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Media Watch

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The SideBar that appears in "Short Takes" is a good starting point for any discussion of the Media in the Real World --

How Do I Decide Who To Trust?

Three network TV stations, each with its own anchor-people, news “magazines,” names like Koppell, Geraldo, Tony Brown, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Sam Donaldson, plus dozens of role-players, each vying to be The One You Trust; add CNN, PBS, names like Blitzer, Amanapour, Charlie Rose; add The New York Times, The Daily News, Time, Newsweek, Nation...and dozens more, each one with scores of writers and reporters, each vying to be The One You Trust....

    How do you sort through them?  How can you possibly decide who to believe?   How do you decide which one is true, most true, most likely to be true, least untrue? 

    The way I do it is so obvious it borders on being simpleminded. Take any controversial incident — like the Gulf-of-Tonkin incident that started the Vietnam War.  Most people believed LBJ when he said they attacked us; some thought LBJ got his pronouns crossed—they didn’t start it, we did. Years later, LBJ admitted that he made the whole thing up!  You recall one or two people who did say that (but it seemed so preposterous you ignored them...)  If they had it right, put their names at the top of your list.  The first person who told you that the CIA sold drugs or that it was Israel who stole Palestine, not the other way around—put them on your list.  Do that for months, years.  Before long, you know the studs from the duds. If you ask me to name one person who has been right more often than anyone else: Noam Chomsky.  If you want the publications that have it right an astonishing amount of the time, see Z Magazine, The Nation, CounterPunch and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.  If you want to know which TV station had it right, NONE OF THEM!  A poll taken by F.A.I.R. (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) came to the astonishing conclusion that the more you watched TV during the Gulf War, the less you knew about it!   

Bottom Line: deciding which source of the news to believe is probably the most critical truth-learning decision you'll ever make.

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We aren't total idiots.  We strongly suspect that the Media doesn't tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but most of us don't have a clue about how the Media really functions.  What makes it tick?  What are the mechanisms and motives behind it?  Does it follow any discernible pattern?  If I had to name only two books that together reveal how the Media really works, I'd point you at Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly (1983), and Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.  Those are wonderful, brilliant books --and if you have a high threshold for boredom, you should read them.

If you want a shamefully quick and easy overview of how the media works, check out the Media chapter in David Cogswell's Chomsky for Beginners.  I commissioned and edited Chomsky for Beginners. Dave Cogswell and I worked hard to make the book's structure and chapter headings so clear and logical that you could get a headstart on understanding the book by simply reading the Table of Contents.

Reproduced below is the Table of Contents of Part Four of Chomsky for Beginners -- "Noam Chomsky and the MEDIA: Can You Believe What You See and Hear?" 

If you double click on the black & white image in the left column, you will see the opening page of the Media section of Chomsky for Beginners.  Between the Table of Contents and that one page, you get a feel for the reality of the Media.  They do not exist to tell us the truth about the "news" or about anything else.  The Media is "little more than a public relations industry for the rich and powerful."  

Or, to put that another way, "Can a newspaper or TV station blow the whistle on the Good Old Boys that own it?"   Of course it can't! To paraphrase a line from the contents above, "ownership determines content."

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I will deal with the Chomsky for Beginners media chapters more systematically later on, but for now I'd like to draw your attention to "Filter #5: ANTI-COMMUNISM--Creating a Bogeyman."  I will eventually do a section on the "Defense Budget," because it is impossible to understand how America works without understanding the Defense Budget.  But for now, a couple of facts will make our point:

1. A Defense Budget is a recent 'invention.'  We didn't have one at the onset of World War II, America's most far reaching war, and we did pretty well without it.

2. When WW II ended, President Truman and his advisors decided that it was in the best interest of rich guys who manufactured weapons to KEEP the huge Defense Budget after the war.

3. Truman and his advisors decided that the American people would not tolerate a huge Defense Budget during peace time -- unless they could come up with a "Bogeyman" to scare the hell out of us.

4. The Bogeyman they used from the end of WW II until the collapse of the Soviet Union was "Communism."  The Threat of World Domination by Communist Dictators.

5. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Communism -- and "the Evil Empire" -- could no longer be used to frighten us with; if our leaders wanted to maintain that huge Defense Budget, they had to come up with a new Bogeyman to scare the brains out of us. 

6. Within a couple months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Noam Chomsky ventured an educated guess on who or what would be the New Bogeyman.  Chomsky felt that the leading candidate was some combination of words that depicted Arab and Muslims as utter madmen: Arab Terrorism or Muslim Fundamentalists or...I'm sure you get the point.  Our leaders aren't trying to ice Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or anyone else, because that would be finite and measurable.  When they got the Anti Christ of the Day the threat would be over and they'd have no excuse for a Defense Budget so enormous that it keeps America broke and so dangerously useless that they have to invent threats out of mid air to fight wars with.  Our leaders, under the spiritual guidance of large defense contracts and the Israeli lobby, are on a mission from Gawd to stomp out "Islamic Fundamentalism" or "Arab Terrorism" or some other all-inclusive abstraction that uses Arabs and Muslims everywhere in the world as scapegoats.  It would be funny if it didn't hurt so damned much.

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One of the things that Dave Cogswell loves most about Chomsky's analysis of the Media is Chomsky's "trick" of comparing Media coverage of one event to another event by using the irrefutable,  measurable, objective standard of how many "column inches" one article gets compared to another.  

Whatever gets the most space, column inches, words ... is the most important.  

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I have never before put what I am about to say in writing.  

(If I was waiting for the right time, then I guess this is the right time...)

There was a point during the 1990-91 Gulf War when I became so frustrated with the TV coverage of the war that I took out my runner's stopwatch and, feeling every inch of the way like a madman, I began to time the segments of the news.  What I found was so slimy and underhanded and manipulative that it was like something out of Orwell's novel 1984.

And it can be verified by anyone who is willing to go the archives of the three TV networks.  

I don't expect many people to go to those archives.  But what I DO expect you to know is this: if I am inaccurate in any way, the networks will not sit quietly by while I slander their slimy asses.  If what I'm saying isn't 100% true and accurate, they will nail me to the wall.

What follows is the truth --

It was Superbowl weekend, 1991.  The feeling that drove me was the completely irrational notion that I wasn't seeing the American news about an American war waged on the people of Iraq, I was watching the Israeli news about the poor besieged people of Israel ... and in which the Americans and Iraqis were bit players in a relatively unimportant TV "sidebar."

Ridiculous, right?

But, as I said, I was stark raving mad, so I timed the news reports.

The dates and times of the three news reports I taped are stated clearly at top of each...psychotic episode?

The numbers on the left hand side reflect the running time (or cumulative time elapsed) of the news report, beginning at 0:00.  The numbers on the right hand side reflect the time of each particular segment.

TV NEWS BREAKDOWN

Saturday, January 26, 1991 — Channel 7 (ABC), 11:00 P.M. News:

TOTALS: 

News about the WAR between the U.S. and Iraq = 2:50

News about the fear of Terrorists = 2:45

News about Israel = 4:20 

Sunday, January 27, 1991 — Channel 2 (CBS), 11:00 PM News:

TOTALS: 

News about the war between the U.S. and Iraq = 2:30

News about Israel = 5:30 

Monday, January 28, 1991 — Channel 4 (NBC), 11:00 PM News

TOTALS: 

News about the war between the U.S. and Iraq = 2:45

News about Saudi Arabia = 2:30 

Interview with Saddam Hussein = 2:30 

News about Israel = 2:30 

Amazing!!!  I wasn't cracked after all.  In the television news equivalent of Chomsky's irrefutable, objective, measurable, verifiable comparison of the relative importance of news items:

= the CBS "news" report contained over twice as much news about Israel as it did about America's war against Iraq.  Somebody at CBS clearly felt that news about Israel was over twice as important as news about America even America was waging (or staging) a war.  

= the ABC "news" report dedicated about 60% more "column inches" to Israel than it did to America's war against Iraq.  Somebody at ABC clearly (but not as clearly as CBS) put Israel FIRST

= the NBC news report apparently gave equal time to everything 

For the moment (especially since I don't have my notes in front of me and I am not quite dumb enough to say something inaccurate about such a touchy subject) I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about the reasons for those astonishingly "tilted" news report.  But I will give you a hint of where to look for the answers to why that happened.  Check out the list of the major stockholders of the three TV networks in Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly.  Then check out the rest of the verifiable, public information that these two books provide -- the interlocking chains of ownership (companies that own, or are owned by the networks); the Boards of Directors of the largest non-Media corporations in America, including our major banks, etc, etc, etc.  The metaphor that all of these Rich Dudes are "in bed with each other" is a pretty good one...but baby, that is one huge bed.

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Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly, arguably the seminal book in understanding the implications of corporate-owned, profit-run Media, answerable to its stockholders and subservient to its advertisers,  but indifferent to its "consumers" -- us: they generate bullshit and we buy it -- was written 1983.  But because of its 'other' discovery, The Media Monopoly has to be updated every couple years.  Bagdikian's other discovery was that a handful of Media corporations, "the media of influence," control most of the "information" we get.  The Media of Influence (the three TV networks, major newspapers like the New York Times, etc.), depending upon how you slice the pie, consists of between ten and 24 corporations.  If you want to know the names of those major corporations before I get around to listing them (my most urgent purpose is to stop the impending slaughter of the people of Iraq and the genocide-in-progress of the people of Palestine; at this time, everything else is secondary) check out the two books I've been raving about.  Every year, fewer corporations own and control more of the Media.  (Remember the obvious: ownership determines content.) The fewer corporations that own and control the Media, the more ALL of the news is the same.  The Media, to an enormous extent, determine what we consider "reality."  If you read and see and hear that shit is popcorn enough times, you will eventually be certain that shit is popcorn and that anyone who claims otherwise is nuts.

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We interrupt this tirade with a question the tirader(?) neglected to ask: why was NBC the only one of the three TV networks that didn't broadcast Israel-First news?  It seems impossible that the answer could be this blatant and straightforward...but maybe it is.  Maybe those huge Media of Influence corporations are so arrogant, and consider US so stupid and irrelevant, that they don't bother to hide their "affiliations."  As far as I can tell, the reason that NBC gave a relatively even handed report of the war is this: the "parent company" of NBC is General Electric, one of the largest manufacturers of weapons in the world.  They make a lot of scratch on war, no matter who fights it, so it behooves them to fan the flames, instigate, to Henry-Kissingerize the world.  ("You gonna let him say that about your Mama, or you gonna be a man and purchase this fine pistola?")

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I assure you, I have much to say about the Media.

Ron D