Manufacturing
Consent
--
Only
the corporate sector has the resources to produce public
information and propaganda on a scale of the pentagon and
other government 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 lobbying in excesss of those of the AFSC and NCC runs
into the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands. A corporate
collective like the US Chamber 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 milion 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. (74)
Besides
the US 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 of well over
150,000 professionals,” (75) and
its resources are related to corporate income, profits,
and the protective value of public-relations and lobbying
outlays. Corporate profits before taxes in 1985 were $295.5
billion. When the corporate 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 $650 milion 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 advertising and grass=roots outlays
weree 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 business-news promoters go to great pains to make things
easy for news organizations. They provide the media organization
with facilities with 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 opportunity” sessions. (79) It is the job of news 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,(81) the subsidy at the taxpayer’s expense, so that, in
effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest
of powerful 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 of their lesser
availability and higher cost of establishing credibility,
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 NPR 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 participant; (83)
Claire Sterling refused to participate in television-network
shows on the Bulgarian Conneciton where her critics would
appear. (84) In the last two of these
cases, the authorities and brand-name experts were successful
in monopolizing access by coercive threats.
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, lawsuits, speeches and bills before
congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive
action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it
may consist of the entirely independent actions of individuals.
If
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 without, sometimes before legislatures
and possibly even in courts. Advertisers 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
boycott products. Advertisers are still concerned to avoid
offending constituencies that might produce flak, and their
demand for suitable programming is a continuing feature
of the media environment. (98)
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 80s. 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 putting together a program, or from irate officials
of ad agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials
asking for reply time or threatening retaliation. (99)
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 80s,
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 specialiazed in Fairness
Doctrine complaints and libel suits to aid “media
victims.” The Capital Legal Foundation, incorporated
in 1977, was the vehicle for Westmoreland’s $120 million
libel suit against CBS. (100)
The
Media Institute, organized in 1972 and funded by corporate-wealthy
patrons, sponsors monitoring projects, conferences, and
studies 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, (101) but it underwirtes 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-rleations officer
of the American Medical Associaiton; 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-1980s as a “non-profit,
non-partisan” research institute, with warm accolades
from Patrick Buchanan, 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 mainly from large corporations
and the wealthy heirs and foundation of the corporate system.
At least eight separate oil companies were contributors
to AIM in the early 1980s, but the wide representation 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 bandwagons, and attacks
them for alleged deficiencies whenever they fail to toe
the line on foreign policy. It conditions the media to expect
trouble (and cost increases) for violating right-wing standards
of bias. (105)
Freedom
House, which dates back to the early 1940s, has had interlocks
with AIM, the World Anticommunist League, Resistance Internatonal,
and US 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 supervision it found
dubious. Its election monitors also found the Salvadoran
elections of 1982 admirable. (106) It
has expended substantial resources in criticizing the media
for insufficient sympathy with US foreign-policy ventures
and excessively harsh criticism of US client states. Its
most notable publication of this genre was Peter Braestrup’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. In 1982, when
the Reagan adminstration 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 propagandistic role and links to a larger corporate
program are rarely mentioned or analyzed. AIM head, Reed
Irvine’s diatribes are frequently published, 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)
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