The New York Times Versus Civil
Society
Protests, tribunals, labor and
militarization and wars
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine, December 2005
The biases of the New York Times surface
in one or another fashion on a daily basis, but while sometimes
awfully crude, these manifestations of bias are often sufficiently
subtle and self-assured, with facts galore thrown in, that it
is easy to get fooled by them. Analyzing them is still a useful
enterprise to keep us alert to the paper's ideological premises
and numerous crimes of omission, selectivity, gullible acceptance
of convenient disinformation, and pursuit of a discernible political
agenda in many spheres that it covers.
The veteran Times reporter John Hess
has said that in all 24 years of his service at the paper he "never
saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support, never
saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase
that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in
a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers.
And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social
Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
The paper is an establishment institution and serves establishment
ends. As Times historian Harrison Salisbury said about former
executive editor Max Frankel, "The last thing that would
have entered his mind would be to hassle the American Establishment,
of which he was so proud to be a part."
One very important feature of an establishment
institution is that it gives heavy weight to official and corporate
news and opinion and little attention to facts and opinions put
forward by those disagreeing with the official/corporate view.
Government and corporate officials are "primary definers"
of the news, and experts affiliated with, funded by, and/or supporting
them function to institutionalize those views. In a perverse process,
the links of these experts to official and corporate sources give
them a preferred position in the media despite the built-in conflict-of-interest,
unrecognized by establishment institutions. (PBS has repeatedly
turned down labor-funded programs on grounds of conflict-of-interest,
but doesn't do the same for corporate-funded programs, as PBS
officials have internalized the establishment's normalization
of conflicts-of-interest involving the dominant institutions of
society.) Those in opposition, even if representing very large
numbers, even a majority of the population, have difficulty gaining
access. Another way of expressing this is to say that the media,
as part of the establishment, align themselves with other constituents
of the establishment, and are very often at odds with and give
little voice to the civil society.
Of course the media defend their heavy
and largely uncritical dependence on the primary definers for
news on the ground that they make the news and define the reality,
so that giving them the floor is justified on grounds of inherent
relevance. What this ignores is that the media may be helping
these primary sources accomplish their goals by serving as conduits
of assertions and claims that may be false, misleading, and designed
to manipulate the public; effectively, by allowing themselves
to be managed. Substantive, as opposed to nominal, objectivity
calls for examining and possibly contesting these claims, providing
valid information to the public, and serving as watch-dogs rather
than lap-dogs. Regrettably, we have moved into the age of the
lap-dog, nowhere more clearly than in the case of the New York
Times.
This lap-dog role and failure to serve
civil society is regularly displayed in the media's treatment
of protests where large numbers are often driven to gathering
in the streets to try to gain media access denied them in the
normal course of events. Where the protests are large enough,
they may be covered, but the media regularly give undercounts
of numbers, unfavorable placement, disproportionate attention
to counter-protestors and protester violence-sometimes concocted
as well as inflated-and they rarely attempt to convey the messages
and analyses of the protesters, let alone give editorial support
to the protesters. This is true of protests against wars of aggression,
globalization, racism, or corporate aggrandizement and labor disputes.
In The Whole World Is Watching, Todd
Gitlin described how during the Vietnam War the New York Times
eased out of reporting on war protest a reporter who was showing
too much sympathy with the protesters (Fred Powledge) and gradually
moved to trivialization and aggressive denigration of antiwar
protests, in the process "screening out discrepant information
to which its own routines gave access." Gitlin showed how
in a major antiwar protest in April 1965, while the Times's news
article acknowledged that the protesters outnumbered the counter-demonstrators
by better than 150-1, the paper carefully selected from among
a set of available photos the one that gave the pro-war counter-demonstrators
equal photographic space. (On the fallacy that the paper was "against
the Vietnam war," see Edward Herman, "All The News Fit
To Print, Part 3, The Vietnam War and the myth of a liberal media":
www.zmag.org.)
Throughout the Cold War, the Times treated
protests in the Soviet Union and among the Soviet satellites with
great and uncritical generosity, with front page attention, photos
of crowds, and in one case even providing a box featuring the
protest signs of Soviet protesters, something they never did with
U.S. protests.
Jumping to the present, the Times placed
its small news report on the large September 24, 2005, Washington,
DC antiwar protest on page A26 (Michael Janofsky, "Antiwar
Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities," September
25, 2005) and gave that protest no editorial support. By contrast,
on October 22, the paper had a large front page picture of "Hundreds
of protesters [there were 150,000 or more in Washington on September
24] gathered at the grave of Lebanon's former prime minister in
Beirut yesterday to demand the ouster of Syria's president."
This front page picture-and there was one on A8 as well, showing
the crater that a bomb left that had killed Rafik Hariri-geared
well into the Bush administration's campaign to destabilize Syria.
On the same day there was a front page article on "Bush pushes
U.N. to Move Swiftly on Syria Report," and day after day
there has been a steady tattoo of similar articles featured in
the paper as it serves Bush once again in the same capacity as
it had served in the pre-invasion Iraq propaganda campaign.
We should also note that the civil society
uprising in the Ukraine in 2004-2005, funded heavily by U.S. government
agencies and friendly NGOs, was given much more lavish news treatment
than domestic protests, along with editorial support. The close
association between news-editorial attention and support and external
protests consistent with U.S. foreign policy initiatives, and
grudging attention and non-support (or opposition) to domestic
civil society actions protesting ongoing official policy, is long-standing
and is observable in other areas.
Labor Disputes
The New York Times, as well as its mainstream
news rivals, all supported the North American Free Trade Agreement
in 1994, following the lead of the business community, whereas
organized labor and a consistent majority of the population at
large opposed that agreement. In one of the most telling exhibitions
of the Times's class bias and narrow definition of the "national
interest," and its resentment at labor's and the civil society's
refusal to accept this elite initiative, the paper actually editorialized
against labor's attempt to influence the outcome of this debate
("Running Scared From Nafta," November 16, 1993, with
a chart, Labor's Money: Congressional opponents of NAFTA from
the New York metropolitan area, northern New Jersey and Connecticut
who have received more than $150,000 in campaign contributions
from labor political action committees since 1983). It had no
comparable editorial on the even larger business intervention
in this debate, or even the multi-million dollar publicity campaign
carried out by the Mexican government in the United States.
The Times had only modest and scattered
coverage of the Reagan-business community attacks on organized
labor in the 1980s, even though many of these attacks were in
violation of the law, and although they were badly weakening an
important civil society institution that protects ordinary citizens
both in the workplace and political arena and was arguably essential
to a real rather than nominal democracy. Business Week wrote in
1984 that "over the past dozen yearsU.S. industry has conducted
one of the most successful union wars ever" assisted by "illegally
firing thousands of workers for exercising their right to organize."
But you would hardly know this reading the New York Times (or
for that matter its mainstream colleagues).
As in the case of political protests,
however, you could find a great deal of Times coverage of the
Solidarity movement actions in Poland in the early 1980s, and
the Soviet miners strike in the late 1980s. The latter is especially
interesting as it overlapped the significant Pittston miners strike
in the United States, which took place in 1989, with a plant takeover
phase in September of 1989. The plant takeover was not covered
at all by the Times (or by the TV networks), and was barely mentioned
anywhere in the mainstream press. The Times did have a fair number
of articles on the Pittston strike-54 versus 39 on the Soviet
miners strike between February 1, 1989 through February 21, 1990-but
the Soviet strike drew more full-length treatments (24 versus
16), more front page attention (9 versus 1) and more op-eds (3
to 0). The Soviet strike received concentrated attention in July
1989, with 15 full-length articles, 7 beginning on page 1, 1 on
the first page of the Sunday Week in Review, and 2 op-ed columns.
The coverage of the Pittston strike never had any such concentrated
attention, and its one front page article was on the settlement
of the strike.
Again, this fits a pattern of news coverage
that follows an establishment agenda. The intensive coverage of
the Soviet strike served the Reagan-era effort to put the "evil
empire" in a bad light and encourage opposition to Soviet
rule. Intensive treatment of the Pittston strike might have aroused
interest in the deteriorating condition of U.S. labor and sympathy
with labor's plight here, which is not something the U.S. elite
was eager to do (the Times "left" in the 1980s, Anthony
Lewis, even lauded Margaret Thatcher for having put labor in its
place; and Lewis assailed labor for its opposition to NAFTA in
1993). Similarly, in the same time frame as the great attention
given Solidarity in Poland, the Times and its colleagues essentially
ignored the even more ferocious attack on labor in Turkey by its
military government, which, hardly coincidentally, was supported
by the U.S. gov- ernment.
War Crime Tribunals
Privately organized tribunals are another
way in which civil society tries to counter establishment criminal
activity like aggressive wars and sponsored terrorism. Of course,
the establishment organizes its own tribunals, as with the ICTY
and the trial of Milosevic, and through tribunals nominally organized
by its client/puppet governments, as in the case of the forthcoming
trial of Saddam Hussein. The New York Times has given the Milosevic
trial enormous-and hugely biased-coverage (Edward S. Herman and
David Peterson, "Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal:
A Study in Total Propaganda Service," (ZNet, 2004), although
interestingly that coverage fell to virtually zero once the prosecution
case was ended and the defense began. The trial of Saddam Hussein
has produced more coverage in the paper than all the dissident
tribunals in history, even before the trial has commenced.
In 1967, when Bertrand Russell organized
an International War Crimes Tribunal to examine and denounce the
U.S. war against Vietnam and fight "Against the Crime of
Silence" (the title of the published proceedings), the New
York Times and other establishment media treated it with extreme
brevity and hostility. The same was true of a Second Russell Tribunal
on "Repression in Latin America," held in Rome and Brussels
in April 1974 and January 1975, which took very impressive testimony
on the brutalities of the U.S.-sponsored system of National Security
States that had made Latin America the torture center of the world,
but which was barely mentioned in the mainstream media.
The Iraq invasion-occupation brought
forth a surge of civil society tribunals-20 or more linked tribunals
on U.S.-British war crimes against Iraq, culminating in a major
three-day session in Istanbul from June 24-27, 2005 (www.worldtribunal.org).
This very moving session, featuring Arundhati Roy, Richard Falk,
Dennis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, Walden Bellow, Dahr Jamail,
Wamidh Nadhmi (and seven other Iraqis), provided a large volume
of telling evidence and background on the U.S.-British war, and,
as Richard Falk indicated, it represented civil society speaking.
This civil society had spoken in the massive, global protest marches
of February 2003 before the war and polls at that time showed
that a large majority of people in the world opposed that war.
The New York Times and mainstream media in general have completely
ignored the Istanbul and other tribunals, a deterioration from
1967, and showing the growing gap between the establishment, establishment
media, and ordinary citizens.
Militarization and War
As the United States has militarized and
become a global interventionist and rogue state par excellence,
the Times has gone along with this, with occasional small reservations
at haste and excess. It never challenged the string of "gaps"
and threats used to justify each surge in the buildup of overkill,
brilliantly exposed in Tom Gervasi's The Myth of Soviet Military
Supremacy (1986), which the Times failed to review in the midst
of the Reagan-era buildup based on the lies of that era. It was
revealing that the Times editorialized in favor of barring Ralph
Nader from the debates in 2000 on the ground that Gore and Bush
provided the public with all the alternatives they needed, although
both supported a further enlargement of the U.S. military budget-neither
favored any "peace dividend," and then and still today
the paper does not contest a military budget that has little to
do with "defense." The civil society demurs, polls disclosing
regularly-except in times of actual war and stoked fears-that
the majority would like to see social expenditures enlarged and
the military budget reduced.
It is now clear and has even been admitted
by the editors that the Times served the Bush administration in
its drive to an invasion-occupation of Iraq. What is remarkable
in their doing this is that the basis of the invasion was so crude,
the lies so blatant, the violation of international law so gross
that you would think a hired press agency of the government would
be embarrassed to have to swallow these and push for war. But
the Times pushed ahead, not just disseminating propaganda, but
propaganda whose central components were disinformation. Judith
Miller's statement that, "The analysts, the experts and the
journalists who covered them-we were all wrong. If your sources
are wrong, you are wrong," is a lie. There were a great many
experts and analysts who were right, but the New York Times ignored
them, misrepresented their views, and even smeared them (Barry
Bearak, "Scott Ritter's Iraq Complex," November 24,
2002).
It is important to recognize that the
paper's performance as a de facto public relations arm of the
war party was by no means confined to Judith Miller. It was an
institutional process that can be seen in the editorials, opinion
columns, news, magazine, and book reviews. It reflected the choices
and decisions of the paper's leadership, including publisher Arthur
Ochs Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller. The editorials
were vacillating, but had these characteristics: they never once
mentioned international law and the UN Charter and the fact that
an invasion without Security Council approval would be the "supreme
crime"; and they repeatedly asserted as proven that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction (even speaking of its "storehouses
of biological toxins," September 13, 2002). The editorials
set the moral stage for war, as did their op-ed columns that gave
no space to informed opponents of the war like Scott Ritter, Hans
Von Sponeck, or Glen Rangwala (a close student of the official
lies: see Glen Rangwala and Raymond Whitaker, "20 Lies About
the War," The Independent, July 13, 2003); or legal authorities
like Richard Falk, Francis Boyle, or Michael Mandel; but instead
offered generous space to war protagonist Kenneth Pollack (four
long op-ed columns) and pro-war legal authorities Ruth Wedgwood,
Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Michael Glennon. The New York Times
Magazine was saturated with the war apologetics of George Packer,
Michael Ignatieff, Barry Berak, and James Traub.
These were the choices of editors with
an agenda, and that agenda overwhelmed the news department as
well. Whatever the Bush team spouted, the paper would feature
heavily, even if it was repetitive and another "vow"
or expression of "resolve." They felt no obligation
to check the sources cited (if any) and to search aggressively
for alternative sources, even though the Bush team had already
shown an unrestrained willingness to lie.
Even when alternative sources were available,
time after time the paper would filter out news that was incompatible
with the party line. Thus, while Miller and her colleagues swallowed
a steady stream of informants supplied by Chalabi and the Bush
team, whose credibility was extremely dubious, the paper never
got around to reporting the fact that the defector Hussein Kamel
told the CIA that Saddam Hussein had destroyed all of his chemical
and biological weapons stocks and delivery missiles in 1991. Here
was the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam
Hussein's inner circle, a person who had direct knowledge of what
he claimed: for ten years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical,
biological and missile programs. His admission had been hidden
by the Clinton administration, but was finally reported in Newsweek
in early March 2003 (John Barry, "Exclusive: The Defector's
Secrets," March 3, 2003).
This extremely important information
about Saddam's WMD by a qualified and credible defector has never
yet been mentioned by the Times. They have also failed to report
Colin Powell's statement made in 2001, but before 9/11, that Saddam
Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with
respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project
conventional power against his neighbors." This admission,
made before the party line was firmed up, is not only newsworthy
in itself but would alert an honest news agency to the possibility
of fraud in the later claims.
The steady stream of evidence by Mohamed
ElBaradei and the IAEA that Saddam's nuclear programs had been
destroyed and their negative reports on their examination of alleged
sites of possible renewed activity was ignored by Kenneth Pollack
and the Times editors and news gatherers, all of whom preferred
to pass along the claims of administration officials and their
favorite expatriates and defectors. (For detailed evidence of
the Times's ignoring or misrepresenting ElBaradei's and the IAEA's
findings (see Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the
Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy).
Judith Miller, of course, set the standard for reliance on administration
claims and the supposed evidence of defectors provided by Chalabi.
This was sometimes coordinated with administration claims, with
Miller reporting the new "evidence," and then Cheney
or some other official the next day citing the New York Times
for evidence of the discovery of WMD like mobile weapons labs.
Here most clearly the Times operation was closely integrated into
the news/disinformation management efforts of the Bush war-manufacturing
machinery, that was, in the Times's own words, "following
a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the publicof the need
to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein." Here also it
might be argued that Miller and her bosses, Sulzberger and Keller,
were part of a "joint conspiracy" to carry out the supreme
crime, and ought to be in prison awaiting trial for serious criminal
behavior.
The awfulness of the Times's news coverage
possibly reached its peak in the front page article by Judith
Miller on April 21, 2003, "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of
War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said To Assert." Notice that this
piece reaches page one although it is clear from the title that
Miller didn't even talk with the alleged scientist, who is "said
to assert" something by "U.S. military officials,"
the same folks who brought us the disinforming stories of Jessica
Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc. The "scientist" said everything
the Bushies wanted: that Saddam had buried his WMD, sent such
stuff to Syria, and was cooperating with Al Qaeda. While Miller
couldn't talk to this ultra-convenient "source," "she
was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he
said the material from the arms program was buried. Clad in nondescript
clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the
sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material
were buried." That's the last we heard of this find and this
source's revelations.
This story is eerily reminiscent of an
earlier Times fiasco, given a marvelously satirical treatment
by Alexander Cockburn, where one Christopher Jones, writing in
the New York Times Magazine on "In the Land of the Khmer
Rouge" in 1982, after visiting Khmer Rouge country, wrote:
"By an old Cambodian cemetery a blind man was chanting the
Ramayana, a part of Cambodia's cultural heritage, as he twanged
a primitive guitar. What better personification of Cambodia could
I have found than this old singer, whose heroic and poetic ballad
had ceased to have any connection with anything I had just seen?
Cambodia, a land possessed, its ancient hymns, like its temples,
fallen on evil days. Of all dead lands, the most dead." Cockburn
pointed out that this exact language is to be found in Andre Malraux's
1923 novel La Voie Royale. Cockburn commented: "Of course
if he was old when Malraux heard him in 1923, the singer must
be quite marvelously venerable by now, but I dare say Jones was
too enthralled, on his remote frontier crossing, to notice that."
Judith Miller and the Times's editors
must have been too enthralled with the marvel of the new Iraqi
"source" that found all these good things supporting
every claim of the Bushies to note that such lies had been pushed
and then embarrassingly found wanting with painful regularity
in the past. But some people will not learn if their biases and
will-to-believe are overwhelmingly strong. Unfortunately, however,
as the paper admitted in the wake of the Christopher Jones incident,
such performances "debase democracy."
Edward S. Herman is a media analyst, economist,
and author of numerous books and articles.
Edward S. Herman page
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