, W., `Edward S. Herman on the propaganda model',

Monthly Review, January 1989

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 14.

12. Ibid., p. 8

13. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.

14. US News & World Report, 11 November 1996, p. 48.

15. Bagdikan, Ben H., The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992,

p. 4.

16. Alger, Dean, Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass

Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy, Rowman &

Littlefield, Oxford, 1998. See this book for references on the

previous citations.

17. All this is well understood. For studies of elite power in

relation to Britain see for instance John Scott, Who Rules Britain?,

Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991; Mark Curtis's study in The Ambiguities

of Power of the mainstream British media is also very illuminating,

disclosing the subservience of the media in relation to Nicaragua and

the Gulf War in particular. A fairly competent analysis of the

British media is Curran, James and Seaton, Jean, Power without

responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Methuen,

London, 1985; and especially Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media, St.

Martin's Press, New York, 1997. Also see Pilger, John, Distant

Voices, Vintage, London, 1992; Pilger, John, Hidden Agendas, Vintage,

London, 1998. Also see more general studies of the media that focus

particularly on the U.S., especially Chomsky and Herman, The

Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy

of Human Rights, South End Press, Boston, 1979; Smith, Anthony, The

Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World,

Faber & Faber, London, 1980; Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the

News in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992; Parenti,

Michael, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News Media, St.

Martin's Press, 1993; Herman, Edward S. and McChesney, Robert W., The

Global Media and the New Missionaries of Global Capitalism, Cassell,

1997.

18. Dearlove, J. and Saunders, P. An Introduction to British

Politics; cited in Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media, St. Martin's

Press, New York, 1997, p. 41.

19. Franklin, Bob, ibid.

20. Cited in Ibid.

21. Cited in 24 Hours, Sydney, April 1996; Pilger, John, Hidden

Agendas, Vintage, London, 1998, p. 543.

22. Adelaide Review, February 1996.

23. Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media, op. cit. p. 40.

24. Ben Bagdikian interviewed by David Barsamian in `Navigating the

Media', Z Magazine, September 1998.

25. Memorandum to Director of CIA, Task Force on Greater CIA

Openness, 18 Nov. 1991.

26. Cited in McGowan, David, Derailing Democracy, Common Courage

Press, Monroe, Maine, 1999; from online e-mail bulletin, Political

Literacy Course, Common Courage Press, 20 March 2000,

www.commoncouragepress.com.

27. Franklin, Bob, Newszak and News Media, op. cit., p. 31.

28. Parenti cited in Pilger, John, Hidden Agendas, op. cit., p. 4.

29. Bennet, W. Lance, News: The Politics of Illusion, Longman, New

York, 1988, p. 178-79.

30. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.

31. Alger, Dan, Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass

Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy, Rowan &

Littlefield, Oxford, 1998, p. 154, 158; Curran, James and Seaton,

Jean, Power without responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in

Britain, Methuen, London, 1985, p.31. Also see Barnouw, Erik, The

Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, Oxford University Press, 1978.

32. Interview with Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney by David

Peterson, `The Global Media', Z Magazine, June 1997.

33. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 14.

34. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.

35. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 21-22.

36. Fishman, Mark, Manufacturing News, University of Texas Press,

Austin, 1980.

37. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.

38. For an introductory discussion of how the propaganda model can be

extended to explain and reveal the corporate conditioning of Western

culture and academia, see Edwards, David, Free To Be Human:

Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions, A Resurgence Book,

Green Books, Devon, 1995.

39. McChesney, Monthly Review, January 1989.

40. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 25.

41. Ibid., p. 291.

42. See for example, Masud, Enver, The War On Islam, The Wisdom Fund,

Madrasah Books Division, Arlington, 2000.

 

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a political analyst and human rights

activist, specialising in Western foreign policy and its impact on

human rights. He is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy

Research & Development (IPRD), an independent, interdisciplinary, non-

profit think tank based in Brighton, UK. The IPRD conducts research

and analysis of local and global society for the promotion of human

rights, justice and peace. For further information, visit

www.globalresearch.org.

The above article appeared in

 

New Dawn No. 72 (May-June 2002)

 

http://newdawnmagazine.com.au/Article/

Why_The_Media_Lie_Part_One.html