Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [260]
In a chapter entitled “The Deserving Rich,” A. J. Liebling pointed out that in the United States as well, “The crusade against the destitute is the favorite crusade of the newspaper publisher,” and that “There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor” (The Press [New York: Ballantine, 1964], pp. 78–79). Liebling went into great detail on various efforts of the media to keep welfare expenses and taxes down “by saying that they [the poor] have concealed assets, or bad character, or both” (p. 79). These strategies not only divert, they also help split the employed working class from the unemployed and marginalized, and make these all exceedingly uncomfortable about participating in a degraded system of scrounging. See Peter Golding and Sue Middleton, “Attitudes to Claimants: A Culture of Contempt,” in Images of Welfare, pp. 169ff. President Reagan’s fabricated anecdotes about welfare chiselers, and his complete silence on the large-scale chiseling of his corporate sponsors, have fitted into a long tradition of cynical and heartless greed.
120. For a full discussion of this dichotomized treatment, see Edward S. Herman, “Gatekeeper versus Propaganda Models: A Critical American Perspective,” in Peter Golding, Graham Murdock and Philip Schlesinger, eds., Communicating Politics (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 182–94.
121. Editorial, March 1, 1973. The Soviets apparently didn’t know that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this was covered up by U.S. officials, and the false allegation of a knowing destruction of a civilian aircraft provided the basis for extremely harsh criticism of the Soviets for barbaric behavior. The Israelis openly admitted knowing that they were shooting down a civilian plane, but this point was of no interest in the West in this particular case.
122. The New York Times Index, for example, has seven full pages of citations to the KAL 007 incident for September 1983 alone.
123. Patriotic orgies, such as the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the space-shuttle flights, and “Liberty Weekend,” perform a similar function in “bringing us all together.” See Elayne Rapping, The Looking Glass World of Nonfiction TV (Boston: South End Press, 1987), chapter 5, “National Rituals.”
124. See below, chapter 6.
125. On issues where the elite is seriously divided, there will be dissenting voices allowed in the mass media, and the inflation of claims and suspension of critical judgment will be subject to some constraint. See the discussion of this point in the preface, pp. lx–lxi, and examples in the case studies that follow.
126. The role of the government in these cases cannot be entirely discounted, given the close ties of the Reader’s Digest to the CIA and the fact that Paul Henze, one of the primary sources and movers in the Bulgarian Connection campaign, was a longtime CIA official. On the CIA–Reader’s Digest connection, see Epstein, “The Invention of Arkady Shevchenko,” pp. 40–41. On Henze, see below, chapter 4. On the strong likelihood that an influential Reader’s Digest best-seller on Cambodia was in part a CIA disinformation effort, see below chapter 6, p. 274–75, and sources cited.
127. We provide many illustrations of these points in the chapters that follow. Watergate and, more recently, the late-Reagan-era exposures of Iran-Contragate, which are put forward as counterexamples, are discussed in chapter 7, below.
128. These points