The former may be
expected
to elicit a propaganda outburst by the mass media; the latter will n.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
Serious flak has increased in close parallel with business's growing resentment of media criticism and the corporate offensive of the 1970S and 1980s.
Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect.
The direct would include letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather or William Paley, or from the FCC to the television networks asking for documents used in put- ting together a program, or from irate officials of ad agencies or corpo- rate sponsors to media officials asking for reply time or threatening retaliation.
9~ The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by complaining to their own constituencies (stockholders, employees) about the media, by generating institutional advertising that does the same, and by funding right-wing monitoring or think-tank operations designed to attack the media.
They may also fund political campaigns and help put into power conservative politicians who will more directly serve the interests of private power in curbing any deviationism in the media.
,
Along with its other political investments of the 1970S and 1980s, the corporate community sponsored the growth of institutions such as the American Legal Foundation, the Capital Legal Foundation, the Media Institute, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media (AIM). These may be regarded as institutions organized for the specific purpose of producing flak. Another and older flak-producing machine with a broader design is Freedom House. The American Legal Foundation, organized in 1980, has specialized in Fairness Doctrine complaints and libel suits to aid "media victims. " The Capital Legal Foundation, incorporated in 1977, was the Scaife vehicle for Westmore- land's Sl2o-million libel suit against CBS. lOO
The Media Institute, organized in 1972 and funded by corporate- wealthy patrons, sponsors monitoring projects, conferences, and stud- ies of the media. It has focused less heavily on media failings in foreign policy, concentrating more on media portrayals of economic issues and the business community, but its range of interests is broad. The main theme of its sponsored studies and conferences has been the failure of the media to portray business accurately and to give adequate weight to the business point of view,lOl but it underwrites works such as John Corry's expose of the alleged left-wing bias of the mass media. 102 The chairman of the board of trustees of the institute in 1985 was Steven V. Seekins, the top public-relations officer of the American Medical Asso- ciation; chairman of the National Advisory Council was Herbert Schmertz, of the Mobil Oil Corporation.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs, run by Linda and Robert Lichter, came into existence in the mid-198os as a "non-profit, non- partisan" research institute, with warm accolades from Patrick Bu- chanan, Faith Whittlesey, and Ronald Reagan himself, who recognized the need for an objective and fair press. Their Media Monitor and research studies continue their earlier efforts to demonstrate the liberal bias and anti-business propensities of the mass media. 103
AIM was formed in 1969, and it grew spectacularly in the 1970s. Its annual income rose from $5,000 in 1971 to $1. 5 million in the early 1980s, with funding m. ainly from large corporations and the wealthy heirs and foundations of the corporate system. At least eight separate oil compa- nies were contributors to AIM in the early 1980s, but the wide represen- tation in sponsors from the corporate community is impressive. 104 The function of AIM is to harass the media and put pressure on them. to follow the corporate agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy. It presses the media to join more enthusiastically in Red-scare band- wagons, and attacks them for alleged deficiencies whenever they fail to toe the line on foreign policy. It conditions the media to expect trou-
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 27
28 M A NUF A CTURING CONSENT
ble (and cost increases) for violating right-wing standards of bias. lOS Freedom House, which dates back to the early 1940s, has had inter- locks with AIM, the World Anticommunist League, Resistance Inter- national, and U. S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and international right wing. It sent election monitors to the Rhodesian elections staged by Ian Smith in 1979 and found them "fair," whereas the 1980 elections won by Mugabe under British super- vision it found dubious. Its election monitors also found the Salvadoran elections of1982 admirable. lo6 It has expended substantial resources in criticizing the media for insufficient sympathy with U. S. foreign-policy ventures and excessively harsh criticism of U. S. client states. Its most notable publication of this genre was Peter Braestfup's Big Story, which contended that the media's negative portrayal of the Tet offensive helped lose the war. The work is a travesty of scholarship, but more interesting is its premise: that the mass media not only should support any national venture abroad, but should do so with enthusiasm, such
enterprises being by definition noble (see the extensive review of the Freedom House study in chapter 5 and appendix 3). In 1982, when the Reagan administration was having trouble containing media reporting of the systematic killing of civilians by the Salvadoran army, Freedom House came through with a denunciation of the "imbalance" in media reporting from El Salvador. 107
Although the flak machines steadily attack the mass media, the media treat them well. They receive respectful attention, and their propagan- distic role and links to a larger corporate program are rarely mentioned or analyzed. AIM head, Reed Irvine's diatribes are frequently pub- lished, and right-wing network flacks who regularly assail the "liberal media," such as Michael Ledeen,108 are given Op-Ed column space, sympathetic reviewers, and a regular place on talk shows as experts. This reflects the power of the sponsors, including the well-entrenched position of the right wing in the mass media themselves. 109
The producers offlak add to one another's strength and reinforce the command of political authority in its news-management activities. The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing, threatening, and "correcting" the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line. News management itself is designed to produce flak. In the Reagan years, Mr. Reagan was put on television to exude charm to millions, many of whom berated the media when they dared to criticize the "Great Communicator. "llo
I
1. 5. ANTICOMMUNISM AS A CONTROL MECHANISM
A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status. The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and the ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist? states have contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radi- calism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on Communists and "play into their hands" is rationalized in similar terms.
Liberals at home, often accused of being pro-Communist or insuffi- ciently anti-Communist, are kept continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. If they allow communism, or something that can be labeled communism, to triumph in the provinces while they are in office, the political costs are heavy. Most of them have fully internalized the religion anyway, but they are all under great pressure to demonstrate their anti-Commu- nist credentials. This causes them to behave very much like reactionar- ies. Their occasional support of social democrats often breaks down where the latter are insufficiently harsh on their own indigenous radi- cals or on popular groups that are organizing among generally margin- alized sectors. In his brief tenure in the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch attacked corruption in the armed forces and government, began a land-reform program, undertook a major project for mass education of the populace, and maintained a remarkably open government and
system of effective civil liberties. These policies threatened powerful internal vested interests, and the United States resented his indepen- dence and the extension of civil liberties to Communists and radicals. This was carrying democracy and pluralism too far. Kennedy was "extremely disappointed" in Bosch's rule, and the State Department "quickly soured on the first democratically elected Dominican Presi- dent in over thirty years. " Bosch's overthrow by the military after nine months in office had at least the tacit support of the United States. 1l1 Two years later, by contrast, the Johnson administration invaded the
A PROPAGA~DA MODEL 29
30 MANUPACTURING CONSENT
Dominican Republic to make sure that Bosch did not resume power. The Kennedy liberals were enthusiastic about the military coup and displacement of a populist government in Brazil in 1964. 112 A major spurt in rhe growth of neo-Fascist national-security states took place under Kennedy and Johnson. In the cases of the U. S. subversion of Guatemala, 1947-54, and the military attacks on Nicaragua, 1981-87, allegations of Communist links and a Communist threat caused many liberals to support counterrevolutionary intervention, while others lapsed into silence, paralyzed by the fear of being tarred with charges
of infidelity to the national religion.
It should be noted that when anti-Communist fervor is aroused, the
demand for serious evidence in support of claims of "communist" abuses is suspended, and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources. Defectors, informers, and assorted other opportunists move to center stage as "experts," and they remain there even after exposure as highly unreliable, if not downright liars. l l 3 Pascal Delwit and Jean-Michel Dewaele point out that in France, too, the ideologues of anticommu- nism "can do and say anything. "1l4 Analyzing the new status of Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix, two former passionate Stalinists now pos- sessed of a large and uncritical audience in France,m Delwit and Dewaele note;
If we analyse their writings, we find all the classic reactions of people who have been disappointed in love. But no one dreams of criticising them for their past, even though it has marked them forever. They may well have been converted, but they have not changed. . . . no one notices the constants, even though they are glaringly obvious. Their best sellers prove, thanks to the support of the most indulgent and slothful critics anyone could hope for, that the public can be fooled. Noone denounces or even notices the arrogance of both yesterday's eulogies and today's diatribes; no one cares that there is never any proof and that invective is used in place of analysis. Their inverted hyper-Stalinism-which
takes the usual form of total manicheanism-is whitewashed sim- ply because it is directed against Communism. The hysteria has not changed, but it gets a better welcome in its present guise. ll6
The anti-Communist control mechanism reaches through the system to exercise a profound influence on the mass media. In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for "our
side" considered an entirely legitimate news practice. It is the mass media that identify, create, and push into the limelight a Joe McCarthy. Arkady Shevchenko, and Claire Sterling and Robert Leiken, or an Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix. The ideology and religion of anticom- munism is a potent filter.
1. 6. DICHOTOMIZATION AND? PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGNS
The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become "big news," subject to sustained news campaigns. By definition, news from primary establish- ment sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accom- modated by the mass media. Messages from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized individuals and groups, domestic and foreign, are at an initial disadvantage in sourcing costs and credibility, and they often do not comport with the ideology or interests of the gatekeepers and other powerful parties that influence the filtering process. 117
Thus, for example, the torture of political prisoners and the attack on trade unions in Tutkey will be pressed on the media only by human- rights activists and groups that have little political leverage. The U. S. government supported the Turkish martial-law government from its inception in 1980, and the U. S. business community has been warm toward regimes that profess fervent anticommunism, encourage foreign investment, repress unions, and loyally support U. S. foreign policy (a set of virtues that are frequently closely linked). Media that chose to feature Turkish violence against their own citizenry would have had to go to extra expense to find and check out information sources; they would elicit flak from government, business, and organized right-wing flak machines, and they might be looked upon with disfavor by the corpOrate community (including advertisers) for indulging in such a quixotic interest and crusade. They would tend to stand alone in focus- ing on victims that from the standpoint of dominant American interests were unworthy. llS
In marked contrast, protest over political prisoners and the violation ofthe rights oftrade unions in Poland was seen by the Reagan adminis- tration and business elites in 1981 as a noble cause, and, not coinciden- tally, as an opportunity to score political points. Many media leaders and syndicated columnists felt the_same way. Thus information and
A PROPAGANDA, MODEL 31
32 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
strong opinions on human-rights violations in Poland could be obtained
from official sources in Washington, and reliance on Polish dissidents
would not elicit flak from the U. S. government or the flak machines.
These victims would be generally acknowledged by the managers of the
filters to be worthy. The mass media never explain why Andrei Sa-
kharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy-the attention and general dichotomization occur "naturally" as a result of
the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar
had instructed the media: "Concentrate on the victims ofenemy powers
and forget about the victims of friends. "ll9 j
Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda cam- paigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public. This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007 in early' September 1983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31, 1984, U. S. officials "assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow. " In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for <<cold-blooded murder,"121) and no boy~ cotto This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility: "N0 useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai peninsula last week. "l21 There was a very "useful purpose" served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued. I22
Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919-20 served well to abort the union- organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syn- drome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from the upward redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan's domestic economic program. I23 The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been
needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in EI Salvador and to justify the escalating V. S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.
Conversely, propaganda campaigns will not be mobilized where vic- timization, even though massive, sustained, and dramatic, fails to meet the test of utility to elite interests. Thus, while the focus on Cambodia in the Pol Pot era (and thereafter) was exceedingly serviceable, as Cambodia had fallen to the Communists and useful lessons could be drawn by attention to their victims, the numerous victims of the U. S. bombing before the Communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the V. S. elite press. After Pol Pot's ouster by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted support to this "worse than Hitler" villain, with little notice in the press, which adjusted once again to the national political agenda. l24 Attention to the Indonesian massacres of 1965--66, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor from 1975 onward~ would also be distinctly unhelpful as bases of media cam- paigns, because Indonesia is a U. S. ally and client that maintains an
open door to Western investment, and because, in the case of East Timor, the United States bears major responsibility for the slaughter. The same is true of the victims of srare terror in Chile and Guaremala, U. S. clients whose basic institutional structures, including the state terror system, were put in place and maintained by, or with crucial assistance from, U. S. power, and who remain U. S. client states. Propa- ganda campaigns on behalfofthese victims would conflict with govern- ment-business-military interests and, in our model, would not be able to pass through the filtering system. 125
Propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the government or by one or more of the top media firms. The campaigns to discredit the government of Nicaragua, to support the Salvadoran elections as an exercise in legitimizing democracy, and to use the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL DO? as a means of mobilizing public suppOrt for the arms buildup, were instituted and propelled by the government. The campaigns to publicize the crimes of Pol Pot and the alleged KGB plot to assassinate the pope were initiated by the Reader's Digest, with strong follow-up support from NBC-TV, the New York Times, and other major media companies. 126 Some propaganda cam- paigns are jointly initiated by government and media; all of them re- quire the collaboration of the mass media. The secret of the unidirectionality of the politics of media propaganda campaigns is the multiple filter system discussed above: the mass media will allow any
stories that are hurtful to large interests to peter out quickly, if they surface at alJ. 127
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 33
. '
34 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
?
For stories that are usefu~ the process will get under way with a series
of government leaks, press conferences, white papers, etc. , or with one or more of the mass media starting the ball rolling with such articles as Barron and Paul's "Murder of a Gentle Land" (Cambodia), or Claire Sterling's "The Plot to Kill the Pope," both in the Reader's Digest. If the other major media like the story, they will follow it up with their own versions, and the matter quickly becomes newsworthy by familiar- ity. If the articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or alternative interpretations in the mass media, and command support by authority figures, the propaganda themes quickly become established as true even without real evidence. This tends to close out dissenting views even more comprehensively, as they would now conflict with an already established popular belief. This in turn opens up further opportunities for still more inflated claims. as these can be made without fear of serious repercussions. Similar wild assertions made in contradiction of official views would elicit powerful flak, so that such an inflation process would be controlled by the gov- ernment and the market. No such protections exist with system-sup-
portive claims; there, flak will tend to press the media to greater hysteria in the face of enemy evil. The media not only suspend critical judgment and investigative zeal, they compete to find ways of putting the newly established truth in a supportive light. Themes and facts-even careful and well-documented analyses-that are incompatible with the now institutionalized theme are suppressed or ignored. If the theme col- lapses of its own burden of fabrications, the mass media will quietly fold their tents and move on to another topic. l2S
Using a propaganda model, we would not only anticipate definitions of worth based on utility. and dichotomous attention based on the same criterion, we would also expect the news stories about worthy and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality. That is, we would expect official sources of the United States and its client regimes to be used heavily-and uncritically-in connection with one's own abuses and those offriendly governments, while refugees and other dissident sources will be used in dealing with enemies. 129 We would anticipate the uncritical acceptance of certain premises in deal- ing with self and friends-such as that one's own state and leaders seek peace and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth-premises which will not be applied in treating enemy states. We would expect different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy
in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends. DO What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other. 13l We would also
Ii. , _
expect great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states, but dimin- ished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one's own and friendly states.
The quality of coverage should also be displayed more directly and crudely in placement, headlining, word usage, and other modes of mobilizing interest and outrage. In the opinion columns, we would anticipate sharp restraints on the range of opinion allowed expression. Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will gener- ate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.
Meanwhile, because of the power of establishment sources, the flak machines, and anti-Communist ideology, we would anticipate outcries that the worthy victims are being sorely neglected, that the unworthy are treated with excessive and uncritical generosity,132 that the media's liberal, adversarial (if not subversive) hostility to government explains our difficulties in mustering support for the latest national venture in counterrevolutionary intervention.
In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a system- atic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests. This should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage. In the chapters that follow we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness oftreatment) differ in ways that serve political ends.
A PROPAGAKDA MODEL 35
2
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
APROPAGANDA SYSTEM WILL CONSISTENTLY PORTRAY PEOPLE abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation. We will show in this chapter that the U. S. mass media's practical definitions afworth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model. While this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone. This is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system.
2. 1. JERZY' POPIELUSZKO VERSUS A HUNDRED RELIGIOUS VICTIMS IN LATIN AMERICA
A useful comparison can be made between the mass media's treatment of Jerzy Popie! uszko, a Polish priest murdered by the Polish police in
? 38 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
October 1984, and the media's coverage of priests murdered within the U. S. sphere of influence. In our model, Popieluszko, murdered in an enemy state, will be a worthy victim, whereas priests murdered in our client states in Latin America will be unworthy.
The former may be expected to elicit a propaganda outburst by the mass media; the latter will n. at genetate s. ustained cQvera1be.
2. 1. 1. Quantitative aspects of coverage.
Table 2-1 shows, on row t, the coverage of Popieluszko's murder and the trial of his murderers by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, and CBS News. Rows 2 through 5 summarize the coverage in the same media given to religious personnel murdered in Latin America by agents of U. S. client states:l Row 2 shows the coverage given seventy- two individuals in a list of Latin American religious "martyrs" named by Penny Lernoux in her book Cry ofthe People; row 3 describes media coverage of twenty-three priests, missionaries, and other religious workers murdered in Guatemala between January 1980 and February 1985. Row 4 summarizes the coverage of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, of ? 1 Salvador, shot by an assassin in March 1980. Row 5 shows the level of media coverage of four U. S. women religious workers, murdered in ? 1 Salvador in December 1980.
The coverage of the Popieluszko murder not only dwarfs that of the unworthy victims, it constitutes a major episode of news management and propaganda. Nothing comparable can be found for victims within the free world. 2 It can be seen that the New York Times featured the Popieluszko case on its front page on ten different occasions, and the intensity of coverage assured that its readers would know who Popie- luszko was, that he had been murdered, and that this sordid violence had occurred in a Communist state. By contrast, the public would not have seen mention of the names of Father Augusto Ramirez Monast- erio, father superior of the Franciscan order in Guatemala, murdered in November 1983, or Father Miguel Angel Montufar, a Guatemalan priest who disappeared in the same month that Popieluszko was killed in Poland, or literally dozens of other religious murder victims in the Latin American provinces, who were sometimes given substantial cov- erage in the local press of the countries in which the murders took place.
1n fact, none of the extremely prominent victims ofmurder in Latin
I
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 39
America, including Archbishop Romero and the four American church- women, received anywhere near the attention accorded Popieluszko. We will show below that the quality of treatment of the worthy and unworthy victims also differed sharply. While the coverage ofthe wor- thy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of vio- lence and the inherent tragedy ofhuman life. This qualitative difference is already apparent in placement and editorializing: ten front-page articles on Popieluszko is a statement about importance, as is the fact of three editorials denouncing the Poles, without a single editorial denunciation for the murderers of the unworthy victims.
By comparing rows 1 and 6 of table 2-1, we can see that for every media category the coverage of the worthy victim, Popieluszko, ex- ceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together. We suspect that the coverage of Popieluszko may have ex- ceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War II, as the most prominent are included in our hundred. From the table we can also calculate the relative wor- thiness of the world's victims, as measured by the weight given them by the U. S. mass media. The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the U. S. client states;3 or,looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland.
The claim is sometimes made that unworthy victims are so treated by the U. S. mass media because they are killed at a great distance, and are so unlike ourselves that they are easy to disregard. 4 Poland, how- ever, is farther away than Central America, and its cultural and business links with the United States are not as great as those of Latin American countries in general. Three of the religious victims among the twenty- three murdered in Guatemala (row 3) were American citizens, a consid- eration that failed to light a fire under the media. Even the four American churchwomen raped and murdered by members of the Sal- vadoran National Guard failed to elicit attention comparable with that accorded Popieluszko. Their relative valuation by the New York Times was less than a tenth that of the Polish priest, and we will show later that the coverage of these American victims displayed considerably less outrage and passion than that of Popieluszko. 5
The coverage of Popieluszko was somewhat inflated by the fact that his murderers were quickly tried, and in a trial that American reporters
TABLE 2-1
t
? > z o
Mass-Media Coverage of Worthy and Unworthy Victims (1): ? > o
A Murdered Polish Priest versus One Hundred Murdered o
"
Religious in Latin America
? z o
NEW YORK TIMES
TIME and NEWSWEEK
CBS NEWS
o o z
? z
No. of evening
" Articles' inches articles Editorialsl Articles! inches programs' programs
Front- Column pas'
No. of
news news
row I row I row I row I row I row 1 row I row I
78 (100) 1183. 0 (100) 10 (100) 3 (100) I 16 (100) 313. 0 (100) 46 (100) 23 (100)
Column
No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. % of No. % of
Yictinu
I. Jerzy Popieluszko,
murdered on
OCL 19, 1984 2. 72 religious
victims in Latin Ameri~ 1964-782
8 (10. 3) lIB
(9. 9) I (10)
16 (5. 1)
~
S. 23 religious, murdered in
Guatemala Jan.
19SQ-Feb. 19S5? 4. Oscar Romero,
murdered
Mar. IS, 19S0 5. 4 U. S. religious
women, murdered in EI Salvador, Dec. 2, 19S0
6. Total of lines 2-5
7 (? . 0) ". 5 (5. ') - - - -I 2 (12. 5) :14. 0 (10. ') 1 2 (4. 3) 2 (8. 7)
(20. 5) 219. 0 (IS. 5) ? (40) - -I 3 (lS. S) S6. 5 (27. 6) 1 13 (2S. 3) ? (17. 4) "
,
2. (33. 3) 201. 5 (17. 0) 3 (30) - -I (31. 2) 111. 0 (35. 5) 1 22 (47. S) 10 (43. 5)
57 (73. 1) 604. ' (51. 1) 8 (80) - -I 10 (62. 5) 247. 5 (79. 1) 1 37 (SO. 4) 16 (69. 6) o? - ?
?
<
1. The media coverage a for an l&-month period from the time of the tint repon of the victim's disappearance or murder.
>
z o
"
o ;&. Listed in Penny Lemoux, Cry olehe People (New York: Doubleday, 19S0), pp. 464-65. We hllve omitted the names of seven ? z
manyrs who had joined the guerrillas. Lemoux points out that ber list is far from complete, and is composed of only the o better-known victims. ?
3? The CBS News Index begins in 1975; our blank figure for this category does not cover earlier years.
- ? <
< 4. This is a panial listing only, laken from tabulations of "Religious Killed or 'Disappeared' in Guatemala," put out -
periodically by CONFREGUA: Conferend4J tk Religiosos de Gwatemakl.
o
? ?
"! :
42 MANUFACTURING CONSENT ?
could freely report. Almost every murder ofthe Latin American victims was carried out by official or paramilitary forces in crimes that were never investigated or prosecuted under law, and were on occasion even subject to active official cover-ups (as we describe below in connection with Romero and the four churchwomen). Only in the case of the four murdered American women, in El Salvador, was there sufficient pres- sure to force some kind of investigation and legal process. As we will see, this legal process was barely noted by the mass media (in contrast with their intense interest in the Popieluszko trial), and the press did not comment upon or explore the significance of the fact that there was a relatively serious trial in "totalitarian" Poland, while state murders were being carried out on a daily basis without any investigations or trials of the murderers in a number of countries within the U. S. sphere of influence called "fledgling democracies. "
2. 1. 2. Coverage of the Popieluszko case
Jerzy Popieluszko was an activist priest and a strong supporter of the Solidarity movement in Poland. In an effort to eliminate or intimidate him, members of the Polish secret police abducted him on October 19, 1984. He was beJ3ten, bound, and gagged, and eventually thrown into a reservoir. His body was found several days later. In the furor that ensued, the police directly involved in the killing were quickly identi- fied and were eventually tried and given stiff jail sentences. As we have seen, the level of attention given to the case in the United States was very great. The quality of coverage was also extremely well designed to score political points, and contrasts sharply with the quality of coverage of unworthy victims.
2. 1. 2(a). Fullness and reiteration ofthe details ofthe murder and the damage inflicted on the victim. The coverage of the Popieluszko murder was notable for the fullness of the details regarding his treat- ment by the police and the condition of the recovered body. What is more, these details were repeated at every opportunity. The condition of the body was described at its recovery, at the trial when the medical evidence was presented, and during the testimony of the perpetrators of the crime. 6 At the trial, the emotional strain and guilt manifested by the police officers were described time and again, interspersed with the description of how Popieluszko pleaded for his life, and evidence of the
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 43
brutality of the act. Numerous unflattering photos of the policemen on trial were presented, adding dramatic detail in support of the image of police viciousness. In the courtroom, the guilty police sit, one with "a nervous tic on the right side of his face [that] caused his dark mustache to twitch uncontrollably," with "tear-filled testimony [that] gave the trial some of its most dramatic moments" (Time~ Feb. I8, I985). The police weep openly or bow their heads in the face of the grisly evidence. Popieluszko himself was humanized, with descriptions of his physical characteristics and personality that made him into something more than a distant victim. 7 In sum, the act of violence and its effects on Popie- luszko were presented in such a way as to generate the maximum emotional impact on readers. The act was vicious and deserved the presentation it received. The acts against the unworthy victims were also vicious, but they were treated very differently.
2. 1. 2(b). Stress on indignation, shock, and demands for justice. In a large proportion of the articles on the Popieluszko murder there are quotations or assertions of outrage, indignation, profound shock, and mourning, and demands that justice be done. Steady and wholly sympa- thetic attention is given to demonstrators, mourners, weeping people, work stoppages, masses held in honor of the victim, and expressions of outrage, mainly by nonofficial sources. The population "continues to mourn," "public outrage mounted," the pope is deeply shaken, and even Jaruzelski condemns the action. The net effect ofthis day-in-day- out repetition of outrage and indignation was to call very forcible attention to a terrible injustice, to put the Polish government on the defensive, and, probably, to contribute to remedial action.
2. 1. 2(c). The search for responsibility at the top. In article after article, the U. S. media raised the question: how high up was the act known and approved? By our count, eighteen articles in the New York Times stressed the question of higher responsibility, often with aggres- sive headlines addressed to that point. s A number of articles bring in a Soviet link ("Lawyer Seemingly [sic] Implies a Soviet Link in Slaying of Priest" Uan. 31, 1985]), and Michael Kaufman, of the Times, twice manages to drag in the plot to kill the pope, which the U. S. press, led by the New York Times, had been trying to tie in with the Soviets and Bulgarians. 9 These links to the Soviet Union and the Bulgarian Con- nection are established by finding someone who says what the reporter and his paper want to dredge up--in no case was there a trace of
supportive evidence.
Time, Newsweek and CBS News played the same game of aggres-
?
?
44 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
sively ralsmg questions about "Hints of a Contract from the Top" (Time) and "Keeping the Lid on Murder" (Newsweek), and Time raised questions about possible Soviet involvement as well as the Bulgarian Connection.
2. 1. 2(d). Conclusions and follow-up. The New York Times had three editorials on the Popieluszko case. In each it focused on the responsi- bility of the higher authorities and the fact that "A police state is especially responsible for the actions of its police" ("Murderous Po- land:' Oct. 30, 1984). It freely applied words like "thuggery," "shame- less," and "crude" to the Polish state. The fact that police officers were quickly identified, tried, and convicted it attributed to the agitation at home and abroad that put a limit on villainy. This is a good point, and one that we stress throughout this book: villainy may be constrained by intense publicity. But we also stress the corresponding importance of a refusal to publicize and the leeway this gives murderous clients under the protection of the United States and its media, where the impact of publicity would be far greater. 10 The Times also fails to note the con- trast between murderous Poland and murderous EI Salvador-in the latter country, no murders of Salvadorans by the security forces or the death squads connected to them have ever resulted in a trial. The absence of such a comparison, as well as the failure of the Times to produce an editorial entitled "Murderous El Salvador," illustrates how a serviceable terrorism is protected in a propaganda mode. II
2. 2.
,
Along with its other political investments of the 1970S and 1980s, the corporate community sponsored the growth of institutions such as the American Legal Foundation, the Capital Legal Foundation, the Media Institute, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media (AIM). These may be regarded as institutions organized for the specific purpose of producing flak. Another and older flak-producing machine with a broader design is Freedom House. The American Legal Foundation, organized in 1980, has specialized in Fairness Doctrine complaints and libel suits to aid "media victims. " The Capital Legal Foundation, incorporated in 1977, was the Scaife vehicle for Westmore- land's Sl2o-million libel suit against CBS. lOO
The Media Institute, organized in 1972 and funded by corporate- wealthy patrons, sponsors monitoring projects, conferences, and stud- ies of the media. It has focused less heavily on media failings in foreign policy, concentrating more on media portrayals of economic issues and the business community, but its range of interests is broad. The main theme of its sponsored studies and conferences has been the failure of the media to portray business accurately and to give adequate weight to the business point of view,lOl but it underwrites works such as John Corry's expose of the alleged left-wing bias of the mass media. 102 The chairman of the board of trustees of the institute in 1985 was Steven V. Seekins, the top public-relations officer of the American Medical Asso- ciation; chairman of the National Advisory Council was Herbert Schmertz, of the Mobil Oil Corporation.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs, run by Linda and Robert Lichter, came into existence in the mid-198os as a "non-profit, non- partisan" research institute, with warm accolades from Patrick Bu- chanan, Faith Whittlesey, and Ronald Reagan himself, who recognized the need for an objective and fair press. Their Media Monitor and research studies continue their earlier efforts to demonstrate the liberal bias and anti-business propensities of the mass media. 103
AIM was formed in 1969, and it grew spectacularly in the 1970s. Its annual income rose from $5,000 in 1971 to $1. 5 million in the early 1980s, with funding m. ainly from large corporations and the wealthy heirs and foundations of the corporate system. At least eight separate oil compa- nies were contributors to AIM in the early 1980s, but the wide represen- tation in sponsors from the corporate community is impressive. 104 The function of AIM is to harass the media and put pressure on them. to follow the corporate agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy. It presses the media to join more enthusiastically in Red-scare band- wagons, and attacks them for alleged deficiencies whenever they fail to toe the line on foreign policy. It conditions the media to expect trou-
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 27
28 M A NUF A CTURING CONSENT
ble (and cost increases) for violating right-wing standards of bias. lOS Freedom House, which dates back to the early 1940s, has had inter- locks with AIM, the World Anticommunist League, Resistance Inter- national, and U. S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and international right wing. It sent election monitors to the Rhodesian elections staged by Ian Smith in 1979 and found them "fair," whereas the 1980 elections won by Mugabe under British super- vision it found dubious. Its election monitors also found the Salvadoran elections of1982 admirable. lo6 It has expended substantial resources in criticizing the media for insufficient sympathy with U. S. foreign-policy ventures and excessively harsh criticism of U. S. client states. Its most notable publication of this genre was Peter Braestfup's Big Story, which contended that the media's negative portrayal of the Tet offensive helped lose the war. The work is a travesty of scholarship, but more interesting is its premise: that the mass media not only should support any national venture abroad, but should do so with enthusiasm, such
enterprises being by definition noble (see the extensive review of the Freedom House study in chapter 5 and appendix 3). In 1982, when the Reagan administration was having trouble containing media reporting of the systematic killing of civilians by the Salvadoran army, Freedom House came through with a denunciation of the "imbalance" in media reporting from El Salvador. 107
Although the flak machines steadily attack the mass media, the media treat them well. They receive respectful attention, and their propagan- distic role and links to a larger corporate program are rarely mentioned or analyzed. AIM head, Reed Irvine's diatribes are frequently pub- lished, and right-wing network flacks who regularly assail the "liberal media," such as Michael Ledeen,108 are given Op-Ed column space, sympathetic reviewers, and a regular place on talk shows as experts. This reflects the power of the sponsors, including the well-entrenched position of the right wing in the mass media themselves. 109
The producers offlak add to one another's strength and reinforce the command of political authority in its news-management activities. The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing, threatening, and "correcting" the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line. News management itself is designed to produce flak. In the Reagan years, Mr. Reagan was put on television to exude charm to millions, many of whom berated the media when they dared to criticize the "Great Communicator. "llo
I
1. 5. ANTICOMMUNISM AS A CONTROL MECHANISM
A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status. The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and the ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist? states have contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radi- calism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on Communists and "play into their hands" is rationalized in similar terms.
Liberals at home, often accused of being pro-Communist or insuffi- ciently anti-Communist, are kept continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu in which anticommunism is the dominant religion. If they allow communism, or something that can be labeled communism, to triumph in the provinces while they are in office, the political costs are heavy. Most of them have fully internalized the religion anyway, but they are all under great pressure to demonstrate their anti-Commu- nist credentials. This causes them to behave very much like reactionar- ies. Their occasional support of social democrats often breaks down where the latter are insufficiently harsh on their own indigenous radi- cals or on popular groups that are organizing among generally margin- alized sectors. In his brief tenure in the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch attacked corruption in the armed forces and government, began a land-reform program, undertook a major project for mass education of the populace, and maintained a remarkably open government and
system of effective civil liberties. These policies threatened powerful internal vested interests, and the United States resented his indepen- dence and the extension of civil liberties to Communists and radicals. This was carrying democracy and pluralism too far. Kennedy was "extremely disappointed" in Bosch's rule, and the State Department "quickly soured on the first democratically elected Dominican Presi- dent in over thirty years. " Bosch's overthrow by the military after nine months in office had at least the tacit support of the United States. 1l1 Two years later, by contrast, the Johnson administration invaded the
A PROPAGA~DA MODEL 29
30 MANUPACTURING CONSENT
Dominican Republic to make sure that Bosch did not resume power. The Kennedy liberals were enthusiastic about the military coup and displacement of a populist government in Brazil in 1964. 112 A major spurt in rhe growth of neo-Fascist national-security states took place under Kennedy and Johnson. In the cases of the U. S. subversion of Guatemala, 1947-54, and the military attacks on Nicaragua, 1981-87, allegations of Communist links and a Communist threat caused many liberals to support counterrevolutionary intervention, while others lapsed into silence, paralyzed by the fear of being tarred with charges
of infidelity to the national religion.
It should be noted that when anti-Communist fervor is aroused, the
demand for serious evidence in support of claims of "communist" abuses is suspended, and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources. Defectors, informers, and assorted other opportunists move to center stage as "experts," and they remain there even after exposure as highly unreliable, if not downright liars. l l 3 Pascal Delwit and Jean-Michel Dewaele point out that in France, too, the ideologues of anticommu- nism "can do and say anything. "1l4 Analyzing the new status of Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix, two former passionate Stalinists now pos- sessed of a large and uncritical audience in France,m Delwit and Dewaele note;
If we analyse their writings, we find all the classic reactions of people who have been disappointed in love. But no one dreams of criticising them for their past, even though it has marked them forever. They may well have been converted, but they have not changed. . . . no one notices the constants, even though they are glaringly obvious. Their best sellers prove, thanks to the support of the most indulgent and slothful critics anyone could hope for, that the public can be fooled. Noone denounces or even notices the arrogance of both yesterday's eulogies and today's diatribes; no one cares that there is never any proof and that invective is used in place of analysis. Their inverted hyper-Stalinism-which
takes the usual form of total manicheanism-is whitewashed sim- ply because it is directed against Communism. The hysteria has not changed, but it gets a better welcome in its present guise. ll6
The anti-Communist control mechanism reaches through the system to exercise a profound influence on the mass media. In normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tend to be framed in terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting sides, and rooting for "our
side" considered an entirely legitimate news practice. It is the mass media that identify, create, and push into the limelight a Joe McCarthy. Arkady Shevchenko, and Claire Sterling and Robert Leiken, or an Annie Kriegel and Pierre Daix. The ideology and religion of anticom- munism is a potent filter.
1. 6. DICHOTOMIZATION AND? PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGNS
The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become "big news," subject to sustained news campaigns. By definition, news from primary establish- ment sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accom- modated by the mass media. Messages from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized individuals and groups, domestic and foreign, are at an initial disadvantage in sourcing costs and credibility, and they often do not comport with the ideology or interests of the gatekeepers and other powerful parties that influence the filtering process. 117
Thus, for example, the torture of political prisoners and the attack on trade unions in Tutkey will be pressed on the media only by human- rights activists and groups that have little political leverage. The U. S. government supported the Turkish martial-law government from its inception in 1980, and the U. S. business community has been warm toward regimes that profess fervent anticommunism, encourage foreign investment, repress unions, and loyally support U. S. foreign policy (a set of virtues that are frequently closely linked). Media that chose to feature Turkish violence against their own citizenry would have had to go to extra expense to find and check out information sources; they would elicit flak from government, business, and organized right-wing flak machines, and they might be looked upon with disfavor by the corpOrate community (including advertisers) for indulging in such a quixotic interest and crusade. They would tend to stand alone in focus- ing on victims that from the standpoint of dominant American interests were unworthy. llS
In marked contrast, protest over political prisoners and the violation ofthe rights oftrade unions in Poland was seen by the Reagan adminis- tration and business elites in 1981 as a noble cause, and, not coinciden- tally, as an opportunity to score political points. Many media leaders and syndicated columnists felt the_same way. Thus information and
A PROPAGANDA, MODEL 31
32 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
strong opinions on human-rights violations in Poland could be obtained
from official sources in Washington, and reliance on Polish dissidents
would not elicit flak from the U. S. government or the flak machines.
These victims would be generally acknowledged by the managers of the
filters to be worthy. The mass media never explain why Andrei Sa-
kharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy-the attention and general dichotomization occur "naturally" as a result of
the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar
had instructed the media: "Concentrate on the victims ofenemy powers
and forget about the victims of friends. "ll9 j
Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda cam- paigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public. This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007 in early' September 1983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31, 1984, U. S. officials "assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow. " In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for <<cold-blooded murder,"121) and no boy~ cotto This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility: "N0 useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai peninsula last week. "l21 There was a very "useful purpose" served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued. I22
Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919-20 served well to abort the union- organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syn- drome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from the upward redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan's domestic economic program. I23 The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been
needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in EI Salvador and to justify the escalating V. S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.
Conversely, propaganda campaigns will not be mobilized where vic- timization, even though massive, sustained, and dramatic, fails to meet the test of utility to elite interests. Thus, while the focus on Cambodia in the Pol Pot era (and thereafter) was exceedingly serviceable, as Cambodia had fallen to the Communists and useful lessons could be drawn by attention to their victims, the numerous victims of the U. S. bombing before the Communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the V. S. elite press. After Pol Pot's ouster by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted support to this "worse than Hitler" villain, with little notice in the press, which adjusted once again to the national political agenda. l24 Attention to the Indonesian massacres of 1965--66, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor from 1975 onward~ would also be distinctly unhelpful as bases of media cam- paigns, because Indonesia is a U. S. ally and client that maintains an
open door to Western investment, and because, in the case of East Timor, the United States bears major responsibility for the slaughter. The same is true of the victims of srare terror in Chile and Guaremala, U. S. clients whose basic institutional structures, including the state terror system, were put in place and maintained by, or with crucial assistance from, U. S. power, and who remain U. S. client states. Propa- ganda campaigns on behalfofthese victims would conflict with govern- ment-business-military interests and, in our model, would not be able to pass through the filtering system. 125
Propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the government or by one or more of the top media firms. The campaigns to discredit the government of Nicaragua, to support the Salvadoran elections as an exercise in legitimizing democracy, and to use the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL DO? as a means of mobilizing public suppOrt for the arms buildup, were instituted and propelled by the government. The campaigns to publicize the crimes of Pol Pot and the alleged KGB plot to assassinate the pope were initiated by the Reader's Digest, with strong follow-up support from NBC-TV, the New York Times, and other major media companies. 126 Some propaganda cam- paigns are jointly initiated by government and media; all of them re- quire the collaboration of the mass media. The secret of the unidirectionality of the politics of media propaganda campaigns is the multiple filter system discussed above: the mass media will allow any
stories that are hurtful to large interests to peter out quickly, if they surface at alJ. 127
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 33
. '
34 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
?
For stories that are usefu~ the process will get under way with a series
of government leaks, press conferences, white papers, etc. , or with one or more of the mass media starting the ball rolling with such articles as Barron and Paul's "Murder of a Gentle Land" (Cambodia), or Claire Sterling's "The Plot to Kill the Pope," both in the Reader's Digest. If the other major media like the story, they will follow it up with their own versions, and the matter quickly becomes newsworthy by familiar- ity. If the articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or alternative interpretations in the mass media, and command support by authority figures, the propaganda themes quickly become established as true even without real evidence. This tends to close out dissenting views even more comprehensively, as they would now conflict with an already established popular belief. This in turn opens up further opportunities for still more inflated claims. as these can be made without fear of serious repercussions. Similar wild assertions made in contradiction of official views would elicit powerful flak, so that such an inflation process would be controlled by the gov- ernment and the market. No such protections exist with system-sup-
portive claims; there, flak will tend to press the media to greater hysteria in the face of enemy evil. The media not only suspend critical judgment and investigative zeal, they compete to find ways of putting the newly established truth in a supportive light. Themes and facts-even careful and well-documented analyses-that are incompatible with the now institutionalized theme are suppressed or ignored. If the theme col- lapses of its own burden of fabrications, the mass media will quietly fold their tents and move on to another topic. l2S
Using a propaganda model, we would not only anticipate definitions of worth based on utility. and dichotomous attention based on the same criterion, we would also expect the news stories about worthy and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality. That is, we would expect official sources of the United States and its client regimes to be used heavily-and uncritically-in connection with one's own abuses and those offriendly governments, while refugees and other dissident sources will be used in dealing with enemies. 129 We would anticipate the uncritical acceptance of certain premises in deal- ing with self and friends-such as that one's own state and leaders seek peace and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth-premises which will not be applied in treating enemy states. We would expect different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy
in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends. DO What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other. 13l We would also
Ii. , _
expect great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states, but dimin- ished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one's own and friendly states.
The quality of coverage should also be displayed more directly and crudely in placement, headlining, word usage, and other modes of mobilizing interest and outrage. In the opinion columns, we would anticipate sharp restraints on the range of opinion allowed expression. Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will gener- ate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.
Meanwhile, because of the power of establishment sources, the flak machines, and anti-Communist ideology, we would anticipate outcries that the worthy victims are being sorely neglected, that the unworthy are treated with excessive and uncritical generosity,132 that the media's liberal, adversarial (if not subversive) hostility to government explains our difficulties in mustering support for the latest national venture in counterrevolutionary intervention.
In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a system- atic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests. This should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage. In the chapters that follow we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness oftreatment) differ in ways that serve political ends.
A PROPAGAKDA MODEL 35
2
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
APROPAGANDA SYSTEM WILL CONSISTENTLY PORTRAY PEOPLE abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation. We will show in this chapter that the U. S. mass media's practical definitions afworth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model. While this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone. This is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system.
2. 1. JERZY' POPIELUSZKO VERSUS A HUNDRED RELIGIOUS VICTIMS IN LATIN AMERICA
A useful comparison can be made between the mass media's treatment of Jerzy Popie! uszko, a Polish priest murdered by the Polish police in
? 38 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
October 1984, and the media's coverage of priests murdered within the U. S. sphere of influence. In our model, Popieluszko, murdered in an enemy state, will be a worthy victim, whereas priests murdered in our client states in Latin America will be unworthy.
The former may be expected to elicit a propaganda outburst by the mass media; the latter will n. at genetate s. ustained cQvera1be.
2. 1. 1. Quantitative aspects of coverage.
Table 2-1 shows, on row t, the coverage of Popieluszko's murder and the trial of his murderers by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, and CBS News. Rows 2 through 5 summarize the coverage in the same media given to religious personnel murdered in Latin America by agents of U. S. client states:l Row 2 shows the coverage given seventy- two individuals in a list of Latin American religious "martyrs" named by Penny Lernoux in her book Cry ofthe People; row 3 describes media coverage of twenty-three priests, missionaries, and other religious workers murdered in Guatemala between January 1980 and February 1985. Row 4 summarizes the coverage of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, of ? 1 Salvador, shot by an assassin in March 1980. Row 5 shows the level of media coverage of four U. S. women religious workers, murdered in ? 1 Salvador in December 1980.
The coverage of the Popieluszko murder not only dwarfs that of the unworthy victims, it constitutes a major episode of news management and propaganda. Nothing comparable can be found for victims within the free world. 2 It can be seen that the New York Times featured the Popieluszko case on its front page on ten different occasions, and the intensity of coverage assured that its readers would know who Popie- luszko was, that he had been murdered, and that this sordid violence had occurred in a Communist state. By contrast, the public would not have seen mention of the names of Father Augusto Ramirez Monast- erio, father superior of the Franciscan order in Guatemala, murdered in November 1983, or Father Miguel Angel Montufar, a Guatemalan priest who disappeared in the same month that Popieluszko was killed in Poland, or literally dozens of other religious murder victims in the Latin American provinces, who were sometimes given substantial cov- erage in the local press of the countries in which the murders took place.
1n fact, none of the extremely prominent victims ofmurder in Latin
I
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 39
America, including Archbishop Romero and the four American church- women, received anywhere near the attention accorded Popieluszko. We will show below that the quality of treatment of the worthy and unworthy victims also differed sharply. While the coverage ofthe wor- thy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of vio- lence and the inherent tragedy ofhuman life. This qualitative difference is already apparent in placement and editorializing: ten front-page articles on Popieluszko is a statement about importance, as is the fact of three editorials denouncing the Poles, without a single editorial denunciation for the murderers of the unworthy victims.
By comparing rows 1 and 6 of table 2-1, we can see that for every media category the coverage of the worthy victim, Popieluszko, ex- ceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together. We suspect that the coverage of Popieluszko may have ex- ceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War II, as the most prominent are included in our hundred. From the table we can also calculate the relative wor- thiness of the world's victims, as measured by the weight given them by the U. S. mass media. The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the U. S. client states;3 or,looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland.
The claim is sometimes made that unworthy victims are so treated by the U. S. mass media because they are killed at a great distance, and are so unlike ourselves that they are easy to disregard. 4 Poland, how- ever, is farther away than Central America, and its cultural and business links with the United States are not as great as those of Latin American countries in general. Three of the religious victims among the twenty- three murdered in Guatemala (row 3) were American citizens, a consid- eration that failed to light a fire under the media. Even the four American churchwomen raped and murdered by members of the Sal- vadoran National Guard failed to elicit attention comparable with that accorded Popieluszko. Their relative valuation by the New York Times was less than a tenth that of the Polish priest, and we will show later that the coverage of these American victims displayed considerably less outrage and passion than that of Popieluszko. 5
The coverage of Popieluszko was somewhat inflated by the fact that his murderers were quickly tried, and in a trial that American reporters
TABLE 2-1
t
? > z o
Mass-Media Coverage of Worthy and Unworthy Victims (1): ? > o
A Murdered Polish Priest versus One Hundred Murdered o
"
Religious in Latin America
? z o
NEW YORK TIMES
TIME and NEWSWEEK
CBS NEWS
o o z
? z
No. of evening
" Articles' inches articles Editorialsl Articles! inches programs' programs
Front- Column pas'
No. of
news news
row I row I row I row I row I row 1 row I row I
78 (100) 1183. 0 (100) 10 (100) 3 (100) I 16 (100) 313. 0 (100) 46 (100) 23 (100)
Column
No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. '" of No. % of No. % of
Yictinu
I. Jerzy Popieluszko,
murdered on
OCL 19, 1984 2. 72 religious
victims in Latin Ameri~ 1964-782
8 (10. 3) lIB
(9. 9) I (10)
16 (5. 1)
~
S. 23 religious, murdered in
Guatemala Jan.
19SQ-Feb. 19S5? 4. Oscar Romero,
murdered
Mar. IS, 19S0 5. 4 U. S. religious
women, murdered in EI Salvador, Dec. 2, 19S0
6. Total of lines 2-5
7 (? . 0) ". 5 (5. ') - - - -I 2 (12. 5) :14. 0 (10. ') 1 2 (4. 3) 2 (8. 7)
(20. 5) 219. 0 (IS. 5) ? (40) - -I 3 (lS. S) S6. 5 (27. 6) 1 13 (2S. 3) ? (17. 4) "
,
2. (33. 3) 201. 5 (17. 0) 3 (30) - -I (31. 2) 111. 0 (35. 5) 1 22 (47. S) 10 (43. 5)
57 (73. 1) 604. ' (51. 1) 8 (80) - -I 10 (62. 5) 247. 5 (79. 1) 1 37 (SO. 4) 16 (69. 6) o? - ?
?
<
1. The media coverage a for an l&-month period from the time of the tint repon of the victim's disappearance or murder.
>
z o
"
o ;&. Listed in Penny Lemoux, Cry olehe People (New York: Doubleday, 19S0), pp. 464-65. We hllve omitted the names of seven ? z
manyrs who had joined the guerrillas. Lemoux points out that ber list is far from complete, and is composed of only the o better-known victims. ?
3? The CBS News Index begins in 1975; our blank figure for this category does not cover earlier years.
- ? <
< 4. This is a panial listing only, laken from tabulations of "Religious Killed or 'Disappeared' in Guatemala," put out -
periodically by CONFREGUA: Conferend4J tk Religiosos de Gwatemakl.
o
? ?
"! :
42 MANUFACTURING CONSENT ?
could freely report. Almost every murder ofthe Latin American victims was carried out by official or paramilitary forces in crimes that were never investigated or prosecuted under law, and were on occasion even subject to active official cover-ups (as we describe below in connection with Romero and the four churchwomen). Only in the case of the four murdered American women, in El Salvador, was there sufficient pres- sure to force some kind of investigation and legal process. As we will see, this legal process was barely noted by the mass media (in contrast with their intense interest in the Popieluszko trial), and the press did not comment upon or explore the significance of the fact that there was a relatively serious trial in "totalitarian" Poland, while state murders were being carried out on a daily basis without any investigations or trials of the murderers in a number of countries within the U. S. sphere of influence called "fledgling democracies. "
2. 1. 2. Coverage of the Popieluszko case
Jerzy Popieluszko was an activist priest and a strong supporter of the Solidarity movement in Poland. In an effort to eliminate or intimidate him, members of the Polish secret police abducted him on October 19, 1984. He was beJ3ten, bound, and gagged, and eventually thrown into a reservoir. His body was found several days later. In the furor that ensued, the police directly involved in the killing were quickly identi- fied and were eventually tried and given stiff jail sentences. As we have seen, the level of attention given to the case in the United States was very great. The quality of coverage was also extremely well designed to score political points, and contrasts sharply with the quality of coverage of unworthy victims.
2. 1. 2(a). Fullness and reiteration ofthe details ofthe murder and the damage inflicted on the victim. The coverage of the Popieluszko murder was notable for the fullness of the details regarding his treat- ment by the police and the condition of the recovered body. What is more, these details were repeated at every opportunity. The condition of the body was described at its recovery, at the trial when the medical evidence was presented, and during the testimony of the perpetrators of the crime. 6 At the trial, the emotional strain and guilt manifested by the police officers were described time and again, interspersed with the description of how Popieluszko pleaded for his life, and evidence of the
WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS 43
brutality of the act. Numerous unflattering photos of the policemen on trial were presented, adding dramatic detail in support of the image of police viciousness. In the courtroom, the guilty police sit, one with "a nervous tic on the right side of his face [that] caused his dark mustache to twitch uncontrollably," with "tear-filled testimony [that] gave the trial some of its most dramatic moments" (Time~ Feb. I8, I985). The police weep openly or bow their heads in the face of the grisly evidence. Popieluszko himself was humanized, with descriptions of his physical characteristics and personality that made him into something more than a distant victim. 7 In sum, the act of violence and its effects on Popie- luszko were presented in such a way as to generate the maximum emotional impact on readers. The act was vicious and deserved the presentation it received. The acts against the unworthy victims were also vicious, but they were treated very differently.
2. 1. 2(b). Stress on indignation, shock, and demands for justice. In a large proportion of the articles on the Popieluszko murder there are quotations or assertions of outrage, indignation, profound shock, and mourning, and demands that justice be done. Steady and wholly sympa- thetic attention is given to demonstrators, mourners, weeping people, work stoppages, masses held in honor of the victim, and expressions of outrage, mainly by nonofficial sources. The population "continues to mourn," "public outrage mounted," the pope is deeply shaken, and even Jaruzelski condemns the action. The net effect ofthis day-in-day- out repetition of outrage and indignation was to call very forcible attention to a terrible injustice, to put the Polish government on the defensive, and, probably, to contribute to remedial action.
2. 1. 2(c). The search for responsibility at the top. In article after article, the U. S. media raised the question: how high up was the act known and approved? By our count, eighteen articles in the New York Times stressed the question of higher responsibility, often with aggres- sive headlines addressed to that point. s A number of articles bring in a Soviet link ("Lawyer Seemingly [sic] Implies a Soviet Link in Slaying of Priest" Uan. 31, 1985]), and Michael Kaufman, of the Times, twice manages to drag in the plot to kill the pope, which the U. S. press, led by the New York Times, had been trying to tie in with the Soviets and Bulgarians. 9 These links to the Soviet Union and the Bulgarian Con- nection are established by finding someone who says what the reporter and his paper want to dredge up--in no case was there a trace of
supportive evidence.
Time, Newsweek and CBS News played the same game of aggres-
?
?
44 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
sively ralsmg questions about "Hints of a Contract from the Top" (Time) and "Keeping the Lid on Murder" (Newsweek), and Time raised questions about possible Soviet involvement as well as the Bulgarian Connection.
2. 1. 2(d). Conclusions and follow-up. The New York Times had three editorials on the Popieluszko case. In each it focused on the responsi- bility of the higher authorities and the fact that "A police state is especially responsible for the actions of its police" ("Murderous Po- land:' Oct. 30, 1984). It freely applied words like "thuggery," "shame- less," and "crude" to the Polish state. The fact that police officers were quickly identified, tried, and convicted it attributed to the agitation at home and abroad that put a limit on villainy. This is a good point, and one that we stress throughout this book: villainy may be constrained by intense publicity. But we also stress the corresponding importance of a refusal to publicize and the leeway this gives murderous clients under the protection of the United States and its media, where the impact of publicity would be far greater. 10 The Times also fails to note the con- trast between murderous Poland and murderous EI Salvador-in the latter country, no murders of Salvadorans by the security forces or the death squads connected to them have ever resulted in a trial. The absence of such a comparison, as well as the failure of the Times to produce an editorial entitled "Murderous El Salvador," illustrates how a serviceable terrorism is protected in a propaganda mode. II
2. 2.
