[Peace-discuss] The Myth Of The Free Press

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

The Myth Of The Free Press

Description: Screen shot of journalist Gary Webb from Vimeo.


By Chris Hedges,
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_the_free_press_20141026>
www.truthdig.com
October 28th, 2014

Screen shot of journalist Gary Webb from  <http://vimeo.com/109627037>
Vimeo.

There is more truth about American journalism in the film “Kill the
Messenger,” which chronicles the corporate media’s discrediting of the work
of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie “All
the President’s Men,” which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who
uncovered the Watergate scandal.

The corporate media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism.
They laud and promote the myth of American democracy—even as we are stripped
of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the
leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their
crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name
of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn
from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They
usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And
they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories,
sports and trivia. The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot
official propaganda to the masses. The corporations, which own the press,
hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote
them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of
dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as
<http://www.johnralstonsaul.com/biography/> John Ralston Saul writes,
hedonists of power.

When Webb,  <http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/shock/start.htm> writing
in a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed the Central
Intelligence Agency’s complicity in smuggling tons of cocaine for sale into
the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the
press turned him into a journalistic leper. And over the generations there
is a long list of journalistic lepers, from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone to
Julian Assange.

The attacks against Webb have been renewed in publications such as The
Washington Post since the release of the film earlier this month. These
attacks are an act of self-justification. They are an attempt by the
corporate media to mask the collaboration between themselves and the power
elite. The corporate media, like the rest of the liberal establishment, seek
to wrap themselves in the moral veneer of the fearless pursuit of truth and
justice. But to maintain this myth they have to destroy the credibility of
journalists such as Webb and Assange who shine a light on the sinister and
murderous inner workings of empire, who care more about truth than news.

The country’s major news outlets—including my old employer The New York
Times, which wrote that there was “scant proof” of Webb’s
contention—functioned as guard dogs for the CIA. Soon after the 1996 exposé
appeared, The Washington Post devoted nearly two full pages to attacking
Webb’s assertions. The Los Angeles Times ran three separate articles that
slammed Webb and his story. It was a seedy, disgusting and shameful chapter
in American journalism. But it was hardly unique. Alexander Cockburn and
Jeffrey St. Clair,
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/12/17/how-the-press-and-the-cia-killed-gar
y-webb-s-career/> in the 2004 article “How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary
Webb’s Career,” detailed the dynamics of the nationwide smear campaign.

Webb’s newspaper, after printing a mea culpa about the series, cast him out.
He was unable to work again as an investigative journalist and, fearful of
losing his house, he committed suicide in 2004. We know, in part because of
a Senate investigation led by then-Sen. John Kerry, that Webb was right. But
truth was never the issue for those who opposed the journalist. Webb exposed
the CIA as a bunch of gunrunning, drug-smuggling thugs. He exposed the mass
media, which depend on official sources for most of their news and are
therefore hostage to those sources, as craven handmaidens of power. He had
crossed the line. And he paid for it.

If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into
inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that
say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell
us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the
government’s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor
people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about
rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?

These were questions the power elites, and their courtiers in the press,
were determined to silence.

The corporate media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and
careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and
religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of
impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power. The
press writes and speaks—unlike academics that chatter among themselves in
arcane jargon like medieval theologians—to be heard and understood by the
public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely
controlled by the state. It plays an essential role in the dissemination of
official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the
press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide
its true intentions.

The corporate media, as
<http://infed.org/mobi/c-wright-mills-power-craftsmanship-and-private-troubl
es-and-public-issues/> C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for
conformity. They impart to readers and viewers their sense of themselves.
They tell them who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should
be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a
variety of techniques, advice and schemes that promise personal and
professional success. The mass media, as Wright wrote, exist primarily to
help citizens feel they are successful and that they have met their
aspirations even if they have not. They use language and images to
manipulate and form opinions, not to foster genuine democratic debate and
conversation or to open up public space for free political action and public
deliberation. We are transformed into passive spectators of power by the
corporate media, which decide for us what is true and what is untrue, what
is legitimate and what is not. Truth is not something we discover. It is
decreed by the organs of mass communication.

“The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of
communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda; it has
disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take
our bearings in the world is destroyed,” James W. Carey wrote in
“Communication as Culture.”

Bridging the vast gap between the idealized identities—ones that in a
commodity culture revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and
power, or at least the illusion of it—and actual identities is the primary
function of the corporate media. And catering to these idealized identities,
largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, can be very
profitable. We are given not what we need but what we want. The corporate
media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and
spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern
of the corporate media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any
newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for
self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.

“This,” Mills wrote, “is probably the basic psychological formula of the
corporate media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the
development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the
media invent and sustain.”

At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions,
including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and
virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These
institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be
assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be
exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in
the mass media.

Those who work in the corporate media, as I did for two decades, are acutely
aware of the collaboration with power and the cynical manipulation of the
public by the power elites. It does not mean there is never good journalism
and that the subservience to corporate power within the academy always
precludes good scholarship, but the internal pressures, hidden from public
view, make great journalism and great scholarship very, very difficult. Such
work, especially if it is sustained, is usually a career killer. Scholars
like  <http://normanfinkelstein.com/biography/> Norman Finkelstein and
journalists like Webb and Assange who step outside the acceptable parameters
of debate and challenge the mythic narrative of power, who question the
motives and virtues of established institutions and who name the crimes of
empire are always cast out.

The press will attack groups within the power elite only when one faction
within the circle of power goes to war with another. When Richard Nixon, who
had used illegal and clandestine methods to harass and shut down the
underground press as well as persecute anti-war activists and radical black
dissidents, went after the Democratic Party he became fair game for the
press. His sin was not the abuse of power. He had abused power for a long
time against people and groups that did not matter in the eyes of the
Establishment. Nixon’s sin was to abuse power against a faction within the
power elite itself.

The Watergate scandal, mythologized as evidence of a fearless and
independent press, is illustrative of how circumscribed the mass media is
when it comes to investigating centers of power.

“History has been kind enough to contrive for us a ‘controlled experiment’
to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the
confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear
and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not
surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position
and rights are threatened,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in “
<http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375
714499/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414270234&sr=1-1&keywords=%22Manufact
uring+Consent%3A> Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media.” “By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic
substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S.
military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general
population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why
Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely
because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.”

The righteous thunder of the abolitionists and civil rights preachers, the
investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the
Chicago stockyards, the radical theater productions, such as “The Cradle
Will Rock,” that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a
voice to ordinary people, the labor unions that permitted African-Americans,
immigrants and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great
public universities that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a
first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a
democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable
standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private
power, are no longer part of the American landscape. It was Webb’s
misfortune to work in an era when the freedom of the press was as empty a
cliché as democracy itself.

 
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/cradlewillrock.htm
l> “The Cradle Will Rock,” like much of the popular work that came out of
the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class
rather than the power elite. And it excoriated the folly of war, greed,
corruption and the complicity of liberal institutions, especially the press,
in protecting the power elite and ignoring the abuses of capitalism. Mister
Mister in the play runs the town like a private corporation.

“I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,” Mister Mister says. “My
steel industry is dependent on them really.”

 

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