By Jim Miller
In this series on the media that originally ran in December of last year, I discuss “the conservative media entertainment complex” as conceived of by former Bush propagandist David Frum and note that he only touches on the tip of the corporate media propaganda iceberg. This article is part two. Part one is here. (Jim Miller is on vacation)
In last week’s column, I discussed Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s propaganda model and noted how it was even more relevant today than it was when they first published Manufacturing Consent in 1988 as the concentration of media ownership they decried in the eighties has only continued to increase dramatically. I ended that column by referring to Project Censored, an organization that has been monitoring the news media and putting out a list of the top 25 “censored” stories of the year since 1976.
Recently when I mentioned this project to a former journalist friend of mine he objected to the use of the word “censorship” because he didn’t think it applied to the news media, a group of people who, in his estimation, are far more driven by market forces than by the desire to monitor ideas. With that objection in mind, let’s consider Project Censored’s definition of the term “censorship”
We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).
In sum, the folks at Project Censored argue, along with Chomsky and Herman, that all the information we consume in our market driven system has to go through a series of “filters” before a story makes it (or doesn’t make it) to our eyes and ears. This is not a definition that implies a conspiracy; it is a structural analysis of how our media system works in the real world with all the economic, political, and legal pressures that shape the process of delivering the infotainment we call news.
Consequently, it’s not that a few guys in a room sit around and censor our news as might happen in a totalitarian dictatorship, but that our system of corporate media is structurally designed in a way that inclines it to narrow the frame. The news media are not controlled by corporate interests; they are corporate interests. Thus it should come as no surprise to us that such a profit driven industry is far more concerned with its economic interests than with the public interest.
In the case of Fox News or San Diego’s House of Manchester, the ownership manipulation and ideological filters are plain to see.
In the case of Fox News or San Diego’s House of Manchester, the ownership manipulation and ideological filters are plain to see. However, in other more ideologically diverse, intellectually sophisticated outlets, the filters may be harder to discern, but a systematic examination of our media landscape reveals their presence and negative effect nonetheless.
The result is not, according to our friends at Project Censored, that some information is totally stopped from coming out, but rather that many extremely important stories are woefully underreported. Hence we may frequently lose sight of crucial events and trends in our society as we drown in a glut of compelling live action shots, tabloid trivia, and sound bytes devoid of context.
So perhaps, if we take my friend’s point, much important news is not totally censored in the market system, but underreported to the point of invisibility. Put another way, in a dictatorship dissidents are tortured or shot—here we just ignore them in the process of amusing ourselves to death.
Perhaps Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was more prescient than George Orwell’s 1984 in predicting our means of social control, but the subtle nature of our system of market censorship makes it a far more effective tool for maintaining ideological hegemony. After all, the best systems of social control maintain power not by playing the role of a boot stamping on a human face forever, but by seducing the majority of people into adopting an ideology that serves the interests of the powerful over their own.
Thus the naïve surfer of the global information network is apt to get crushed by wave after wave of bullshit. Indeed, this ocean of misinformation makes the job of being a critical consumer of “news” and an active citizen in our democracy much harder, though not impossible.
Despite all the filters information goes through in our “open society,” the power of plutocracy is not total. Just as our imperfect democratic system is thoroughly polluted by corporate money but not yet totally subject to it, our media system also has cracks, fissures, and seams that allow the uncomfortable truth to occasionally slip through. The key to navigating our information landscape is a kind of informed skepticism rather than resigned cynicism.
Once you accept the fact that that the myth of objectivity is precisely that, a myth, you can begin to view all information as the product of interested sources.
Once you accept the fact that that the myth of objectivity is precisely that, a myth, you can begin to view all information as the product of interested sources. Arguing about bias is a useless sideshow. The point is not that there are some sources with ideology and others without it, but that every piece of information you consume comes from a particular perspective with an inherent ideology that supports a set of interests. The trouble isn’t being biased; it’s pretending that you aren’t. And the issue with our information landscape isn’t that there are biased sources, it is that there is no real diversity of sources and that the media monopoly can effectively mask their interests.
So the real work of the critical consumer of information is to try to discern what baggage the information they are consuming comes with. Some of the key questions are: who owns this source? What are their interests? What influences the frame that the information comes from in terms of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, region, etc? What kinds of “experts” or organizations does this source rely on for evidence? What conscious or unconscious ideology is present in sources that proclaim their neutrality or independence? How does the focus of the corporate media compare to that of the alternative media? How “alternative” is the so-called alternative media in terms of ownership, advertising, and other filters? The list goes on. It’s hard work, but not beyond the ability of the average Jill or Joe given the proper toolkit.
On that note, frequently, the big stories we don’t hear about come from obscure sources with fewer filters and less to lose by reporting inconvenient facts. How different would our social, political, and cultural reality be if this sort of reporting drove the national and local discussion? Take a look at Project Censored’s most recent list of underreported stories and see what you think. Note: the 2013 list is a retrospective list of 2012 stories.
Top Censored Stories of 2013
1. Signs of an Emerging Police State
2. Oceans in Peril
3. Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Worse than Anticipated
4. FBI Agents Responsible for Majority of Terrorist Plots in the United States
5. First Federal Reserve Audit Reveals Trillions Loaned to Major Banks
6. Small Network of Corporations Run the Global Economy
7. 2012: The International Year of Cooperatives
8. NATO War Crimes in Libya
9. Prison Slavery in Today’s USA
10. HR 347 Would Make Many Forms of Nonviolent Protest Illegal
11. Members of Congress Grow Wealthier Despite Recession
12. US Joins Forces with al-Qaeda in Syria
13. Education “Reform” a Trojan Horse for Privatization
14. Who Are the Top 1 Percent and How Do They Earn a Living?
15. Dangers of Everyday Technology
16. Sexual Violence against Women Soldiers on the Rise and under Wraps
17. Students Crushed By One Trillion Dollars in Student Loans
18. Palestinian Women Prisoners Shackled during Childbirth
19. New York Police Plant Drugs on Innocent People to Meet Arrest Quotas
20. Stealing from Public Education to Feed the Prison-Industrial Complex
21. Conservatives Attack US Post Office to Break the Union and Privatize Postal Services
22. Wachovia Bank Laundered Money for Latin American Drug Cartels
23. US Covers up Afghan Massacre
24. Alabama Farmers Look to Replace Migrants with Prisoners
25. Evidence Points to Guantánamo Dryboarding
For more on all of these stories see the Project Censored website:http://www.projectcensored.org/
Eds. Note: Originally Posted December 10, 2012. We’re re-running some of the best of his columns while Jim takes this ‘vacation’ thing we keep hearing about.
Jim Miller
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My own experiences of what was suppressed while I was a U-T reporter in the 70s and, later, a freelancer will appear banal next to the earthquakes in Project Censored’s list of 25, but I can say:
— after the assistant investigations editor frontpaged a report on life insurance companies that were marketing policies with obscure escape clauses I was told by the editor, who’d just come back from vacation, “It was a good story, but it would never have run if I’d been here.”
— I can remember as a kid reporter on the county beat calling up the city editor because the Supervisors were about to approve a subdivision south of Escondido that defied the zoning of the county’s general plan. “That’s not a story; it happens all the time, ” he said.
— After I’d quit the Trib I was the local stringer for The New York Times and gave them a short piece on a San Diego mounted cop who’d put a rope around an African-American neck and force-walked the man through his neighborhood. “Hold it, hold it,” said the national editor, “I can only use one atrocity a week from San Diego.” The story did not run.
Jim Miller is right to emphasize that it’s not just official lies that color our perceptions, but an insistence that the world be reported on in a way that leaves power unchallenged. This sort of political correctness has grown to the point that we are now debating whether wholesale spying on citizens is a good or bad thing.