Introduction
"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols
to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and
inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of
behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the
larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of
class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state
bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by
official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a
dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work
where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is
especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and
expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray
themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.
What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited
nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of
resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on
its behavior and performance.
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its
multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes
by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print,
marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests
to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our
propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following
headings:
(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit
orientation of the dominant mass-media firms;
(2) advertising as the primary
income source of the mass media;
(3) the reliance of the media on
information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and
approved by these primary sources and agents of power;
(4) "flak" as a means
of disciplining the media; and
(5) "anticommunism" as a national religion
and control mechanism.
These elements interact with and reinforce one
another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters,
leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of
discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in
the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to
propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that
results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media
news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are
able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news
"objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the
limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints
are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way,
that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing
the newsworthiness of the U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of
MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, 1984, the media do not stop to ponder the
bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw
material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the
news, imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from
other material. It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story),
view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic
bias.
Size,
concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the
dominant mass-media firms
In their analysis of the evolution of the media in Great Britain, James
Curran and Jean Seaton describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth
century, a radical press emerged that reached a national working-class
audience. This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class
consciousness: it unified the workers because it fostered an alternative
value system and framework for looking at the world, and because it
"promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the
potential power of working people to effect social change through the force
of 'combination' and organized action." This was deemed a major threat by
the ruling elites.
One MP asserted that the working class newspapers "inflame passions and
awaken their selfishness, contrasting their current condition with what they
contend to be their future condition-a condition incompatible with human
nature, and those immutable laws which Providence has established for the
regulation of civil society." The result was an attempt to squelch the
working-class media by libel laws and prosecutions, by requiring an
expensive security bond as a condition for publication, and by imposing
various taxes designed to drive out radical media by raising their costs.
These coercive efforts were not effective, and by mid-century they had been
abandoned in favor of the liberal view that the market would enforce
responsibility.
Curran and Seaton show that the market did successfully accomplish what
state intervention failed to do. Following the repeal of the punitive taxes
on newspapers between I853 and I869, a new daily local press came into
existence, but not one new local working-class daily was established through
the rest of the nineteenth century. Curran and Seaton note that indeed, the
eclipse of the national radical press was so total that when the Labour
Party developed out of the working-class movement in the first decade of the
twentieth century, it did not obtain the exclusive backing of a single
national daily or Sunday paper.
One important reason for this was the rise in scale of newspaper
enterprise and the associated increase in capital costs from the
mid-nineteenth century onward, which was based on technological improvements
along with the owners' increased stress on reaching large audiences. The
expansion of the free market was accompanied by an "industrialization of the
press." The total cost of establishing a national weekly on a profitable
basis in 1837 was under a thousand pounds, with a break-even circulation of
6,200 copies. By 1867, the estimated start-up cost of a new London daily was
50,000 pounds. The Sunday Express, launched in 1918, spent over two million
pounds before it broke even with a circulation of over 200,000.
Similar processes were at work in the United States, where the start-up
cost of a new paper in New York City in I85I was $69,000; the public sale of
the St. Louis Democrat in 1872 yielded $456,000; and city newspapers were
selling at from $6 to $I8 million in the 1920s. The cost of machinery alone,
of even very small newspapers, has for many decades run into the hundreds of
thousands of dollars; in 1945 it could be said that "Even small-newspaper
publishing is big business . . . [and] is no longer a trade one takes up
lightly even if he has substantial cash-or takes up at all if he doesn't."
Thus the first filter-the limitation on ownership of media with any
substantial outreach by the requisite large size of investment-was
applicable a century or more ago, and it has become increasingly effective
over time. In 1986 there were some I,500 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines,
9,000 radio and I,500 TV stations, Z,400 book publishers, and seven movie
studios in the United States-over 25,000 media entities in all. But a large
proportion of those among this set who were news dispensers were very small
and local, dependent on the large national companies and wire services for
all but local news. Many more were subject to common ownership, sometimes
extending through virtually the entire set of media variants.
Ben Bagdikian stresses the fact that despite the large media numbers, the
twenty-nine largest media systems account for over half of the output of
newspapers, and most of the sales and audiences in magazines, broadcasting,
books, and movies. He contends that these "constitute a new Private Ministry
of Information and Culture" that can set the national agenda.
Actually, while suggesting a media autonomy from corporate and government
power that we believe to be incompatible with structural facts (as we
describe below), Bagdikian also may be understating the degree of effective
concentration in news manufacture. It has long been noted that the media are
tiered, with the top tier-as measured by prestige, resources, and
outreach-comprising somewhere between ten and twenty-four systems. It is
this top tier, along with the government and wire services, that defines the
news agenda and supplies much of the national and international news to the
lower tiers of the media, and thus for the general public. Centralization
within the top tier was substantially increased by the post-World War II
rise of television and the national networking of this important medium.
Pre-television news markets were local, even if heavily dependent on the
higher tiers and a narrow set of sources for national and international
news; the networks provide national and international news from three
national sources, and television is now the principal source of news for the
public. The maturing of cable, however, has resulted in a fragmentation of
television audiences and a slow erosion of the market share and power of the
networks.... the twenty-four media giants (or their controlling parent
companies) that make up the top tier of media companies in the United
States. This compilation includes:
(I) the three television networks: ABC (through its parent, Capital
Cities), CBS, and NBC (through its ultimate parent, General Electric
[GE]);
(2) the leading newspaper empires: New York Times, Washington Post, Los
Angeles Times (Times-Mirror), Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones),
Knight-Ridder, Gannett, Hearst, Scripps-Howard, Newhouse (Advance
Publications), and the Tribune Company;
(3) the major news and general-interest magazines: Time, Newsweek
(subsumed under Washington Post), Reader's Digest, TV Guide (Triangle),
and U.S. News ~ World Report;
(4) a major book publisher (McGraw-Hill); and
(5) other cable-TV systems of large and growing importance: those of
Murdoch, Turner, Cox, General Corp., Taft, Storer, and Group W
(Westinghouse).
Many of these systems are prominent in more than one field and are only
arbitrarily placed in a particular category (Time, Inc., is very important
in cable as well as magazines; McGraw-Hill is a major publisher of
magazines; the Tribune Company has become a large force in television as
well as newspapers; Hearst is important in magazines as well as newspapers;
and Murdoch has significant newspaper interests as well as television and
movie holdings).
These twenty-four companies are large, profit-seeking corporations, owned
and controlled by quite wealthy people. It can be seen in table I-I that all
but one of the top companies for whom data are available have assets in
excess of $I billion, and the median size (middle item by size) is $z.6
billion. It can also be seen in the table that approximately three-quarters
of these media giants had after-tax profits in excess of $100 million, with
the median at $183 million.
Many of the large media companies are fully integrated into the market, and
for the others, too, the pressures of stockholders, directors, and bankers
to focus on the bottom line are powerful. These pressures have intensified
in recent years as media stocks have become market favorites, and actual or
prospective owners of newspapers and television properties have found it
possible to capitalize increased audience size and advertising revenues into
multiplied values of the media franchises-and great wealth. This has
encouraged the entry of speculators and increased the pressure and
temptation to focus more intensively on profitability. Family owners have
been increasingly divided between those wanting to take advantage of the new
opportunities and those desiring a continuation of family control, and their
splits have often precipitated crises leading finally to the sale of the
family interest.
This trend toward greater integration of the media into the market system
has been accelerated by the loosening of rules limiting media concentration,
cross-ownership, and control by non-media companies. There has also been an
abandonment of restrictions-previously quite feeble anyway-on radio-TV
commercials, entertainment mayhem programming, and "fairness doctrine"
threats, opening the door to the unrestrained commercial use of the
airwaves.
The greater profitability of the media in a deregulated environment has also
led to an increase in takeovers and takeover threats, with even giants like
CBS and Time, Inc., directly attacked or threatened. This has forced the
managements of the media giants to incur greater debt and to focus ever more
aggressively and unequivocally on profitability, in order to placate owners
and reduce the attractiveness of their properties to outsiders. They have
lost some of their limited autonomy to bankers, institutional investors, and
large individual investors whom they have had to solicit as potential "white
knights."
While the stock of the great majority of large media firms is traded on
the securities markets, approximately two-thirds of these companies are
either closely held or still controlled by members of the originating family
who retain large blocks of stock. This situation is changing as family
ownership becomes diffused among larger numbers of heirs and the market
opportunities for selling media properties continue to improve, but the
persistence of family control is evident in the data shown in table I-Z.
Also evident in the table is the enormous wealth possessed by the
controlling families of the top media firms. For seven of the twenty-four,
the market value of the media properties owned by the controlling families
in the mid-1980s exceeded a billion dollars, and the median value was close
to half a billion dollars. 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. And they exercise the
power of this strategic position, if only by establishing the general aims
of the company and choosing its top management.
The control groups of the media giants are also brought into close
relationships with the mainstream of the corporate community through boards
of directors and social links. In the cases of NBC and the Group W
television and cable systems, their respective parents, GE and Westinghouse,
are themselves mainstream corporate giants, with boards of directors that
are dominated by corporate and banking executives. Many of the other large
media firms have boards made up predominantly of insiders, a general
characteristic of relatively small and owner-dominated companies. The larger
the firm and the more widely distributed the stock, the larger the number
and proportion of outside directors.
The composition of the outside directors of the media giants is very
similar to that of large non-media corporations. ... active corporate
executives and bankers together account for a little over half the total of
the outside directors of ten media giants; and the lawyers and
corporate-banker retirees (who account for nine of the thirteen under
"Retired") push the corporate total to about two-thirds of the
outside-director aggregate. These 95 outside directors had directorships in
an additional 36 banks and 255 other companies (aside from the media company
and their own firm of primary affiliation).
In addition to these board linkages, the large media companies all do
business with commercial and investment bankers, obtaining lines of credit
and loans, and receiving advice and service in selling stock and bond issues
and in dealing with acquisition opportunities and takeover threats. Banks
and other institutional investors are also large owners of media stock. In
the early 1980s, such institutions held 44 percent of the stock of publicly
owned newspapers and 35 percent of the stock of publicly owned broadcasting
companies.
These investors are also frequently among the largest stockholders of
individual companies. For example, in 1980-81, the Capital Group, an
investment company system, held 7.I percent of the stock of ABC, 6.6 percent
of Knight Ridder, 6 percent of Time, Inc., and z.8 percent of Westinghouse.
These holdings, individually and collectively, do not convey control, but
these large investors can make themselves heard, and their actions can
affect the welfare of the companies and their managers. If the managers fail
to pursue actions that favor shareholder returns, institutional investors
will be inclined to sell the stock (depressing its price), or to listen
sympathetically to outsiders contemplating takeovers. These investors are a
force helping press media companies toward strictly market (profitability)
objectives.
So is the diversification and geographic spread of the great media
companies. Many of them have diversified out of particular media fields into
others that seemed like growth areas. Many older newspaper-based media
companies, fearful of the power of television and its effects on advertising
revenue, moved as rapidly as they could into broadcasting and cable TV.
Time, Inc., also, made a major diversification move into cable TV, which now
accounts for more than half its profits. Only a small minority of the
twenty-four largest media giants remain in a single media sector.
The large media companies have also diversified beyond the media field,
and non-media companies have established a strong presence in the mass
media. The most important cases of the latter are GE, owning RCA, which owns
the NBC network, and Westinghouse, which owns major television-broadcasting
stations, a cable network, and a radio station network. GE and Westinghouse
are both huge, diversified multinational companies heavily involved in the
controversial areas of weapons production and nuclear power.
It may be recalled that from 1965 to 1967, an attempt by International
Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) to acquire ABC was frustrated following a huge
outcry that focused on the dangers of allowing a great multinational
corporation with extensive foreign investments and business activities to
control a major media outlet. The fear was that ITT control "could
compromise the independence of ABC's news coverage of political events in
countries where ITT has interests."
The soundness of the decision disallowing the acquisition seemed to have
been vindicated by the later revelations of ITT's political bribery and
involvement in attempts to overthrow the government of Chile. RCA and
Westinghouse, however, had been permitted to control media companies long
before the ITT case, although some of the objections applicable to ITT would
seem to apply to them as well. GE is a more powerful company than ITT, with
an extensive international reach, deeply involved in the nuclear power
business, and far more important than ITT in the arms industry. It is a
highly centralized and quite secretive organization, but one with a vast
stake in "political" decisions. GE has contributed to the funding of the
American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank that supports
intellectuals who will get the business message across.
With the acquisition of ABC, GE should be in a far better position to
assure that sound views are given proper attention. The lack of outcry over
its takeover of RCA and NBC resulted in part from the fact that RCA control
over NBC had already breached the gate of separateness, but it also
reflected the more pro-business and laissez-faire environment of the Reagan
era.
The non-media interests of most of the media giants are not large, and,
excluding the GE and Westinghouse systems, they account for only a small
fraction of their total revenue. Their multinational outreach, however, is
more significant. The television networks, television syndicators, major
news magazines, and motion-picture studios all do extensive business abroad,
and they derive a substantial fraction of their revenues from foreign sales
and the operation of foreign affiliates. Reader's Digest is printed in
seventeen languages and is available in over I60 countries. The Murdoch
empire was originally based in Australia, and the controlling parent company
is still an Australian corporation; its expansion in the United States is
funded by profits from Australian and British affiliates.
Another structural relationship of importance is the media companies'
dependence on and ties with government. The radio-TV companies and networks
all require government licenses and franchises and are thus potentially
subject to government control or harassment. This technical legal dependency
has been used as a club to discipline the media, and media policies that
stray too often from an establishment orientation could activate this
threat. The media protect themselves from this contingency by lobbying and
other political expenditures, the cultivation of political relationships,
and care in policy.
The political ties of the media have been impressive. ... fifteen of
ninety-five outside directors of ten of the media giants are former
government officials, and Peter Dreier gives a similar proportion in his
study of large newspapers. In television, the revolving-door flow of
personnel between regulators and the regulated firms was massive during the
years when the oligopolistic structure of the media and networks was being
established.
The great media also depend on the government for more general policy
support. All business firms are interested in business taxes, interest
rates, labor policies, and enforcement and nonenforcement of the antitrust
laws. GE and Westinghouse depend on the government to subsidize their
nuclear power and military research and development, and to create a
favorable climate for their overseas sales.
The Reader's Digest, Time, Newsweek, and movie- and
television-syndication sellers also depend on diplomatic support for their
rights to penetrate foreign cultures with U.S. commercial and value messages
and interpretations of current affairs. The media giants, advertising
agencies, and great multinational corporations have a joint and close
interest in a favorable climate of investment in the Third World, and their
interconnections and relationships with the government in these policies are
symbiotic. In sum, the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they
are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to
sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces; and
they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with
other major corporations, banks, and government. This is the first powerful
filter that will affect news choices.
Advertising as the
primary income source of the mass media
In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of controlling
dissident opinion in the mid-nineteenth century, the Liberal chancellor of
the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis, noted that the market would promote
those papers "enjoying the preference of the advertising public.''
Advertising did, in fact, serve as a powerful mechanism weakening the
working-class press. Curran and Seaton give the growth of advertising a
status comparable with the increase in capital costs as a factor allowing
the market to accomplish what state taxes and harassment failed to do,
noting that these "advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority
since, without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically viable."
Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had to
cover the costs of doing business. With the growth of advertising, papers
that attracted ads could afford a copy price well below production costs.
This put papers lacking in advertising at a serious disadvantage: their
prices would tend to be higher, curtailing sales, and they would have less
surplus to invest in improving the salability of the paper (features,
attractive format, promotion, etc.). For this reason, an advertising-based
system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality the media
companies and types that depend on revenue from sales alone. With
advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final
buyer choice decides. The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity
and survival The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives
them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and
further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals. Even if ad-based
media cater to an affluent ("upscale") audience, they easily pick up a large
part of the "downscale" audience, and their rivals lose market share and are
eventually driven out or marginalized.
In fact, advertising has played a potent role in increasing concentration
even among rivals that focus with equal energy on seeking advertising
revenue. A market share and advertising edge on the part of one paper or
television station will give it additional revenue to compete more
effectively-promote more aggressively, buy more salable features and
programs-and the disadvantaged rival must add expenses it cannot afford to
try to stem the cumulative process of dwindling market (and revenue) share.
The crunch is often fatal, and it helps explain the death of many
large-circulation papers and magazines and the attrition in the number of
newspapers.
From the time of the introduction of press advertising, therefore,
working-class and radical papers have been at a serious disadvantage. Their
readers have tended to be of modest means, a factor that has always affected
advertiser interest. One advertising executive stated in I856 that some
journals are poor vehicles because "their readers are not purchasers, and
any money thrown upon them is so much thrown away." The same force took a
heavy toll of the post-World War II social-democratic press in Great
Britain, with the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, and Sunday Citizen failing
or absorbed into establishment systems between 1960 and 1967, despite a
collective average daily readership of 9.3 million. As James Curran points
out, with 4.7 million readers in its last year, "the Daily Herald actually
had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the
Guardian combined."
What is more, surveys showed that its readers "thought more highly of
their paper than the regular readers of any other popular newspaper," and
"they also read more in their paper than the readers of other popular papers
despite being overwhelmingly working class...." The death of the Herald, as
well as of the News Chronicle and Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a
result of progressive strangulation by lack of advertising support. The
Herald, with 8.I percent of national daily circulation, got 3.5 percent of
net advertising revenue; the Sunday Citizen got one-tenth of the net
advertising revenue of the Sunday Times and one-seventh that of the Observer
(on a per-thousand-copies basis).
Curran argues persuasively that the loss of these three papers was an
important contribution to the declining fortunes of the Labor party, in the
case of the Herald specifically removing a mass-circulation institution that
provided "an alternative framework of analysis and understanding that
contested the dominant systems of representation in both broadcasting and
the mainstream press." A mass movement without any major media support, and
subject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious
disability, and struggles against grave odds.
The successful media today are fully attuned to the crucial importance of
audience "quality": CBS proudly tells its shareholders that while it
"continuously seeks to maximize audience delivery," it has developed a new
"sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client Audience Profile,
or CAP, will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network
television schedules by evaluating audience segments in proportion to usage
levels of advertisers' products and services." In short, the mass media are
interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se;
it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the
nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the
mass media "democratic" thus suffers from the initial weakness that its
political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!
The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the
simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs-they are the "patrons"
who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media compete for their
patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and
necessarily having to explain how their programs serve advertisers' needs.
The choices of these patrons greatly affect the welfare of the media, and
the patrons become what William Evan calls "normative reference
organizations," whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if
they are to succeed.
For a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percentage
point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a change in advertising revenue
of from $80 to $100 million a year, with some variation depending on
measures of audience "quality." The stakes in audience size and affluence
are thus extremely large, and in a market system there is a strong tendency
for such considerations to affect policy profoundly. This is partly a matter
of institutional pressures to focus on the bottom line, partly a matter of
the continuous interaction of the media organization with patrons who supply
the revenue dollars. As Grant Tinker, then head of NBC-TV, observed,
television "is an advertising supported medium, and to the extent that
support falls out, programming will change."
Working-class and radical media also suffer from the political
discrimination of advertisers. Political discrimination is structured into
advertising allocations by the stress on people with money to buy. But many
firms will always refuse to patronize ideological enemies and those whom
they perceive as damaging their interests, and cases of overt discrimination
add to the force of the voting system weighted by income. Public-television
station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western in 1985 after
the station showed the documentary "Hungry for Profit," which contains
material critical of multinational corporate activities in the Third World.
Even before the program was shown, in anticipation of negative corporate
reaction, station officials "did all we could to get the program sanitized"
(according to one station source). The chief executive of Gulf + Western
complained to the station that the program was "virulently anti-business if
not anti-American," and that the station's carrying the program was not the
behavior "of a friend" of the corporation. The London Economist says that
"Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again."
In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions,
advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their own
principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically
conservative. Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor
programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as
the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the
military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third
World tyrannies. Erik Barnouw recounts the history of a proposed documentary
series on environmental problems by NBC at a time of great interest in these
issues. Barnouw notes that although at that time a great many large
companies were spending money on commercials and other publicity regarding
environmental problems, the documentary series failed for want of sponsors.
The problem was one of excessive objectivity in the series, which included
suggestions of corporate or systemic failure, whereas the corporate message
"was one of reassurance."
Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and
would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in addition,
they may offend powerful advertisers.' With the rise in the price of
advertising spots, the forgone revenue increases; and with increasing market
pressure for financial performance and the diminishing constraints from
regulation, an advertising-based media system will gradually increase
advertising time and marginalize or eliminate altogether programming that
has significant public-affairs content.
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious
complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buying
mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with
the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases-the dissemination of
a selling message. Thus over time, instead of programs like "The Selling of
the Pentagon," it is a natural evolution of a market seeking sponsor dollars
to offer programs such as "A Bird's-Eye View of Scotland," "Barry
Goldwater's Arizona," "An Essay on Hotels," and "Mr. Rooney Goes to
Dinner"-a CBS program on "how Americans eat when they dine out, where they
go and why." There are exceptional cases of companies willing to sponsor
serious programs, sometimes a result of recent embarrassments that call for
a public-relations offset. But even in these cases the companies will
usually not want to sponsor close examination of sensitive and divisive
issues-they prefer programs on Greek antiquities, the ballet, and items of
cultural and national history and nostalgia. Barnouw points out an
interesting contrast: commercial-television drama "deals almost wholly with
the here and now, as processed via advertising budgets," but on public
television, culture "has come to mean 'other cultures.' . . . American
civilization, here and now, is excluded from consideration.''
Television stations and networks are also concerned to maintain audience
"flow" levels, i.e., to keep people watching from program to program, in
order to sustain advertising ratings and revenue. Airing program interludes
of documentary-cultural matter that cause station switching is costly, and
over time a "free" (i.e., ad-based) commercial system will tend to excise
it. Such documentary-cultural-critical materials will be driven out of
secondary media vehicles as well, as these companies strive to qualify for
advertiser interest, although there will always be some cultural-political
programming trying to come into being or surviving on the periphery of the
mainstream media.
The reliance
of the media on information provided by government, business, and
"experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power
The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful
sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest.
The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news. They
have daily news demands and imperative news schedules that they must meet.
They cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where
important stories may break. Economics dictates that they concentrate their
resources where significant news often occurs, where important rumors and
leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House,
the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central
nodes of such news activity. On a local basis, city hall and the police
department are the subject of regular news "beats" for reporters. Business
corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible purveyors of
stories deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn out a large volume of
material that meets the demands of news organizations for reliable,
scheduled flows. Mark Fishman calls this "the principle of bureaucratic
affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news
bureaucracy."
Government and corporate sources also have the great merit of being
recognizable and credible by their status and prestige. This is important to
the mass media. As Fishman notes,
Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual
because news personnel participate in upholding a normative order of
authorized 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 recognize 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 labor: officials have and give the facts; reporters merely
get them.
Another reason for the heavy weight given to official sources is that the
mass media claim to be "objective" dispensers of the news. Partly to
maintain the image of objectivity, but also to protect themselves from
criticisms of bias and the threat of libel suits, they need material that
can be portrayed as presumptively accurate. This is also partly a matter of
cost: taking information from sources that may be presumed credible reduces
investigative expense, whereas material from sources that are not prima
facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats, requires careful
checking and costly research.
The magnitude of the public-information operations of large government
and corporate bureaucracies that constitute the primary news sources is vast
and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a
public-information service that involves many thousands of employees,
spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only
the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but
the aggregate of such groups. In 1979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of
relative openness (since closed down), the U.S. Air Force revealed that its
public-information outreach included the following:
I40 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly
circulation I25,000 34 radio and I7 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000
headquarters and unit news releases 6I5,000 hometown news releases 6,600
interviews with news media 3,200 news conferences 500 news media orientation
flights 50 meetings with editorial boards 11,000 speeches
This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort.
Writing back in 1970, Senator J. W. Fulbright had found that the air force
public-relations effort in 1968 involved I,305 full-time employees,
exclusive of additional thousands that "have public functions collateral to
other duties." The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service
for TV and a taped features program for use three times a week, sent to
I,I39 radio stations; it also produced I48 motion pictures, of which 24 were
released for public consumption. There is no reason to believe that the air
force public-relations effort has diminished since the 1960s.
Note that this is just the air force. There are three other branches with
massive programs, and there is a separate, overall public-information
program under an assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in the
Pentagon. In 197I, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon
was publishing a total of 37I magazines at an annual cost of some $57
million, an operation sixteen times larger than the nation's biggest
publisher. In an update in 1982, the Air Force Journal International
indicated that the Pentagon was publishing I,203 periodicals. To put this
into perspective, we may note the scope of public-information operations of
the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Council of
the Churches of Christ (NCC), two of the largest of the nonprofit
organizations that offer a consistently challenging voice to the views of
the Pentagon.
The AFSC's main office information-services budget in 1984-85 was under
$500,000, with eleven staff people. Its institution-wide press releases run
at about two hundred per year, its press conferences thirty a year, and it
produces about one film and two or three slide shows a year. It does not
offer film clips, photos, or taped radio programs to the media. The NCC
Office of Information has an annual budget of some $350,000, issues about a
hundred news releases per year, and holds four press conferences annually.
The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the
AFSC and NCC taken together are I50 to I (or 2,200 to 1, if we count
hometown news releases of the air force, and 94 to I respectively.
Aggregating the other services would increase the differential by a large
factor.
Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information
and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies. The
AFSC and NCC cannot duplicate the Mobil Oil company's multimillion-dollar
purchase of newspaper space and other corporate investments to get its
viewpoint across. The number of individual corporations with budgets for
public information and lobbying in excess of those of the AFSC and NCC runs
into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands. A corporate collective like
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a 1983 budget for research, communications,
and political activities of $65 million. By 1980, the chamber was publishing
a business magazine (Nation's Business) with a circulation of I.3 million
and a weekly newspaper with 740,000 subscribers, and it was producing a
weekly panel show distributed to 400 radio stations, as well as its own
weekly panel-discussion programs carried by I28 commercial television
stations.
Besides the U.S. Chamber, there are thousands of state and local chambers
of commerce and trade associations also engaged in public relations and
lobbying activities. The corporate and trade-association lobbying network
community is "a network of well over I50,000 professionals," and its
resources are related to corporate income, profits, and the protective value
of public-relations and lobbying outlays. Corporate profits before taxes in
1985 were $295.5 billion. When the corporate community gets agitated about
the political environment, as it did in the 1970s, it obviously has the
wherewithal to meet the perceived threat.
Corporate and trade-association image and issues advertising increased
from $305 million in 1975 to $650 million in 1980. So did direct-mail
campaigns through dividend and other mail stuffers, the distribution of
educational films, booklets and pamphlets, and outlays on initiatives and
referendums, lobbying, and political and think-tank contributions. Aggregate
corporate and trade-association political advertising and grass-roots
outlays were estimated to have reached the billion-dollar-a-year level by 1978, and to have grown to $I.6 billion by
1984.
To consolidate their preeminent position as sources, government and
business-news promoters go to great pains to make things easy for news
organizations. They provide the media organizations with facilities in which
to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming
reports; they schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news
deadlines; they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully
organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions. It is the
job of news officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material
that their beat agency has generated at its own pace."
In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize 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. It
should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and
the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, the subsidy is at the
taxpayers' expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be
propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military
contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.
Because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, and mutual
dependency, the powerful can use personal relationships, threats, and
rewards to further influence and coerce the media. The media may feel
obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not
to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship. It is very
difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even
if they tell whoppers. Critical sources may be avoided not only because of
their lesser availability and higher cost of establishing credibility, but
also because the primary sources may be offended and may even threaten the
media using them.
Powerful sources may also use their prestige and importance to the media
as a lever to deny critics access to the media: the Defense Department, for
example, refused to participate in National Public Radio discussions of
defense issues if experts from the Center for Defense Information were on
the program; Elliott Abrams refused to appear on a program on human rights
in Central America at the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard
University, unless the former ambassador, Robert White, was excluded as a
participant; Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network
shows on the Bulgarian Connection where her critics would appear. In the
last two of these cases, the authorities and brand-name experts were
successful in monopolizing access by coercive threats.
Perhaps more important, powerful sources regularly take advantage of
media routines and dependency to "manage" the media, to manipulate them into
following a special agenda and framework (as we will show in detail in the
chapters that follow). Part of this management process consists of
inundating the media with stories, which serve sometimes to foist a
particular line and frame on the media (e.g., Nicaragua as illicitly
supplying arms to the Salvadoran rebels), and at other times to help chase
unwanted stories off the front page or out of the media altogether (the
alleged delivery of MIGs to Nicaragua during the week of the 1984 Nicaraguan
election). This strategy can be traced back at least as far as the Committee
on Public Information, established to coordinate propaganda during World War
I, which "discovered in 1917-18 that one of the best means of controlling
news was flooding news channels with 'facts,' or what amounted to official
information."
The relation between power and sourcing extends beyond official and
corporate provision of day-to-day news to shaping the supply of "experts."
The dominance of official sources is weakened by the existence of highly
respectable unofficial sources that give dissident views with great
authority. This problem is alleviated by "co-opting the experts"-i.e.,
putting them on the payroll as consultants, funding their research, and
organizing think tanks that will hire them directly and help disseminate
their messages. In this way bias may be structured, and the supply of
experts may be skewed in the direction desired by the government and "the
market." As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, in this "age of the expert,"
the "constituency" of the expert is "those who have a vested interest in
commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining its consensus at a high
level has, after all, made him an expert." It is therefore appropriate that
this restructuring has taken place to allow the commonly held opinions
(meaning those that are functional for elite interests) to continue to
prevail.
This process of creating the needed body of experts has been carried out
on a deliberate basis and a massive scale. Back in 1972, Judge Lewis Powell
(later elevated to the Supreme Court) wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce urging business "to buy the top academic reputations in the country
to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice
on the campuses." One buys them, and assures that-in the words of Dr. Edwin
Feulner, of the Heritage Foundation-the public-policy area "is awash with
in-depth academic studies" that have the proper conclusions. Using the
analogy of Procter & Gamble selling toothpaste, Feulner explained that "They
sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the
consumer's mind." By the sales effort, including the dissemination of the
correct ideas to "thousands of newspapers," it is possible to keep debate
"within its proper perspective.''
In accordance with this formula, during the 1970s and early 1980s a
string of institutions was created and old ones were activated to the end of
propagandizing the corporate viewpoint. Many hundreds of intellectuals were
brought to these institutions, where their work was funded and their outputs
were disseminated to the media by a sophisticated propaganda effort. The
corporate funding and clear ideological purpose in the overall effort had no
discernible effect on the credibility of the intellectuals so mobilized; on
the contrary, the funding and pushing of their ideas catapulted them into
the press.
As an illustration of how the funded experts preempt space in the media,
table I-4 describes the "experts" on terrorism and defense issues who
appeared on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour" in the course of a year in the
mid-1980s. We can see that, excluding journalists, a majority of the
participants (54 percent) were present or former government officials, and
that the next highest category (I5.7 percent) was drawn from conservative
think tanks. The largest number of appearances in the latter category was
supplied by the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),
an organization funded by conservative foundations and corporations, and
providing a revolving door between the State Department and CIA and a
nominally private organization. On such issues as terrorism and the
Bulgarian Connection, the CSIS has occupied space in the media that
otherwise might have been filled by independent voices.
The mass media themselves also provide "experts" who regularly echo the
official view. John Barron and Claire Sterling are household names as
authorities on the KGB and terrorism because the Reader's Digest has funded,
published, and publicized their work; the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko
became an expert on Soviet arms and intelligence because Time, ABC-TV, and
the New York Times chose to feature him (despite his badly tarnished
credentials). By giving these purveyors of the preferred view a great deal
of exposure, the media confer status and make them the obvious candidates
for opinion and analysis.
Another class of experts whose prominence is largely a function of
serviceability to power is former radicals who have come to "see the light."
The motives that cause these individuals to switch gods, from Stalin (or
Mao) to Reagan and free enterprise, is varied, but for the establishment
media the reason for the change is simply that the ex-radicals have finally
seen the error of their ways. In a country whose citizenry values
acknowledgement of sin and repentance, the turncoats are an important class
of repentant sinners. It is interesting to observe how the former sinners,
whose previous work was of little interest or an object of ridicule to the
mass media, are suddenly elevated to prominence and become authentic
experts. We may recall how, during the McCarthy era, defectors and
ex-Communists vied with one another in tales of the imminence of a Soviet
invasion and other lurid stories. They found that news coverage was a
function of their trimming their accounts to the prevailing demand. The
steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we
are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the
establishment wants said.
"flak" as a means of
disciplining the media
"Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It
may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits,
speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat,
and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may
consist of the entirely independent actions of individuals.
If flak is produced on a large scale, or by individuals or groups with
substantial resources, it can be both uncomfortable and costly to the media.
Positions have to be defended within the organization and without, sometimes
before legislatures and possibly even in courts. Advertisers may withdraw
patronage. Television advertising is mainly of consumer goods that are
readily subject to organized boycott. During the McCarthy years, many
advertisers and radio and television stations were effectively coerced into
quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red
hunters to boycott products. Advertisers are still concerned to avoid
offending constituencies that might produce flak, and their demand for
suitable programming is a continuing feature of the media environment. If
certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to elicit
flak, this prospect can be a deterrent.
The ability to produce flak, and especially flak that is costly and
threatening, is related to power. Serious flak has increased in close
parallel with business's growing resentment of media criticism and the
corporate offensive of the 1970s and 1980s. Flak from the powerful can be
either direct or indirect. The direct would include letters or phone calls
from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley, or from the FCC to the
television networks asking for documents used in putting together a program,
or from irate officials of ad agencies or corporate sponsors to media
officials asking for reply time or threatening retaliation. The powerful can
also work on the media indirectly by complaining to their own constituencies
(stockholders, employees) about the media, by generating institutional
advertising that does the same, and by funding right-wing monitoring or
think-tank operations designed to attack the media. They may also fund
political campaigns and help put into power conservative politicians who
will more directly serve the interests of private power in curbing any
deviationism in the media.
Along with its other political investments of the 1970s and 1980s, the
corporate community sponsored the growth of institutions such as the
American Legal Foundation, the Capital Legal Foundation, the Media
Institute, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media
(AIM). These may be regarded as institutions organized for the specific
purpose of producing flak. Another and older flak-producing machine with a
broader design is Freedom House. The American Legal Foundation, organized in
1980, has specialized in Fairness Doctrine complaints and libel suits to aid
"media victims." The Capital Legal Foundation, incorporated in 1977, was the
Scaife vehicle for Westmoreland's $I20-million libel suit against CBS.
The Media Institute, organized in 1972 and funded by corporate-wealthy
patrons, sponsors monitoring projects, conferences, and studies of the
media. It has focused less heavily on media failings in foreign policy,
concentrating more on media portrayals of economic issues and the business
community, but its range of interests is broad. The main theme of its
sponsored studies and conferences has been the failure of the media to
portray business accurately and to give adequate weight to the business
point of view, but it underwrites works such as John Corry's expose of the
alleged left-wing bias of the mass media. The chairman of the board of
trustees of the institute in 1985 was Steven V. Seekins, the top
public-relations officer of the American Medical Association; chairman of
the National Advisory Council was Herbert Schmertz, of the Mobil Oil
Corporation.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs, run by Linda and Robert Lichter,
came into existence in the mid-1980s as a "non-profit, nonpartisan" research
institute, with warm accolades from Patrick Buchanan, Faith Whittlesey, and
Ronald Reagan himself, who recognized the need for an objective and fair
press. Their Media Monitor and research studies continue their earlier
efforts to demonstrate the liberal bias and anti-business propensities of
the mass media.
AIM was formed in 1969, and it grew spectacularly in the 1970s. Its annual
income rose from $5,000 in 197I to $I.5 million in the early 1980s, with
funding mainly from large corporations and the wealthy heirs and foundations
of the corporate system. At least eight separate oil companies were
contributors to AIM in the early 1980s, but the wide representation in
sponsors from the corporate community is impressive. The function of AIM is
to harass the media and put pressure on them to follow the corporate agenda
and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy. It presses the media to join
more enthusiastically in Red-scare bandwagons, and attacks them for alleged
deficiencies whenever they fail to toe the line on foreign policy. It
conditions the media to expect trouble (and cost increases) for violating
right-wing standards of bias.
Freedom House, which dates back to the early 1940s, has had interlocks
with AIM, the World Anticommunist League, Resistance International, and U.S.
government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has long served
as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and international right wing.
It sent election monitors to the Rhodesian elections staged by Ian Smith in
1979 and found them "fair," whereas the 1980 elections won by Mugabe under
British supervision it found dubious. Its election monitors also found the
Salvadoran elections of 1982 admirable. It has expended substantial
resources in criticizing the media for insufficient sympathy with U.S.
foreign-policy ventures and excessively harsh criticism of U.S. client
states. Its most notable publication of this genre was Peter Braestrup's Big
Story, which contended that the media's negative portrayal of the Tet
offensive helped lose the war. The work is a travesty of scholarship, but
more interesting is its premise: that the mass media not only should support
any national venture abroad, but should do so with enthusiasm, such
enterprises being by definition noble. In 1982, when the Reagan
administration was having trouble containing media reporting of the
systematic killing of civilians by the Salvadoran army, Freedom House came
through with a denunciation of the "imbalance" in media reporting from El
Salvador.
Although the flak machines steadily attack the mass media, the media
treat them well. They receive respectful attention, and their propagandistic
role and links to a larger corporate program are rarely mentioned or
analyzed. AIM head, Reed Irvine's diatribes are frequently published, and
right-wing network flacks who regularly assail the "liberal media," such as
Michael Ledeen, are given Op-Ed column space, sympathetic reviewers, and a
regular place on talk shows as experts. This reflects the power of the
sponsors, including the well-entrenched position of the right wing in the
mass media themselves.
The producers of flak add to one another's strength and reinforce the
command of political authority in its news-management activities. The
government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing, threatening,
and "correcting" the media, trying to contain any deviations from the
established line. News management itself is designed to produce flak. In the
Reagan years, Mr. Reagan was put on television to exude charm to millions,
many of whom berated the media when they dared to criticize the "Great
Communicator.''
"anticommunism" as a
national religion and control mechanism
A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the
ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it
threatens the very root of their class position and superior status. The
Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and
the ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist states
have contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first principle
of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the populace
against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against
anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support
accommodation with Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps
fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control
mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the
support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to
social democrats who are too soft on Communists and "play into their hands"
is rationalized in similar terms.
Liberals at home, often accused of being pro-Communist or insufficiently
anti-Communist, are kept continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu
in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. If they allow communism, or
something that can be labeled communism, to triumph in the provinces while
they are in office, the political costs are heavy. Most of them have fully
internalized the religion anyway, but they are all under great pressure to
demonstrate their anti-Communist credentials. This causes them to behave
very much like reactionaries. Their occasional support of social democrats
often breaks down where the latter are insufficiently harsh on their own
indigenous radicals or on popular groups that are organizing among generally
marginalized sectors. In his brief tenure in the Dominican Republic, Juan
Bosch attacked corruption in the armed forces and government, began a
land-reform program, undertook a major project for mass education of the
populace, and maintained a remarkably open government and system of
effective civil liberties.
These policies threatened powerful internal vested interests, and the
United States resented his independence and the extension of civil liberties
to Communists and radicals. This was carrying democracy and pluralism too
far. Kennedy was "extremely disappointed" in Bosch's rule, and the State
Department "quickly soured on the first democratically elected Dominican
President in over thirty years." Bosch's overthrow by the military after
nine months in office had at least the tacit support of the United States.
Two years later, by contrast, the Johnson administration invaded the
Dominican Republic to make sure that Bosch did not resume power.
The Kennedy liberals were enthusiastic about the military coup and
displacement of a populist government in Brazil in 1964. A major spurt in
the growth of neo-Fascist national-security states took place under Kennedy
and Johnson. In the cases of the U.S. subversion of Guatemala, 1947-54, and
the military attacks on Nicaragua, 198I-87, allegations of Communist links
and a Communist threat caused many liberals to support counterrevolutionary
intervention, while others lapsed into silence, paralyzed by the fear of
being tarred with charges of infidelity to the national religion.
It should be noted that when anti-Communist fervor is aroused, the demand
for serious evidence in support of claims of "communist" abuses is
suspended, and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources.
Defectors, informers, and assorted other opportunists move to center
stage as "experts," and they remain there even after exposure as highly
unreliable, if not downright liars. Pascal Delwit and Jean-Michel Dewaele
point out that in France, too, the ideologues of anticommunism "can do and
say anything.'' Analyzing the new status of Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix,
two former passionate Stalinists now possessed of a large and uncritical
audience in France, Delwit and Dewaele note:
If we analyze their writings, we find all the classic reactions of people
who have been disappointed in love. But no one dreams of criticizing them
for their past, even though it has marked them forever. They may well have
been converted, but they have not changed.... no one notices the constants,
even though they are glaringly obvious. Their best sellers prove, thanks to
the support of the most indulgent and slothful critics anyone could hope
for, that the public can be fooled. No one denounces or even notices the
arrogance of both yesterday's eulogies and today's diatribes; no one cares
that there is never any proof and that invective is used in place of
analysis. Their inverted hyper-Stalinism-which takes the usual form of total
manicheanism-is whitewashed simply because it is directed against Communism.
The hysteria has not changed, but it gets a better welcome in its present
guise.
The anti-Communist control mechanism reaches through the system to
exercise a profound influence on the mass media. In normal times as well as
in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in terms of a
dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and
losses allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for "our side" considered
an entirely legitimate news practice. It is the mass media that identify,
create, and push into the limelight a Joe McCarthy, Arkady Shevchenko, and
Claire Sterling and Robert Leiken, or an Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix. The
ideology and religion of anticommunism is a potent filter.
Dichotomisation and
Propaganda Campaigns
The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates,
and even more sharply limit what can become "big news," subject to sustained
news campaigns. By definition, news from primary establishment sources meets
one major filter requirement and is readily accommodated by the mass media.
Messages from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized individuals and
groups, domestic and foreign, are at an initial disadvantage in sourcing
costs and credibility, and they often do not comport with the ideology or
interests of the gatekeepers and other powerful parties that influence the
filtering process.
Thus, for example, the torture of political prisoners and the attack on
trade unions in Turkey will be pressed on the media only by human rights
activists and groups that have little political leverage. The U.S.
government supported the Turkish martial-law government from its inception
in 1980, and the U.S. business community has been warm toward regimes that
profess fervent anticommunism, encourage foreign investment, repress unions,
and loyally support U.S. foreign policy (a set of virtues that are
frequently closely linked). Media that chose to feature Turkish violence
against their own citizenry would have had to go to extra expense to find
and check out information sources; they would elicit flak from government,
business, and organized right-wing flak machines, and they might be looked
upon with disfavor by the corporate community (including advertisers) for
indulging in such a quixotic interest and crusade. They would tend to stand
alone in focusing on victims that from the standpoint of dominant American
interests were unworthy.
In marked contrast, protest over political prisoners and the violation of
the rights of trade unions in Poland was seen by the Reagan administration
and business elites in 198I as a noble cause, and, not coincidentally, as an
opportunity to score political points. Many media leaders and syndicated
columnists felt the same way. Thus information and strong opinions on
human-rights violations in Poland could be obtained from official sources in
Washington, and reliance on Polish dissidents would not elicit flak from the
U.S. government or the flak machines. These victims would be generally
acknowledged by the managers of the filters to be worthy. The mass media
never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera, in
Uruguay, is unworthy-the attention and general dichotomization occur
"naturally" as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the
same as if a commissar had instructed the media: "Concentrate on the victims
of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.''
Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the
filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns.
If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is
useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to
enlighten the public. This was true, for example, of the shooting down by
the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007 in early September 1983, which
permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and
greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman
noted complacently in the New York Times of August 3I, 1984, U.S. officials
"assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has
strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow." In sharp
contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in
February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for
"cold-blooded murder,'' and no boycott. This difference in treatment was
explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility: "No
useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of
blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai peninsula last
week.'' There was a very "useful purpose" served by focusing on the Soviet
act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued.
Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite
interests. The Red scare of 1919-20 served well to abort the union
organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other
industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and
the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive
coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet
dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection
helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more
aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from the upward
redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan's domestic economic
program. The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been
needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in E1 Salvador and to
justify the escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central
America.
Conversely, propaganda campaigns will not be mobilized where
victimization, even though massive, sustained, and dramatic, fails to meet
the test of utility to elite interests. Thus, while the focus on Cambodia in
the Pol Pot era (and thereafter) was exceedingly serviceable, as Cambodia
had fallen to the Communists and useful lessons could be drawn by attention
to their victims, the numerous victims of the U.S. bombing before the
Communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the U.S. elite press. After
Pol Pot's ouster by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted
support to this "worse than Hitler" villain, with little notice in the
press, which adjusted once again to the national political agenda. Attention
to the Indonesian massacres of 1965-66, or the victims of the Indonesian
invasion of East Timor from 1975 onward, would also be distinctly unhelpful
as bases of media campaigns, because Indonesia is a U.S. ally and client
that maintains an open door to Western investment, and because, in the case
of East Timor, the United States bears major responsibility for the
slaughter. The same is true of the victims of state terror in Chile and
Guatemala, U.S. clients whose basic institutional structures, including the
state terror system, were put in place and maintained by, or with crucial
assistance from, U.S. power, and who remain U.S. client states. Propaganda
campaigns on behalf of these victims would conflict with
government-business-military interests and, in our model, would not be able
to pass through the filtering system.
Propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the government or by one
or more of the top media firms. The campaigns to discredit the government of
Nicaragua, to support the Salvadoran elections as an exercise in
legitimizing democracy, and to use the Soviet shooting down of the Korean
airliner KAL 007 as a means of mobilizing public support for the arms
buildup, were instituted and propelled by the government. The campaigns to
publicize the crimes of Pol Pot and the alleged KGB plot to assassinate the
pope were initiated by the Reader's Digest, with strong follow-up support
from NBC-TV, the New York Times, and other major media companies. Some
propaganda campaigns are jointly initiated by government and media; all of
them require the collaboration of the mass media. The secret of the
unidirectionality of the politics of media propaganda campaigns is the
multiple filter system discussed above: the mass media will allow any
stories that are hurtful to large interests to peter out quickly, if they
surface at all.
For stories that are useful, the process will get under way with a series
of government leaks, press conferences, white papers, etc., or with one or
more of the mass media starting the ball rolling with such articles as
Barron and Paul's "Murder of a Gentle Land" (Cambodia), or Claire Sterling's
"The Plot to Kill the Pope," both in the Reader's Digest. If the other major
media like the story, they will follow it up with their own versions, and
the matter quickly becomes newsworthy by familiarity. If the articles are
written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or
alternative interpretations in the mass media, and command support by
authority figures, the propaganda themes quickly become established as true
even without real evidence.
This tends to close out dissenting views even more comprehensively, as
they would now conflict with an already established popular belief. This in
turn opens up further opportunities for still more inflated claims, as these
can be made without fear of serious repercussions. Similar wild assertions
made in contradiction of official views would elicit powerful flak, so that
such an inflation process would be controlled by the government and the
market. No such protections exist with system-supportive claims; there, flak
will tend to press the media to greater hysteria in the face of enemy evil.
The media not only suspend critical judgment and investigative zeal, they
compete to find ways of putting the newly established truth in a supportive
light. Themes and facts-even careful and well-documented analyses-that are
incompatible with the now institutionalized theme are suppressed or ignored.
If the theme collapses of its own burden of fabrications, the mass media
will quietly fold their tents and move on to another topic.
Using a propaganda model, we would not only anticipate definitions of
worth based on utility, and dichotomous attention based on the same
criterion, we would also expect the news stories about worthy and unworthy
victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality. That is, we
would expect official sources of the United States and its client regimes to
be used heavily-and uncritically-in connection with one's own abuses and
those of friendly governments, while refugees and other dissident sources
will be used in dealing with enemies.
We would anticipate the uncritical acceptance of certain premises in
dealing with self and friends-such as that one's own state and leaders seek
peace and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth-premises which
will not be applied in treating enemy states. We would expect different
criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy in enemy
states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of
oneself and friends. What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off
the agenda in discussing the other. We would also expect great investigatory
zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high
officials for abuses in enemy states, but diminished enterprise in examining
such matters in connection with one's own and friendly states.
The quality of coverage should also be displayed more directly and
crudely in placement, headlining, word usage, and other modes of mobilizing
interest and outrage. In the opinion columns, we would anticipate sharp
restraints on the range of opinion allowed expression. Our hypothesis is
that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they
will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and
context in story construction that will generate reader interest and
sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight
detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and
enrage.
Meanwhile, because of the power of establishment sources, the flak
machines, and anti-Communist ideology, we would anticipate outcries that the
worthy victims are being sorely neglected, that the unworthy are treated
with excessive and uncritical generosity, that the media's liberal,
adversarial (if not subversive) hostility to government explains our
difficulties in mustering support for the latest national venture in
counterrevolutionary intervention.
In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and
highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to
important domestic power interests. This should be observable in
dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage...
such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only
are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system
advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials
(placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve
political ends."
