No More Learning

57. Advertisers may also be offended by attacks on themselves or their pro- ducts. On the tendency of the media to avoid criticism of advertised products even when very important to consumer welfare [e. g. , the effects of smoking], see Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. 168-73.
58. This is hard to prove statistically, given the poor data made available by the FCC over the years. The long-term trend in advertising time/programming time is dramatically revealed by the fact that in 1929 the National Association of Broadcasting adopted as a standard of commercial practice on radio the following: "Commercial announcements . . . shall not be broadcast between 7 and II P. M. " William Paley testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in 1930 that only 22 percent of CBS's time was allocated to commercially sponsored programs, with t. he other 78 percent sustaining; and he noted that advertising took up only "seven-tenths of I percent of all our time" (quoted in Public Service Responsibility ofBroadcast Licensees, FCC [Washington: GPO,
Mar. 7, 1946], p. 42). Frank Wolf states in reference to public-affairs program- ming: "That such programs were even shown at all on commercial television may have been the result of FCC regulation" (Television Programmingfor News and Public Affairs [New York: Praeger, 1972], p. 138; see also pp. 99-139). 59. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 134.
60. For Alcoa's post-antitrust-suit sponsorship of Edward R. Murrow, and ITT's post-earlY-1970s-scandals sponsorship of "The Big Blue Marble," see Barnouw, The Sponsor, ibid. , pp. 51-52, 84-86. Barnouw shows that network news coverage of ITT was sharply constrained during the period of ITT program sponsorship.
61. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 150.
62. Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 198o), p. 143.
63? Ibid. , pp. 144-45.
64. Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 2 (1972), pp. 662-64?
65. United States Air Force, "Fact Sheet: The United States Air Force Infor- mation Program" (March 1979); "News Releases: 600,000 in a Year," Air Force Times, April 28, 1980.
66. ]. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (New York: H. Live- right, 1970), p. 88.
67. Ibid. , p. 90.
68. An Associated Press report on "Newspapers Mustered as Air Force De- fends BIB," published in the Washington Post, April 3, 1987, indicates that the U. S. Air Force had 277 newspapers in 1987, as compared with 140 in 1979? 69. "DOD Kills 205 Periodicals; Still Publishes 1,203 Others," Armed Forces
Journal International (August 1982), p. 16.
70. Its nine regional offices also had some public-information operations, but personnel and funding are not readily allocable to this function. They are smaller than the central office aggregate.
The AFSC aggregate public-information budget is about the same size as the contract given by the State Department to International Business Com- munications (! BC) for lobbying on behalf of the contras ($419,000). This was only one of twenty-five contracts investigated by the GAO that "the Latin American Public Diplomacy office awarded to individuals for research and papers on Central America, said a GAO official involved in the investigation" (Rita Beamish, "Pro-contra Contracts are Probed," Philadelphia Inquirer, July 22, 1987, p. 4A).
71. The NCC's news services are concentrated in the Office of Information, but it has some dispersed staff in communications functions elsewhere in the organization that produce a few newsletters, magazines, and some videotapes and filmstrips.
72. In 1980, Mobil Oil had a public-relations budget of $21 million and a public-relations staff of seventy-three. Between 1976 and 1981 it produced at least a dozen televised special reports on such issues as gasoline prices, with a hired television journalist interviewing Mobil executives and other experts, that are shown frequently on television, often without indication of Mobil sponsorship. See A. Kent MacDougall, Ninety Seconds To Tell It All (Home- wood, Ill. : Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981), pp. II7-20.
73. John S. Saloma III, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), p. 79.
74. MacDougall, Ninety Seconds, pp. II6-17.
75. Thomas B. Edsall, The New Politics ofInequality (New York: Norton, 1984), p. IIO.
76. Peggy Dardenne, "Corporate Advertising," Public Relations Journal (No- vember 1982), p. 36.
77. S. Prakash Sethi, Handbook ofAdvocacy Advertising: Strategies and Applica- tions (Cambridge, Mass. : Ballinger, 1987), p. 22. See also Edsall, New Politics, chapter 3, "The Politicization of the Business Community"; and Saloma, Ominous Politics, chapter 6, "The Corporations: Making Our Voices Heard. " 78. The April 14, 1986, U. S. bombing of Libya was the first military action timed to preempt attention on 7 P. M. prime-time television news. See Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors, P. 147.
79. For the masterful way the Reagan administration used these to manipulate the press, see "Standups," The New Yorker, December 2, 1985, pp. 81ff.
80. Fishman, Manufacturing the News, p. 153.
81. See note 70.
82. On January 16, 1986, the American Friends Service Committee issued a news release, based on extended Freedom of Information Act inquiries, which showed that there had been 381 navy nuclear-weapons accidents and "inci- dents" in the period 1965-77, a figure far higher than that previously claimed.
. .
342 NOTI! S TO PAGES 22-25
NOTES TO PAGES 25-28 343
The mass media did not cover this hot story directly but through the filter of the navy's reply, which downplayed the significance of the new findings and eliminated or relegated to the background the AFSC's full range of facts and interpretation of the meaning of what they had un~overed. ~ typic~headin~; "Navy Lists Nuclear Mishaps: None of 630 Impenlled Pubhc, ServIce Says, Washington Post, January 16, 1986.
83. The Harvard professor in charge of t~eprogram, Harvey ~. ansfield,stated that the invitation to White had been a mIstake anyway, as he IS a representa- tive of the far left," whereas the forum was intended to involve a debate "between liberals and conservatives" (Harvard Crimson, May 14, 1986).
84. See Edward S. Herman and Frank. Brodhead, The R,ise . and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Shendan Square PubhcatIons, 1986), pp.
123-24. . . ,
85. Mark Hertsgaard, "How Reagan Seduced Us: InSIde the,;resldent s"p~op-
former associates. The fact that their claims are often fraudulent is not a problem because the mass media refuse to point this out. Thus Jean Lacouture lent credence to his criticisms of the Khmer Rouge by claiming to have been a former sympathizer-not only a falsehood, as he was pro-Sihanouk, but an absurdity, as nothing had been known about the Khmer Rouge. David Horo- witz added to his value as a born-again patriot by claiming that along with protesters against the Vietnam War generally, he came "to acquire a new appreciation for foreign tyrants like Kim II Sung of North Korea" (Peter Collier and David Horowitz, "Confessions of Two New-Left Radicals: Why We Voted for Reagan," Washington Post National Weekly Edition, April 8, 1985). Robert Leiken became more potent as a critic of the Sandinistas as an alleged former peace-movement activist and early supporter of the Sandinis- tas. Each of these claims was a fabrication, but this fact went unmentioned in the mass media. On Leiken's claims, and the "special force" his anti-Sandinista writings gained by his alleged conversion from "fan of the Sandinistas," see Michael Massing, "Contra Aides," Mother Jones (October 1987). While dis- missing this pretense, Massing credits Leiken's claim that he "was active in the antiwar movement," but that is highly misleading. Activists in the Boston area, where he claims to have been an antiwar organizer, recall no participation by Leiken until about 1970-at which time McGeorge Bundy could also have been described as an activist leader.
98. See above, note 55.
99. See "The Business Campaign Against 'Trial by TV,' " Business Week, June 22,1980, pp. 77-79; William H. Miller, "Fighting TV Hatchet Jobs," Industry Week, January 12, 1981, pp. 61-64.
100. See Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, "Beyond Westmoreland: The Right's Attack on the Press," The Nation, March 30, 1985.
101. An ad widely distributed by United Technologies Corporation, titled "Crooks and Clowns on TV," is based on the Media Institute's study entitled Crooks, Conmen and Clowns: Businessmen in TVEntertainment, which contends that businessmen are treated badly in television entertainment programs. 102. John Corry, TV News and the Dominant Culture (Washington: Media Institute), 1986.
r03. See S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter, The Media Elite (Bethesda, Md. : Adler & Adler, 1986). For a good discussion of the Lichters' new center, see Alexander Cockburn, "Ashes and Diamonds," In These Times, July 8-21, 1987.
104. Louis Wolf, "Accuracy in Media Rewrites News and History," Covert Action Information Bulletin (Spring 1984), pp. 26-29.
105. AIM's impact is hard to gauge, but it must be recognized as only a part of a larger corporate-right-wing campaign of attack. It has common funding sources with such components of the conservative labyrinth as AEI, Hoover, the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and others (see Saloma, Ominous Politics, esp. chapters 2, 3, and 6), and has its own special role to play. AIM's head, Reed Irvine, is a frequent participant in television talk shows, and his letters to the editor and commentary are regularly published in the mass media. The media feel obligated to provide careful responses to his detailed attacks on their news and documentaries, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even helped fund his group's reply to the PBS series on Vietnam. His ability
aganda Factory," Village Voice, September 18, 1984; see also
Standups, cited . .
in note 79 above.
86. Stephen L. Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Ltnes (Chapel HIll: UmversIty
of North Carolina Press, 198o), p. 194?
87. Bruce Owen and Ronald Braeuti? am, The Regulat! on Game: Strategic Use of the Administrative Process (Cambndge, Mass. : Balhnger, 1978), p. 7?
88. See Edward S. Herman, "The Institutionalization of Bias in Economics," Media, Culture and Society (July 1982), pp. 275-91.
89. Henry Kissinger, American Fore~gnPoli~ (Ne~. York:Norton, 1969), p. 28. 90. Quoted in Alex Carey, "Manag1Og Pubhc O~Imon:The Corporate Offen- sive" (University of New South Wales, 1986, J. lllme~graphed), p. 32.
91. Ibid. , pp. 46-47, quoting Feulner papers gIve~10. 1978 and 19~5.
92.
For a good discussion of many of these orgamzatIons and t? eIr purp. o~e,
funding, networking, and outreach programs, see Saloma, Omtnous Polmcs, chapters 4, 6, and 9? .
93. See Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, p. 259; Fred LandiS, "Georgetown's Ivory Tower for Old Spooks," Inquiry, September 30, 1979, pp.
~:? The CSIS's expert on terrorism, Robert K~~perman,was probably ~he most widely used participant on radio and teleVISion talk shows on terronsm
in the last several years.
95. On Sterling's qualifications as an expert, see Herman and Brodh~ad'"Bul- garian Connection, pp. 125-46; on Shevchenko, see Edward J. Epste1O, The Invention of Arkady Shevchenko, Supermole: The Spy Who Came In to Be Sold," New Republic, July 15-22, 1985.
96. See David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Tru~ man and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), pp. II4-38, wh stresses the importance of the lying informer. This McCarthyit. e p~~hologywas
replicated in Robert Leiken's 1982 book on "Soviet hegemomsm . - t h e stan-
dard Maoist phrase-which conjures up a Soviet strategy of tak10g over ~he S d? , d guemlla Western Hemisphere by means of Cuba and the a? Imsta~, an .
movements elsewhere (Leiken, Soviet Strategy in Lattn Amenca [New York. Praeger, 1982]). . bl
97. Then and now, former dissidents are portr~yed as espe. clally valua . e experts for the seeming authenticity they can brIng to the mIstakes of theIr
. .
344 NOTES TO PAGES 28-31
NOTES TO PAGES 31-32 345
to get the publisher of the New York Times to meet with him personally once a year-a first objective of any lobbyist-is impressive testimony to influence. On his contribution to the departure of Raymond Bonner from the Times, see Wolf, "Accuracy in Media Rewrites News and History," pp. 32-33.
106. For an analysis of the bias of the Freedom House observers, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U. S. -Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and EI Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), appendix I, "Freedom House Observers in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and EI Salvador. "
107. R. Bruce McColm, "El Salvador: Peaceful Revolution or Armed Strug- gle? " Perspectives on Freedom I (New York: Freedom House, 1982); James Nelson Goodsell, "Freedom House Labels US Reports on Salvador Biased," Christian Science Monitor, February 3, 1982.
108. For a discussion of Ledeen's views on the media, see Herman and Brod- head, Bulgan'an Connection, pp. 166-70.
109. Among the contributors to AIM have been the Reader's Digest Associa- tion and the DeWitt Wallace Fund, Walter Annenberg, Sir James Goldsmith (owner of the French L'Express), and E. W. Scripps II, board chairman of a newspaper-television-radio system.
110. George Skelton, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, noted that in reference to Reagan's errors offact, "You write the stories once, twice, and you get a lot of mail saying, 'You're picking on the guy, you guys in the press make mistakes too. ' And editors respond to that, so after a while the stories don't run anymore. We're intimidated" (quoted in Hertsgaard, "How Reagan Seduced Us").
ish case is the Western press's refusal to publicize the Turkish government's attacks on the press, including the U. S. press's own reporters in that country. UPI's reporter Ismet Imset, beaten up by the Turkish police and imprisoned under trumped-up charges, was warned by UPI not to publicize the charges against him, and UPI eventually fired him for criticizing their badly compro- mised handling of his case. See Chris Christiansen, "Keeping In With The Generals," New Statesman, January 4, 1985.
119. We believe that the same dichotomization applies in the domestic sphere. For example, both British and American analysts have noted the periodic intense focus on-and indignation over-"welfare chiselers" by the mass media, and the parallel de-emphasis of and benign attitudes toward the far more important fraud and tax abuses of business and the affluent. There is also a deep-seated reluctance on the part of the mass media to examine the struc- tural causes of inequality and poverty. Peter Golding and Sue Middleton, after an extensive discussion of the long-standing "criminalization of poverty" and incessant attacks on welfare scroungers in Britain, point out that tax evasion, by contrast, is "acceptable, even laudable," in the press, that the tax evader "is not merely a victim but a hero. " They note, also, that "The supreme achievement of welfare capitalism" has been to render the causes and condi- tion of poverty almost invisible (Images of Welfare: Press and Public Attitudes to Poverty [Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982], pp. 66-67,98-100, 186, 193).
In a chapter entitled "The Deserving Rich," A. J. Liebling pointed out that in the United States as well, "The crusade against the destitute is the favorite crusade of the newspaper publisher," and that "There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor" (The Press [New York: Ballantine, 1964], pp. 78-79). Liebling went into great detail on various efforts of the media to keep welfare expenses and taxes down "by saying that they [the poor] have concealed assets, or bad character, or both" (p. 79). These strategies not only divert, they also help split the employed working class from the unemployed and marginalized, and make these all exceedingly uncomfortable about participating in a degraded system of scrounging. See Peter Golding and Sue Middleton, "Attitudes to Claimants: A Culture of Contempt," in Images of Welfare, pp. 169ff. President Reagan's fabricated anecdotes about welfare chiselers, and his complete silence on the large-scale chiseling of his corporate sponsors, have fitted into a long tradition o f cynical and heartless greed.
120. For a full discussion of this dichotomized treatment, see Edward S. Her- man, "Gatekeeper versus Propaganda Models: A Critical American Perspec- tive," in Peter Golding, Graham Murdock and Philip Schlesinger, eds. , Communicating Politics (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 182-94. 121. Editorial, March I, 1973. The Soviets apparently didn't know that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this was covered up by U. S. officials, and the false allegation of a knowing destruction of a civilian aircraft provided the basis for extremely harsh criticism of the Soviets for barbaric behavior. The Israelis openly admitted knowing that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this point was of no interest in the West in this particular case. 122. The New York Times Index, for example, has seven full pages of citations to the KAL 007 incident for September 1983 alone.
123. Patriotic orgies, such as the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the
I I I . Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican
sity Press, 1978), pp. 95-99.
112. Jan K. Black, United States Penetration ofBrazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), pp. 39-56.
113. See above, pp. 24-25; below, pp. 157-61.
114. "The Stalinists of Anti-Communism," in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, Socialist Register, 1984: The Uses ofAnticommunism (Lon- don: Merlin Press, 1984), p. 337.
115. Daix, in 1949, referred to the Stalin concentration camps as "one of the Soviet Union's most glorious achievements," displaying "the complete sup- pression of man's exploitation of man" (quoted in Miliband et aI. , Socialist Register, p. 337). Kriegel, formerly a hard-line Communist party functionary, was the author of a 1982 book explaining that the KGB organized the Sabra- Shatila massacres, employing German terrorists associated with the PLO and with the tacit cooperation of the CIA, in order to defame Israel as part of the Soviet program of international terrorism. For more on this profound study, and its influence, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 291-92, 374-75.
116. Socialist Register, p. 345.
117. Where dissidents are prepared to denounce official enemies, of course, they can pass through the mass-media filtering system, in the manner of the ex-Communist experts described in "Anticommunism as a Control Mecha- nism" (p. 29).
118. See chapter 2, "Worthy and Unworthy Victims. " Of interest in the Turk-
Crisis
(Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univer-
346 NOTES TO P AGES 32-35
NOTES TO P AGES 38-43 347
space-shuttle flights, and "Liberty Weekend," perform a similar function in "bringing us all together. " See Elayne Rapping, The Looking Glass World of Nonfiction TV (Boston: South End Press, 1987), chapter 5, "National Rituals. " 124. See below, chapter 6.
125. On issues where the elite is seriously divided, there will be dissenting voices allowed in the mass media, and the inflation of claims and suspension of critical judgment will be subject to some constraint. See the discussion of this point in the preface, pp. xii-xiii, and examples in the case studies that follow. 126. The role of the government in these cases cannot be entirely discounted, given the close ties of the Reader's Digest to the CIA and the fact that Paul Henze, one of the primary sources and movers in the Bulgarian Connection campaign, was a longtime CIA official. On the CIA-Reader's Digest connec- tion, see Epstein, "The Invention of Arkady Shevchenko," pp. 40-41. On Henze, see below, chapter 4. On the strong likelihood that an influential Reader's Digest best-seller on Cambodia was in part a CIA disinformation effort, see below chapter 6, p. 293, and sources cited.
127. We provide many illustrations of these points in the chapters that follow. Watergate and, more recently, the late-Reagan-era exposures of Iran-Contra- gate, which are put forward as counterexamples, are discussed in chapter 7, below .
128. These points apply clearly to the case of the alleged Bulgarian Connection in the plot to assassinate the pope. See below, chapter 4.
129. We have noted elsewhere that the New York Times regularly relied upon Indonesian officials in "presenting the facts" about East Timor, which was being invaded by Indonesia, and ignored refugees, church sources, etc. In contrast, refugees, not state officials, were the prime source in the Times's reporting on postwar events in Vietnam and Cambodia (The Washington Con- nection and Third World Fascism [Boston: South End Press, 1979J, pp. 151-52, 169-76, 184-87). On attempts to evade the obvious implications, see chapter 6, under "The Pol Pot Era" (pp. 284-85).
130. Thus when the CIA directs Nicaraguan contras to attack such "soft targets" as farming cooperatives, with explicit State Department approval, the media commentators, including doves, either applaud or offer philosophical disquisitions on whether such targets are legitimate, given that they are de- fended by lightly armed militia. Terrorist attacks on Israeli kibbutzim, also defended by armed settlers, are regarded somewhat differently. For details, see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988). 131. The variable use of agendas and frameworks can be seen with great clarity' in the treatment of Third World elections supported and opposed by the United States, as described in chapter 3.
132. Classic in their audacity are Michael Ledeen's assertions that: (I) Qad- dafi's word is given more credence in the mass media than that of the U. S. government; and (2) "Relatively minor human rights transgressions in a friendly country (especially if ruled by an authoritarian government of the Right) are given far more attention and more intense criticism than far graver sins of countries hostile to us . . . " (Grave New World [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 131; Qaddafi's superior credence is described on pp. 132-33). See chapter 2 of this book for documentation on the reality of mass- media treatment of abuses by clients and enemy states.
I
Chapter 2: W orthy and Unworthy Victims
I. In a speech ofJuly 19, 1986, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, in answer- ing charges of religious persecution, asserted that of 138 religious persons murdered and 278 kidnapped or disappeared in Central America since 1979 (a figure that includes Lay Delegates of the Word), none had been victimized by the Nicaraguan government. (Central Amen'ca News Update, Aug. 4, 1986). Many had been killed by the contras, however, in an ongoing tradition of Somocista violence. See Andrew Reding, "The Church in Nicaragua,"
Monthly Review (July-August 1987), pp. 34-36. The large majority were mur- dered by the army and security forces of U. S. client states, or the death squads affiliated with them.
2. In The Real Terror Network (Boston: South End Press, 1982), Edward Her- man shows that in the years 1976-81, the only massive coverage of the victimi- zation of individuals abroad by the New York Times was of Soviet dissidents, most notably Sharansky and Sakharov (pp. 196-99), although there were nu- merous cases of comparable or far worse treatment within U. S. domains.
3. Computed by dividing the number of articles and CBS News reports (or column inches) devoted to Popieluszko by the number dealing with the one hundred religious victims and multiplying by 100.
4? Anthony Lewis says that the Soviet dissidents "are enough like us so that we identify with them" ("A Craving for Rights," New York Times, Jan. 31, 1977), a partially valid point, as the vast majority of victims of U. S. foreign policy are Third World peasants, but invalid in that victims in U. S. client states as much "like us" as Soviet dissidents do not get comparable attention, as shown in the cases mentioned and the reference in note 2.
5. It is not coincidental that the U. S. secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, actually de-
fended the assassinations of the American women, as described below.
6. Apart from the details by the New York Times shown in table 2-2, there were at least four other Times articles that repeated such information, and similar detail was given in Time and Newsweek and on CBS News. To give a sample of one of many in Time, an article entitled "Grim Tale: Details of a Martyr's Death" (Nov. 19, 1984), reads as follows: "Church officials who viewed the martyred priest's body reported that he had been savagely beaten. A rope had been tied around his neck, wrists and ankles so that he would strangle himself if he struggled to get free. Three fingers of Popieluszko's left hand were sliced through to the bone, and there were deep gouges on his arms. His lungs contained enough water to indicate that he was still breathing, even if unconscious, when he was tossed, bound hand and foot, into a reservoir. " Time repeats these details and others with obvious relish at every opportunity. As we will see, Time is less lavish in details on unworthy victims.
7. Time's account entitled "Memories of Father Jerzy" (Nov.