No More Learning

It is a highly centralized and quite secretive organization, but one with a vast stake in "political" decisions. 33 GE has contributed to the funding of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank that sup- ports intellectuals who will get the business message across. With the acquisition of ABC, GE should be in a far better position to assure that sound views are given proper attention. 34 The lack of outcry over its takeover of RCA and NBC resulted in part from the fact that RCA control over NBC had already breached the gate of separateness, but
J
A PR. OPAGANDA MODEL 13
it also reflected the more pro-business and laissez-faire environment of the Reagan era.
The non-media interests of most of the media giants are not large, and, excluding the GE and Westinghouse systems, they account for only a small fraction of their total revenue. Their multinational out- reach, however, is more significant. The television networks, television syndicators, major news magazines, and motion-picture studios all do extensive business abroad, and they derive a substantial fraction of their revenues from foreign sales and the operation of foreign affiliates. Reader's Digest is printed in seventeen languages and is available in over 160 countries. The Murdoch empire was originally based in Australia, and the controlling parent company is still an Australian corporation; its expansion in the United States is funded by profits from Australian and British affiliates. 35
Another structural relationship of importance is the media compa-
nies' dependence on and ties with government. The radio-TV compa-
nies and networks all require government licenses and franchises and
are thus potentially subject to government control or harassment. This
technical legal dependency has been used as a club to discipline the I media, and media policies that stray too often from an establishment
orientation could activate this threat. 36 The media protect themselves
from this contingency by lobbying and other political expenditures, the
cultivation of political relationships, and care in policy. The political
ties of the media have been impressive. Table 1-3 shows that fifteen of
ninety-five outside directors of ten of the media giants are former
government officials, and Peter Dreier gives a similar proportion in his
study of large newspapers. 37 In television, the revolving-door flow of
personnel between regulators and the regulated firms was massive dur-
ing the years when the oligopolistic structure ofthe media and networks I was being established. 38
The great media also depend on the government for more general policy support. All business firms are interested in business taxes, inter- est rates, labor policies, and enforcement and nonenforcement of the antitrust laws. GE and Westinghouse depend on the government to subsidize their nuclear power and military research and development, and to create a favorable climate for their overseas sales. The Reader's Diges4 Time, Newsweek, and movie- and television-syndication sellers also depend on diplomatic support for their rights to penetrate foreign cultures with U. S. commercial and value messages and interpretations of current affairs. The media giants, advertising agencies, and great multinational corporations have a joint and close interest in a favorable
climate of investment in the Third World, and their interconnections
14 MAN\JFACTURISG CONSENT
and relationships with the government in these policies are symbiotic. 39 In sum, the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces;40 and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government. This is the first
powerful filter that will affect news choices.
1. 2. THE ADVERTISING LICENSE TO DO BUSINESS: THE SECOND FILTER
In arguing for the benefits of the free market as a means of controlling dissident opinion in the mid-nineteenth century, the Liberal chancellor of the British exchequer, Sir George Lewis, noted that the market would promote those papers "enjoying the preference of the advertising public. "41 Advertising did, in fact, serve as a powerful mechanism weakening the working-class press. Curran and Seaton give the growth of advertising a status comparable with the increase in capital costs as a factor allowing the market to accomplish what state taxes and harass- ment failed to do, noting that these "advertisers thus acquired a de facto licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to be economically viable. "42
Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had to cover the costs of doing business. With the growth of advertising, papers that attracted ads could afford a copy price well below produc- tion costs. This put papers lacking in advertising at a serious disadvan- tage: their prices would tend to be higher, curtailing sales, and they would have less surplus to invest in improving the salability of the paper (features, attractive format, promotion, etc. ). For this reason, an adver- tising-based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginal- ity the media companies and types that depend on revenue from sales alone. With advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and surviva1. 43 The ad-based media receive an adver- tising subsidy that gives them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free (or ad- disadvantaged) rivals. " Even if ad-based media cater to an affluent
(<<upscale") audience, they easily pick up a large part of the "down-
I
A PROP AGANDA MODEL l j
scale" audience, and their rivals lose market share and are eventually driven out or marginalized.
In fact, advertising has played a potent role in increasing concentra- tion even among rivals that focus with equal energy on seeking advertis- ing revenue. A market share and advertising edge on the part of one paper or television station will give it additional revenue to compete more effectively-promote more aggressively, buy more salable fea- tures and programs-and the disadvantaged rival must add expenses it cannot afford to try to stem the cumulative process of dwindling market (and revenue) share. The crunch is often fatal, and it helps explain the death of many large-circulation papers and magazines and the attrition in the number of newspapers. 45
From the time of the introduction of press advertising, therefore, working-class and radical papers have been at a serious disadvantage. Their readers have tended to be of modest means, a factor that has always affected advertiser interest. One advertising executive stated in 1856 that some journals are poor vehicles because "their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much thrown away. "46 The same force took a heavy toll of the post-World War II social-democratic press in Great Britain, with the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, and Sunday Citizen failing or abSorbed into establishment systems between 1960 and 1967, despite a collective average daily read- ership of 9. 3 million. As James Curran points out, with 4. 7 million readers in its last year, "the Daily Herald actually had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined. " What is more, surveys showed that its readers "thought mare highly of their paper than the regular readers of any other popular newspaper," and "they also read more in their paper than the readers of other popular papers despite being overwhelmingly working class. . . . "47 The death of the Herald, as well as of the News Chronicle and Sunday Citizen, was in large measure a result of progressive stran- gulation by lack of advertising support. The Herald, with 8. 1 percent of national daily circulation, got 3. 5 percent of net advertising revenue; the Sunday Citizen got one-tenth of the net advertising revenue of the Sunday Times and one-seventh that of the Observer (on a per-thou- sand-copies basis). Curran argues persuasively that the loss of these three papers was an important contribution to the declining fortunes
of the Labor party, in the case of the Herald specifically removing a mass-circulation institution that provided "an alternative framework of analysis and understanding that contested the dominant systems of representation in both broadcasting and the mainstream press. "48 A mass movement without any major media support, and subject to a
16 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave odds.
The successful media today are fully attuned to the crucial impor- tance of audience "quality": CBS proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to maximize audience delivery," it has developed a new "sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client Audience Profile, or CAP, will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network television schedules by evaluating audi- ence segments in proportion to usage levels of advertisers' products and services. "49 In short, the mass media are interested in attracting audi- ences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media "demo- cratic" thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!
The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs-they are the "patrons" who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their programs serve advertisers' needs. The choices of these patrons greatly affect the welfare of the media, and the patrons become what William Evan calls "normative reference organizations,"5o whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed. 51
For a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percentage point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year, with some variation depend- ing on measures of audience "quality. " The stakes in audience size and affluence are thus extremely large, and in a market system there is a strong tendency for such considerations to affect policy profoundly.
This is partly a matter of institutional pressures to focus on the bottom line, partly a maner of the continuous interaction of the media or- ganization with patrons who supply the revenue dollars. As Grant Tinker, then head of NBC-TV , observed, television "is an advertising- supported medium, and to the extent that support falls out, program- ming will change. "52
Working-class and radical media also suffer from the political dis- crimination of advertisers. Political discrimination is structured into advertising allocations by the stress on people with money to buy. But many firms will always refuse to patronize ideological enemies and those whom they perceive as damaging their interests, and cases of
overt discrimination add to the force of the voting system weighted by income. Public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western in 1985 after the station showed the documentary "Hungry for Profit," which contains material critical of multinational corporate activities in the Third World. Even before the program was shown, in anticipation of negative corporate reaction, station officials "did all we could to get the program sanitized" (according to one station source). 53 The chief executive of Gulf + Western complained to the station that the program was "virulently anti-business if not anti- American," and that the station's carrying the program was not the behavior "of a friend" of the corporation. The London Economist says that "Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mis- take again. "54
In addition to discrimination against unfriendly media institutions, advertisers also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their own principles. With rare exceptions these are culturally and politically conservative. 55 Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activi- ties, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies. Erik Bamouw recounts the history of a proposed documentary series on environmental problems by NBC at a time of great interest in these issues. Barnouw notes that although at that time a great many large companies were spending money on com- mercials and other publicity regarding environmental problems, the documentary series failed for want of sponsors. The problem was one of excessive objectivity in the series, which included suggestions of corporate or systemic failure, whereas the corporate message "was one of reassurance. "56
Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers. 57 With the rise in the price of advertising spots, the forgone revenue increases; and with increasing market pressure for financial performance and the diminish- ing constraints from regulation, an advertising-based media system will gradually increase advertising time and marginalize or eliminate alto- gether programming that has significant public-affairs content. 58
Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buy- ing mood. " They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases-the
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 17
'I
i .
I
dissemination of a selling message. Thus over time, instead of programs like "The Selling of the Pentagon," it is a natural evolution of a market seeking sponsor dollars to offer programs such as "A Bird's-Eye View of Scotland," "Barry Goldwater's Arizona," "An Essay on Hotels," and "Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner"-a CBS program on "how Americans eat when they dine out, where they go and why. "5~ There are excep- tional cases of companies willing to sponsor serious programs, some- times a result of recent embarrassments that call for a public-relations offset. 6O But even in these cases the companies will usually not want to sponsor close examination of sensitive and divisive issues-they prefer programs on Greek antiquities, the ballet, and items of cultural and national history and nostalgia. Bamouw points out an interesting con- trast: commercial-television drama "deals almost wholly with the here a. nd now, a. s processed via advertising budgets," but on public televi- sion, culture "has come to mean 'other cultures. ' . . . American civiliza- tion, here and now, is excluded from consideration. "61
Television stations and networks are also concerned to maintain audience "flow" levels, i. e. , to keep people watching from program to program, in order to sustain advertising ratings and revenue. Airing program interludes of documentary-cultural matter that cause station switching is costly, and over time a "free" (i. e. , ad-based) commercial system will tend to excise it. Such documentary-cultural-critical materials will be driven out ofsecondary media vehicles as well, as these companies strive to qualify for advertiser interest, although there will always be some cultural-political programming trying to come into being or surviving on the periphery of the mainstream media.
1. 3. SOURCING MASS-MEDIA NEWS: THE THIRD FILTER
The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of inter- est. The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news. They have daily news demands and imperative news schedules that they must meet. They cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where important stories may break. Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs, where important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press
18 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
conferences are held. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D. C. , are central nodes of such news activity. On a local basis, city hall and the police department are the subject of regular news "beats" for reporters. Business corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible purveyors of stories deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn OUt a large volume of material that meets the demands of news organizations for reliable, scheduled flows. Mark Fishman calls this "the principle of bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureauc- racy. "62
Government and corporate sources also have the great merit ofbeing recognizable and credible by their status and prestige. This is important to the mass media. As Fishman notes,
Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel participate in upholding a norma- tive order of authorized knowers in the society. Reporters operate with the attitude that officials ought to know what it is their job to know. . . . In particular, a newsworker will recognize an official's claim to knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge. This amounts to a moral division of labor: officials have and give the facts; reporters merely get them. 6 3
Another reason for the heavy weight given to official sources is that the mass media claim to be "Objective" dispensers of the news. Partly to maintain the image of objectivity, but also to protect themselves from criticisms of bias and the threat of libel suits, they need material that can be portrayed as presumptively accurate. 64 This is also partly a matter of cost: taking information from sources that may be presumed credible reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats, requires careful checking and costly research.
The magnitude ofthe public-information operations oflarge govern- ment and corporate bureaucracies that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thou- sands ofemployees, spending hundreds ofmiIIions ofdollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissent- ing individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In 1979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of relative openness (since closed down),
A PROPAGANDA MODEL C9
20 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
the U. S. Air Force revealed that its public-information outreach in- cluded the following:
140 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week Airman magazine, monthly circulation 125,000 34 radio and 17 TV stations, primarily overseas 45,000 headquarters and unit news releases 615,000 hometown news releases
6,600 interviews with news media
3,200 news conferences
500 news media orientation flights
50 meetings with editorial boards
11,000 speeches65
This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort. Writing back in 1970, Senator J. W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in 1968 involved 1,305 full-time employees, exclusive of additional thousands that "have public functions collateral to other duties. "66 The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service for TV and a taped features program for use three times a week, sent to 1,139 radio stations; it also produced 148 motion pictures, of which 24 were released for public consumption. 67 There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations effort has diminished since the 1960s. 68
Note that this is iust the air force. There are three other branches with massive programs, and there is a separate, overall public-information program under an assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in the Pentagon. In 1971, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was publishing a total of 371 magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times larger than the nation's biggest publisher. In an update in 1982, the Air Furee Journal lnterna- OQ7lal indicated that the Pentagon was publishing 1,203 periodicals. 69 To put this into perspective, we may note the scope of public-informa- tion operations of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCC), two of the largest of the nonprofit organizations that offer a consistently challeng- ing voice to the views of the Pentagon. The AFSC's main office infor- mation-services budget in 1984-85 was under $500,000, with eleven staffpeople. 70 Its institution-wide press releases run at about two hun- dred per year, its press conferences thirty a year, and it produces about
one film and two or rhree slide shows a year. It does not offer film clips,
photos, or taped radio programs to the media. The NCC Office of Information has an annual budget of some $350,000, issues about a hundred news releases per year, and holds four press conferences annu- ally. 71 The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the AFSC and NCC taken together are 150 to I (or 2,200 to I if we count hometown news releases of the air force), and 94 to I respectively. Aggregating the other services would increase the differ- ential by a large factor.
Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public infor- mation and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other govern- ment bodies. The AFSC and NCC cannot duplicate the Mobil Oil company's multimillion-dollar purchase of newspaper space and other corporate investments to get its viewpoint across. 72 The number of individual corporations with budgets for public information and lobby- ing in excess of those of the AFSC and NCC runs into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands. A corporate collective like the U. S. Cham- ber of Commerce had a 1983 budget for research, communications, and political activities of$65 million. 73 By 1980, the chamber was publishing a business magazine (Nation's Business) with a circulation of 1. 3 million and a weekly newspaper with 740,000 subscribers, and it was producing a weekly panel show distributed to 400 radio stations, as well as its own weekly panel-discussion programs carried by 128 commercial television stations. 7 4
Besides the U. S. Chamber, there are thousands of state and local chambers of commerce and trade associations also engaged in public- relations and lobbying activities. The corporate and trade-association lobbying network community is "a network ofwell over 150,000 profes- sionals,"75 and its resources are related to corporate income, profits, and the protective value of public-relations and lobbying outlays. Cor- porate profits before taxes in 1985 were $295. 5 billion. When the corpo- rate community gets agitated about the political environment, as it did in the 1970s, it obviously has the wherewithal to meet the perceived threat. Corporate and trade-association image and issues advertising increased from $305 million in 1975 to 5650 million in 1980. 76 So did direct-mail campaigns through dividend and other mail stuffers, the distribution of educational films, booklets and pamphlets, and outlays on initiatives and referendums, lobbying, and political and think-tank contributions. Aggregate corporate and trade-association political advertising and grass-roots outlays were estimated to have reached the billion-dollar-a- year level by 1978, and to have grown to $1. 6 billion by 1984. 77
To consolidate their preeminent position as sources, government and
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 21
22 MASUFACTURING CONSENT
business-news promoters go to great pains to make things easy for news organizations. They provide the media organizations with facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports; they schedule press conferences at hours well- geared to news deadlines;78 they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and "photo oppor- tunity" sessions. 79 It is the job ofnews officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material that their beat agency has generated at its own pace. "80
In effect, the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring the raw materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become "routine" news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers. It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy,Sl the subsidy is at the taxpayers' expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of power- ful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.
Because of their services, continuous contact on the beat, and mutual dependency, the powerful can use personal relationships, threats, and rewards to further influence and coerce the media. The media may feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship. 82 It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers. Critical sources may be avoided not only because aftheir lesser availability and higher cost of establishing credi- bility, but also because the primary sources may be offended and may even threaten the media using them.
Powerful sources may also use their prestige and importance to the media as a lever to deny critics access to the media: the Defense Department, for example, refused to participate in National Public Radio discussions of defense issues if experts from the Center for Defense Information were on the program; Elliott Abrams refused to appear on a program on human rights in Central America at the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, unless the former ambassador, Robert White, was excluded as a partici- pant;S3 Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network shows on the Bulgarian Connection where her critics would appear. 84 In the last two of these cases, the authorities and brand-name ex-
pens? were successful in monopolizing access by coercive threats. Perhaps more important, powerful sources regularly take advantage of media routines and dependency to "manage" the media, to manipu- late them into following a special agenda and framework (as we will show in detail in the chapters that follow). 85 Part of this management process consists of inundating the media with stories, which serve sometimes to foist a particular line and frame on the media (e. g. , Nicaragua as illicitly supplying arms to the Salvadoran rebels), and at other times to help chase unwanted stories off the front page or out of the media altogether (the alleged delivery of MIGs to Nicaragua during the week of the 1984 Nicaraguan election). This strategy can be traced back at least as far as the Comminee on Public Information, established to coordinate propaganda during World War I, which "discovered in 1917-18 that one of the best means of controlling news was flooding news channels with 'facts,' or what amounted to official information. "86 The relation between power and sourcing extends beyond official and corporate provision of day-to-day news to shaping the supply of "experts. " The dominance of official sources is weakened by the exis- tence of highly respectable unofficial sources that give dissident views I with great authority. This problem is alleviated by "co-opting the ex-
perts"87_i. e. , puning them on the payroll as consultants, funding their research, and organizing think tanks that will hire them directly and help disseminate their messages. In this way bias may be structured, and the supply of experts may be skewed in the direction desired by the government and "the market. "88 As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, in this "age of the expert," the "constituency" of the expert is "those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining its consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an ex- pert. "89 It is therefore appropriate that this restructuring has taken place to allow the commonly held opinions (meaning those that are functional for elite interests) to continue to prevail.
This process of creating the needed body of experts has been carried out on a deliberate basis and a massive scale.
Back in 1972, Judge Lewis Powell (later elevated to the Supreme Court) wrote a memo to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce urging business "to buy the top academic repu- tations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses. "90 One buys them, and assures that-in the words of Dr. Edwin Feulner, of the Heritage Foundation-the public-policy area "is awash with in-depth academic studies" that have the proper conclusions. Using the analogy of Procter & Gamble selling toothpaste, Feulner explained that "They sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer's
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 23
24 M A NliF A CTURING CONSENT
mind. " By the sales effort, including the dissemination of the correct ideas to "thousands of newspapers," it is possible to keep debate "within its proper perspective. "91
In accordance with this formula, during the 1970S and early 1980s a string of institutions was created and old ones were activated to the end of propagandizing the corporate viewpoint. Many hundreds of intellec- tuals were brought to these institutions, where their work was funded and their outputs were disseminated to the media by a sophisticated propaganda etfort. 92 The corporate funding and clear ideological pur- pose in the overall effort had no discernible effect on the credibility of the intellectuals so mobilized; on the contrary, the funding and pushing of their ideas catapaulted them into the press.
As an illustration of how the funded experts preempt space in the media, table 1-4 describes the "experts" on terrorism and defense issues who appeared on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour" in the course of a year in the mid-1980s. We can see that, excluding journalists, a majority of the participants (54 percent) were present or former government officials, and that the next highest category (15. 7 percent) was drawn from conservative think tanks. The largest number of appearances in the latter category was supplied by the Georgetown Center for Strate- gic and International Studies (CSIS), an organization funded by con- servative foundations and corporations, and providing a revolving door between the State Department and CIA and a nominally private organi- zation. 93 On such issues as terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection, the CSIS has occupied space in the media that otherwise might have been filled by independent voices. 94
The mass media themselves also provide "experts" who regularly echo the official view. John Barron and Claire Sterling are household names as authorities on the KGB and terrorism because the Reader's Digest has funded, published, and publicized their work; the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko became an expert on Soviet arms and intelligence because Time, ABC-TV, and the New York Times chose to feature him (despite his badly tarnished credentials). 95 By giving these purveyors of the preferred view a great deal of exposure, the media confer status and make them the obvious candidates for opinion and analysis.
Another class of experts whose prominence is largely a function of serviceability to power is former radicals who have come to "see the light. " The motives that cause these individuals to switch gods, from Stalin (or Mao) to Reagan and free enterprise, is varied, but for the establishment media the reason for the change is simply that the ex-
TABLE 1-4
Experts on Terrorism and Defense on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour," January 14, 1985,
to January 27, 1986*
A PROPAGANDA MODEL 25
CATEGORY OF EXPERT NO.
NO. EXCLUDING JOURNALISTS
% EXCLUDING JOURNALISTS
27 27 15. 7 13. 5
3. 4 5. 6 7. 8
100
Government official 24 20
Former government official 24 20
Conservative think tank 14 11. 7
Academic 12 10
Journalist 31 25. 8
Consultant 3 2. 5
Foreign government official 5 4. 2
Other 75. 8 7
Totals 120 100 89
24 24 14 12
3 5
* This is a compilation of all appearances on the news hour concerning the Bulgarian Connection (3), the shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL 007 (5), and terrorism, defense, and arms ,ontrol (33), from January 14, 1985, through January 27,1986.
radicals have finally seen the error of their ways. In a country whose citizenry values acknowledgement ofsin and repentance, the turncoats are an important class of repentant sinners. It is interesting to observe how the former sinners. whose previous work was of little interest or an object of ridicule to the mass media, are suddenly elevated to promi- nence and become authentic experts. We may recall how, during the McCarthy era, defectors and ex-Communists vied with one another in tales of the imminence of a Soviet invasion and other lurid stories. 96 They found that news coverage was a function of their trimming their accounts to the prevailing demand. The steady flow ofex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said. 91
26 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
1. 4. FLAK AND THE ENFORCERS: THE FOURTH FILTER
"Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, law- suits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of com- plaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of in- dividuals.
I f flak is produced on a large scale, or by individuals or groups with substantial resources, it can be both uncomfortable and costly to the media. Positions have to be defended within the organization and with- out, sometimes before legislatures and possibly even in courts. Adver- tisers may withdraw patronage. Television advertising is mainly of consumer goods that are readily subject to organized boycott. During the McCarthy years, many advertisers and radio and television stations were effectively coerced into quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red hunters to boycon products. Adver- tisers are still concerned to avoid offending constituencies that might produce flak, and their demand for suitable programming is a continu- ing feature of the media environment. 98 If certain kinds of fact, posi- tion, or program are thought likely to elicit flak, this prospect can be a deterrent.
The ability to produce flak, and especially flak that is costly and threatening, is related to power. 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-
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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
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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
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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.