Inventing Reality: The Politics of Mass Media

316 Pages·5.484 MB·English

by  Michael Parenti

INVENTING REALITY
the politics of mass media
BY
michael parenti
To the memory of Philip Meranto
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements.........................................................................................................i
I. From Cronkite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight................................................1
- Whom to Believe?...............................................................................................3
- Cronkite and Other Critics...............................................................................5
- Class, Race, and Gender...................................................................................10
- Monopoly Politics.............................................................................................20
- Do the Media Manage Our Minds?...............................................................23
- Beyond Orwell’s 1984.......................................................................................27
II. “Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Man Who Owns One”...........................29
- A Favored Few...................................................................................................29
- Interlocking Control........................................................................................32
- Many Voices, One Chorus...............................................................................33
III. Who Controls the News?......................................................................................37
- Calling the Tune: Owners...............................................................................37
- Calling the Tune: Advertisers.........................................................................40
- On the Line: Editors.........................................................................................43
- Self-Censorship: Reporters..............................................................................47
- The Ruling Culture...........................................................................................48
- Suppressing the News......................................................................................52
IV. Objectivity and Government Manipulation.......................................................59
- The Myth of Objectivity..................................................................................59
- Not Enough Time, Space, and Money?.........................................................64
- Maintaining Appearances...............................................................................67
- Is it All Economics?.........................................................................................69
- Government Manipulation..............................................................................71
V. The Big Sell...............................................................................................................81
- The Consumer Ideology...................................................................................83
- Selling the System.............................................................................................85
- Public Service for Private Interests................................................................90
- Even Sports and Weather.................................................................................92
VI. Giving Labor the Business....................................................................................97
- Business Over Labor.........................................................................................97
- Nice Bosses, Crazy Strikers...........................................................................102
- The Invisible Worker......................................................................................107
VII. “Liberal” Media, Conservative Bias.................................................................110
- Creating a “Conservative Mood”..................................................................111
- Populist Electorate, Conservative Outcome...............................................117
- Pundits to the Right.......................................................................................119
- How to Discredit Protestors..........................................................................121
VIII. The Media Fight the Red Menace..................................................................129
- Enter the Red Menace....................................................................................129
- The Cold War..................................................................................................135
- The Creation of Joe McCarthy......................................................................138
- Rational Hysteria............................................................................................141
- Twists and Turns............................................................................................144
- Celebrating the Collapse of Communism...................................................150
IX. Doing the Third World........................................................................................158
- The Vietnam Apology....................................................................................159
- Murder in Chile...............................................................................................164
- Stomping on Grenada....................................................................................170
X. For the New World Order.....................................................................................176
- The “Totalitarian” Sandinistas.....................................................................176
- A Devil in Panama..........................................................................................182
- Celebrating the Massacre of Iraq.................................................................187
XI. Propaganda Themes............................................................................................197
- American Virtue and “Anti-Americanism”.................................................197
- The Nonexistence of Imperialism................................................................200
- “Moderate Authoritarian” Regimes.............................................................202
- Evil, Power-Hungry Le�ists..........................................................................206
- Economic “Failures”.......................................................................................212
- Democracy is in the Eyes of the Beholder...................................................214
- “Inferior” Peoples and Their Hopeless Ways.............................................215
XII. Methods of Misrepresentation.........................................................................219
- Selectivity and Deliberate Omission............................................................219
- Lies and Face-Value Transmission..............................................................222
- False Balancing...............................................................................................227
- Framing and Labeling....................................................................................230
- The Greying of Reality...................................................................................232
- Auxiliary Embellishments.............................................................................235
- Placement........................................................................................................238
XIII. Culture, Control, and Resistance....................................................................241
- Capitalism and Culture..................................................................................241
- The Limits of Orthodoxy...............................................................................244
- Credibility and the “Liberal Bias”................................................................249
- Between Conspiracy and Culture.................................................................257
- The Conflict Within.......................................................................................261
Appendix......................................................................................................................264
Notes.............................................................................................................................269
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Peggy Noton,Gwen Glesmann, Sally Soriano,andLaura
Cooley for the generous assistance they rendered atcrucial times. My thanksto
the St. Martin’s Press staff, especially my editor Don Reisman, Frances Jones,
and Suzanne Holt for their efficient and thoughtful service in guiding the
manuscript safely through hazardous editorial and production straits—and
improving its quality along the way.
For their critical suggestions I wish to thank Earl S. Grow, The
University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, and Edward C. Uliassi, Northeastern
Illinois University.
Encouraging and helpful comments from interested readers, too
numerous to mention, regarding the first edition of this book gave memuchof
the resolve to write this updated and, I think, improved version. For this they
have my gratitude.
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INVENTING REALITY
I. From Conkrite’s Complaint to Orwell’s Oversight
For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the news
media. Indeed, what we even define as an issue or event, what weseeandhear,
and what we do not see and hear are greatly determined by those who control
the communications world. Be it peace protestors, uprisings in Latin America,
crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of usknowof things except astheyare
depicted in the news. Even when we don’t believe what the media say, we are
still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They are still
getting the agenda, defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or
reject. The media exert a persistent influence in defining the scope of
respectable political discourse.
Be this as it may, growing numbers of people are becoming increasingly
aware that the media are neither objective nor consistently accurate in their
portrayal of things. There seems to be agrowing understandingthat weneedto
defend ourselves by challenging the misinformation we are fed. In this book I
will try to demonstrate how the news media distort important aspects ofsocial
and political life and why. The press’s misrepresentations are not usually
accidental, not merely the result of the complexity of actual events and the
honest confusions of poorly prepared reporters. While those kinds of problems
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MICHAEL PARENTI
exist, another kind of distortion predominates, one not due to chance or to the
idiosyncratic qualities ofnewsproduction ornewspeople.The major distortions
are repeatable and systemic—the product not only of deliberate manipulation
but of the ideological and economic conditions underwhich the media operate.
One book cannot cover all that might be said about the media. I will
concentrate on national and international politico-economic class issues, with
some attention given to the racist and sexist biases in the media (dealt with in
this chapter). I do not deal with the entertainment media and the many hidden
ideological and political biases found therein. That subject is treated in my
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recent book Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment. In the pages
ahead we will explore the way the press distorts andsuppresses thenewsabout
major domestic and foreign events, the hidden and not-so- hidden ideological
values, the influence of ownership, and the opportunities for dissent.
Rather than attempt a comprehensive canvassing of the news complete
with statistical breakdowns and content analyses, I trace media performance
along several basic themes, providing representative samples of how the press
treats or mistreatsasubject.Amore systematicundertakingwouldhavehadthe
virtue of thoroughness and maybe increased precision of a sort, but it would
have made for a very huge and dull volume. In any case, numerous systematic
studies are cited and summarized in the chapters that follow.
This book concentrates on the more influential news media, specifically
the three major networks: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the
National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the American Broadcasting
Company (ABC), along with the New York Times and Washington Post (and their
respective news services). These two newspapers, the Post and the Times, not
only feed information to the public butto other news mediaas well.Occasional
attention is also given hereintotwonewsweeklies,TimeandNewsweek,theWall
Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and lesser publications and broadcast
media. Taken together these variousoutletscompose whatI alternately describe
as the “major media,” the “mainstream media,” the “corporate-owned press,”
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INVENTING REALITY
the “US press,” the “national media,” or just the “press” and the “news media.”
Throughout this book I use the terms news media and press synonymously to
mean the printed and broadcast news organizations. It so happens that press is
singular and media plural, but I mean the same by both. The above-mentioned
news organizations represent the higher quality establishment press, being
more informative and less distorted than most of the other (more conservative)
media. If this book has a bias in selection, then, it is in the direction of
understatement.
WHOM TO BELIEVE?
If the media so preempts the communication universe, then how canwe
evaluate them? And who is to say whether our criticisms are to be trusted? In
attempting to expose the distortions and biases of the press, do we not
unavoidably introduce biases of our own? And if objectivity is unattainable,are
we not then le� in the grip of asubjectivisminwhich one person’simpressions
are about as reliable (or unreliable) as another’s? To be sure, there isalwaysthe
danger that a dissenting viewpoint of the kind presented in this book will
introduce distortions of its own. The reader should watch for these. But this
new “danger” is probably not as great as the one posed by the press itself,
because readers approach the dissenting viewpoint a�er having been
conditioned throughout their lives to the sentiments and images of the
dominant society. Far more insidious and less open to conscious challenge are
the notions that so fit into the dominant political culture’s field of established
images that they appear not as biased manipulations but as “the nature of
things.”
When exposed to a view that challenges the prevailing message, the
reader is not thensimplyburdened withadditionaldistortions. A dissidentview
provides us with an occasion to test the prevailing beliefs, open ourselves to
information that the mainstream media and the dominant belief system have
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