Political Elites and the Media

excerpted from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

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Political Elites and the Media

... Media in the United States convey a remarkably uniform view of the world, and it has been a politically specific one: anticommunist, pro-corporate, and nationalist. It is hard to imagine any criticism of capitalism by a U.S. reporter or broadcaster. Perhaps the contrast with a media such as the USSR's should be drawn partly in this way: Until glasnost, theirs hewed to an ideology prescribed by government censors. In the United States, a different ideology is followed with equal reliability and consistency, but the most important mechanism of censorship is corporate ownership and management rather than government oversight. Like their Russian counterparts, the American media are adept at exposing "slow progress on projects, sloppy workmanship...poorly made goods, and the like," but the privately owned media is no more likely to attribute such lapses to capitalism than the communist-controlled media was likely, before glasnost, to attribute such problems to communism. When political discourse over fundamental political issues occurs in the United States, it proceeds in spite of, rather than because of, a technologically sophisticated, privately owned mass media that reaches into every home.

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In the 1980s, conservative groups decided that media "objectivity" actually amounted to a liberal bias, and they launched a well-organized and well-financed campaign to pull the media to the right. Among the leading proponents of the "media as liberal" thesis were a number of activists with close relationships to the corporations and the military-defense establishment. Among these activists was Reed Irvine a North Carolina conservative who founded Accuracy In Media (AIM). AIM publishes a biweekly report that examines the largest media organizations, with a particular emphasis on the Washington Post, the New York Times, the news weeklies and the networks. Another organization, the American Legal Foundation (ALF), was organized by Daniel Popeo in 1980. The ALF involved itself in a number of regulatory and legal challenges to media companies. For example, it challenged minority and women's "citizen's agreements" with broadcast license owners and served as a resource center for businesses and politicians suing for libel. At the same time, the ALF petitioned the FCC to deny licenses to a group of nonprofit alternative radio stations carrying programs from the independent Pacifica Foundation.

Two other well-financed groups active in countering the allegedly liberal bias of the media included the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA) and the U.S. Industrial Council Educational Foundation (USICEF). IEA, cofounded in 1978 by former Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon and neoconservative author Irving Kristol, attracted funding from several foundations and corporations, including General Motors, Northrup, Nestle, Dow Chemical, and Boise-Cascade. IEA and USICEF funded more than seventy student-run conservative newspapers from 1979 to 1985. USICEF helped launch the conservative Yale Free Press and the Harvard Sentinel, and it provided syndicated services to about fifty student papers. Conservative organizations also organized programs to train and place journalists. The National Journalism Center trained reporters "within a context of traditional values."

Fairness in Media (FIM) was organized in 1978 by a Raleigh, North Carolina attorney named Thomas Ellis, a political ally of Senator Jesse Helms. According to Ellis, the liberal media was thwarting the will of the electorate: "We won the election but we lost the battle afterwards because of the media....Every time the conservatives start to move, the liberal media is able to change that agenda." Ellis said the idea to organize FIM was hatched as early as 1967 when, angered by network coverage of the Vietnam War, he bought one share each in CBS, ABC, and RCA. This example was cited in 1985 when FIM, Senator Jesse Helms, and conservative activists encouraged their supporters to buy shares in CBS Inc. in order to "become Dan Rather's boss."

Urged on by the Reagan administration, conservative critics launched an assault on journalists and broadcasters. Reagan's science adviser, George A. Keyworth, summed up the administration's charge of liberal bias when he said, "Much of the press seems to be drawn from a reactively narrow fringe element on the far left of our society...and...is trying to tear down America.'' The networks responded to these attacks by mounting public relations campaigns. ABC initiated an ad campaign in the fall of 1985 entitled "American Television and You." According to explanations by ABC executives, the campaign was designed to allay public concerns about the effect of multibillion-dollar takeovers of the networks. After thirteen weeks of spot ads and concurrent newspaper advertising, ABC researchers noted an increase in the number of viewers "who felt more positive toward television than they did before they saw the message." As a follow-up, ABC inaugurated Viewpoint, an irregular series featuring a live discussion format designed to provide an ostensibly objective forum for public criticism of the media.

Claiming that he knew of a "no more patriotic group than television journalists," in 1986 NBC's anchor Tom Brokaw took a "loyalty oath" to prove his own patriotism. In the same summer CBS began running a series of advertisements promoting its evening news program. Using black-and-white stills of individuals, the voiceover on the spot said: "Americans, we know who we are. And when it comes to news, we know who we trust. Dan Rather, CBS News."

The networks also aired documentaries on the press. For example, NBC aired a "white paper" in June 1985, called A Portrait of the Press: Warts and All, written and hosted by commentator John Chancellor. In a closing segment, Chancellor said, "The most important thing we learned in covering the story of journalism in America today is this. The problems the press does have would be much easier to handle if there were more attention paid to the craft of journalism." Indeed, the "craft of journalism" underwent profound changes in the 1980s that have had the effect of making the media an active partner in the neoconservative revolution. The pressures that brought this about were not only applied by political groups. In the end, news lost all possibility of a critical or investigative role (what its critics called "left leaning") because of corporate pressures.

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The failure of the media to serve its watchdog role during the 1980s was often attributed to Ronald Reagan's genial personality and his alleged ability to manipulate the media. But it was the media itself, not the government, that manufactured the "Teflon" coating for Reagan, in part because the values of the corporate executives who own news organizations were the same as those that put Reagan in the White House:

the press took its definition of what constituted political news from the political governing class in Washington. Thus while the press shaped mass opinion it reflected elite opinion; indeed, it effectively functioned as a mechanism by which the latter was transformed, albeit imperfectly, into the former.

In the 1980s, it was inevitable that the corporate media would amplify conservative voices in news and news commentary. George Will was named the lone commentator on ABC News in 1984, reaching the largest audience of any journalist in the country. Using this position, Will editorialized for the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua, the deployment of the MX missile, and military intervention against Libya, and he opposed sanctions against the Republic of South Africa. Two newly created news operations, Turner Broadcasting's Cable News Network in 1980 and Gannett's USA Today in 1982, were distinctly conservative in orientation. And since 198O, the New York Times, which provides a significant source of syndicated editorial material to other media, swung decisively toward neoconservative ideas and writers. In other newspapers, the most widely distributed syndicated columnists by the late 1980s were conservatives like James J. Kilpatrick, George Will, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, and Joseph Kraft. Liberals, such as Mary McGrory and William Raspberry, each were able to distribute their columns to less than one-third the number of newspapers reached by Kilpatrick. Of course, no syndicated "left" columnist was published in the national daily press.

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The atmosphere of hysteria whipped up by the press exerted tremendous influence on politics within the United States. The near-universal editorial opposition to the 1948 presidential campaign of the short-lived Progressive Party presaged the press's collaboration in the hunt for internal subversives in the 1950s. The party's candidate, former Vice President Henry Wallace, offered voters a liberalized version of the New Deal. Wallace found himself excoriated in the press as "the centerpiece of U.S. communism's most authentic looking facade." The anticommunist hysteria sustained a rollback in many of the rights that labor unions had won in the 1930s. The press did its part by painting the labor movement as a "communist front." Business's breakthrough against labor, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, was supported by almost all the major newspapers in the country. The act empowered the courts to issue injunctions against strikes and to levy heavy fines for violations. Mass picketing and secondary boycotts were outlawed. States were permitted to pass "right-to-work" laws allowing nonunion employees to work in unionized plants. Owners were allowed to lock out workers and to refuse to bargain. Union officials were required to sign oaths certifying that they were not Communists. The press did not report on the conflict between industry, government, and labor so much as it acted as an active and powerful participant in the struggle. It played the crucial role of mobilizing public opinion sufficiently so that labor could be beaten: "Under the pressure of the combined forces of industry, government, and the press, the major strikes had been broken, wages driven down, the open shop restored and the ranks of the unions decimated."

By 1950, the Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear warhead, the Chinese Communist party had ousted the U.S.-backed government of Chiang Kai-shek, and the United States was sinking into an unpopular war in Korea. Alger Hiss, a State Department official, had been convicted in January of perjury, following a barrage of hysterically negative press reports that ensured he could not get a fair trial. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested six months later, accused of conspiring to pass the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. Their subsequent death sentence was, to the Hearst press, an appropriate way to rid the nation of a cancer: "The trial...disclosed in shuddering detail the Red cancer in the American body politic-a cancer which the government is now forced to obliterate in self-defense. The sentences indicate the scalpel which prosecutors can be expected to use in that operation."

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One reason for the public's skepticism may have been frequent revelations about a close relationship between the U.S. intelligence community and the media. Reporters and CIA agents historically have been so close that U.S. News and World Report's chief foreign editor, Joseph Fromm, once told a congressional committee that "a foreign government could be forgiven for assuming that there is some kind of informal link." The long-standing relationship was disclosed in a series of congressional intelligence committee hearings held in the mid-1970s. Those investigations revealed not only that hundreds of reporters had worked closely with intelligence agencies, but that some reporters were actually on the CIA payroll. A partial list of journalists who had collaborated with the CIA included New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger, syndicated columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, editors for CBS and ABC news, and reporters for United Press International.

At one time the CIA ran at least fifty of its own media and 200 wire services and publications (the present number is unknown). The agency also provided financial support to Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. It induced Kenneth Love, a reporter for the New York Times, to cooperate with it in its successful effort to topple the constitutional government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and it successfully pressured the Times into pulling a reporter (Sidney Gruson) from a story about the CIA-inspired overthrow of the democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954.64 On many occasions it planted news stories abroad in order to have them picked up by wire services and U.S. newspapers. In one instance among many, stories about Cuban soldiers killing babies and raping women in Angola were concocted by the CIA in the early 1980s, and reported as fact in the U.S. press.

The CIA is not the only government agency that has forged close relationships with the media. For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintained cooperative relationships with more than 300 journalists in more than twenty-five cities including at least twenty-five "friendly" media contacts in the Chicago area alone. Uncooperative media were treated differently. The FBI acknowledged that from 1956 to 1971 it carried out large-scale intelligence-gathering and disruption efforts against alternative and underground newspapers, reporting syndicates and individual journalists.

Even if media reporters wanted to establish their independence, the news process makes it difficult or impossible for them to check on government sources. For foreign reporting, reporters must primarily use such sources or rely on news generated by the major wire services (Associated Press, United Press International and British-based Reuters) and by the elite press (the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times). For this reason, alternative sources of information are rarely available to the news consumer and news stories reported by different news organizations are remarkably similar.

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News During the Reagan Years

As a consequence of their heavy reliance on the government for information, news organizations are loathe to offend "official sources" and they are subject to manipulation. Government officials use their monopoly over information to generate favorable coverage and to manage the news. All presidential administrations have tried to control the flow of information as much as possible, but news management became a fine-tuned art during the presidency of Ronald Reagan The Reagan administration, operating under the umbrella of what it saw as its conservative mandate, paid close attention to the art of controlling information. One of its best successes came with its decision to exclude the press from covering the October 25, 1983, invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. The invasion was used by the administration as an opportunity to assert almost complete control over information As a result of acquiescing to these new government policies, the media has substantially agreed since 1983 to censor itself when covering military actions.

Journalists had been permitted to cover military operations in every previous military engagement since the American Revolution, including the Civil War; twenty Caribbean expeditions between 1880 and 1924; the First World War; the Second World War; the wars in Korea and Vietnam; and the 1956 intervention in Lebanon.

But the media accepted new restraints on the publication of news about the Grenada invasion, including information embargos and voluntary "ground rules." The military limited the number of reporters who could accompany individual units during specific operations.

The military also imposed censorship, as it has done before. During the Civil War, correspondents were required to submit copy to a provost marshal for approval, telegraph lines were put under military control, and a number of newspapers were censored or closed. During the First World War, seventy-five newspapers in the United States were closed or censored and the government's Committee on Public Information issued a voluntary censorship code. Reporters were accredited by the military during the Second World War and the Korean War.

But coverage of the invasion of Grenada was different from previous military operations. The U.S. media were limited to official and secondary sources of information, and the military made no pictures of the invasion available. "Reporters were working under unprecedented U.S. restrictions," one journalist noted, "that kept them 150 miles away from the battle and totally dependent on the military itself for information." General John W. Vessey, Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained his rationale: "We didn't bring the media with us to Grenada because of the need for surprise in this operation. We were going in there quickly, and we needed surprise in order to have it be successful." This explanation soon was exposed as false when it became known that two days before the operation, Radio Havana had broadcast news about an imminent U.S. invasion of Grenada.

On the second day of the invasion, again relying on official sources, the U.S press reported that the U.S. soldiers were meeting substantial resistance from 1,100

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The Propaganda Machine

Propaganda is an accurate term for describing U.S. information policy Indeed, use of the term in this context was justified by the conservative newsweekly U.S. News & World Report in 1985, with the reasoning that "[Propaganda] does not always involve distortion of the facts...it can consist of disseminating the truth to help one's cause. For this reason, at various times distinguished journalists such as Edward R. Murrow and John Chancellor have agreed to do stints in key USIA [U.S. Information Agency] jobs."

The Reagan administration played to win the propaganda game. It steadily enhanced the budget of the USIA, which reached nearly $800 million in 1986-a 74 percent increase since 1981. It inaugurated "WorldNet," a $15 million per-year project linking foreign journalists and American policy makers by satellite. In October 1985, it began, for the first time since the end of the Second World War, 24-hour Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts to Europe. Under the mantle of VOA, the administration also created Radio Marti, staffed by many anti-Castro expatriates, which broadcast programs to Cuba. In the 1970s, the CIA financed opposition dailies in Jamaica during the socialist government of Prime Minister Michael Manley and opposition newspapers in Chile during the socialist government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. After the Sandinistas took power in 1969, it provided a large part of the financial support for La Prensa, the main opposition daily in Nicaragua. Before the invasion of Grenada, U.S. psychological warfare units had been broadcasting to the island via Radio Spice Island.

These activities illustrate a much broader phenomenon-the overwhelming dominance of U.S. governmental and media institutions over communications around the world. During the past decade, developing countries have complained about the role of the international media in controlling information about world affairs. Their complaints cited the effects of policies dating back to the Second World War and before. In 1946, William Benton, Assistant Secretary of State, outlined the U.S government's position on the freedom of international communications:

The State Department plans to do everything within its power along political or diplomatic lines to help break down the artificial barriers to the expansion of private American news agencies, magazines, motion pictures and other media of communications throughout the world....Freedom of the press-and freedom of exchange of information, generally-is an integral part of our foreign policy.

The United States can be credited with making the "free flow of information" an article in the UNESCO constitution when the United Nations was organized in 1946. The United States originally had proposed that the organization establish a worldwide communications system. Great Britain protested, charging that the United States was attempting to use the organization "to blitz the world with American ideas." The proposal was shelved, but the United States continued to produce material for UNESCO radio programming that even sympathetic foreign newspapers labeled as propaganda.

At least seventy countries gained their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s, and by 1969, at a UNESCO meeting in Montreal, a reaction against U.S. media dominance surfaced. New members introduced the concept of "two-way circulation of news and balanced circulation of news." A report from the conference argued:

The fact that the production of mass communications materials is largely concentrated in the hands of the major developed countries...affects the role of the media in promoting international understanding. Communication at the moment is a "one-way street" and the problems of developing nations are seen with the eyes of journalists and producers from the developed regions; moreover, the materials they produce are aimed primarily at audiences of those regions. As a result, not only is the image of the developing nations often a false and distorted one, but that very image is reflected back to the developing countries themselves.

Roughly 90 percent of the world news disseminated by the media in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (excepting Japan and China) originates from centers in Paris, London and New York City. Despite its resources, media in the United States use very few foreign media products. A report by the International Communications Agency in 1979 noted that most foreign news reaches the United States through AP and UPI and that the U.S. television system is the second most closed to foreign programming in the world.

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Political Discourse and the Media

Despite concentrated corporate ownership of media, some alternatives to corporate programming are available: two television news programs, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and Pacifica News; a few magazines, including The Nation, Mother Jones, The Village Voice, The Progressive, Z, and various magazines sponsored by environmental organizations; and newspapers like In These Times and The Guardian. The viewpoints and information represented in these sources, however, are relegated to the margins because of their very limited circulation and audience. The exception is PBS, which strives for a tone of objectivity and evenhandedness. Its right-wing critics label its coverage "liberal" because corporate owners and advertisers are not constantly present to pull news and commentary toward the right (though corporations contribute money to PBS, with a potentially similar effect).

The flowering of an alternative press came about during the Vietnam War, peaking during a period bracketed by the end of the Johnson (1968) and the Nixon (1974) administrations. These media outlets-self-described as "underground"- were responsible for breaking some of the most dramatic stories of the period, ranging , ~ from disclosures of covert U.S. intervention abroad to domestic spying by the FBI Z and CIA. A case in point is recounted by a reporter who coauthored a report linking drug trade to officials in the South Vietnamese government:

The May 1971 issue of Ramparts featured the story on its cover with the headline "Marshall Ky: The Biggest Pusher in the World."...The story was a well-documented block-buster, but the conventional media virtually ignored it. There were a few column inches about Congressional hearings being called for, and then the story vanished for months until Senator Albert Gruening of Alaska opened hearings. Suddenly the story was "discovered" by the Washington Post and NBC News. However, after the hearings, the story received continued coverage only through alternative sources such as the Dispatch News Service International.

Economic exigency spelled the end for a large number of overtly partisan, political, and radical papers. Some survivors, like the democratic-socialist weekly In These Times, which emerged in the 1970s, and The Guardian, which was founded in the 1950s, have periodically turned to readers for emergency financial support. An editorial published in In These Times in 1980 underscored the dilemma faced by the alternative media: "Because its readership is relatively small, regionally dispersed, and from a Madison Avenue standpoint, heterogeneous, it has no chance of gaining substantial revenues from advertising. Instead, it has to derive its income from circulation. Its circulation income, is, in turn, largely limited to subscriptions, acquired primarily through direct-mail." The magazines The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Progressive also are forced each year to make appeals to subscribers for donations.

Corporate ownership of media institutions has had the effect of limiting the availability of finance capital to support alternative media. As a consequence, many alternative publications have become largely adjuncts to the establishment media. In the process they have lost much of their distinct political message and now focus on middle-class concerns about environmental and lifestyle issues:

[Some] alternative papers that survived the protest years have prospered, emerging from homespun publications to become slick, professional managed multi-million-dollar businesses with upscale readers in their mid-20s to late 30s....[Some] in an effort to cash in on the success of the alternatives, have adopted the* bread-and-butter coverage in the arts, lifestyles, service listing and personal ads-but left out the meat, the tough editorial stand.

The mere existence of "alternative" media institutions-meaning noncorporate, publicly owned or nonprofit, not necessarily "leftist"-is sometimes cited as evidence that there is a "multitude of tongues" in American public discourse. But of course this claim ignores the enormous, even controlling influence that money wields on media institutions. Alternative media are accorded a right to compete in the same way that minor party candidates are allowed to compete with Democrats and Republicans. They are only denied a key resource, money, which originates most abundantly from corporations and wealthy individuals. Corporate America does not finance its own opposition, either in information or in politics.

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