Killed by the Messenger
by Drew Tipson
"Since most people base their political judgments on a few powerful media outlets, the performance of these institutions cries out for scrutiny."-Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
"Since most people base their political judgments on a few powerful media outlets, the performance of these institutions cries out for scrutiny."
In "Iron and Silk", a novella by Mark Salzman, I came across a passage in which a naive American teacher asks his Chinese students how they can believe their own Communist-controlled newspapers instead of the American free press. One of his students responds: "Why that's simple--your newspapers are run by capitalist oppressors, so of course they will print whatever makes them look good. But our newspapers are controlled by the people-why would they lie to us?" Granted, I was and still am quite skeptical of who "the people" are in this statement, but I couldn't help thinking that there might be some truth in this observation of the American media. It turns out there's a great deal of truth to it.Today, the Constitutional guarantee to "freedom of the press," one of the most venerated tenets of U.S. democracy, is helping to tear apart the very ideal it is based upon. From The Washington Post to supposedly "public" television, our modern news media is primarily controlled by large corporate interests who routinely pervert the standards of journalistic integrity, unbiased reporting, and even political neutrality. Furthermore, most of these large media outlets fight to economically eradicate smaller, independent, or dissenting news sources (re. "The Crack Conspiracy" in Dec'96 issue of the Hermes). The First Amendment protects the actions of these media powers, yet because they monopolize the content and public perception of "the news," they in effect violate the very spirit of the law.Trying to counter these large media interests is the primary focus of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), a media watchdog group based in New York. FAIR's online archives contain countless examples of how media bias subtly manipulates the political, moral, and historical debates. I'll summarize just a few of them to illustrate how modern media bias operates:The most obvious mechanism for influencing the news is screening the stories that get published in the first place. Todd Putnam, editor of National Boycott News, was recently contacted by an NBC reporter who wanted to do a story on current influential boycotts. When Putnam told her that the biggest boycott was against GE, owner of NBC since 1986, she immediately responded, "We can't do that one. Well, we could do that one,but we won't." After learning that most of the other major boycotts were against corporations with large advertising shares, the story was dropped entirely.If that doesn't bother you, then recent firings of liberal and populist columnists should. Colin McCarthy, nicknamed the "conscience" of The Washington Post for his anti-war sentiments and stories on the lives of the poor, was "let go" last month without explanation. You may not remember his work-he was the one who wrote all those condemnations of U.S. conduct in the Persian Gulf War were never published in The Washington Post. Barbara Reynolds, one of the few black feminists in the mainstream news, also lost her job without explanation last November. USA Today certainly did not fire her because she was unpopular. Perhaps it had something to do with her constant criticism of the media's total lack of interest in covering increasing urban economic destitution-something she was told "just wasn't interesting anymore." Urban poverty is still growing steadily. Mainstream news coverage on the subject is steadily falling.News shows like The News Hour with Jim Lerhrer, whose guest experts are nearly all white males, go as far as to ban all critics of progressive policy from the show-Lerhrer himself labels them "moaners" and "whiners." In countless discussion segments on Central America not a single guest on Lerhrer's show has represented the large and vocal anti-intervention movement. During discussions on environmental issues only one out of seventeen guests represented the concerns of environmental groups. This is the kind of balanced discussion of issues we get, even on public television.But there are more subtle means of manipulating news content, such as placing questionable emphasis on certain facts and neglecting others. Consider Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was celebrated nationally a month ago. Every year news programs and national papers roll out the same historical retrospective, the grainy "I have a dream" video on TV, and read a short reflection on his assassination. If you look carefully at the dates of King's life, however, you'll notice that the last years of King's life seem to have disappeared. That's because the media spent those two years viciously attacking King for his views on poverty and American imperialism. After the Civil Rights acts passed in 1965, King saw the next step as advancing economic reforms and "human rights"-without which he believed "civil rights" would be a hollow victory. Just before his assassination King had already planned a second march on Washington, this time with a multiracial "army of the poor" who would demand "a poor people's Bill of Rights.". For this the press charged him with "insurrection."King also challenged with America's military and economic abuses abroad in a speech called "Beyond Vietnam." King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence today," and noted that western businesses were investing in economically underdeveloped countries "only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries." In response, Time magazine called him a "demagogic slanderer", his speech "a script from Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post went so far as to claim that King had "diminished his usefulness" to the country. Northern-based mainstream media certainly find King's image useful today-but only to chastise the more blatant southern brand of racism. Nothing is mentioned when it comes to King's views on the more insidious northern economic classism, his criticism of large abusive corporations, and his insinuation that the U.S. was corrupt as a "policeman of the world"-nothing is remembered.Press coverage is supposed to be balanced-presenting all sides of a story. But often this "balanced" coverage is "balanced" between two relatively similar positions-usually representing the views among powerful politicians and lobbyists in Washington. Other interests viewpoints are shut out, as they were during the recent welfare debate. A FAIR survey found that only 10% of media sources during this debate represented "recipients of welfare and social services." While these people were crucial to the discussion, this small percentage were never allowed to make their case. News commentators, like Diane Sawyer (est. yearly salary 7 million), went so far as to ridicule their concerns on the air. More disturbing is the limited degree of research reporters put into the story-only 9% of sources consulted had done any sort of study into the effects of welfare at all. Most reporters take their facts from other reporters without checking for validity, choosing to put their efforts into getting sound-bites from politicians (who make up the vast majority of quoted media sources). We never hear, for instance, that the money lost from tax cheating by the rich dwarfs all welfare aid to the poor. Or that the increase or decrease of welfare coverage has no statistical effect on out-of-wedlock birth rates. By limiting the debate primarily to male, anti-welfare voices, we lose these crucial observations, and for many voters, whose only source of facts is the mainstream news, this coverage is nothing more then a political advertisement.Choices of wording often betray bias as well. The Washington Post routinely labels violent acts by Palestinians terrorism, yet articles about violent Israelis, like Noam Freedman (who gunned down several unarmed Palestinians), sport strange titles like: "Israeli soldier opposed to accord." As CounterSpin commentator Janine Jackson explained it: "Violent acts by Israelis are explained by 'individual glitches' while violent acts by Palestinians are almost always taken as proof of a group propensity." Speaking of the Middle East, you may remember anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments during the Oklahoma City bombing. "Terrorism experts" like Steven Emerson opinions delivered opinions such as: "This was done to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait." The New York Times made its terrorism conclusions based only the fact that the city has "at least three mosques." You probably never heard about Iraqi refugee Saher Al-Saidi, whose unborn child was killed when vigilantes threw stones through the windows of her home after 24 hours of straight news coverage blaming Muslims for the bombing. This story, as well as other instances of violence against Muslims, will surely not be included in media retrospectives of the bombing.One of CounterSpin's more compelling examples of media "spin" is the story of Karen Palmer, who was kidnapped and raped at gunpoint on Oct 3, 1995. Palmer sold her story to NBC because she "felt very strongly that we as women need to break the silence about rape," and wanted to "put a face on rape survivors." Her story was made the subject of a one-hour Dateline special which was called "Screams in the Night" and was aired on Dec. 4. After getting a hold of a review copy of the show, Plamer was outraged with the handling of her story and organized against NBC, succeeding in changing a few, but not all of the show's faulty elements.The special's version of the facts was that Palmer was a naive rape victim whose experience inspired her to become an activist and fight the police for justice. The program begins with Mrs. Palmer's driving away from a candlelight vigil protesting violence about women... on the night of the O.J. Simpson verdict. Indeed much of the program's content dealt with O.J. Simpson, a subject guaranteed to arouse interest, and was peppered with voice-overs by Maria Shriver like: "she grew up... just a few blocks from O.J. Simpson. The night he was set free would turn out to be the worst night of her life," and "she couldn't stop thinking about the verdict."But according to Palmer, this simply wasn't her story. First of all, Palmer was hardly naive. She had been a long time activist, which was partly why she was later able to publicly organize against NBC so effectively. Secondly, the O.J. Simpson verdict had nothing to do with her rape. Palmer's real story concerned her struggle with the racism she encountered in the Santa Monica police department.One of Palmer's main problems with the show was that it featured a gradual revealing of the original police composite sketch of her rapist- done for dramatic effect. Not only had Palmer never before seen this sketch, but it looked nothing like her attacker. The sketch was so generic, in fact, that the police could, and did, use it to arrest young black men at random. Palmer was able to later document that half a dozen young black men were picked up for her rape and held for days without phone calls or charges being made-and many of them didn't even resemble the already erroneous sketch. None of this information was part of NBC's original report, at least partly because it didn't fit the program's "theme" of connecting black violence to the O.J. Simpson verdict. Palmer was later told that her activism had been left out because it would "lose their audience". NBC apparently couldn't imagine how an anti-rape activist could also be anti-racism.These stories are just a tiny sampling of a growing trend of sloppy reporting and downright subversion by corporate and politically slanted interests in mind. I have included these examples not to create a tight narrative of media abuses, but as individual examples. There is no organized media conspiracy. But we must question the collective effects of corporate and political influences on the news. When a limited set of interests controls the news and regulates content to fit their own views there is a word for it: "propaganda".Fewer then 15 corporations control the daily circulation of newspapers. This number is constantly shrinking. The press is supposedly a public forum. Yet you need millions of dollars to even start an medium sized newspaper, billions to buy space on the supposedly "public airwaves" to start a radio or television station. You will have to rely on advertisers and thus bow to their interests. Even then every other news source will do its best to wipe you out economically. Imagine the Hermes competing with Time Magazine-or the Argus competing with The Washington Times. When free speech costs both millions and censorship of the original message, the speech is hardly free.