The Mass Media – Neutral, Honest, Psychopathic

Another helpful attitude is one of deep distrust. Since most of what we hear is either plainly untrue, or half true and half distorted, and since most of what we read in the newspapers is distorted interpretations served as facts, it is by far the best plan to start out with radical scepticism and the assumption that most of what one hears is likely to be a lie or a distortion. (Erich Fromm, The Art of Being, Continuum, 1992, p. 44)

PULLING THE OTHER ONE – THE CORPORATE 'FREE PRESS'

Even the word 'media' is problematic. It is the plural of the word medium, which can be defined as 'the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses'. Air, for example, acts as a medium for the transmission of sound – it is a neutral, disinterested carrier of energetic vibrations.

News organisations would have us believe that they transmit information in a similarly neutral, natural way. They represent themselves as self-evidently dispassionate windows on the world. Thus, while there is plenty of discussion about what appears in these windows, there is next to no discussion about who built them, about what their goals and values might be. One might almost think that the mass media had always existed in their current form; that they were simply facts of life, even God-given.

And yet consider two salient facts: 1) much of the contemporary world is dominated by giant, multinational corporations; 2) the media system reporting on that world is itself made up of giant corporations. Indeed, media entities are often owned by the same giant corporations they are tasked with covering.

How young would a child have to be before it failed to recognise a problem here? And yet this is a realisation that escapes close to 100 per cent of professional journalists, at least if their public utterances are to be believed.

The complacent media silence surrounding the oxymoron that is 'the corporate free press' is not indicative of an honest, rational consensus in a free society; it is symptomatic of an all-pervasive media corruption, of a deep cultural malaise. The silence, quite simply, is a lie.

In this book, we will argue that the corporate mass media – not just the right-wing Tory press, but also the most highly respected 'liberal' media – broadcasters like the BBC, and newspapers like the Guardian, the Observer and the Independent – constitute a propaganda system for elite interests. We will show how even the most obvious facts concerning even the most vital subjects – US-UK government responsibility for genocide, vast corporate criminality, threats to the very existence of human life – are distorted, suppressed, marginalised and ignored. In what lies ahead, readers will encounter rational mainstream discussion and forensic analysis – and then sudden, inexplicable silence. We will encounter confident, reasoned debate – and then weird irrationality.

For readers subjected to the corporate media version of the world over several decades, the above claim may well seem remarkable, even outlandish. The natural response is to insist: 'Sorry, but we do see honest reporting and commentary in the media. We read Robert Fisk in the Independent, Seumas Milne in the Guardian and John Pilger (and Media Lens!) in the New Statesman. The government has been widely criticised and challenged on its conduct in the build up to the Iraq war. Corporations are subject to robust censure and investigation – look at the Enron scandal, for goodness sake!'

Alas, all is not as it seems. As ever, the devil lies in the detail. He is also highly visible one step back from our common-sense presumptions – when we are able to recognise, with psychologist Erich Fromm, 'the pathology of normalcy'. Then we will see that the media system is less a window on the world and more a painting of a window on the world.

Correcting for the distorted vision of the media begins with an understanding of just how and why that vision has been distorted. It begins, in fact, with an understanding of the fundamental structure of that curious abstract entity – the corporation.

OUTLAWING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

In his book, The Corporation, Canadian law professor Joel Bakan notes that corporations are legally obliged to maximise returns for shareholders. Company executives are literally compelled to subordinate all considerations to profit:

The law forbids any motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people's money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves – only as means to serve the corporation's own interests, which generally means to maximise the wealth of its shareholders. Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal – at least when it is genuine. (Joel Bakan, The Corporation, Constable, 2004, p. 37)

This ban on social responsibility has been established in legal judgments over hundreds of years. In a key nineteenth-century court case, for example, Lord Bowen declared:

charity has no business to sit at boards of directors qua charity. There is, however, a kind of charitable dealing which is for the interest of those who practise it, and to that extent and in that garb (I admit not a very philanthropic garb) charity may sit at the board, but for no other purpose. (Quoted, ibid., pp. 38-9)

The inevitable consequence, Bakan writes, is what are known blandly as 'externalities': the routine and regular harms caused to others – workers, consumers, communities, the environment. This, Bakan notes, makes the corporation essentially a 'psychopathic creature', unable to recognise or act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others (ibid., p. 60).

Robert Hinkley, who spent 23 years as a corporate securities attorney advising large corporations on securities offerings, mergers and acquisitions explains:

When toxic chemicals are spilled, forests destroyed, employees left in poverty, or communities devastated through plant shutdowns, corporations view these as unimportant side effects outside their area of concern. But when the company's stock price dips, that's a disaster. The reason is that, in our legal framework, a low stock price leaves a company vulnerable to takeover or means the CEO's job could be at risk. In the end, the natural result is that corporate bottom line goes up, and the state of the public good goes down. This is called privatising the gain and externalising the cost. ('How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility', Business Ethics, January/February 2002, )

Businessman Robert Monks adds:

The corporation is an externalising machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine ... There isn't any question of malevolence or of will; the enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed. (Quoted, Bakan, The Corporation, p. 70)

This seems a world away, does it not, from the smiley, affable, hightech output of the corporate media? Adverts are full of humour and fun, television presenters beam with smiles and personal warmth. Can this really be the product of some kind of psychopathic system? It is a deeply troubling notion – we grew up with the media, we are used to viewing it as a normal part of our lives.

And yet consider that the US media watch site, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), described how media executives 'worry that the flood of grisly images flowing into living rooms from Iraq and elsewhere will discourage advertisers'. Sure enough, a General Motors spokesperson explained that her company 'would not advertise on a TV programme [just] about atrocities in Iraq', while an advertising executive advised 'you don't want to run a humorous commercial next to horrific images and stories' (quoted, Peter Hart and Julie Hollar, 'Fear & Favor 2004 – How Power Shapes the News', March/ April 2005, ).

This helps explain why a typical half-hour US local TV news broadcast devotes 6 minutes 21 seconds to sport and weather, while a typical half-hour national newscast devotes 38 seconds to US foreign policy including the war in Iraq (Time, February 28, 2005).

What the West has done to Iraq is almost beyond belief – we have imposed vast slaughter and suffering on an already impoverished Third World country. And yet we see only glimpses of the truth on our TV screens because burned and blasted bodies obstruct the selling of cars and toothpaste! If that does not reflect a psychopathic set of values, what does?

OF BIG BROTHER AND 'AUNTIE BEEB' THE PROPAGANDA MODEL

In their seminal work Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky set out their 'propaganda model' of the media. In a subsequent article written in 1996, Edward Herman reflected on the origins of the model:

We had long been impressed with the regularity with which the media operate within restricted assumptions, depend heavily and uncritically on elite information sources, and participate in propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests. In trying to explain why they do this we looked for structural factors as the only possible root of systematic behaviour and performance patterns. ('The Propaganda Model Revisited', Monthly Review, July 1996)

This would indeed seem a highly rational response; and yet it is rejected out of hand by the mainstream media. Consider that Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model has been mentioned four times by name in British national newspapers since 1988 (including two mentions in book reviews). The much vaunted Guardian has mentioned the model precisely once over this period. A detailed explanation of the kind you are reading now has never appeared in a national British newspaper.

Herman and Chomsky were right to be impressed by patterns of media performance. As readers will discover over the course of this book, the media adhere with awesome consistency to broadly similar presumptions about the priorities and goals of Western power.

But how can this happen in a free society? Surely no conspiracy theory could account for conformity in literally thousands of journalists and media workers operating within hundreds of media organisations. The idea is outlandish in the extreme – the political mechanisms for projecting Big Brother control of this kind do not exist; a plot on such a scale would be instantly exposed by any number of whistleblowers.

Far more plausible is Herman and Chomsky's suggestion that media performance is largely shaped by market forces, by the bottom-line goals of media corporations operating within state-capitalist society. Built into the system itself, they suggest, is a range of filters that work ceaselessly to shape media output. Herman here explains with great concision:

The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses.

Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack. The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labelled communist.

These factors are linked together, reflecting the multi-levelled capability of powerful business and government entities and collectives (e.g., the Business Roundtable; U.S. Chamber of Commerce; industry lobbies and front groups) to exert power over the flow of information. (Ibid.)

Thus, media companies are typically large conglomerates – News International, CBS (now merged with Westinghouse), Turner Broadcasting (now merged with Time-Warner) – which may belong to even larger parent corporations such as General Electric (owners of NBC).

All are tied into the stock market, all have wealthy individuals sitting on their boards, many with extensive personal and business contacts in other corporations. General Electric and Westinghouse, for example, are huge multinational companies heavily involved in weapons production and nuclear power.

It is not hard to appreciate how press neutrality is compromised by these factors. Former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil wrote of his exboss: 'Rupert expects his papers to stand broadly for what he believes: a combination of right-wing Republicanism from America mixed with undiluted Thatcherism from Britain' (Quoted, Alan Rusbridger, 'Sour Times – The Only Good Editor Is an Obedient Editor if You Are Rupert Murdoch', Guardian, October 24, 1996). Media academics Peter Golding and Graham Murdoch accept that 'media proprietors can determine the editorial line ... of the papers and broadcast stations they own' (Mass Media and Society, Arnold, 1996, p. 15). FAIR quote a US newspaper reporter whose bosses also own a TV station:

When the Nielsen TV ratings come out, I know I am expected to write a big story if the co-owned station's ratings are good and to bury the story if the co-owned station's ratings are down. Or another example. A few years ago, I ran a survey asking readers what they thought of local television news programs. My general manager told me the next time I do something that might affect our sister station, I better check with him first. I got the message. I haven't done a similar project since then. (Quoted, Hart and Hollar, 'Fear & Favor 2004')

Newspapers have to attract and maintain a high proportion of advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, the price of any newspaper would skyrocket, which would soon spell its demise in the marketplace. Britain's most progressive broadsheet newspapers – the Guardian, the Observer and the Independent – are dependent on advertising for '75 per cent or more of their total take' (Peter Preston, 'War, What Is it Good For?', Observer, October 7, 2001).

Even the threat of withdrawal of advertising can affect editorial content. In April 2005, the Independent reported that General Motors had pulled its advertising from one of America's biggest newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, after it called for GM chief executive Rick Wagoner to be sacked. The car manufacturer decided to stop advertising in the west coast publication due to 'factual errors and misrepresentation' (Katherine Griffiths, 'Angry GM Withdraws Ads from LA Times', Independent, April 9, 2005). FAIR described how a survey of US media workers had found respondents concerned about 'pressure from advertisers trying to shape coverage' as well as 'outside control of editorial policy' (quoted, Hart and Hollar, 'Fear & Favor 2004'). In May 2005, financial giant Morgan Stanley informed key publications of new guidelines that required its adverts to be pulled if negative stories about it were published. A key section of its planned addition to advertising contracts read:

In the event that objectionable editorial coverage is planned, agency must be notified as a last-minute change may be necessary. If an issue arises after-hours or a call cannot be made, immediately cancel all Morgan Stanley ads for a minimum of 48 hours. (Jon Fine, 'Morgan Stanley Institutes New "Pull Ad" Press Policy Designed to Respond to "Objectionable" Editorial Coverage', AdAge.com, May 18, 2005)