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Why The Media Lies - Corporate Structure of The Mass Media
Thu Mar 11 15:23:36 2004
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Why The Media Lies -
The Corporate Structure of The Mass Media
http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq32.html

Introduction

It was Walter Lippman who coined the phrase �the manufacture of consent�, enjoining it as a means of population control. Lippman�s concept may indeed be in effect today. In this regard, the status of the mass media and its faithful propagation of the established opinion that Western policy is fundamentally benevolent in intention, is an issue of paramount importance. What role has the media played in clarifying the real principles and motives of Western policy to the public, and what does this entail for the nature of Western democracy and the role of the population in the formulation of policy? The mass media is clearly one of the most powerful institutions in society; it is, for most of the public, the ultimate source of all their information. The structure of the mass media will therefore have fundamental implications for the political and cultural orientation of the public. Hence, an understanding of the mass media will throw considerable light on the structure of Western society, the relationship between the public and those who possess power, as well as the ideologies produced by the media and their impact on the public. All scholars generally agree that the media do have the capacity to set the agenda of public discourse about political affairs, and it is widely recognised that the media has a significant role in actualising the diffusion of Western ideology and culture throughout the world. However, they differ over the degree to which the media limits the public�s understanding of current affairs and the overall consequences of this.

Nevertheless, the vast extent of the manipulation of the media under the sway of business interests has been harshly revealed in the statement of John Swainton, Chief of Staff of the New York Times. �There is not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinion,� he reprimanded his colleagues at his retirement party in September.

�The business of a journalist now is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fall at the feet of Mammon and sell himself for his daily bread. We are tools, vessels of rich men behind the scenes, we are jumping jacks. They pull the strings; we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are the properties of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes.�[1]

I. The Independent Media: A Myth

It is generally clear that the media has failed to generate genuine public awareness of the actual nature of Western policy. Majid Tehranian, for example, who is Professor of International Communication at the University of Hawaii and Director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, points out that:

�In their scholarship, William Appleton Williams, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Ramsey Clark, Ali Mazrui, and other critics of US foreign policies have provided an abundance of evidence to support the charges on the counter-democratic role of the United States in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.�[2]

British historian Mark Curtis, former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London, similarly confirms:

�Mutual Anglo-American support in ordering the affairs of key nations and regions, often with violence, to their design has been a consistent feature of the era that followed the Second World War... Policy in, for example, Malaya, Kenya, British Guiana and Iran was geared towards organising Third World economies along guidelines in which British, and Western, interests would be paramount, and those of the often malnourished populations would be ignored or further undermined. Similarly, US interventions overseas - in Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, etcetera - were designed to counter threats to the Western practice of assigning the Third World to mere client status to Western business interests. British and US forces have acted as mercenary - and often extremely violent - mobs intended to restore �order� in their domains and to preserve the existing privileges of elites within their own societies.�[3]

Development specialist Dr. J. W. Smith, who is Director of Research for the California-based Institute for Economic Democracy, is even more explicit:

�No society will tolerate it if they knew that they (as a country) were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990... While mouthing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule, all over the world state-sponsored terrorists were overthrowing democratic governments, installing and protecting dictators, and preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule. Twelve to fifteen million mostly innocent people were slaughtered in that successful 45 year effort to suppress those breaks for economic freedom which were bursting out all over the world... All intelligence agencies have been, and are still in, the business of destabilizing undeveloped countries to maintain their dependency and the flow of the world�s natural wealth to powerful nations� industries at a low price and to provide markets for those industries at a high price.�[4]

That the media has failed to accurately portray the real nature of Western foreign policy to the public, playing instead the subservient role of a propaganda machine for elite interests, is therefore quite obvious. The question that then remains is, why does the media � conventionally believed to be critical of the establishment - behave in a way that conforms to the false picture presented by the government and corporate elite of their own policies? The anwer is simple: in a nutshell, the mass media is the establishment.

To begin our analysis then, we will discuss a propaganda model of the mass media. It is thus useful to begin with what is arguably the most thorough model of the media - that proposed by Edward Herman (Professor Emeritus of Finance at Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania) and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT), both of whom are leading critics of US foreign policy.[5]

There are particularly pertinent reasons to begin with their model - the primary one being that it is arguably the most thoroughly researched and empirically verified model available. Herman and Chomsky�s landmark study, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, comes under the recommendation of America�s leading national media watchdog and research group, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). It is also recommended as an essential resource for media literacy by the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy (GRIID), affiliated with the US-based Community Media Centre (CMC).[6] The Oxford-based research and publishing group Corporate Watch (not to be confused with the US-based organisation of the same name), which works in cooperation with a variety of other human rights and environmentalist organisations, describes the study as �one of the most incisive critiques of the media�s role in society�.[7] The respected journal Publisher�s Weekly gives the following review of Manufacturing Consent:

�Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that America�s government and its corporate giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend make the national media propagandistic - the major three being the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media�s close links to and often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV, newspapers and radio distort world events� Extensive evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our freedom is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system that panders to the interest of America�s privileged and neglects its duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at stake.�

Indeed, according to the leading American media scholar Robert W. McChesney, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Illinois, any significant attempt to comprehend the structure and operation of the mass media must begin with Herman and Chomsky�s study.[8] He further observes that:
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