Quotations

from the book

Unreliable Sources

a guide to detecting bias in news media

by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon

A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol Publishing Group, 1990

p16
On a typical weekday evening, more than 29 million households tune in for a half-hour news show on one of three national TV networks. Most people tend to believe what comes across the luminous screen.

p17
Sam Donaldson to a Southern California newspaper

"... As a rule, we are, if not handmaidens of the establishment, at least blood brothers to the establishment... We end up the day usually having some version of what the White House...has suggested as a story."

p17
Los Angeles Times staff writer David Shaw, a specialist in examining media practices, has found that "reporters often call a source because they want a quotation to illustrate a particular point, and they are sure to get exactly what they want if they call a source whose attitudes they already know."

p17
Professor Robert Entman observes in a 1989 book

"The elites who make most of the national news, are the ones who control policy outcomes in Washington... News reports can advance or undermine the policy proposals they want enacted or privileges they want maintained. The information they provide is tainted."

p17
Walter Karp, Harper's Magazine, 1989

"The overwhelming majority of stories are based on official sources-on information provided by members of Congress, presidential aides, and politicians... The first fact of American journalism is its overwhelming dependence on sources, mostly official, usually powerful."

p17
... when covering highly-politicized matters of foreign policy, NPR reporters at the State Department, Pentagon, Congress and White House are prone to do little but raptly transmit the utterances of politicians and their appointees. The tilt is against non-officials, and against officials not on the president's team.

p18
Walter Karp, Harper's Magazine, 1989

"It is a bitter irony of source journalism, that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the 'best' sources."

p18
Walter Karp, Harper's Magazine, 1989

"So pervasive is the passivity of the press that when a reporter actually looks for news on his or her own it is given a special name, 'investigative journalism,' to distinguish it from routine, passive 'source journalism.' It is investigative journalism that wins the professional honors, that makes what little history the American press ever makes, and that provides the misleading exception that proves the rule: the American press, unbidden by powerful sources, seldom investigates anything."

p18
Professor Robert Entman observes in a 1989 book

"Government sources and journalists join in an intimacy that renders any notion of a genuinely 'free' press inaccurate."

p18
More than any other publications, the Washington Post and the New York Times exert tremendous impact on American political life. Every day these newspapers contain more comprehensive coverage than any other U.S. media. While enjoying reputations for hard-hitting journalism, both papers are integral to the prevailing political power structure. They publish exclusive news stories and eminent punditry that greatly influence the direction and tone of other media. And their printed words carry heavy weight within the government's "national security" leviathan.

p82
former GE President Charles Wilson, a longtime advocate of a permanent war economy, in a speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association, he urged the media to rally behind the government's Cold War crusade.

"The free world is in mortal danger. If the people were not convinced of that, it would be impossible for Congress to vote vast sums now being spent to avert that danger," said Wilson. "With the support of public opinion, as marshaled by the press, we are off to a good start... It is our job-yours and mine-to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build America's might."

p93
Prior to World War II, media critic George Seldes took Time-Life publishing magnate Henry Luce to task for devoting "an entire issue of Fortune to glorifying Mussolini and Fascism.

p93
[George] Seldes exposed a secret $400,000-a-year deal between Hitler and press baron William Randolph Hearst, which resulted in pro-Nazi articles in all Hearst papers. As late as December 1940, Hearst was ordering his editors not to include "unnecessarily offensive" cartoons of Hitler and Mussolini in his papers.

[William Randolph] Hearst propaganda masquerading as journalism played a major role in starting the Spanish-American War in 1898. His media empire also was instrumental in backing Senator Joe McCarthy when he launched his anti-Red crusade in 1950.

p101
Corporate control of the media limits the spectrum of news coverage and, by implication, the range of options available to the U.S. public.

p101
Robert Cirano

"It is ownership of the mass media by the wealthy, rather than a conspiracy of any kind, that explains why the important decisions usually favor viewpoints that support things as they are, rather than viewpoints that support fundamental changes in society."

p103
TV's top journalists are part of the wealthy and influential elite, often socializing with people they're supposed to be scrutinizing.

p103
Most U.S. citizens who hear about a state-controlled press think of something that exists in faraway places, not in their own country.

p104
Lyndon Johnson

"Reporters are puppets. They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings."

p104
Newsday editor Anthony Marro

"For all its bluster and professed skepticism, the press is far too willing to take the government at its word."

p104
Bill Moyers

"Most of the news on television is, unfortunately, whatever the government says is news."

p105
Journalists have a long history of cooperating with U.S. military officials. During World War II, the American press functioned as a virtual PR arm of the government.

p105
Phillip Knightley in his book on wartime press coverage

"Public relations, of which war correspondents were considered a part, became another cog in the massive military machine the Americans constructed to defeat Hitler.

p105
General Eisenhower

"Public opinion wins wars. I have always considered as quasi-staff officers, correspondents accredited to my headquarters."

p105
William Dorman in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

"Not surprisingly, the mainstream news media...have performed during the Cold War as they always have during hot ones. The media have moved further and further away from the watchdog role democratic theory assumed they would play in affairs of state where national defense and foreign policy are concerned."

p106
New York Times editorialized about allegations that the U.S. Iagged far behind the Soviet arsenal during the Cold War 'missle crisis'

"At the time of the missile crisis, the United States had 2,000 long-range missiles, the Soviet Union less than 100."

p109
Walter J. Smith, a U.S. Air Force non-commissioned officer in Laos

"It seemed that everyone knew what was going on in Laos, except for the American public. And Americans didn't know about it because the media were willingly keeping it secret."

p109
Walter Karp, Harpers magazine

"The obligation of a free press to 'act as a check on the power of government' is checked itself by the power of government."

p113
Whether conservative, moderate or liberal, mainstream journalists function within a media system dominated by government and corporate elites. Constrained by rigid institutional structures and narrow cultural assumptions, most reporters are not predisposed toward bucking the status quo.

p116
The CIA's most important print media asset has been the New York Times, which provided press credentials and cover for more than a dozen CIA operatives during the Cold War.

p127
Over the years, reporters have had to contend with a steady barrage of deceptions, half-truths and blatant falsehoods emanating from the White House. This deliberate perversion of the truth calls into question the fundamental character of a democratic society, which is supposed to be based on the consent of the governed. An ill-informed public can't hold officials accountable for their policies.

p127
I.F. Stone

"Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed." said

p127
George Bush's press secretary stated shortly after the vice presidential debate with Geraldine Ferraro in October 1984

"You can say anything you want in a debate and 80 million people hear it. If reporters then document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, so what? Maybe 200 people read it."

p127
Austrian scholar Karl Kraus

"How is the world ruled and led into war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe those lies when they see them in print."

p129
Winston Churchill

"In time of war, the truth is so precious it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

p143
President Reagan's media point man David Gergen declared in a 1981 interview

"In terms of the syndicated columnists, if there is an ideological bias, it's more and more to the right,"

p148
Walter Karp, Harpers magazine

"For eight years the Democratic opposition had shielded from the public a feckless, lawless President with an appalling appetite for private power. That was the story of the Reagan years, and Washington journalists evidently knew it. Yet they never turned the collusive politics of the Democratic party into news. Slavishly in thrall to the powerful, incapable of enlightening the ruled without the consent of the rulers, the working press, the 'star' reporters, the pundits, the sages, the columnists passed on to us, instead, the Democrats' mendacious drivel about the President's 'Teflon shield.' For eight years, we saw the effects of a bipartisan political class in action, but the press did not show us that political class acting, exercising its collective power, making things happen, contriving the appearances that were reported as news."

p148
The past half-century of polling data from Gallup Report showed Reagan's average public approval rating while in office (52 percent) to be lower than Presidents Johnson (54 percent), Kennedy (70 percent), Eisenhower (66 percent), and Roosevelt (68 percent). What's more, Reagan barely bested his three immediate predecessors-Carter (47 percent), Ford (46 percent) and Nixon (48 percent). Of the last nine Presidents, Reagan's approval ranking was a mediocre fifth.

p150
Much of the Reagan program was directly at odds with popular sentiment. But the President's aides figured they could overcome this problem if the press adopted the Reagan agenda as its own. The goal was not simply to neutralize the press but to turn it into a government asset.

p150
Reagan aide Michael Deaver

"Ronald Reagan enjoyed the most generous treatment by the press of any President in the postwar era. He knew it, and liked the distinction."

p151
Time magazine, 1986

"People tend to trust him [Reagan], even if they utterly disagree with his principles."

p153
Mark Hertsgaard

"The essentials of the contra story and to some extent the Iran arms sales were known to individual members of the press nearly 18 months before they became headline news in November 1986. Parts of the stories were even reported in major media outlets... But the stories were not deemed worthy of vigorous pursuit, were not picked up throughout the rest of the news media, were not accorded a sufficiently high profile to attract the attention of the American public. And so they floated past largely unnoticed, fortifying Reagan administration officials in the conviction that they could conduct whatever illegal or unpopular operations they wished without fear of detection."

p176
Christian Science Monitor

"In a nation of people with ambitions to be affluent themselves, someday, class warfare does not sell."

p177
Washington Post quote from Robert Greenstein, director of the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

"The gap between the rich and the middle class and the rich and the poor has now reached its widest point in at least 40 years."

The quotation came in the article's tenth paragraph, appearing on page A15. But the article had begun on the front page, under the upbeat headline: "Number of Poor Americans at Lowest Level Since 1980."

p177
San Francisco writer Ann Bartz

"Class difference in the United States has so far been the great, undiscussed elephant in the national living room."

p177
Author Barbara Ehrenreich

"Income distribution is now almost as perilously skewed as that of India."

p177
economist and author Hazel Henderson

"The problem with economic news today is that most of it comes from economists. And economists are trained to deal with statistics, not with people."

p177
Barbara Wien of the Institute for Policy Studies

"The detached and abstracted manner in which television talk shows like Wall Street Week in Review report economic news means that we never learn about the fundamental causes and human impact of certain policy choices."

p180
Jonathan Kozol

"The gulf in income between rich and poor American families is wider than at any time since figures were recorded, starting in the 1940s... black children are more than twice as likely to die in infancy as whites-nine times as likely to be neurologically impaired.... homeless children were seen begging in the streets of major cities for the first time since the Great Depression a fivefold increase in homeless children was seen in Washington, D.C., in 1986 alone. By 1987 nearly half the occupants of homeless shelters in New York City were children. The average homeless child was only six years old."

p182
No news broadcast is complete without a summary of the day's events on Wall Street. Yet only two percent of the public owns half of the country's individual stock and bond holdings. Most people in the market are very small investors.

p188
By the end of the 1980s only 17 percent of American workers were union members-down from 40 percent in 1956.

p189
Barbara Ehrenreich

If I turn on one of the public affairs talk shows on TV and see usually four white men, well-dressed-I'm sure they earn close to six figures a year-pontificating on...the minimum wage. Now, none of them have been close to the minimum wage since they were paper boys. Why don't they have someone on who's trying to support a family on the minimum wage?"

p191
The Soviet coal strike [1980s] was front-page news in the United States. The American coal strike wasn't. As columnist Alexander Cockburn observed in The Nation, media accounts of the U.S. strike "covered the 'violence' of the miners (rock throwing, destruction of property) without examining the economic and physical violence that is waged against the miners: no coverage of the danger of going down into the pits, where many miners die; of the conditions of poverty in which many of them live."

... A grievous omission was the non-coverage of a remarkable event: For the first time in half a century [1989], according to union observers, strikers occupied a U.S. industrial plant, ejecting scabs and halting production. The nonviolent occupation lasted four days, with 99 miners holed up inside the Pittston Company's coal-processing plant near Carbo, Virginia, while about 1,000 union supporters blocked the plant gates. The occupation went virtually unreported in American mass media.

p201
American journalism has been much better at pointing to environmental victims than culprits. Even when responsibility would seem to be clear, corporate biggies usually slide right off the media hook.

p241
New York Times

"More than $100 billion a year in drug money flows through the nation's banks."

p242
Jeffry H Reiman, professor of criminal justice at American University

"We have a system shaped by economic bias from the start. The dangerous acts and crimes unique to the wealthy are either ignored or treated lightly, while for the so-called common crimes, the poor are far more likely an the well-off to be arrested, if arrested charged, if charged convicted, and if convicted sentenced to prison."

p242
attorney Gerry Spence

"The cost of corporate crime in America is over ten times greater than the combined larcenies, robberies, burglaries and auto thefts committed by individuals."

p242
Jeffry H Reiman, professor of criminal justice at American University

America's mass media impart "a message of enormous ideological value to those at the top in our society: the message that the greatest danger to the average citizen comes from below him or her on the economic ladder, not from above."

p242
Jeffry H Reiman, professor of criminal justice at American University

"The label 'crime' is not used in America to name all or the worst of the actions that cause misery and suffering to Americans. It is primarily reserved for the dangerous actions of the poor."

p242
If our media were more independent and evenhanded, a TV news broadcast might include reportage like this: Two people were killed in an armed robbery today. And in other crime news: Figures released today show that more than 20 area residents died last month because they could not get adequate medical care. At the same time, failures by local employers to provide safe working conditions resulted in the deaths of four workers.

p250
Almost half of all black children in the United States -- 45 percent -- were living in families officially below the poverty line, a 1989 study found.

p251
scientist Stephen Jay Gould

"How convenient to blame the poor and the hungry for their own condition -- lest we be forced to blame our economic system or our government for an abject failure to secure a decent life for all people."

p251

* "There are almost as many young black men in prison as in college."

* "For the first time in American history the life expectancy for black people is declining."

* "Murder and suicide are the two leading causes of death. A young black man...stands a one in 21 chance of being murdered before he's 44; for a white man, it's one in 133."

* "The suicide rate for young black men is up and rising. White men who commit suicide tend to do it when they see themselves as 'powerless' in their 50s; for black men, 'powerless' in their 20s."

* "Even though black men make up only six percent of the U.S. population, half of all the men behind bars are black."

* "There is no federal response to what's happening to [black men] shown by the alarming rise in statistics. There are, of course, some job training programs, some education programs, but there is no focused effort on this problem."

p253
Martin Luther King, 1968

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

p266
In the United States [in 1988], fully one-fifth of the races for seats in the House of Representatives had only one candidate. What's more, as The Nation pointed out, over 98 percent of House members and 85 percent of Senators won their bids for reelection ...

p273
journalism analyst Jay Rosen

"The refusal of the U.S. to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons is an example of what might be called ( a 'public secret'-a fact that is publicly known but not known by the public. Such facts mark the limits of the public as an active body in a democracy, for they make it impossible for citizens to debate and help decide the matters the 'secrets' concern. One can hardly get agitated about a policy one does not know exists. Thus, the same study that found a large majority ignorant of the first-use policy in Western Europe also found that three of four Americans oppose the use of nuclear weapons to repel a conventional attack."

p281
The New York Times uncritically quoted the President's July 4 resurrection of his administration's KAL incident deceit:

"Remember the KAL, a group of Soviet fighter planes went up, identified the plane for what it was and then proceeded to shoot it down. There's no comparison."

p281
Seymour Hersh's 1986 book The Target Is Destroyed

the Reagan administration knew within days of the KAL shootdown that the Soviets had believed it to be a military aircraft on a spy mission. Soviet commanders had no idea that they were tracking a plane with civilians on board.

p288
Richard Falk wrote in Revolutionaries and Functionaries: The Dual Face of Terror

"The terrorist is as much the well-groomed bureaucrat reading the Wall Street Journal as the Arab in desert dress looking through the gunsights of a Kalashnikov rifle."

p288
Because the U.S. government dominates the media agenda, Third World revolutionary violence continues to exert a distracting hold on the American imagination, while U.S.-backed state terrorism in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, the Philippines and Indonesia is downplayed.

p289
Jude Wanniski, former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and author of the annual Media Guide, an ardent defender of Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, widely believed to be the mastermind of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980. Wanniski dismissed the notion that D'Aubuisson has anything to do with the death squads, calling it "one of the most successful hoaxes of the decade." Those like former U.S. ambassador Robert White and ex-Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, who have linked D'Aubuisson to the death squads, were guilty, in Wanniski's words, of "a McCarthyist tactic, pure and simple." Wanniski didn't mention D'Aubuisson's admiring comment about Adolf Hitler told to a German reporter and another European journalist: "You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism, and you began to kill them."

p289
The kind of terrorism the U.S. media pay most attention to is committed by small groups on planes, ships, or at airports-what Edward S. Herman has described as "retail terror"-compared to "wholesale terror" that occurs with U.S. financial assistance and military support in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Philippines ...

p299
1984 memo from John Poindexter to National Security Adviser Robert MacFarlane on peace talks with Nicaragua

"Continue active negotiations but agree on no treaty and agree to work out some way to support the contras either directly or indirectly. Withhold true objectives from staffs."

p305
Fred Sherwood, former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, was heard telling journalist Allan Nairn

"Why should we do anything about the death squads? They're killing commies. I'd give them more power! I'd give them cartridges if I could..."

p305
The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, butchered more than a million people in Cambodia. The Communist Khmer Rouge were eventually ousted by Vietnamese troops, whereupon the Reagan administration quietly shifted its support to Pol Pot's army-a cynical and outrageous foreign policy maneuver that provoked little comment in the U.S. media at the time.

p306
In January 1990, after Vietnam had withdrawn its forces, the New York Times rewrote history in a chronology headlined "Two Decades of Suffering in Cambodia." But the chronology skipped five grief-stricken years-from March 1970 to April 1975. This was a period of massive American bombing of the Cambodian countryside that left the country in ruins, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. A Finnish government commission of inquiry on Cambodia referred to the entire 1970s as the "decade of genocide," but the Times omitted any reference to the genocidal violence perpetrated by the United States.

p306
Turkey is one of the most egregious human rights violators, yet it's a low priority for American media. When the Turkish government, a staunch U.S. ally and NATO member, figures in human rights stories, they are usually about the brutal mistreatment of the Kurdish ethnic minority. But very little is said about the Turkish government's ongoing oppression of its own people.

... Since the military coup in 1980, as many as 300,000 Turkish citizens have been denied passports, and, according to Amnesty International, 250,000 political prisoners were detained and nearly all were tortured; 200 Turks died while in custody because of torture.

... Labor unions have also been a prime target of Turkish government repression. Martial law in Turkey put an end to collective bargaining in the early 1980s, and the trade union movement was decimated by mass arrests, torture and executions. This occurred at a time when the fledgling Solidarity movement in Poland was a major story in the American media. Driven more by U.S. policy interests than by a concern for human rights, mass media averted their eyes from the nightmare in anticommunist Turkey, and thereby helped to perpetuate it.

p309
Major Smedley Butler, U.S. Marine hero in Nicaragua in 1912, spoke before the American Legion on August 21, 1931. The New York Times didn't see fit to print Butler's speech.

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

"I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents."

"I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

p309
After five years of Sandinista rule, infant mortality dropped to the lowest level in Central America. Over 85 percent of the population had learned to read and write at least on a third-grade level as a result of a crash literacy program acclaimed by UNESCO. The number of schools had doubled since the overthrow of Anastazio Somoza. The Sandinistas also initiated sweeping agrarian reform, emphasizing basic grains and crops for local needs rather than export-a development strategy that brought Nicaragua close to food self-sufficiency.

.. In addition, the Nicaraguan government banned DDT and other harmful sprays, while neighboring states still serve as dumping grounds for U.S.-made chemical toxins. Strides in Nicaraguan health care won praise from the United Nations and other international groups. The World Health Organization lauded Nicaragua's success in nearly eliminating polio, measles and diphtheria, and reducing infant mortality. But many of these achievements were subsequently eroded-along with the Sandinistas' popularity-as the Nicaraguan government diverted its resources in an effort to defend itself from attacks by U.S.-financed mercenary forces. "Unfortunately," said former contra leader Edgar Chamorro, "the contras bum down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas can build them."

... While the U.S. media followed Washington's lead in dismissing the 1984 Nicaraguan elections as meaningless, the vast majority of independent observers considered it to be a free and fair vote.

... The British Guardian summed up the results in a news story headlined "A Revolution That Proved Itself at the Polls

" A report by an Irish parliamentary delegation stated: "The electoral process was carried out with total integrity. The seven parties participating in the elections represented a broad spectrum of political ideologies." The general counsel of New York's Human Rights Commission described the election as "free, fair and hotly contested."

... The New York Times proclaimed, "Only the naive believe the election was democratic or legitimizing proof of the Sandinistas' popularity."

p311
Right-wing death squads had murdered tens of thousands of Salvadorans-unionists, students, church activists-and anyone campaigning for progressive change or for human rights would have risked his or her life. But ongoing state terror, which precluded an open campaign essential for a free and fair vote, didn't figure in the U.S. media as a factor that had any bearing on the Salvadoran election-an event designed to put a happy-face on a government drenched in blood from massacring its own people.

p311

Maria Julia Hemandez, a leading Salvadoran human rights monitor

"These elections have been imposed by the U.S. State Department to legitimize the government so it can get more U.S. military aid. All this will mean is more deaths, more violations of human rights."

p312
Holly Burkhalter of Americas Watch

"It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between the death squads and the government security forces in El Salvador, because frequently the security forces will abduct people in unmarked vans, wearing plainclothes."

p315
Virgilio Godoy, a foe of the Sandinistas who was the U.S-supported vice presidential candidate in the 1990 election, told the Christian Science Monitor about the last election five years earlier

"If the U.S. administration said that the Guatemalan and Salvadoran elections were valid ones, how can they condemn elections in Nicaragua, when they have been no worse and probably a lot better? The elections here have been much more peaceful. There were no deaths as in the other two countries, where the opposition were often in fear for their lives."

p315
The main tactical issue mulled over in the U.S. press with respect to Nicaragua's 1990 elections was how to channel millions of dollars to the political opposition-covertly via the CIA or openly through the National Endowment for Democracy. That such meddling-whether overt or covert-might compromise the integrity of the Nicaraguan electoral process was never mentioned by most mainstream journalists, who seemingly took for granted that it's perfectly fine if the U.S. government interferes in the affairs of other countries.

p320
Latin America
Half a million children died in 1988, according to UNICEF, as families in the developing world slid into severe poverty, while their governments imposed strict austerity measures at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This was the standard prescription for servicing the foreign debt-much of which had accrued in Latin America while U.S.-backed dictators looted their own treasuries, siphoning loans into various secret bank accounts. Yet the loans kept coming.

p320
Esther Perez Aguirre, talked about the transition from Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s to electoral democracies of the 1980s

"The national security regimes are becoming obsolete, but the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank haven't changed. Transnational and U.S.-based corporations are seeking to maintain the same unjust policies without propping up openly repressive regimes. Accordingly, the U.S. government is promoting a new doctrine, not very well known yet, called democracia tutelaria, or 'controlled democracy.' This doctrine tries to avoid the brutal image of military rule, but the oppression of our people continues."

p331
In 1940, Seldes started a weekly newsletter, In fact, the world's first regular publication devoted entirely to press criticism. During its ten-year life, circulation rose to over 175,000 -- with kudos from Eleanor Roosevelt, among others-before In fact was Red-baited to death by McCarthyites

p332
TV Newscasts share a half-hour continuum with high-budget commercials that intersperse the con and the come-on, mixing messages whose net effect is to inculcate confusion and passivity. Taking in the world of the foreign crisis and the yellowed kitchen floor, heart-rending disasters and new cars, severe domestic ills and great light beer, TV viewers are conditioned to be passive about nearly everything that can't be purchased. While commercials emphatically encourage shopping sprees, television imparts little enthusiasm for grassroots activism, least of all for Americans who might endeavor to significantly alter a society with unforgivable extremes of wealth and poverty, a poisoned ecology and other festering injustices.

p332
Ralph Nader
"Who is watching the direction of society, if we are all at home watching re-runs?"

p333
psychotherapist Anne Wilson Schaef

"No one is more controllable than a confused person; no society is more controllable than a confused society. Politicians know this better than anyone, and that is why they use innuendos, veiled references, and out-and-out lies instead of speaking clearly and truthfully."

p333
While sometimes echoing public skepticism or even disdain toward politicians, news media grant them continuous access-endlessly featuring, quoting, summarizing and propagating their opinions. As with histrionic wrestlers on TV, journalists and political players make various noises, encouraging viewers to mistake the embraces for mortal combat. But when the President wants reporters to jump for a story, they are much less interested in asking "Why?" than "How high?"

p334
... A central function of the American press is to keep legitimizing the country's most powerful institutions

p334
In projecting elite opinion, the U.S. press plays a crucial role in molding popular opinion; it serves as a channel that converts the former, however imprecisely, into the latter. And while mass media can't always dictate our political and social attitudes, they never stop telling us what our views supposedly are-or should be.

p334
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent

"In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest."

p335
Walter Karp, 1989

"In the American republic the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings-Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news."

p336
... we hear precious little about the fact that one percent of the population in the U.S. owns nearly one-half of the country's wealth, and one percent of all industrial corporations in America account for nearly 90 percent of total sales.

p336
Ben Bagdikian

... media giants have two enormous advantages: They control the public image of national leaders who, as a result, fear and favor the media magnates' political agendas; and they control the information and entertainment that help establish the social, political and cultural attitudes of increasingly larger populations." This built-in institutional bias "does more than merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world."

p336
Alexander Cockburn

"There is a fundamental contradiction between a corporately owned press and a press fulfilling its duties as a critical social institution."

p337
Ted Koppel, Nightline, 1989

"We are a discouragingly timid lot. By we, I mean most television anchors and reporters and most of our colleagues of the establishment press... We tremble between daydreams of scooping all of our competitors and the nightmare of standing alone with our scoop for too long... People whose job it is to manipulate the media know this about us. They know that...many of us are truly only comfortable when we travel in a herd."

p338
... commercial broadcasters do not own the airwaves; they rent them. According to the Federal Communications Act, a broadcasting license can be revoked if a network fails to serve the "public interest." But this stipulation is never enforced because powerful groups prefer that it not be enforced.

Unreliable Sources

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