Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [251]
13. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 58–59.
14. A careful reader of the Soviet press could learn facts about the war in Afghanistan that controvert the government line—see chapter 5, pp. 226–27—but these inconvenient facts would not be considered in the West to demonstrate the objectivity of the Soviet press and the adequacy of its coverage of this issue.
CHAPTER 1: A PROPAGANDA MODEL
1. See note 4 of the preface.
2. Media representatives claim that what the government says is “newsworthy” in its own right. If, however, the government’s assertions are transmitted without context or evaluation, and without regard to the government’s possible manipulative intent, the media have set themselves up to be “managed.” Their objectivity is “nominal,” not substantive.
In early October 1986, memos were leaked to the press indicating that the Reagan administration had carried out a deliberate campaign of disinformation to influence events in Libya. The mass media, which had passed along this material without question, expressed a great deal of righteous indignation that they had been misled. To compound the absurdity, five years earlier the press had reported a CIA-run “disinformation program designed to embarrass Qaddafi and his government,” along with terrorist operations to overthrow Quaddafi and perhaps assassinate him (Newsweek, Aug. 3, 1981; P. Edward Haley, Qaddafi and the United States since 1969 [New York: Praeger, 1984], p. 272). But no lessons were learned. In fact, the mass media are gulled on an almost daily basis, but rarely have to suffer the indignity of government documents revealing their gullibility. With regard to Libya, the media have fallen into line for each propaganda ploy, from the 1981 “hit squads” through the Berlin discotheque bombing, swallowing each implausible claim, failing to admit error in retrospect, and apparently unable to learn from successive entrapment—which suggests willing error. See Noam Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors (New York: Claremont, 1986), chapter 3. As we show throughout the present book, a series of lies by the government, successively exposed, never seems to arouse skepticism in the media regarding the next government claim.
3. For a description of the government’s strategy of deflecting attention away from the Nicaraguan election by the fabricated MIG story, and the media’s service in this government program, see chapter 3, under “The MIG Crisis Staged during the Nicaraguan Election Week.”
4. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 24.
5. Quoted in ibid., p. 23.
6. Ibid., p. 34.
7. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
8. Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (New York: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 166, 173.
9. Earl Vance, “Freedom of the Press for Whom,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1945), quoted in Survival of a Free, Competitive Press: The Small Newspaper: Democracy’s Grass Roots, Report of the Chairman, Senate Small Business Committee, 80th Cong., 1st session, 1947, p. 54.
10. Note that we are speaking of media with substantial outreach—mass media. It has always been possible to start small-circulation journals and to produce mimeographed or photocopied news letters sent around to a tiny audience. But even small journals in the United States today typically survive only by virtue of contributions from wealthy financial angels.
11. In 1987, the Times-Mirror Company, for example, owned newspapers