Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [296]
8. The Democratic candidates in 2008 began to put forward programs much closer to what the public wants, based in good part on the fact that U.S. manufacturing industry has been suffering greatly from health care costs assumed by government in other industrialized states. However, thus far the candidates have not proposed actions clearly hurtful to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
9. The New York Times has editorialized against the growing role of money in elections, pointing to “the sheer volume of money it [the current election campaign] is generating,” and the “ludicrously premature handicapping of the race based on the ability to raise cash” (“Running for Dollars,” April 5, 2007). But having done this and emphasized the need for greater substance in electioneering, the Times’s editors still operate as if the 2008 election is meaningful and consistent with a democratic order. The rest of the MSM do the same, often without even the (ultimately ignored) reservations expressed by the Times in this one editorial.
10. Cynthia Peters, “Taking It To the Streets—That’s Freedom,” Boston Globe, February 20, 2003. Peters was referring to the major anti-war protests in the United States as elsewhere that preceded the onset of the looming U.S.–U.K. aggression against Iraq.
11. Theodore Hamm, The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics (New York: The New Press, 2008). Factoring-in both the relative strength of their progressive content and their longevity in this otherwise brave new media world, some valuable newer and bluer media of the past 20 years include ZNet, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, IndyMedia, Information Clearing House, Electric Politics, Center for Economic Policy Research, Just Foreign Policy, UpsideDownWorld, Stopnato, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, among many others. But with rapid technological advances and the reconfiguring of the new media (e.g., Internet and audio-video platforms such as YouTube, and wireless communication) and the bundling of the older media together with the newer (e.g., laptop computers that perform all functions at once), it is impossible to predict what lies ahead, and how serious a democratic challenge to established power the newer media might pose one day, if delivered to the hands of the “second superpower.”
12. See, e.g., Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (New York: The Free Press, 2006); David Brock, The Republican Noise Machine (New York: Crown, 2004); and Bennett et al., When the Press Fails.
13. Boehlert, chap. 7.
14. Ibid., chap. 6.
15. Nichols and McChesney, Tragedy & Farce, pp. 56–87; Greg Mitchell, So Wrong For So Long (New York: Union Square Press, 2008), pp. 2–3, 7; Norman Solomon, War Made Easy (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2005), pp. 123–4, 131–2, 237; and Patrick E. Tyler, “A New Power in the Streets,” New York Times, February 17, 2003.
16. Here we note that at no point during his February 5, 2003, 10,000-word-long presentation before the UN Security Council of the evidence that the U.S. and U.K. alleged they possessed of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” programs did the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell so much as mention the words ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘liberation’ as a way of defining the U.S.–U.K. policy objectives with respect to Iraq. On the contrary, Powell’s entire presentation was consumed with “weapons of mass destruction” and the threat posed to U.S. and U.K. territories by these weapons, whether launched by the President of Iraq or by the hands of “terrorist” organizations such as Al Qaeda.
17. “President George Bush Discusses Iraq in National Press Conference,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, March 6, 2003. Bush’s exact words were: “The world needs him [Saddam Hussein] to answer a single question: Has the Iraqi regime fully and unconditionally disarmed as required by Resolution 1441, or has it not?”
18. Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel, “Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent,” Extra!,