Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [23]
In their eighty-seven-page report, Out of Control: Seattle’s Flawed Response to Protests Against the World Trade Organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated that “demonstrators [in Seattle] were overwhelmingly peaceful. Not so the police.” The response of the Seattle police to the protests was characterized by “draconian” violations of civil liberties, including widespread use of “chemical weapons, rubber bullets and clubs against peaceful protesters and bystanders alike.” But NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and the New York Times and Washington Post all ignored the release of the ACLU’s findings, which ran counter to their own uniformly pro-police and anti-protester line.
The media’s reversal of chronology and inflation of the threat of activist violence, and their low-keyed treatment of numerous illegal police actions designed to instill fear in those wanting to protest peaceably,119 provided the enabling ground for both police violence and serious restrictions on free speech. These increased in scope and sophistication between Seattle and Washington, and were then applied to squelch protest at the Republican and Democratic conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles in July and August 2000.120 The corporate media’s hostility to the goals of the protests, closely aligned with that of the rest of the corporate establishment, caused their devotion to the First Amendment to flag in a way it never has when their own rights and privileges have been at stake.
As is suggested by the media’s treatment of NAFTA and of labor’s right to participate in its debates, as well as the media coverage of Watergate, COINTELPRO, and major events in the earlier history of labor-management conflict (the Haymarket affair, the Homestead strike, the post-World War I “red scare”),121 the propaganda model applies to domestic as well as foreign policy issues. Labor has been under renewed siege in the United States for the past several decades, its condition adversely affected by the deflationary policies of the early 1980s, corporate downsizing, globalization, a vigorous business campaign to defeat unions, and government support of, or indifference to, the damage being inflicted on unions and workers. There was a major drop in union membership from the beginning of the Reagan era, with union density falling from 25 percent in 1980 to 14.5 percent in 1996 (and only 10.2 percent in the private sector). This reflected weakened labor bargaining power and was accompanied by significant concessions in wages and benefits, more onerous working conditions, and greater worker insecurity.
President Reagan’s firing of 11,000 striking air-controllers in 1981 “put the government seal of approval on strike-breaking and a new era of industrial relations opened.”122 But you would hardly know this from reading or listening to the mainstream media. An exceptional 1994 Business Week article noted that “over the past dozen years . . . U.S. industry has conducted one of the most successful union wars ever,” helped by “illegally firing thousands of workers for exercising their right to organize,” with unlawful firings occurring in “one-third of all representation elections in the late ’80s.”123 But this successful war was carried out quietly, with media cooperation. The decertification of unions, use of replacement workers, and long, debilitating strikes like that involving Caterpillar were treated in a very low key manner. In a notable illustration of the applicability of the propaganda model, the nine-month-long Pittston miners’ strike that began in April 1989 was accorded much less attention, and less friendly treatment, than the Soviet miners’ strikes of the summer of that same year.124
From 1977 through 1999, while the incomes of the top 1 percent of households grew by 84.8 percent and