Chapter 1: A
Propaganda
Model
I.
I.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
7
. On pa~ificati? n,"TV and radio commentators went far beyond the available lOfor~atlOn to Imply the dramatic worst. " Three examples are cited to prove t~ePOlOt (I, 565). Howard Tuckner, ofNBC-TV, reported from New York the views of "U. S. intelligence officials" and "Some U. S. officials in Vietnam"- correctly~as Braestrup concedes in a footnote, adding that these were the views of "CIA 10 Washington" and "Disheartened junior CORDS officials in Viet-
nam. " By Freedom House standards, it is improper to cite such sources accu- rately. The second example is a CBS radio report criticized only for being
328 APPENDIX 3
APPENDIX 3 329
ing optimistic statements, among them Robert Komer's prediction of "steady progress in pacification" a week before the Tet offensive (I, 72; Braestrup's paraphrase). In fact, part of the shock of the Tet offensive resulted from the faith ofthe media in previous government assessments, undermined by the Tet offensive, as the U. S. military and official Washington were well aware.
Furthermore, General Westmoreland's accounts were hardly persuasive during the offensive. Thus he claimed that "all I I of the Vietnamese division commanders . . . commanded their units effectively," whereas, as a journalist learned, one "had gone into a state of shock during the T et attacks" (I, 454-55). Or consider Westmoreland's claim that allegations about inaccuracy and in- flation of body counts were "one of the great distortions of the war" by the media-there were at most "relatively small inaccuracies" (II, 163). His own generals had a rather different view. In his study of the opinions of the generals, General Douglas Kinnard reports that 61 percent of those responding describe the body count as "often inflated," and only 26 percent "within reason accurate. " The responses include: "a fake-totally worthless," "often blatant lies," "a blot on the honor of the Army," and "grossly exaggerated by many
units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara and Westmoreland. " Perhaps journalists had some reason for skepticism, apart from "vengefulness. "9
To demonstrate the absurd extent of press efforts to find shock value, Braestrup cites a story in Time on enemy tunneling at Khe 8anh, "as occurred around Dienbienphu" (1,435; his emphasis), in general ridiculing the analogy- but forgetting to ridicule the remark by Marine Commander General Cush- man, who said that "He is digging trenches and doing other tricks of the trade which he learned to do at Dienbienphu" (I, 40 3).
"All Vietnam, it appeared on film at home, was in flames or being battered into ruins, and all Vietnamese civilians were homeless refugees," Br~estrup alleges (I, 234), in typically fanciful rhetoric, adding that "there were Virtually no films shown or photographs published during this period of undamaged portions of Saigon, Hue, or other cities" (his emphasis). This shows that coverage was unbalanced, supportive of the enemy. One wonders how many films and photographs of peaceful English villages or Hawaiian towns ap-
peared on the days that Coventry and Pearl Harbor were bombed, to balance
the picture.
Braestrup seeks the causes for the "exoneration of the Vietcong" for "killing
noncombatants or causing the exodus of refugees" (I, 234), overlooking ,the fact chat before seeking the cause of x it is necessary to show that x is true. In this case, it is not. The accounts he cites regularly blame the Viet Congfor
civilian suffering and emphasize Viet Cong atrocities. In fac~,he hi~s~lf
out that "both Time and Newsweek put the onus on the VIetcong 10 SaIgon (I, 246)-as elsewhere. Newsweek titled an article "The VC's Week ofTerror" (Feb. 12) and described VC terror squads executing civilians in Saigon (I, 490 ). Typically, the media blamed the Viet Cong for having "br. oug~t~ull~ts. an~ bombs into the very midst of heavily populated areas, causmg mdIscnmlOat slaughter of civilians caught in the cross fire and making homeless twice o~er the refugees who had fled to the cities for safety . . . " (Time, [1,246]), adopting the position of U. S. government propaganda that the enemy is to blame if the United States kills and destroys, and failing to add that the refugees had fled
to the cities for safety from massive U. S. violence and that such refugee generation was explicit policy. IO In the New York Times, Charles Mohr wrote that "In one sense the Vietcong have been responsible for civilian deaths by launching the urban attacks," citing American officials who are "sure that the population will be bitter about the guerrillas because of their 'callous disregard for human life' " (I, 243). Meanwhile, AP, the Washington Post, NBC, and others reported Viet Cong causing destruction, using civilians as shields, pre- venting civilians from fleeing attack, murdering civilians, etc. , often on the basis of flimsy evidence that would elicit much Freedom House derision if used to support accounts of American atrocities. In a typical misrepresentation, Braestrup claims that NBC-TV "attributed Saigon's losses solely to an allied military decision to 'kill or maim some of the people' to protect the rest" (our emphasis), citing Howard Tuckner's statement that there was a decision "that in order to protect most of the . . . people, they had to kill or maim some of the people"-a statement that is quite different from the paraphrase and is noteworthy only for its standard reference to "protecting" the victims (I, 249).
In general, far from "exonerating the Vietcong," the media bent over back- wards to blame them for the casualties and destruction caused by the U. S. forces who were "protecting" and "defending" South Vietnam and its popula- tion, according to unquestioned dogma. While the reporting was generally accurate in a narrow sense, the framework and the general picture presented are outlandish, and conform closely to the demands of the state propaganda system. It is, once again, highly revealing that Freedom House regards such service to the state as unremarkable-indeed, insufficient, by its standards.
The more general summaries in the Freedom House study leave the evi- dence presented far behind. Thus the ruins and destruction "were presented as symbolic evidence of a stunning 'defeat' (variously implied or defined) for allied forces" (I, 621). "The Americans, by their heavy use of firepower in a few cities, were implicitly depicted as callously destroying all Vietnam . . . , while the Vietcong's indiscriminate use of their own firepower, as well as the Hue killings, were largely overlooked" (I, 286). The dominant themes in the media "added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies" (I, 705). "At Tet, the press shouted that the patient was dying" (I, 714). And so on.
We have already cited enough to show how much merit there is in these characterizations. Furthermore, as already indicated, the media reports gener- ally conformed to those of the U. S. military, although they were often less extreme in suggesting enemy success, as we have seen. Braestrup is not un- aware of this. He writes, for example, that "MACV spokesmen in Saigon themselves contributed in February to a general journalistic perception that no logistics, organizational, or manpower limitations inhibited the NVA's ca- pacity, even after the 'first wave,' to strike anywhere at will ('No place was safe any more')" (I, 190). Furthermore, "most eyewitness combat reporting, rare and restricted as it was, showed up better in February than the MACV com- muniques or the communique rewrites in Saigon" (I, 334). In fact, the military briefings cited are closely similar to media commentary in basic content, e. g. , Brigadier General John Chaisson, February 3, who described "a real battle," "a very successful offensive in its initial phases," "surprisingly well coor- dinated," "surprisingly intensive," conducted with "a surprising amount of audacity"-for example, in Hue, where "the VC had the town," etc. Naturally
p~Ints
330 APPENDIX 3
the media varied more widely in content and style, but characterizations of the sort cited above must simply be dismissed as hysteria, even apart from the numerous misrepresentations and sheer fabrications.
If this is one of the great achievements of contemporary scholarship, as John Roche claims, then scholarship is in a bad way indeed.
Notes
Preface
I. We use the term "special interests" in its commonsense meaning, not in the Orwellian usage of the Reagan era, where it designates workers, farmers, women, youth, blacks, the aged and infirm, the unemployed-in short, the population at large. Only one group did not merit this appellation: corpora- tions, and their owners and managers. They are not "special interests," they represent the "national interest. " This terminology represents the reality of domination and the operational usage of "national interest" for the two major political parties. For a similar view, with evidence of the relevance of this usage to both major political parties, see Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 37-39 and passim.
2. Herbert Gans, for example, states that "The beliefs that actually make it into the news are professional values that are intrinsic to national journalism and that journalists learn on the job. . . . The rules of news judgment call for ignoring story implications . . . " ("Are U. S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal? " Columbia Journalism Review [Nov. -Dec. 1985], pp. 32-33). In his book Decid- ing What's News (New York: Vintage, 1980), Gans contends that media report-
- nU&. :) AI-All
ers are by and large "objective," but within a framework of beliefs in a set of "enduring values" that include "ethnocentrism" and "responsible capitalism," among others. We would submit that if reporters for Pravda were found to operate within the constraints of belief in the essential justice of the Soviet state and "responsible communism," this would be found to make any further discussion of "objectivity" pointless. Furthermore, as we shall document below, Gans greatly understates the extent to which media reporters work within a limiting framework of assumptions.
3. Neoconservative critiques of the mass media commonly portray them as bastions of liberal, antiestablishment attacks on the system. They ignore the fact that the mass media are large business corporations controlled by very wealthy individuals or other corporations, and that the members of what the neoconservatives describe as the "liberal culture" of the media are hired employees. They also disregard the fact that the members of this liberal culture generally accept the basic premises of the system and differ with other mem- bers of the establishment largely on the tactics appropriate to achieving com- mon ends. The neoconservatives are simply not prepared to allow deviations from their own views. In our analysis in chapter I, we describe them as playing the important role of "enforcers," attempting to browbeat the media into excluding from a hearing even the limited dissent now tolerated. For an analysis of the neoconservative view of the media, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, "Ledeen on the Media," in The Rise and Fall ofthe Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986), pp. 166-70; George Gerbner, "Television: The Mainstreaming of America," in Business and the Media, Conference Report, Yankelovich, Skelly and White, November
19,1981; Gans, "Are U. S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal? "
4. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1921; reprint, London: Allen & Unwin, 1932); Harold Lasswell, "Propaganda," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: H. Liveright, 1928); M. J. Crozier, S. P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governabi/ity of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975). For further discussion, see Noam Chomsky, T()'{I)ards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), chapter I. and references cited, particularly, Alex Carey, "Reshaping the Truth: Pragmatists and Propagandists in America," Meanjin Quarterly (Australia), vol. 35, no. 4 (1976).
5. Public Opinion, p. 248. Lippmann did not find this objectionable, as "the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality" (p. 310). He was distressed that the incorrigible bias of the press might mislead the "specialized class" as well as the public. The problem, therefore, was how to get adequate information to the decision-making elites (pp. 31-32).
This, he believed, might be accomplished by development of a body of inde- pendent experts who could give the leadership unbiased advice. Lippmann raised no question about possible personal or class interests of the "specialized class" or the "experts" on whom they might choose to rely, on their ability, or their right, to articulate "the common interest. "
6. For example, Claire Sterling and the experts of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies-Walter Laqueur, Michael Ledeen, and
NOTES TO PAGES xii-xiii 333
;:3;:3- ~. . "" . . . . . . . . . , . . v . . .
Robert Kupperman-have been established as the authorities on terrorism by the mass media; on the Sterling and Paul Henze role in working up the Bulgarian Connection in the plot against the pope, see chapter 4. In the case of Latin America, the media have been compelled to avoid the usual resort to the academic profession for expression of approved opinion, as the profession largely rejects the framework of state propaganda in this instance. It has therefore been necessary to create a new cadre of "experts" (Robert Leiken, Ronald Radosh, Mark Falcoff, Susan Kaufman Purcell, etc. ) to whom they can turn to satisfy doctrinal needs. See Noam Chomsl(y~The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), for examples. On the process ,of creating experts to meet system demands, see our chapter 1 under "Sourcing Mass- Media News. "
7. Like other terms of political discourse, the word "democracy" has a techni- cal Orwellian sense when used in rhetorical flights, or in regular "news report- ing," to refer to U. S. efforts to establish "democracy. " The term refers to systems in which control over resourFes and the means of violence ensures the rule of elements that will serve the needs of U. S. power. Thus the terror states of El Salvador and Guatemala are "democratic," as is Honduras under the rule of the military and oligarchy, and the collection of wealthy businessmen, bankers, etc. , organized by the United States as a front for the Somocista-Ied mercenary army created by the Unite4 States is entitled "the democratic resistance. " See further, chapter 3.
8. In the eighty-five opinion columns on Nicaragua that appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post in the first three months of 1986, during the "national debate" preceding the congressional votes on contra aid, not a single one mentioned this elementary fact. For a detailed review, see Noam Chomsky, "Introduction," in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan
Administration and Nicaragua, Monograph I (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987).
9. Only two phrases in the eighty-five opinion columns cited in the previous footnote mentioned that the Nicaraguan government had carried out reforms; none of them compared Nicaragua with EI Salvador and Guatemala on this important question.
10. See Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat ofa Good Example? (Oxford: Oxfam, 1985); see also chapters 3, 5, and 7, below.
II. In an article highly critical of the Reagan "peace plan" for Nicaragua in August 1987, Tom Wicker says, "Whatever his doctrine, the United States has no historic or God-given right to bring democracy to other nations; nor does such a purpose justify the overthrow of governments it does not like" ("That Dog Won't Hunt," New York Times, Aug. 6, I987). Wicker does not contest the claim that Reagan seeks democracy in Nicaragua; it is just that his means are dubious and his plan won't work. We should note that Wicker is at the outer limits of expressible dissident opinion in the U. S. mass media. See further, chapter 3. For additional references and discussion, see Chomsky, Culture of Terrorism.
12. For example, in response to the Guatemala peace accords of August 1987, the United States immediately escalated the supply flights required to keep its forces in Nicaragua in the field to the phenomenal level of two to three per day. The purpose was to undermine the accords by intensifying the fighting,
334 NOTES TO P AGES xiii-3
NOTES TO P AGES 4-5 335
and to prevent Nicaragua from relaxing its guard so that it could be accused of failing to comply with the accords. These U. S. initiatives were by far the most serious violations of the accords, but they were virtually unmentioned in the media. For a detailed review, see Noam Chomsky, "Is Peace at Hand? " Z magazine (January 1988).
13. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 58-59.
14. A careful reader of the Soviet press could learn facts about the war in Af- ghanistan that controvert the government line-see chapter 5, pp. 226-27-but these inconvenient facts would not be considered in the West to demonstrate the objectivity ofthe Soviet press and the adequacy ofits coverage ofthis issue.
Chapter 1: A Propaganda Model
I. See note 4 of the preface.
2. Media representatives claim that what the government says is "news- worthy" in its own right. If, however, the government's assertions are transmit- ted without context or evaluation, and without regard to the government's possible manipulative intent, the media have set themselves up to be "managed. " Their objectivity is "nominal," not substantive.
In early October 1986, memos were leaked to the press indicating that the Reagan administration had carried out a deliberate campaign ofdisinformation to influence events in Libya. The mass media, which had passed along this material without question, expressed a great deal of righteous indignation that they had been misled. To compound the absurdity, five years earlier the press had reported a CIA-run "disinformation program designed to embarrass Qad- dafi and his government," along with terrorist operations to overthrow Quad- dafi and perhaps assassinate him (Newsweek, Aug. 3, 1981; P. Edward Haley, Qaddafi and the United States since I969 [New York: Praeger, 1984], p. 272). But no lessons were learned. In fact, the mass media are gulled on an almost daily basis, but rarely have to suffer the indignity of government documents revealing their gullibility. With regard to Libya, the media have fallen into line for each propaganda ploy, from the 1981 "hit squads" through the Berlin discotheque bombing, swallowing each implausible claim, failing to admit error in retrospect, and apparently unable to learn from successive entrap- . ment-which suggests willing error. See Noam Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors (New York: Claremont, 1986), chapter 3. As we show throughout the present book, a series of lies by the government, successively exposed, never seems to arouse skepticism in the media regarding the next government claim.
3. For a description of the government's strategy of deflecting attention away from the Nicaraguan election by the fabricated MIG story, and the media's service in this government program, see chapter 3, under "The MIG Crisis Staged during the Nicaraguan Election Week. "
4. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 24?
5. Quoted in ibid. , p. 23.
6. Ibid. , p. 34.
7? Ibid. , pp. 38-39.
8. Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in Amen'ca (New York: Macmil- lan, 1937), pp. 166, 173.
9? Earl Vance, "Freedom of the Press for Whom," Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1945), quoted in Survival of a Free, Competitive Press: The Small Newspaper: Democracy's Grass Roots, Report of the Chairman, Senate Small Business Committee, 80th Cong. , 1st session, 1947, p. 54.
10. Note that we are speaking of media with substantial outreach-mass media. It has always been possible to start small-circulation journals and to produce mimeographed or photocopied news letters sent around to a tiny audience. But even small journals in the United States today typically survive only by virtue of contributions from wealthy financial angels.
II. In 1987, the Times-Mirror Company, for example, owned newspapers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, and Hartford, Connecticut, had book pub- lishing and magazine subsidiaries, and owned cable systems and seven televi- sion stations.
12. Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. xvi.
13. David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media. Power. Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 7; Stephen Hess, The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices (Washington: Brookings, 1984), pp. 99-100. 14. The four major Western wire services-Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence-France-Presse-account for some 80 per- cent of the international news circulating in the world today. AP is owned by member newspapers; UPI is privately owned; Reuters was owned mainly by the British media until it went public in 1984, but control was retained by the original owners by giving lesser voting rights to the new stockholders; Agence- France-Presse is heavily subsidized by the French government. As is pointed out by Jonathan Fenby, the wire services "exist to serve markets," and their
prime concern, accordingly, "is with the rich media markets of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and increasingly with the business com- munity. . . . " They compete fiercely, but AP and UPI "are really U. S. enter- prises that operate on an international scale. . . . Without their domestic base, the AP and UPI could not operate as international agencies. With it, they must be American organizations, subject to American pressures and requirements" (The International News Services [New York: Schocken, 1986], pp. 7, 9, 73-74)? See also Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics ofInformation: How Western Culture Dominates the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 3. 15. The fourteenth annual Roper survey, "Public Attitudes toward Television and Other Media in a Time of Change" (May 1985), indicates that in 1984, 64 percent of the sample mentioned television as the place "where you usually get most of your news about what's going on in the world today . . . " (p. 3). It has often been noted that the television networks themselves depend heavily on the prestige newspapers, wire services, and government for their choices of news. Their autonomy as newsmakers can be easily exaggerated.
16. The members of the very top tier qualify by audience outreach, importance as setters of news standards, and asset and profit totals. The last half dozen or so in our twenty-four involve a certain amount of arbitrariness of choice, although audience size is still our primary criterion. McGraw-Hill is included
jj" NUn;~ TU ! 'AGES 5-lS
NOTES TO PAGES 8-n 337
because of its joint strength in trade books and magazines of political content and outreach.
17. As noted in table I-I, note 7, Storer came under the temporary control of the securities firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1985. As its ultimate fate was unclear at the time of writing, and as financial data were no longer available after 1984, we have kept Storer on the table and list it here, despite its uncertain status.
18. John Kluge, having taken the Metromedia system private in a leveraged buyout in 1984 worth $I. I billion, sold off various parts of this system in 1985-86 for $5. 5 billion, at a personal profit of some $3 billion (Gary Hector, "Are Shareholders Cheated by LBOs? " Fortune, Jan. 17, 1987, p. 100). Station KDLA-TV, in Los Angeles, which had been bought by a management-outsider group in a leveraged buyout in 1983 for $245 million, was sold to the Tribune Company for $5IO million two years later (Richard Stevenson, "Tribune in TV Deal for $5IO Million," New York Times, May 7, 1985). See also "The Media Magnates: Why Huge Fortunes Roll Off the Presses," Fortune, October 12, 1987.
19. A split among the the heirs of James E. Scripps eventually resulted in the sale of the Detroit Evening News. According to one news article, "Daniel Marentette, a Scripps family member and a self described 'angry shareholder,' says family members want a better return on their money. 'We get better yields investing in a New York checking account,' says Mr. Marentette, who sells race horses" (Damon Darlin, "Takeover Rumors Hit Detroit News Parent," Wall Street Journa~ July 18, 1985). The Bingham family division on these matters led to the sale ofthe Louisville Coun'er-Journal; the New Haven papers of the Jackson family were sold after years of squabbling, and "the sale price [of the New Haven papers], $185 million, has only served to publicize the potential value of family holdings of family newspapers elsewhere" (Geraldine Fabrikant, "Newspaper Properties, Hotter Than Ever," New York Times, Aug. 17, 1986).
20. The Reagan administration strengthened the control of existing holders of television-station licenses by increasing their term from three to five years, and its FCC made renewals essentially automatic. The FCC also greatly facilitated speculation and trading in television properties by a rule change reducing the required holding period before sale of a newly acquired property from three years to one year.
The Reagan era FCC and Department of Justice also refused to challenge mergers and takeover bids that would significantly increase the concentration of power (GE-RCA) or media concentration (Capital Cities-ABC). Further- more, beginning April 2, 1985, media owners could own as many as twelve television stations, as long as their total audience didn't exceed 25 percent of the nation's television households; and they could also hold twelve AM and twelve FM stations, as the 1953 "7-7-7 rule" was replaced with a "12-12-12 rule. " See Herbert H. Howard, "Group and Cross-Media Ownership of Tele- vision Stations: 1985" (Washington: National Association of Broadcasters,
1985).
21. This was justified by Reagan-era FCC chairman Mark Fowler on the grounds that market options are opening up and that the public should be free to choose. Criticized by Fred Friendly for doing away with the law's public-
interest standard, Fowler replied that Friendly "distrusts the ability of the viewing public to make decisions on its own through the marketplace mecha- nism. I do not" (Jeanne Saddler, "Clear Channel: Broadcast Takeovers Meet Less FCC Static, and Critics Are Upset," Wall Street Journa~ June II, 1985). Among other problems, Fowler ignores the fact that true freedom of choice involves the ability to select options that may not be offered by an oligopoly selling audiences to advertisers.
22. CBS increased its debt by about $1 billion in 1985 to finance the purchase of 21 percent of its own stock, in order to fend off a takeover attempt by Ted Turner. The Wall Street Journal noted that "With debt now standing at 60% of capital, it needs to keep advertising revenue up to repay borrowings and interest" (Peter Barnes, "CBS Profit Hinges on Better TV Ratings," June 6, 1986). With the slowed-up growth of advertising revenues, CBS embarked on an employment cutback of as many as six hundred broadcast division em- ployees, the most extensive for CBS since the loss of cigarette advertising in 1971 (Peter Barnes, "CBS Will Cut up to 600 Posts in Broadcasting," Wall StreetJourna~ July I, 1986). In June 1986, Time, Inc. , embarked on a program to buy back as much as 10 million shares, or 16 percent of its common stock, at an expected cost of some $900 million, again to reduce the threat of a hostile takeover (Laura Landro, "Time Will Buy as Much as 16% of Its Common," Wall Stt'eet Journa~ June 20, 1986).
23. In response to the Jesse Helms and Turner threats to CBS, Laurence Tisch, of Loews Corporation, was encouraged to increase his holdings in CBS stock, already at 11. 7 percent. In August 1986, the Loews interest was raised to 24. 9 percent, and Tisch obtained a position of virtual control. In combina- tion with William Paley, who owned 8. 1 percent of the 8hares, the chief executive officer of CBS was removed and Tisch took over that role himself, on a temporary basis (Peter Barnes, "Loews Increases Its Stake in CBS to Almost 25%," Wall Street Journa~ Aug. 12, 1986).
24. The number would be eight if we included the estate of Lila Wallace, who died in 1984, leaving the controlling stock interest in Reader's Digest to the care of trustees.
25. As we noted in the preface, the neoconservatives speak regularly of "lib- eral" domination of the media, assuming or pretending that the underlings call the shots, not the people who own or control the media. These data, showing the wealth position ofmedia owners, are understandably something they prefer to ignore. Sometimes, however, the neoconservatives go "populist," a n d - while financed by Mobil Oil Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife-pretend to be speaking for the "masses" in opposition to a monied elite dominating the media. For further discussion, see Edward S. Herman's review of The Spirit ofDemocratic Capitalism, "Michael Novak's Promised Land: Unfettered Cor- porate Capitalism," Monthly Review (October 1983), and the works cited in the preface, note 3.
26. Similar results are found in Peter Dreier, "The Position of the Press in the U. S. Power Structure," Social Problems (February 1982), pp. 298-310.
27. Benjamin Compaine et aI. , Anatomy of the Communications Industry: Who Owns the Media? (White Plains, N. Y. : Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982),
P? 463?
28. Ibid. , pp. 458-60.
29. See Edward S. Herman, Corporate Contro~ Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 26-54.
30. For the interests of fifteen major newspaper companies in other media fields, and a checklist of other fields entered by leading firms in a variety of media industries, see Compaine, Anatomy of the Communications Industry, tables 2. 19 and 8. 1, pp. II and 452-53.
31. The merger had been sanctioned by the FCC but was stymied by interven- tion of the Department of Justice. See "A broken engagement for ITT and ABC," Business Week, January 6, 1967.
32. Ibid.
33. On the enormous and effective lobbying operations of GE, see Thomas B. Edsall, "Bringing Good Things to GE: Firm's Political Savvy Scores in Wash- ington," Washington Post, April 13, 1985;
34. The widely quoted joke by A. I. Liebling-that if you don't like what your newspaper says you are perfectly free to start or buy one ofyour own-stressed the impotence of the individual. In a favorable political climate such as that provided by the Reagan administration, however, a giant corporation not liking media performance can buy its own, as exemplified by GE.
35. Allan Sloan, "Understanding Murdoch-The Numbers Aren't What Re- ally Matters," Forbes, March 10, 1986, pp. II4ff.
36. On the Nixon-Agnew campaign to bully the media by publicity attacks and threats, see Marilyn Lashner, The Chilling Effect in TV News (New York: Praeger, 1984). Lashner concluded that the Nixon White House's attempt to quiet the media "succeeded handily, at least as far as television is con- cerned . . . " (p. 167). See also Fred Powledge, The Engineering ofRestraint: The Nixon Administration and the Press (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971), and William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).
37. Of the 290 directors in his sample of large newspapers, 36 had high-level positions-past or present-in the federal government (Dreier, "The Position of the Press," p. 303).
38. One study showed that of sixty-five FCC commissioners and high-level staff personnel who left the FCC between 1945 and 1970, twel"e had come out of the private-communications sector before their FCC sel ;e, and thirty- four went into private-firm service after leaving the commission (Roger Noll et aI. , Economic Aspects ofTelevision Regulation [Washington: Brookings, 1973], p.
. On pa~ificati? n,"TV and radio commentators went far beyond the available lOfor~atlOn to Imply the dramatic worst. " Three examples are cited to prove t~ePOlOt (I, 565). Howard Tuckner, ofNBC-TV, reported from New York the views of "U. S. intelligence officials" and "Some U. S. officials in Vietnam"- correctly~as Braestrup concedes in a footnote, adding that these were the views of "CIA 10 Washington" and "Disheartened junior CORDS officials in Viet-
nam. " By Freedom House standards, it is improper to cite such sources accu- rately. The second example is a CBS radio report criticized only for being
328 APPENDIX 3
APPENDIX 3 329
ing optimistic statements, among them Robert Komer's prediction of "steady progress in pacification" a week before the Tet offensive (I, 72; Braestrup's paraphrase). In fact, part of the shock of the Tet offensive resulted from the faith ofthe media in previous government assessments, undermined by the Tet offensive, as the U. S. military and official Washington were well aware.
Furthermore, General Westmoreland's accounts were hardly persuasive during the offensive. Thus he claimed that "all I I of the Vietnamese division commanders . . . commanded their units effectively," whereas, as a journalist learned, one "had gone into a state of shock during the T et attacks" (I, 454-55). Or consider Westmoreland's claim that allegations about inaccuracy and in- flation of body counts were "one of the great distortions of the war" by the media-there were at most "relatively small inaccuracies" (II, 163). His own generals had a rather different view. In his study of the opinions of the generals, General Douglas Kinnard reports that 61 percent of those responding describe the body count as "often inflated," and only 26 percent "within reason accurate. " The responses include: "a fake-totally worthless," "often blatant lies," "a blot on the honor of the Army," and "grossly exaggerated by many
units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara and Westmoreland. " Perhaps journalists had some reason for skepticism, apart from "vengefulness. "9
To demonstrate the absurd extent of press efforts to find shock value, Braestrup cites a story in Time on enemy tunneling at Khe 8anh, "as occurred around Dienbienphu" (1,435; his emphasis), in general ridiculing the analogy- but forgetting to ridicule the remark by Marine Commander General Cush- man, who said that "He is digging trenches and doing other tricks of the trade which he learned to do at Dienbienphu" (I, 40 3).
"All Vietnam, it appeared on film at home, was in flames or being battered into ruins, and all Vietnamese civilians were homeless refugees," Br~estrup alleges (I, 234), in typically fanciful rhetoric, adding that "there were Virtually no films shown or photographs published during this period of undamaged portions of Saigon, Hue, or other cities" (his emphasis). This shows that coverage was unbalanced, supportive of the enemy. One wonders how many films and photographs of peaceful English villages or Hawaiian towns ap-
peared on the days that Coventry and Pearl Harbor were bombed, to balance
the picture.
Braestrup seeks the causes for the "exoneration of the Vietcong" for "killing
noncombatants or causing the exodus of refugees" (I, 234), overlooking ,the fact chat before seeking the cause of x it is necessary to show that x is true. In this case, it is not. The accounts he cites regularly blame the Viet Congfor
civilian suffering and emphasize Viet Cong atrocities. In fac~,he hi~s~lf
out that "both Time and Newsweek put the onus on the VIetcong 10 SaIgon (I, 246)-as elsewhere. Newsweek titled an article "The VC's Week ofTerror" (Feb. 12) and described VC terror squads executing civilians in Saigon (I, 490 ). Typically, the media blamed the Viet Cong for having "br. oug~t~ull~ts. an~ bombs into the very midst of heavily populated areas, causmg mdIscnmlOat slaughter of civilians caught in the cross fire and making homeless twice o~er the refugees who had fled to the cities for safety . . . " (Time, [1,246]), adopting the position of U. S. government propaganda that the enemy is to blame if the United States kills and destroys, and failing to add that the refugees had fled
to the cities for safety from massive U. S. violence and that such refugee generation was explicit policy. IO In the New York Times, Charles Mohr wrote that "In one sense the Vietcong have been responsible for civilian deaths by launching the urban attacks," citing American officials who are "sure that the population will be bitter about the guerrillas because of their 'callous disregard for human life' " (I, 243). Meanwhile, AP, the Washington Post, NBC, and others reported Viet Cong causing destruction, using civilians as shields, pre- venting civilians from fleeing attack, murdering civilians, etc. , often on the basis of flimsy evidence that would elicit much Freedom House derision if used to support accounts of American atrocities. In a typical misrepresentation, Braestrup claims that NBC-TV "attributed Saigon's losses solely to an allied military decision to 'kill or maim some of the people' to protect the rest" (our emphasis), citing Howard Tuckner's statement that there was a decision "that in order to protect most of the . . . people, they had to kill or maim some of the people"-a statement that is quite different from the paraphrase and is noteworthy only for its standard reference to "protecting" the victims (I, 249).
In general, far from "exonerating the Vietcong," the media bent over back- wards to blame them for the casualties and destruction caused by the U. S. forces who were "protecting" and "defending" South Vietnam and its popula- tion, according to unquestioned dogma. While the reporting was generally accurate in a narrow sense, the framework and the general picture presented are outlandish, and conform closely to the demands of the state propaganda system. It is, once again, highly revealing that Freedom House regards such service to the state as unremarkable-indeed, insufficient, by its standards.
The more general summaries in the Freedom House study leave the evi- dence presented far behind. Thus the ruins and destruction "were presented as symbolic evidence of a stunning 'defeat' (variously implied or defined) for allied forces" (I, 621). "The Americans, by their heavy use of firepower in a few cities, were implicitly depicted as callously destroying all Vietnam . . . , while the Vietcong's indiscriminate use of their own firepower, as well as the Hue killings, were largely overlooked" (I, 286). The dominant themes in the media "added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies" (I, 705). "At Tet, the press shouted that the patient was dying" (I, 714). And so on.
We have already cited enough to show how much merit there is in these characterizations. Furthermore, as already indicated, the media reports gener- ally conformed to those of the U. S. military, although they were often less extreme in suggesting enemy success, as we have seen. Braestrup is not un- aware of this. He writes, for example, that "MACV spokesmen in Saigon themselves contributed in February to a general journalistic perception that no logistics, organizational, or manpower limitations inhibited the NVA's ca- pacity, even after the 'first wave,' to strike anywhere at will ('No place was safe any more')" (I, 190). Furthermore, "most eyewitness combat reporting, rare and restricted as it was, showed up better in February than the MACV com- muniques or the communique rewrites in Saigon" (I, 334). In fact, the military briefings cited are closely similar to media commentary in basic content, e. g. , Brigadier General John Chaisson, February 3, who described "a real battle," "a very successful offensive in its initial phases," "surprisingly well coor- dinated," "surprisingly intensive," conducted with "a surprising amount of audacity"-for example, in Hue, where "the VC had the town," etc. Naturally
p~Ints
330 APPENDIX 3
the media varied more widely in content and style, but characterizations of the sort cited above must simply be dismissed as hysteria, even apart from the numerous misrepresentations and sheer fabrications.
If this is one of the great achievements of contemporary scholarship, as John Roche claims, then scholarship is in a bad way indeed.
Notes
Preface
I. We use the term "special interests" in its commonsense meaning, not in the Orwellian usage of the Reagan era, where it designates workers, farmers, women, youth, blacks, the aged and infirm, the unemployed-in short, the population at large. Only one group did not merit this appellation: corpora- tions, and their owners and managers. They are not "special interests," they represent the "national interest. " This terminology represents the reality of domination and the operational usage of "national interest" for the two major political parties. For a similar view, with evidence of the relevance of this usage to both major political parties, see Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 37-39 and passim.
2. Herbert Gans, for example, states that "The beliefs that actually make it into the news are professional values that are intrinsic to national journalism and that journalists learn on the job. . . . The rules of news judgment call for ignoring story implications . . . " ("Are U. S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal? " Columbia Journalism Review [Nov. -Dec. 1985], pp. 32-33). In his book Decid- ing What's News (New York: Vintage, 1980), Gans contends that media report-
- nU&. :) AI-All
ers are by and large "objective," but within a framework of beliefs in a set of "enduring values" that include "ethnocentrism" and "responsible capitalism," among others. We would submit that if reporters for Pravda were found to operate within the constraints of belief in the essential justice of the Soviet state and "responsible communism," this would be found to make any further discussion of "objectivity" pointless. Furthermore, as we shall document below, Gans greatly understates the extent to which media reporters work within a limiting framework of assumptions.
3. Neoconservative critiques of the mass media commonly portray them as bastions of liberal, antiestablishment attacks on the system. They ignore the fact that the mass media are large business corporations controlled by very wealthy individuals or other corporations, and that the members of what the neoconservatives describe as the "liberal culture" of the media are hired employees. They also disregard the fact that the members of this liberal culture generally accept the basic premises of the system and differ with other mem- bers of the establishment largely on the tactics appropriate to achieving com- mon ends. The neoconservatives are simply not prepared to allow deviations from their own views. In our analysis in chapter I, we describe them as playing the important role of "enforcers," attempting to browbeat the media into excluding from a hearing even the limited dissent now tolerated. For an analysis of the neoconservative view of the media, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, "Ledeen on the Media," in The Rise and Fall ofthe Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986), pp. 166-70; George Gerbner, "Television: The Mainstreaming of America," in Business and the Media, Conference Report, Yankelovich, Skelly and White, November
19,1981; Gans, "Are U. S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal? "
4. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1921; reprint, London: Allen & Unwin, 1932); Harold Lasswell, "Propaganda," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: H. Liveright, 1928); M. J. Crozier, S. P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governabi/ity of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975). For further discussion, see Noam Chomsky, T()'{I)ards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), chapter I. and references cited, particularly, Alex Carey, "Reshaping the Truth: Pragmatists and Propagandists in America," Meanjin Quarterly (Australia), vol. 35, no. 4 (1976).
5. Public Opinion, p. 248. Lippmann did not find this objectionable, as "the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality" (p. 310). He was distressed that the incorrigible bias of the press might mislead the "specialized class" as well as the public. The problem, therefore, was how to get adequate information to the decision-making elites (pp. 31-32).
This, he believed, might be accomplished by development of a body of inde- pendent experts who could give the leadership unbiased advice. Lippmann raised no question about possible personal or class interests of the "specialized class" or the "experts" on whom they might choose to rely, on their ability, or their right, to articulate "the common interest. "
6. For example, Claire Sterling and the experts of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies-Walter Laqueur, Michael Ledeen, and
NOTES TO PAGES xii-xiii 333
;:3;:3- ~. . "" . . . . . . . . . , . . v . . .
Robert Kupperman-have been established as the authorities on terrorism by the mass media; on the Sterling and Paul Henze role in working up the Bulgarian Connection in the plot against the pope, see chapter 4. In the case of Latin America, the media have been compelled to avoid the usual resort to the academic profession for expression of approved opinion, as the profession largely rejects the framework of state propaganda in this instance. It has therefore been necessary to create a new cadre of "experts" (Robert Leiken, Ronald Radosh, Mark Falcoff, Susan Kaufman Purcell, etc. ) to whom they can turn to satisfy doctrinal needs. See Noam Chomsl(y~The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), for examples. On the process ,of creating experts to meet system demands, see our chapter 1 under "Sourcing Mass- Media News. "
7. Like other terms of political discourse, the word "democracy" has a techni- cal Orwellian sense when used in rhetorical flights, or in regular "news report- ing," to refer to U. S. efforts to establish "democracy. " The term refers to systems in which control over resourFes and the means of violence ensures the rule of elements that will serve the needs of U. S. power. Thus the terror states of El Salvador and Guatemala are "democratic," as is Honduras under the rule of the military and oligarchy, and the collection of wealthy businessmen, bankers, etc. , organized by the United States as a front for the Somocista-Ied mercenary army created by the Unite4 States is entitled "the democratic resistance. " See further, chapter 3.
8. In the eighty-five opinion columns on Nicaragua that appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post in the first three months of 1986, during the "national debate" preceding the congressional votes on contra aid, not a single one mentioned this elementary fact. For a detailed review, see Noam Chomsky, "Introduction," in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan
Administration and Nicaragua, Monograph I (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987).
9. Only two phrases in the eighty-five opinion columns cited in the previous footnote mentioned that the Nicaraguan government had carried out reforms; none of them compared Nicaragua with EI Salvador and Guatemala on this important question.
10. See Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat ofa Good Example? (Oxford: Oxfam, 1985); see also chapters 3, 5, and 7, below.
II. In an article highly critical of the Reagan "peace plan" for Nicaragua in August 1987, Tom Wicker says, "Whatever his doctrine, the United States has no historic or God-given right to bring democracy to other nations; nor does such a purpose justify the overthrow of governments it does not like" ("That Dog Won't Hunt," New York Times, Aug. 6, I987). Wicker does not contest the claim that Reagan seeks democracy in Nicaragua; it is just that his means are dubious and his plan won't work. We should note that Wicker is at the outer limits of expressible dissident opinion in the U. S. mass media. See further, chapter 3. For additional references and discussion, see Chomsky, Culture of Terrorism.
12. For example, in response to the Guatemala peace accords of August 1987, the United States immediately escalated the supply flights required to keep its forces in Nicaragua in the field to the phenomenal level of two to three per day. The purpose was to undermine the accords by intensifying the fighting,
334 NOTES TO P AGES xiii-3
NOTES TO P AGES 4-5 335
and to prevent Nicaragua from relaxing its guard so that it could be accused of failing to comply with the accords. These U. S. initiatives were by far the most serious violations of the accords, but they were virtually unmentioned in the media. For a detailed review, see Noam Chomsky, "Is Peace at Hand? " Z magazine (January 1988).
13. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 58-59.
14. A careful reader of the Soviet press could learn facts about the war in Af- ghanistan that controvert the government line-see chapter 5, pp. 226-27-but these inconvenient facts would not be considered in the West to demonstrate the objectivity ofthe Soviet press and the adequacy ofits coverage ofthis issue.
Chapter 1: A Propaganda Model
I. See note 4 of the preface.
2. Media representatives claim that what the government says is "news- worthy" in its own right. If, however, the government's assertions are transmit- ted without context or evaluation, and without regard to the government's possible manipulative intent, the media have set themselves up to be "managed. " Their objectivity is "nominal," not substantive.
In early October 1986, memos were leaked to the press indicating that the Reagan administration had carried out a deliberate campaign ofdisinformation to influence events in Libya. The mass media, which had passed along this material without question, expressed a great deal of righteous indignation that they had been misled. To compound the absurdity, five years earlier the press had reported a CIA-run "disinformation program designed to embarrass Qad- dafi and his government," along with terrorist operations to overthrow Quad- dafi and perhaps assassinate him (Newsweek, Aug. 3, 1981; P. Edward Haley, Qaddafi and the United States since I969 [New York: Praeger, 1984], p. 272). But no lessons were learned. In fact, the mass media are gulled on an almost daily basis, but rarely have to suffer the indignity of government documents revealing their gullibility. With regard to Libya, the media have fallen into line for each propaganda ploy, from the 1981 "hit squads" through the Berlin discotheque bombing, swallowing each implausible claim, failing to admit error in retrospect, and apparently unable to learn from successive entrap- . ment-which suggests willing error. See Noam Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors (New York: Claremont, 1986), chapter 3. As we show throughout the present book, a series of lies by the government, successively exposed, never seems to arouse skepticism in the media regarding the next government claim.
3. For a description of the government's strategy of deflecting attention away from the Nicaraguan election by the fabricated MIG story, and the media's service in this government program, see chapter 3, under "The MIG Crisis Staged during the Nicaraguan Election Week. "
4. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 24?
5. Quoted in ibid. , p. 23.
6. Ibid. , p. 34.
7? Ibid. , pp. 38-39.
8. Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in Amen'ca (New York: Macmil- lan, 1937), pp. 166, 173.
9? Earl Vance, "Freedom of the Press for Whom," Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1945), quoted in Survival of a Free, Competitive Press: The Small Newspaper: Democracy's Grass Roots, Report of the Chairman, Senate Small Business Committee, 80th Cong. , 1st session, 1947, p. 54.
10. Note that we are speaking of media with substantial outreach-mass media. It has always been possible to start small-circulation journals and to produce mimeographed or photocopied news letters sent around to a tiny audience. But even small journals in the United States today typically survive only by virtue of contributions from wealthy financial angels.
II. In 1987, the Times-Mirror Company, for example, owned newspapers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, and Hartford, Connecticut, had book pub- lishing and magazine subsidiaries, and owned cable systems and seven televi- sion stations.
12. Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. xvi.
13. David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media. Power. Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 7; Stephen Hess, The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices (Washington: Brookings, 1984), pp. 99-100. 14. The four major Western wire services-Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence-France-Presse-account for some 80 per- cent of the international news circulating in the world today. AP is owned by member newspapers; UPI is privately owned; Reuters was owned mainly by the British media until it went public in 1984, but control was retained by the original owners by giving lesser voting rights to the new stockholders; Agence- France-Presse is heavily subsidized by the French government. As is pointed out by Jonathan Fenby, the wire services "exist to serve markets," and their
prime concern, accordingly, "is with the rich media markets of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and increasingly with the business com- munity. . . . " They compete fiercely, but AP and UPI "are really U. S. enter- prises that operate on an international scale. . . . Without their domestic base, the AP and UPI could not operate as international agencies. With it, they must be American organizations, subject to American pressures and requirements" (The International News Services [New York: Schocken, 1986], pp. 7, 9, 73-74)? See also Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics ofInformation: How Western Culture Dominates the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 3. 15. The fourteenth annual Roper survey, "Public Attitudes toward Television and Other Media in a Time of Change" (May 1985), indicates that in 1984, 64 percent of the sample mentioned television as the place "where you usually get most of your news about what's going on in the world today . . . " (p. 3). It has often been noted that the television networks themselves depend heavily on the prestige newspapers, wire services, and government for their choices of news. Their autonomy as newsmakers can be easily exaggerated.
16. The members of the very top tier qualify by audience outreach, importance as setters of news standards, and asset and profit totals. The last half dozen or so in our twenty-four involve a certain amount of arbitrariness of choice, although audience size is still our primary criterion. McGraw-Hill is included
jj" NUn;~ TU ! 'AGES 5-lS
NOTES TO PAGES 8-n 337
because of its joint strength in trade books and magazines of political content and outreach.
17. As noted in table I-I, note 7, Storer came under the temporary control of the securities firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1985. As its ultimate fate was unclear at the time of writing, and as financial data were no longer available after 1984, we have kept Storer on the table and list it here, despite its uncertain status.
18. John Kluge, having taken the Metromedia system private in a leveraged buyout in 1984 worth $I. I billion, sold off various parts of this system in 1985-86 for $5. 5 billion, at a personal profit of some $3 billion (Gary Hector, "Are Shareholders Cheated by LBOs? " Fortune, Jan. 17, 1987, p. 100). Station KDLA-TV, in Los Angeles, which had been bought by a management-outsider group in a leveraged buyout in 1983 for $245 million, was sold to the Tribune Company for $5IO million two years later (Richard Stevenson, "Tribune in TV Deal for $5IO Million," New York Times, May 7, 1985). See also "The Media Magnates: Why Huge Fortunes Roll Off the Presses," Fortune, October 12, 1987.
19. A split among the the heirs of James E. Scripps eventually resulted in the sale of the Detroit Evening News. According to one news article, "Daniel Marentette, a Scripps family member and a self described 'angry shareholder,' says family members want a better return on their money. 'We get better yields investing in a New York checking account,' says Mr. Marentette, who sells race horses" (Damon Darlin, "Takeover Rumors Hit Detroit News Parent," Wall Street Journa~ July 18, 1985). The Bingham family division on these matters led to the sale ofthe Louisville Coun'er-Journal; the New Haven papers of the Jackson family were sold after years of squabbling, and "the sale price [of the New Haven papers], $185 million, has only served to publicize the potential value of family holdings of family newspapers elsewhere" (Geraldine Fabrikant, "Newspaper Properties, Hotter Than Ever," New York Times, Aug. 17, 1986).
20. The Reagan administration strengthened the control of existing holders of television-station licenses by increasing their term from three to five years, and its FCC made renewals essentially automatic. The FCC also greatly facilitated speculation and trading in television properties by a rule change reducing the required holding period before sale of a newly acquired property from three years to one year.
The Reagan era FCC and Department of Justice also refused to challenge mergers and takeover bids that would significantly increase the concentration of power (GE-RCA) or media concentration (Capital Cities-ABC). Further- more, beginning April 2, 1985, media owners could own as many as twelve television stations, as long as their total audience didn't exceed 25 percent of the nation's television households; and they could also hold twelve AM and twelve FM stations, as the 1953 "7-7-7 rule" was replaced with a "12-12-12 rule. " See Herbert H. Howard, "Group and Cross-Media Ownership of Tele- vision Stations: 1985" (Washington: National Association of Broadcasters,
1985).
21. This was justified by Reagan-era FCC chairman Mark Fowler on the grounds that market options are opening up and that the public should be free to choose. Criticized by Fred Friendly for doing away with the law's public-
interest standard, Fowler replied that Friendly "distrusts the ability of the viewing public to make decisions on its own through the marketplace mecha- nism. I do not" (Jeanne Saddler, "Clear Channel: Broadcast Takeovers Meet Less FCC Static, and Critics Are Upset," Wall Street Journa~ June II, 1985). Among other problems, Fowler ignores the fact that true freedom of choice involves the ability to select options that may not be offered by an oligopoly selling audiences to advertisers.
22. CBS increased its debt by about $1 billion in 1985 to finance the purchase of 21 percent of its own stock, in order to fend off a takeover attempt by Ted Turner. The Wall Street Journal noted that "With debt now standing at 60% of capital, it needs to keep advertising revenue up to repay borrowings and interest" (Peter Barnes, "CBS Profit Hinges on Better TV Ratings," June 6, 1986). With the slowed-up growth of advertising revenues, CBS embarked on an employment cutback of as many as six hundred broadcast division em- ployees, the most extensive for CBS since the loss of cigarette advertising in 1971 (Peter Barnes, "CBS Will Cut up to 600 Posts in Broadcasting," Wall StreetJourna~ July I, 1986). In June 1986, Time, Inc. , embarked on a program to buy back as much as 10 million shares, or 16 percent of its common stock, at an expected cost of some $900 million, again to reduce the threat of a hostile takeover (Laura Landro, "Time Will Buy as Much as 16% of Its Common," Wall Stt'eet Journa~ June 20, 1986).
23. In response to the Jesse Helms and Turner threats to CBS, Laurence Tisch, of Loews Corporation, was encouraged to increase his holdings in CBS stock, already at 11. 7 percent. In August 1986, the Loews interest was raised to 24. 9 percent, and Tisch obtained a position of virtual control. In combina- tion with William Paley, who owned 8. 1 percent of the 8hares, the chief executive officer of CBS was removed and Tisch took over that role himself, on a temporary basis (Peter Barnes, "Loews Increases Its Stake in CBS to Almost 25%," Wall Street Journa~ Aug. 12, 1986).
24. The number would be eight if we included the estate of Lila Wallace, who died in 1984, leaving the controlling stock interest in Reader's Digest to the care of trustees.
25. As we noted in the preface, the neoconservatives speak regularly of "lib- eral" domination of the media, assuming or pretending that the underlings call the shots, not the people who own or control the media. These data, showing the wealth position ofmedia owners, are understandably something they prefer to ignore. Sometimes, however, the neoconservatives go "populist," a n d - while financed by Mobil Oil Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife-pretend to be speaking for the "masses" in opposition to a monied elite dominating the media. For further discussion, see Edward S. Herman's review of The Spirit ofDemocratic Capitalism, "Michael Novak's Promised Land: Unfettered Cor- porate Capitalism," Monthly Review (October 1983), and the works cited in the preface, note 3.
26. Similar results are found in Peter Dreier, "The Position of the Press in the U. S. Power Structure," Social Problems (February 1982), pp. 298-310.
27. Benjamin Compaine et aI. , Anatomy of the Communications Industry: Who Owns the Media? (White Plains, N. Y. : Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982),
P? 463?
28. Ibid. , pp. 458-60.
29. See Edward S. Herman, Corporate Contro~ Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 26-54.
30. For the interests of fifteen major newspaper companies in other media fields, and a checklist of other fields entered by leading firms in a variety of media industries, see Compaine, Anatomy of the Communications Industry, tables 2. 19 and 8. 1, pp. II and 452-53.
31. The merger had been sanctioned by the FCC but was stymied by interven- tion of the Department of Justice. See "A broken engagement for ITT and ABC," Business Week, January 6, 1967.
32. Ibid.
33. On the enormous and effective lobbying operations of GE, see Thomas B. Edsall, "Bringing Good Things to GE: Firm's Political Savvy Scores in Wash- ington," Washington Post, April 13, 1985;
34. The widely quoted joke by A. I. Liebling-that if you don't like what your newspaper says you are perfectly free to start or buy one ofyour own-stressed the impotence of the individual. In a favorable political climate such as that provided by the Reagan administration, however, a giant corporation not liking media performance can buy its own, as exemplified by GE.
35. Allan Sloan, "Understanding Murdoch-The Numbers Aren't What Re- ally Matters," Forbes, March 10, 1986, pp. II4ff.
36. On the Nixon-Agnew campaign to bully the media by publicity attacks and threats, see Marilyn Lashner, The Chilling Effect in TV News (New York: Praeger, 1984). Lashner concluded that the Nixon White House's attempt to quiet the media "succeeded handily, at least as far as television is con- cerned . . . " (p. 167). See also Fred Powledge, The Engineering ofRestraint: The Nixon Administration and the Press (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971), and William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).
37. Of the 290 directors in his sample of large newspapers, 36 had high-level positions-past or present-in the federal government (Dreier, "The Position of the Press," p. 303).
38. One study showed that of sixty-five FCC commissioners and high-level staff personnel who left the FCC between 1945 and 1970, twel"e had come out of the private-communications sector before their FCC sel ;e, and thirty- four went into private-firm service after leaving the commission (Roger Noll et aI. , Economic Aspects ofTelevision Regulation [Washington: Brookings, 1973], p.
