Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [20]
But with Suharto we encounter a whole new world of contextualized apologetics. For many years the main protective formula was that the 1965–66 killings were “a result of a failed coup,” which “touched off a wave of violence,” or followed an “onslaught from the left.”95 This formula, invoked repeatedly, suggests that the mass killings were provoked and thus maybe justified by a prior “onslaught.” The writers never explain why a failed coup could possibly justify a large-scale slaughter, but the hint is left hanging. In more recent years, usually in connection with the explanation and rationalization of the continuation of a dictatorship, the media regularly juxtaposed political repression with “stability” and “growth”: “the signs of his success are everywhere,” although Suharto has brought these gains “by maintaining a tight grip on power and suppressing public criticism and political opposition.”96 These statements, from the New York Times, offer a kind of context that the paper never gives to Castro, let alone a Pol Pot, and it shows an apologetic that runs deep.
This apologetic extends to the Suharto invasion and occupation of East Timor. For years. New York Times reporters have claimed that Indonesia invaded in the midst of a civil war,97 when in fact that civil war was over well before the invasion. The paper’s news coverage of East Timor actually fell to zero as the Indonesian attacks and killings in East Timor reached a deadly peak in 1977–78, a slaughter that elsewhere would be called “genocidal.” And although Indonesia occupied East Timor in violation of standing U.N. rulings till its induced exit in 1999, the paper’s reporters repeatedly referred to East Timor as a “disputed province” and East Timorese resistance as “separatist,” thereby internalizing and explicitly legitimizing the aggression and occupation.98
The bias and gentle treatment of Suharto and the Indonesian government in the media is once again correlated with U.S. policy support that dates back to the military coup and slaughters of 1965. These were greeted with enthusiasm by U.S. officials—then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara referred to the events as one of the “dividends” of U.S. support for the Indonesian military—and the “boiling bloodbath” (Time) and “staggering mass slaughter” (New York Times) were also seen in the media as a “gleam of light” (James Reston in the New York Times).99 U.S. military and economic aid and diplomatic protection continued throughout the years of the Suharto dictatorship, and the media’s finding him a good genocidist followed accordingly.
New York Times reporter David Sanger differentiated Suharto and post-1990 Saddam Hussein—before 1990 he was a U.S. ally—saying “Mr. Suharto is not hoarding anthrax or threatening to invade Australia.”100 That is, Suharto’s invasion, mass killing, and long illegal occupation of East Timor is given zero weight, and his slaughter of somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million people within Indonesia some years back is also not mentioned. This tells us all we need to know about how good and bad genocidists fare in the Western propaganda system.
FURTHER APPLICATIONS
In his book Golden Rule, political scientist Thomas Ferguson argues that where the major investors in political parties and elections agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative. He contends that for ordinary voters to influence electoral choices they would have to have “strong channels that directly facilitate mass deliberation and expression.”101 These would include unions and other intermediate organizations that might, through their collective power, cause the interests of ordinary voters to be given greater weight in the political system.
The propaganda model, and the institutional arrangements that it reflects, suggests that the same