The Role of the Mass Media

excerpted from the book

The Real Terror Network

by Edward S. Herman

South End Press

 

Introduction

The mass media of the United States are a part of the 4 national power structure and they therefore reflect its biases and a, mobilize popular opinion to serve its interests. This is not accomplished by any conspiratorial plotting or explicit censorship-it is built into the structure of the system, and flows naturally and easily from the assorted ownership, sponsor, governmental and other interest group pressures that set limits within which media personnel can operate, and from the nature of the sources on which the media depend for their steady flow of news.(As we have seen) these interest groups find the National Security State (NSS) good, and this preference underlies U.S. sponsorship and support of this terror network. We would therefore expect the mass media to treat the NSS kindly and deflect attention from its abuses. Any other route would be very surprising as the "national interest" itself has long been defined by the very forces that cause the country to support the NSS.

If we examine the larger patterns of selection by the mass media, one of its most notable characteristics is stress on "enemy" misbehavior and problems and a corresponding de-emphasis of misbehavior and problems of "friends." Terror abroad can be classified roughly but usefully as constructive, benign and nefarious. Constructive terror is defined as that which positively serves important domestic interests; benign terror is that which is of little direct interest to the U.S. elite but may sometimes serve the interests of a friendly client; and nefarious terror is that committed by enemy states (or by bearers of hostile ideologies).

Constructive terror would include the holocaust in Indonesia in 1965-1966 and the large scale political murders in Chile in 1973-1974, where the terror in both instances decimated a political opposition deemed threatening to U.S. and western interests, and was quickly followed by an opening of the door to relatively free western economic penetration. In such cases, where business and government like the political outcome, and in fact make notable contributions to the origination and implementation of the terror,' the mass media play down the violence irrespective of its level. Reports on the scope and character of the terror are few and antiseptic, details of the human suffering involved are sparse, indignation and rage at the human agony are rare, and no sustained campaign of daily information or appeals for intervention is mounted. Government attitudes range from mild expressions of regret at the alleged excesses, interspersed with a hard-headed recognition of the (implicitly) just grievances that led to the violence, (communist provocations and threats), to even more explicit apologetics. Thus, Robert McNamara, the U. S. Secretary of Defense at the time of the 1965- 1966 Indonesian coup and massacre of an estimated 500,000-1,000,000 people, described these events as a "dividend" showing that our military aid and training there "was well justified." James Reston of the New York Times wrote of "A Gleam of Light" rising in Indonesia as a result of "developments" in process there. It is worth noting and reflecting on the fact that the numbers slaughtered in cold blood in Indonesia in 1965-1966 exceed by a substantial factor any official U.S. or scholarly estimate of numbers deliberately killed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. As regards the Chilean massacres of 1973-1974, probably in excess of 20,000, William Colby, then CIA head and formerly manager of a national system of death squads in South Vietnam, explained to a Congressional committee in late 1973 that the ongoing mass murder by the Chilean junta was a "good" thing, as it was "rooting out Marxist influence" and reducing the possibility of a civil war which might otherwise have taken place.

Benign terror is well exemplified by the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor from 1975 up to the present time. As Indonesia is a friendly client, its aggression in East Timor aroused negligible interest in the west (with the exception of neighboring Australia), because the health and welfare of the Indonesian NSS was important to western interests (notably those of the United States and Japan), whereas East Timor was otherwise of little concern. The Indonesian invasion was a blatant act of aggression that resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 victims. U. S. arms were extensively employed in this invasion and occupation, in violation of U.S. law, but U.S. officials, including Presidents Ford and Carter, Vice President Mondale, and Secretary of State Kissinger, colluded with the Indonesian generals in playing down the aggression, its illegalities and its savagery. In fact, during the Carter years 1977-1978 arms flows to Indonesia were sharply increased, facilitating the huge massacres of that period. It has been shown in detail elsewhere that, given western support of the Indonesian NSS, and thus the "benign" character of the terror brought to East Timor by the Indonesian military, this quite brutal and illegal state terrorism was off-the-agenda for the western mass media. And just as the media played down this terror, similarly, any explanations and questions about the selective suppression were also duly suppressed!

In sharp, even startling, contrast with western media silence on the events in East Timor was the attention given to Cambodia. There undoubtedly was a holocaust in Cambodia during the same period in which Indonesia was invading and attempting to subjugate East Timor, with many thousands executed and a great many more dying of disease and starvation. A question that western patriots hate to confront, however, is: why the immense attention to the Cambodian violence and the virtually total suppression of discussion of the Indonesian violence in East Timor? It should be noted that the indignation over Cambodia had no practical significance for the victims, as events in that country were beyond western influence after April 1975, and no useful suggestions for alleviating Cambodian misery were even put forward; whereas, in contrast, East Timorese deaths were being carried out in the U.S. sphere of influence, with U.S. weapons, and therefore under circumstances where western indignation and pressure might have had an impact. (It may also be asked, similarly, how we reconcile the outpouring of compassion and indignation over Cambodia and the placidity and apologetics about dividends and the gleam of new light in reference to the even larger massacre in Indonesia in 1965- 1966?) Patriots react negatively to a focus on this selectivity of concern because it obviously compromises the idea that western benevolence is pure-or perhaps even real-and suggests essentially political definitions of worthy victims, and a large measure of hypocrisy. Precisely. This is not to imply that many individuals concerned about Cambodian violence were not sincere and honorable. What happens, however, is that the more powerful forces in the system succeed in mobilizing human decency in a highly selective and politically skewed manner. Sometimes decent things are done for those selected as worthy victims. But victims of benign terror (East Timorese) or constructive terror (500,000 or more Indonesians, 20,000 or more Chileans, many millions of dispossessed and abused peasants in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Indonesia and the Philippines) are frozen out of this system of channeled benevolence.

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Western "ignorance" about East Timor can hardly be advanced as a serious explanation of non-concern-this differential knowledgeability is precisely what has to be explained. Cambodia is a very remote and small country, and U.S. citizens could have been allowed to remain in ignorance of the sequel of events there (as they have about events in, say, Burma, or Thailand since 1975). What is more, media attention to East Timor was not negligible in 1974-1975, during the period of Portuguese withdrawal, when the fate of Timor was of some interest to the west. East Timor became "remote" after the Indonesian invasion, and western media coverage was inversely related to the extent of the Indonesian massacre.

It is clear, then, that if the Readers Digest, Time, the New York Times, the U.S. government, or important businessmen in the United States had concluded that the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was detrimental to U.S. interests, or that political capital could be extracted from focusing on its victims, the U.S. public would have become quickly "knowledgeable." But the important power interests in the United States, including multinational investors and the military-security complex, were closely tied to the Indonesian invaders, and there was certainly no political advantage to be gained from focusing on the abuses of a NSS. U.S. policy, in fact, was supportive of the invasion and the massacre, both in the U.N. and via arms transfers (provided in violation of U.S. and international law). The mass media saw things in the same light, and decided to "lay off." This was helped along by the fact that primary government sources also clammed up, provided no news, and were obviously interested in coverup-which ensued.

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... what the general public knows and is interested in is managed. A small elite sets the agenda for discussion, and while there are limits on its ability to make people think in a certain way, through the mass media it is "stunningly successful in telling [the public]...what to think about."" The U.S. people knew about and were interested in Cambodian atrocities because the mass media latched on to Cambodian violence and made it familiar ground (although the level of distortion was extraordinarily high). They are able to prove the evils of Communism by focusing attention on negative events in Poland, and by simultaneously "blacking out" the facts on the literal murder of hundreds of trade union leaders and permanent martial law of varying levels of intensity in more than a score of western client states. This is a system of self-fulfilling "news interest management" in which constructive and benign terror are never allowed to become the subject of intense scrutiny and concern.

 

As the NSS has come into being and is protected and supported by the economic and political elite that defines the national interest, its ugly proclivities produce "dividends" and are "constructive." As was the case with the huge bloodbath in Indonesia, therefore, the mass media of the United States will not characterize its organizers as madmen, mass murderers and terrorists. By one route or other the Suhartos, Pinochets, Stroessners and their NSS colleagues and operatives will be protected. ...

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The Mass Media as Protectors of the Real Terror Network

Bias is built-in by a number of basic structural facts. One is the close relationship and literal overlap between the leaders of I the mass media and the businessmen and officials who like the NSS. The dozen or so top level mass media enterprises that have real clout ~ 2 are all large, profit-seeking businesses, with boards of directors that interlock with the rest of the business community. Most of them have diversified out of single media operations, some of them out of exclusive media activity, so that they are generally business conglomerates. Some of them are in the defense business (most notably, RCA, the parent of NBC), and a number have substantial foreign interests that make them dependent on the goodwill of host governments. The second tier of mass media enterprises includes even more diversified, defense-oriented and multinational enterprises-most significantly Westinghouse, General Electric, Avco and Kaiser Industries. This commonality of corporate purpose, structure of interlocks, and geographic and product divers)fication make it likely that the mass media leaders will have the same values and the same vision of the national interest as the general community of large corporations. Eric Barnouw goes farther in his survey of TV, the most powerful of all media forms.

The symbiotic growth of American television and global enterprise has made them so interrelated that they cannot be thought of as separate. They are essentially the same phenomenon. Preceded far and wide by military advisers, lobbyists, equipment salesmen, advertising specialists, merchandising experts, and telefilm salesmen as advance agents, the enterprise penetrates much of the non-socialist world. Television is simply its most visible portion.

A second structural fact is the importance of the sponsor. The mass media depend heavily on advertising, which produces well over 50% of their gross revenue. Advertisers are mainly business firms, although the NSS governments also advertise fairly heavily with large ads and supplements in newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and business-oriented publications like Business Week. The general interest and even the specific interests of these advertisers are likely to have an impact on mass media selection processes. Thus, during ITTs time of troubles in the early 1970s, sponsorship of its Big Blue Marble program on TV led to a significant drop-off in mention of ITT on TV news programs. Far more important, however, is the general effect of sponsorship as the prime source of TV revenue-the need to produce programs that will not seriously offend sponsors, and the mutual interest of network and sponsor in providing an environment congenial to selling advertised goods. CBS president Frank Stanton explained in 1960 that "Since we are advertiser-supported we must take into account the general objectives and desires of advertisers as a whole. Barnouw gives persuasive evidence that the sponsor exercises a huge influence on TV programming.

Their influence over it is spearheaded by "commercials"-the "focal point of creative effort"; protected by "entertainment" designed to fit sponsor needs; bordered by a fringe of successfully neutralized "public service" elements; and by a buffer zone of approved "culture.

Barnouw uses as an illustration of sponsor impact the long-time suppression by the TV networks of any negative or minimally objective analysis of the implications of nuclear power. Until the end of the 1960s, "nothing seen or heard on television could lead viewers to think that atomic energy involved risks of any serious kind. Documentaries and public service messages had come overwhelmingly, perhaps exclusively, from those who had a stake in promoting the industry;" and, "As in the early stages of the Vietnam war, the medium had served largely as a transmission belt for official and corporate promotion, closely coordinated."

On foreign news and conditions in the NSSs, the situation tends to be even worse than in the handling of domestic issues like nuclear power, as negative impacts on distant peasants have no political consequences in the home country. As Time, Readers Digest and dozens of U.S. multinational banks and non-financial corporations have extensive interests in Brazil, built up under the auspices of the hospitable generals ruling that NSS, these important members of the mass media and powerful advertisers have an important vested interest in the NSS status quo. The mass media may occasionally bite the hands that feed them, but not very hard or long, and they more than make up for these small falls from grace. They do not focus on dispossessed Brazilian peasants.

The ideological range of the top media leadership extends from enlightened cold war and corporate liberalism to militant conservative or reactionary. For the latter, in large circulation publications like Readers Digest, TV-Guide and within the Hearst and Luce empires, news and opinion bias is blatant and oriented to conservative ideological mobilization. In these publications, the death squads of Latin America, the systematic torture, the looting, and the condition and treatment of the lower 80% of the population, are for all practical purposes completely suppressed. Retail terror and Communist abuses are given enormous and highly emotional play. The Readers Digest, for example, over the decade 1971-1980, had more articles on Castro's Cuba than it did on all 26 U.S. client states that were using torture on an administrative basis in the early and mid-1970s.

This large and blatant brainwashing by the right has no counterpart on the left in the United States-the "left" in the mass media is cold-war liberalism, strongly pro-free enterprise and devoted to the national interest as it would be defined by the progressive managements of large multinational corporations such as IBM or Bank of America. Not exactly a real left in the sense of a critical opposition. Therefore, in the mainstream respectable mass media, abuses in the NSSs are mentioned, and on rare occasion are even highlighted, but always episodically, never in a sustained manner that would build up public indignation and bring political consequences. Relatively miniscule abuses in the Soviet Union can produce day-in-day-out coverage in the mass media; huge and sustained abuses in the NSSs cannot.' That the NSS abuses were a result of U.S. intervention, as in Guatemala, where the ClA-sponsored coup, military aid and training, and the huge U.S.-managed counterinsurgency operations of 1966-1968 were absolutely decisive factors in maintaining 27 years of rightwing terror, is rarely noted and never given its proper weight.

A third structural constraint is the nature of mass media sources. Analysts of the mass media point out that they need steady and reliable sources to meet their day-by-day demands for news, and that the only sources that can produce large volumes with some minimal credibility are very powerful and rich entities-like governments and, secondarily, business firms. Thus, 46.5% of the information sources for stories appearing in the New York Times and Washington Post between 1949 and 1969 were U.S. government officials and agencies, and the trend toward reliance on government sources during that period was upward. The business community is the next most important information source. Foreign news is even more thoroughly dominated by a small and powerful group with vested interests in the NSS-U.S. government officials, the three western news services (A.P., U.P.I. and Reuters), businesses operating abroad and foreign governments. The big news services rely heavily on the local governments for news about events in the NSSs, as do the small contingent of western reporters located there. The news services depend on these governments not only for news, but they also sell news to these governments, who are frequently owners of large media units. The news services are also sold to private NSS media. Any sustained focus by the media on torture, or on the parlous state of the NSS peasantry, would jeopardize relationships with primary and efficient news sources (and, for the wire services, buyers of news services). The U.S. government and businesses operating in the NSSs are the other leading news sources-the former is the Godfather; the latter are the Godfather's progeny obtaining the benefits of the immiserating economic growth in the NSS's.

The lower echelons of the mass media are given a fair amount of freedom of action by the top managements. The top managements themselves, or at least some of them, accept an ideology of staff freedom to do things based on news value, postulated as an objective standard. Is it not possible that this ideology allows reporters, writers, editors, analysts, researchers and broadcasters to disseminate a broad range of views, some hostile to establishment interests? There is some truth in this, and I have noted that NSS abuses can be aired-it is a question of how frequently and in what terms relative to the newsworthiness and human values involved. The terror that has engulfed Guatemala under the Garcia regime (to go back no farther in time) has involved thousands of-deaths, unimaginable violence against ordinary civilians-in a region of predominant U.S. influence and frequent intervention. Trade union leaders have been murdered by the hundreds, peasants have been killed, robbed and pushed off their lands by the thousands with Nazi-like ruthlessness; the center parties have been decimated by scores of murders. By any standard of human values and responsibility Guatemala deserves more indignation than Poland. I have offered the simple and obvious explanation of the lack of attention and indignation in the U.S. mass media: these terrible events and large social processes of abuse in states like Guatemala are serviceable to important domestic economic interests. The abused do not advertise, vote, threaten or complain in ways that can be heard; Bank of America, Dow, GM, Westinghouse, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. government can be heard, often and with compelling force. In the face of this complex of interests, well intentioned individuals in the mass media, while they can occasionally help lift the lid a little, can have only marginal impact; they cannot alter the overall drift of mass media priorities, which rests on basic structural facts and constraints.

Media staff are also predominantly middle class people who tend to share the values of the corporate leadership, and they are affected by the fact that approval, advancement and even job survival depend on acceptance of certain priorities. The biases at the top are filtered down by long term penalties and rewards. The mass media top leadership puts into key positions individuals who reflect their values: "I surround myself with people who generally see the way I do...," says Otis Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Bias is also a consequence of the nature of mass media news sources and the subtle impact of depending on and entering into relationships with them. In the NSSs primary news sources are government officials and local and multinational businessmen, not peasants or disaffected intellectuals. Newspeople who actively sought out abused people would run into difficulties: (I)They would weaken their links to primary sources in these states. (2)This might result not only in loss of availability of ready information but possibly also complaints to the head office, ouster and even physical damage. (3) They would have to work harder, in contrast with the case of reliance on official sources. (4) Their stories might well be rejected at the top as (a) too controversial; (b) lacking in adequate source confirmation; or (c) not of general interest. Reports seriously critical of the NSSs would elicit flak from the powerful friends of the NSS, including enforcers like Accuracy in Media, Freedom House, the U.S. government, the governments of the NSSs, businesses end banks operating there, and advertising firms and their customers who have relationships with the NSSs. In consequence, the sources for stories describing abuses must be extra authoritative. But most dissident sources are inherently unauthoritative and will be contradicted by official sources. The Latin Church is, of course, an exception-a credible source of abuses-which is why it is feared and persecuted by the NSSs, and why it is under increasing attack by current U.S. leaders now aggressively protecting NSS terrorism. It takes a combination of extreme abuse, exceptional reporters and receptive home office people in the media agency for such news to surface. Since this kind of news does not surface that often, it tends to be unfamiliar and is therefore not of "general interest." Thus we have a full circle, in which NSS abuses are suppressed by a built-in process.

My conclusions then, are first, that most members of the mass media avoid a focus on NSS terror for ideological reasons; terror that is "constructive" from the standpoint of important U. S. interests is seen as a regrettable necessity serving the "national interests." And although some of the leaders and a still larger number of the lower echelons of the mass media find the reality of terror reprehensible and push for some coverage, since terror is a regrettable necessity, the primary route taken is looking the other way. Second, this ideological bias is strongly reinforced by the fact that primary sources of information on which the mass media depend are either pro-NSS or have ties of interest and reciprocity that compromise any ability to focus on serious abuses. Third, as the generation and production of information on abuses would involve extra costs in search, and assured negative repercussions from the vocal supporters of the NSS, even episodic treatment of NSS abuses is further constrained, and tends to be handled with a balance and a degree of understatement that is not required of enemy terror. Fourth, this system of watered-down and episodic treatment of terror, in the larger context of mass media protectiveness of the NSS, may actually serve the interests of the real terror network. The muted treatment of friendly terror gives the mass media more credibility as purveyors of "all the news that's fit to print" than would total suppression. The dispensing of small doses of the uglier aspects of the NSSs makes the central apologetic and diversionary role of the mass media less obvious. This allows the more liberal western elites to deceive themselves into thinking that the United States has been a neutral bystander, not an active sponsor of these unfortunate NSS "abuses," which are discussed and debated so openly here at home. We may even be too harsh in criticizing human rights violations which seem to arise so naturally in these I backward cultures.

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Real Terror Network