The Unfree Flow of Information

excerpted from the book

Beyond Hypocrisy

by Edward S. Herman

published by South End Press, 1992

Limits on Free Speech

Free speech in the United States certainly exists in the sense that dissent can usually be voiced without threat of violent reprisal by the state, at least in "normal" times. For communities of color, however, the threshold of the normal has been low and the mildest dissent or even attempts to assert citizens' rights have often been met with savage repression in the domestic application of the "mere gook rule. " More generally, freedom of speech has been limited by the fact that the state does engage in systematic disruption, harassment, and violent repression when dissent is seen as threatening, as in the Civil Rights/Vietnam war era's "COINTELPRO" and other programs, and in the frequent and sometimes large scale attacks on ethnic, labor, and radical leaders and organizations over the years. Deployment of the local, state and federal police, and national guard to quell labor activism and impede labor organization was an outstanding feature of the U.S. economic and political landscape from the 1860s to the Second World War.

Official and police opposition to labor organization was closely tied to restrictions on freedom of speech. Contrary to ongoing mythology, the First Amendment was largely inoperative and offered little or no protection to dissidents threatening the established order for roughly a century and a half after its incorporation into the Constitution. The Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime to utter or publish anything that brought high officials "into contempt or disrepute. " The Sedition Act was never repealed and was only overturned by the Supreme Court in 1964. Before 1860, statutes in every southern state forbade speech or writing condemning slavery, and these "were uniformly enforced by the courts."

In the post-Civil War era, the labor movement quickly focused on gaining the right to free speech as "peaceful labor demonstrations were regularly and often violently broken up by the police." Harassment, arrests, fines and imprisonments by local and state officials, and the use of police-protected vigilantes as enforcers were common responses to labor organizing and dissident speech. Advocates of women's right to vote, let alone birth-control, were regularly attacked by local and federal officials with no obstruction from the courts. In the early 1900s, Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman were frequency arrested and sometimes fined or imprisoned for distributing leaflets with information on birth control. Newspapers that offended the postmaster would include almost anything on the subject of sex of women-were denied the use of the mails. In 1917, women picketing the White House or protesting in a nearby park seeking support for a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, were arrested and jailed for obstructing traffic or disorderly conduct.

The Espionage Act of 1917, an extraordinarily repressive piece of legislation that literally outlawed criticism of World War I, resulted in over 2,000 criminal prosecutions. Despite challenges, none were reversed by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. This almost completely repressive history began to change only in 1919, improving slightly over the next 40 years, and then more rapidly from the early 1960s. Progress came from energetic efforts to expand the scope of civil liberties by social movements, especially during periods of mass mobilization like the 1930s and 1960s. Predictably, these enlargements of democracy were described as "crises of democracy" by spokespersons of the permanent interests. Even in the improved free speech environment of the post-World War II era, however, there were important regressions, most notably in the Truman-McCarthy years, when a new Red Scare caused a quick retreat from the advances of the preceding decades. An important accomplishment of this Red Scare was the purging of many progressives from the communications system and the frightening of those that remained into quiescence or noisy anticommunism. This helped set the stage for global expansion in the name of "anticommunism" and "containment".

The COINTELPRO activity during the Civil Rights/Vietnam war era and the Reagan administration's multi-leveled "secret war" of "low grade domestic terrorism" against the opposition to its Central American policy showed the continuing ease with which the government can threaten and undermine free speech. Arguably, freedom of speech and organization conditioned on its not being perceived as a threat by the establishment is a very constrained kind of freedom. We are not talking about minor constraints either: the steady attacks on the free speech of labor organizers and striking workers from 1865-1960 had a profound effect on the activities, growth, and ultimate character of unions. Numerous labor organizations were destroyed through state actions and connivance with employers. Many newspapers, journals, and movement organizations were eliminated by advertiser boycotts, by government, or government-supported vigilante intimidation and attacks. The FBI's long and systematic efforts to disrupt and destroy both the civil rights movement" and black community activism took a heavy toll: Dr. James Tumer of Comell University and the African Heritage Studies Association stated in 1974 that the FBI's programs had "serious long-term consequences for black Americans,. . .[having] created in blacks a sense of depression and hopelessness." The COINTELPRO campaigns and the covert war against the Central America antiwar movement were also substantial operations.

As Donna Demac observed in regard to the 1960s,

"The social movements that arose during the period, which sought to make fundamental changes in American society, were not allowed to develop naturally; instead, many either died prematurely or were subverted by infiltrators and provocateurs whose corrupting influence succeeded in discrediting them in the eyes of the public. As a consequence, it is impossible to know in what direction these movements might have gone or what they might have achieved without secret government intervention."

The tendency to stifle serious dissent has been aggravated by a dominant U.S. culture that has never been tolerant of "deviance," as De Tocqueville pointed out back in the early nineteenth century. This gives the state a freedom to repress upon slight and / or fabricated provocation. It means also that informal and less severe forms of reprisal can constrain dissent. Many Americans believe in free speech as a principle, but deeply resent its application in practice; after all, while the Soviet people have had reason to complain, why should we who live in the land of the free and the home of the brave? And as one respondent told the New York Times, explaining his shift to Bush (Sept. 20, 1988): "Freedom of speech is very important to me: we should be very proud of this pledge [to the flag], as a nation, and able to take every opportunity to say the pledge." Presumably anybody who doesn't want to make frequent pledges to the flag doesn't believe in freedom of speech. Dissidents who use freedom are abusing freedom.

The Market

Another very important and greatly underrated constraint on freedom of speech is dissenters' lack of access to the mass media, and thus to the general public. Their freedom is in an important sense only a personal freedom with limited public and social significance. Dissenters may have something important to say that the public would find enlightening, but the "gatekeepers" are free to keep them effectively silent. Of course, they are legally free to start their own newspaper or to buy a TV network as the General Electric Company did in 1985, and it is always possible (and occasionally happens) that a major newspaper or TV station will give oppositional viewpoints fleeting access. But an important feature of the U.S. system of f free speech is the powerful structural limits to access to mass media. In this market system of control, ownership is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy and the agents of the corporate establishment-the gatekeepers. Gatekeeper biases are reinforced by the preferences and biases of advertisers, ~s their natural gravitation to convenient and official sources like the White House, Pentagon, and State Department, and their f ear of negative feedback (flak) from bodies and groups that might threaten their position.' Dissenters are excluded in the normal sourcing and processing of news, so that freedom of speech is perfectly compatible with systematic barriers to views that jar and threaten. Reporters are forced to work within the limits imposed by the market system in order to survive and prosper in the media organizations.

The market also works in other ways to assure that only proper views can be heard. The General Electric Company not only owns a television network, it funds and promotes a The McLaughlin Group" of dominantly right-wing commentators on the Public Broadcasting System, complementing other monied groups' funding of William Buckley's "Firing Line," thus buying access to their preferred views on a nominally independent network. GE, other corporations, and related foundations also fund the American Enterprise Institute, the Georgetown Center For Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and scores of other allegedly "non-partisan" but ideologically directed research institutes, who finance and publicize the work of approved "experts. Accredited through these institutional affiliations, these experts can then meet the demands of the media for "non-partisan" and independent sources on subjects like tax policy, poverty, the military budget and arms race, terrorism, and the problems of building democracy in Central America, just as the Advertising Council has provided Public Service ads to fill the gap for mandated "public service" programming on TV with ads nicely fitted to the demands of the powerful.

Market marginalization of dissent has been strengthened by the increased centralization and commercialization of the mass media. The rise of national TV markedly increased mass media concentration, and the almost complete dependence of commercial TV on advertising and its resultant extreme sensitivity to advertiser interests (and the closely related growth and "quality" of audiences and audience expectations) shaped it into an instrument readily mobilized by government propaganda and virtually closed to dissent by the defunding of public radio and TV forced much of this small sector into the commercial nexus and further narrowed avenues of access.

Despite these structural facts, it is frequently asserted and has become a conservative cliché that the mass media, especially network TV and the leading establishment dailies, are both "liberal" and "adversarial" to established authority. To a considerable extent this reflects infighting between the various wings of the establishment, with the hard-line right resenting any f actual presentations inconvenient to established authority and policy (unless liberals are in power end making gestures toward peaceful accommodation, in which case we are confronted with "subversion" in government rather than in the media and are witnessing "appeasement.") The business community also generally wants system-supportive materials in the media and business "news" that amounts to press handouts of the relevant business firms. The Pentagon, White House, State Department, local police departments, and conservatives also went the media to serve simply as conduits for government officials.

Neo-conservative Michael Ledeen has complained: "Most journalists these days consider it beneath their dignity to simply report the words of government officials and let it go at that. Ledeen is wrong: most are quite content to serve as a conduit, but his statement illuminates the neoconservative view of the role of the press in a free society! Others, like Reed Irvine, openly demand that f acts which do not serve their cause be suppressed. During the Gulf war of 1991, Irvine complained bitterly that the media were not serving the Pentagon 100 percent and were reporting facts that while true, were inconvenient to the war effort. Ledeen and Irvine uphold the tradition of Peter Braestrup's Freedom House study of Vietnam war coverage, which castigated the media for failing to be sufficiently upbeat whatever the facts.

It is interesting to note that in early 1988 the Soviet press was assailed by Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov for disclosing negative facts about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which he claimed "played into the hands of the West". The Ledeen-Irvine-Braestrup equivalents in the Soviet Union would surely have supported Yazov's claim that the Soviet press was too liberal and "adversary", as his criticisms of the Soviet press fit their own for the U.S. media with precision. But the "adversary" Soviet press followed the party line on all essentials in 1985, just as the U.S. mass media did in accepting that the United States sought "democracy" in Nicaragua in the 1980s and that it entered a war in the Gulf in 1991 to fight for the principle of non-aggression. The Bush administration wanted to censor the media during the Gulf war, not because they are adversaries, but for the reason implicit in Yazov's critique of the Soviet media: namely, a greedy desire to avoid anything inconvenient or negative.

The attacks leveled against the media as liberal and adversary, although often expressing the true beliefs of the business-neocon assailants, have the important effect of driving the media even more closely toward the state party line and away from facts and analyses that would call it into question. Claire Sterling may put forward rhetorical, implausible, and untrue statements on terrorism and the Bulgarian-KGB connection to the plot to shoot the Pope in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and CBS, but neither Reed Irvine nor government officials will utter a peep of complaint. An Elliott Abrams on Nicaragua, although representing a party line and a confirmed liar, is safe. Dissidents such as Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Diana Johnstone or Jane Hunterwould elicit cries of outrage on the right; therefore, they are rare participants in public discussions.

At the same time, the continual outcry that the media are liberal and adversarial establishes the claim as fact, so that the very process that constrains the media further gives them added (and totally unjustified) credibility as unbiased.

The Power Laws

The structure of power that shapes media choices and determines who gains access also affects truthfulness in the mass media. Those who have assured access can lie; the more powerful they are, the more easily they can lie and the less likely it is that their lies will be corrected. The higher the rank the more "credible" the statement; the more credible the speaker, the greater the freedom to lie.

This can be formulated in two laws: a "power law of access" and an "inverse power law of truthfulness." The first law says that the greater your economic and political clout, the easier your access to the mass media; the less your power, the more difficult the access. At a certain point on the declining power scale, access falls to zero. The fall to zero is accelerated if the message is discordant and would offend the powerful. The second law says that the greater your economic and political power-hence, access. The greater your freedom to lie; the smaller your power, the less your freedom to prevaricate. The second law follows in part from the first, as those who would be most eager to refute the lies of the powerful are weak and have limited access, further reduced by their discordant messages. Their messages can be ignored without cost to the mass media (whose biases would incline them toward avoidance anyway).

The media's gullibility and groveling before the powerful occurs despite recognition by media personnel, in principle, that governments lie. But in practice, when dealing with their own government, especially in the area of foreign policy and the military-industrial-complex,. media personnel abandon or shy away from critical analysis and, frequently, common sense.

Propaganda Campaigns

Structurally-based bias and the power laws make the mass media extremely serviceable f or system-supportive propaganda campaigns. This all works very naturally as the proprietors, advertisers, and government usually have parallel biases, and their experts and flak machines combine to push the media in the same direction. Thus the great Red Scare of 1919-1920 helped thwart a threatening unionization of major industries; the Red Scare of the years (1948 1955) served to liquidate the old New Deal coalition end clear the ground for an aggressive pursuit of U.S. global interests under the guise of "containment" and protecting "national security; and the Soviet Threat could be rehabilitated to provide the rationale for the Reagan era stoking of the arms race and a cover for the upward redistribution of income. In the latter period, the terrorist threat, Kadaffi, the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope, and the "barbaric" Soviet shooting down of Korean airliner 007 in 1983 could all be brought on line in propaganda campaigns to reinforce the demands of the state.

In all of these cases the mass media collaborated with the government to help engineer consent by means of propaganda outbursts that were built, in whole or in part, on lies. They were also built on Orwellian processes of doublethink: only selected incidents that served the state were subject to propaganda campaigns (Libya end Abu Nidal, not South Africa, Guatemala, Orlando Bosch, or Luis Posada); only politically useful shootdowns of airliners aroused indignation and stimulated concentrated media coverage; and only selected cases of torture, murder, and aggression aroused concern. Crucial to the process was the reliance on the powerful and their accredited experts for information, and the exclusion of contesting viewpoints by p dissidents and unaccredited experts.

UNESCO and the "Free Flow of Information"

In 1984 the United States withdrew from United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), on the ground (among others) of its alleged threat to the "free flow of information." In the standard formulation in the U.S. press, UNESCO was said to be in favor of a New World Information Order (NWIO) whose essence was "government control of the media" and the "licensing of journalists"; whereas the United States and its media were dedicated to unconditional freedom of communications as a matter of high principle. This formulation, a caricature of the real positions of the contending parties, reflected an undisclosed conflict of interest on the part of the western media, as well as remarkable hypocrisy.

For many years western media end news agencies have dominated the international flow of news. Third World spokespersons have long protested the biased portrayals of their countries in western news and called for a two-way and balanced news flow. A more basic Third World concern is the threat to cultural integrity and sovereignty from the flood of western advertising messages and other cultural products, as well as news. A number of Third World (and sympathetic western) analysts contended that true independence and popular mobilization for development are impossible without independent national communications systems. Such concerns were accentuated in the 1960s with the development of satellite communications and remote sensing technologies. The former allows western programmers to transmit news, ads, and entertainment entirely outside the control of national governments. Remote sensing allows western states to survey the mineral and other resources of lesser powers, again resulting in a loss in control, power, and independence.

The official U.S. position, followed consistently in the U.S. mass media, was that the only issues raised by a NW were "freedom of the press" versus "government control. Freedom of the press meant a commercial press funded by advertising. Might an advertising-based press display a systematic bias based on its restricted revenue source? Might it be affected by proprietary wealth and interest? Might it reflect the national and corporate interests of the home country and its leading multinational organizations? How concentrated could the media become before it should be regarded as "unfree"? These questions were never raised in the U.S. mass media in their frequent reports and discussions of the withdrawal.

A media worried about the effects of the NWIO on the free flow of information should also be deeply concerned about constraints on free flow on their own western turf. It is one of the ironies of the U.S. and British withdrawals from UNESCO, however, that they were engineered by governments notable for increased secrecy, the curtailment of access to information, covert operations, deception, and manipulation of the press. Demac points out that "From its beginnings, the Reagan administration made little attempt to disguise its preference for operating outside congressional and public scrutiny; it quickly adopted an array of secrecy regulations that reached far beyond those of previous administrations." In addition to major restrictions on the free speech rights of government workers and a sharp increase in the surveillance and harassment of those opposed to government polices, the new administration greatly expanded the classification and destruction of documents it deemed sensitive. It even began the reclassification of documents already in the public domain, a policy worthy of a Ministry of Truth and consistent with its systematic lying and rewriting of history.

Demac also notes the increased restrictions on foreign travel of Americans and visits by politically deviant foreigners to the United States, plus substantial efforts to control the flow of messages, electronic and printed, to and from Cuba and other states. Canadian films on acid rain and the effects of nuclear war were forced to bear the label "propaganda." Fulbright fellowships were cut back and politicized, the reduced funds redistributed to straightforward government propaganda. Constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams remarked that the Reagan administration "acts as if information were in the nature of a potentially disabling disease which must be feared, controlled, and ultimately quarantined."

The Thatcher government was equally or more aggressive in attacking dissident media and whistleblowers. Her movement's attitude toward the free flow of information within Britain was described in an off-the-record briefing to U.S. correspondents on Dec. 3, 1986 by Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister's press spokesman: "There is no freedom of information in this country; there's no public right to know. There's a commonsense idea of how to run a country and Britain is full of commonsense people... Bugger the public's right to know. The game is the security of the state-not the public's right to know."

The U.S. mass media were never very disturbed by the Reagan-Thatcher encroachments on free flow at home, nor did they ever point out during the period of withdrawal from UNESCO the huge contradiction between the Reagan-Thatcher devotion to free flow in UNESCO-related areas and their antithetical policies at home.

Another oddity that might have struck an observer not well indoctrinated with U.S. conceptions of freedom was the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. sphere of influence over the past several decades. Attacks on the media in these countries went well beyond "licensing" and other alleged evils of the NWIO, and were received by the mass media with virtual silence and lack of indignation. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 94 journalists "disappeared" or were murdered in Argentina from 1976-1982,21 were killed in El Salvador between 1980 and 1984, and 48 were killed in Guatemala between 1978 and 1982, almost all by governments supported by the United States.. Numerous papers were closed in these countries, and those that remained open learned a lesson in free flow from the murders. Similar developments occurred in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and other states in Latin America in the period coincident with the rising media concern over a NWIO (1973-84).

On the basis of principled concern over a free press and free flow of information, it is hard to explain why the media would be passionately concerned over "licensing" in a NWIO that did not exist, but failed to rouse themselves over the murder of scores of journalists in U.S. client states in the Third World. The apparent contradiction is resolvable, however, if it is recognized that repressive governments in Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala serve a larger transnational corporate interest and do not interfere with Associated Press and New York Times operations and material interests. Thus, what appears to be an unaccountable inconsistency can be explained, but the relevant principle is corporate access and profit, not freedom of information.

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