HOW WE LOSE THE NEWS

Media coverage of the mass protests against globalised corporate control in Seattle, Washington and Prague, contained a curious omission. No mention was made of one of the protestors’ key assertions: that our ‘free press’ is not a free press; it is a corporate press presenting a highly distorted, business-friendly version of the world.

This media blind spot reflected a long-standing unwritten commandment of journalism: Thou shalt not examine us! When, after all, did your newspaper last analyse the implications for democracy of the fact that mass media corporations are all profit-driven, all owned by wealthy entrepreneurs and giant parent companies, all in the business of selling wealthy audiences to advertisers, all heavily dependent on corporate advertising, and all vulnerable to the financial and political muscle wielded by the corporate system of which they are very much a part?

I asked Hugo Young of the Guardian if I was right in thinking that there had never been a serious, systemic analysis of the ‘free press’ in Britain’s media:

“Yes, that may be so. I don’t recall seeing any systemic analysis.”

Was this silence not astonishing, I asked him, given the clear significance of the issue for democracy? What, after all, does rule of the people by the people mean, if freedom of information is not guaranteed? Young chose to side step my question:

“There have certainly been pieces discussing Rupert Murdoch’s empire and the ramifications. But you’re asking really whether an anti-capitalist critique of the media is to be found, and I can’t recall one,” he said.

In fact I was asking if he thought the absence of all serious discussion on such a vital question was astonishing.

The radical critique of the corporate media makes the case that, through the influence of free market forces, state power, and the human capacity for self-deception, the media dramatically underplay or exclude facts and ideas damaging to the interests of corporate-state power, while promoting facts and ideas supportive of them.

Knee-jerk rejections of this argument generally fall into two categories. The first is to suggest that the argument requires a conspiracy theory: that journalists and editors consciously collude to suppress the truth. Because knowledge of such a widespread conspiracy would quickly leak out, it is argued, and because that clearly hasn’t happened, the argument must be nonsense.

In reality, no conspiracy theory is required. It is not that journalists are liars, rather that they rise to the top of their profession precisely +because+ they have internalised the required beliefs. The rewards offered by the corporate system ensure a steady supply of applicants. In an article in the New Statesman, Nick Cohen noted that most leading journalists and TV presenters, while claiming to represent the public, are in fact fabulously wealthy: “The BBC signed a £3m deal with the Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark. Jeremy Paxman, Kirsty Young and Trevor McDonald have... salaries of between £750,000 and £1m.” A friend on the Daily Mail told Cohen, “You’re nobody here unless you’re in six figures.”

The second knee-jerk rejection involves arguing that media corporations simply give people what they want. While it is of course important for all media entities to reach large numbers of people, this is only one of a range of considerations. In the region of a third of newspaper profits, and between a half and two-thirds of magazine profits, are won through the selling of advertising space. A key goal, then, is to attract wealthy audiences targeted by big corporate advertisers in a way that does not alienate those advertisers. Richard Ingrams of the Observer hinted at the problem in a rare departure from the silent norm in December 1999. Noting the vast amount of mobile phone advertising in pre-Christmas papers, Ingrams wrote: “When the newspapers are obviously doing so well out of all this advertising, it is not so surprising that they tend not to give much coverage to the growing evidence that mobile phones are not only anti-social but extremely dangerous.”

Given a choice, newspaper buyers would doubtless prefer to be given access to this evidence before buying mobiles for loved ones, young children included.

According to most media, however, there is no such evidence to report. A December 2000 Guardian article by Tim Radford declared, “There is no evidence that the phones can cause harm.” A remarkable claim also made in the New Scientist: “There is currently no evidence that mobile phones harm users or people living near transmitter masts.” The BBC and ITN news have both repeatedly affirmed that there is “no evidence” of a risk to human health. Directly beneath the Guardian article on page 15, readers could find a half-page advert for BT Cellnet mobiles. The preceding 14 pages included two full-page, and one half-page, adverts for mobile phones. Similar adverts regularly appear in the New Scientist.

In February 1999, Wireless Technology Research (WTR) - a leading surveillance and research organisation funded by the US telecoms industry - presented findings based on six years of research into the safety of mobile phones. The WTR found that the rate of death from brain cancer among handheld phone users was higher than the rate of brain cancer death among those who used non-handheld phones that were kept away from their head. The risk of a benign tumour of the auditory nerve was fifty percent higher in people who reported using cell phones for six years or more. The risk of rare tumours on the outside of the brain was more than doubled in cell phone users as compared to people who did not use cell phones. There also appeared to be some correlation between brain tumours occurring on the right side of the head and the use of the phone on the right side of the head. Laboratory studies looking at the ability of radiation from a phone’s antenna to cause functional genetic damage were “definitively positive”.

This is not proof of adverse health effects, but it surely +is+ evidence.

Human rights and environmental reporting in the media are subject to the same filtering process. In a study of British foreign policy since 1945, historian Mark Curtis concluded:

“The main argument in this study is that the systematic link between the basic priorities and goals of British foreign policy on the one hand and the horrors of large-scale human rights violations on the other is unmentionable in... [the media], even though that link is clearly recognisable in an analysis of the historical and contemporary record.”

The same unwillingness regularly stretches to British media coverage of US human rights violations. Over the course of the eighteen months that General Augusto Pinochet was under house arrest in Britain, there was considerable media discussion of the atrocities that took place in Chile under Pinochet. Facts relating to the US role in Pinochet’s rise to power, however, were notable by their absence. To my knowledge, the only significant reference was made by Greg Palast in an article buried in the business section of the Observer:

“US companies, from cola to copper, used the CIA as an international debt collection agency and investment security force. Indeed the October 1970 plot against Chile’s President-elect Salvador Allende, using CIA ‘sub-machine guns and ammo’, was the direct result of a plea for action a month earlier by Donald Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, in two telephone calls to the company’s former lawyer, President Richard Nixon.”

That Pinochet’s coup was all about the protection of Western business interests, and nothing to do with the Cold War (as Palast also makes clear), went unreported. I asked Hugo Young if he had seen much reporting on how corporate America put Pinochet into power:

“I can’t remember,” he said. “I would be very surprised if in the many, many bits of writing done about it that that point hadn’t been made.”

Given the seriousness of the charge against Western democracies, and the length of time the Pinochet story ran in Britain, Young’s uncertainty speaks volumes. The point, of course, is not whether the issue was completely neglected – Palast did cover it - but that the coverage was minimal to the point of invisibility. How do we explain the fact that, while the abuses of tyrants like Milosevic and Saddam Hussein are front-page news, US and British complicity in equivalent or worse horrors is met with silence?

During the Kosovo crisis, the US and British governments declared that Serbia was committing genocide in Kosovo and had to be stopped. The media happily swallowed the government-Nato version of events. The Observer talked of “Milosevic’s final solution to the Kosovo problem”; the Daily Mail of “flight from genocide”. Both the Sun and the Mirror referred to “echoes of the Holocaust”.

In fact, the approximate number of people killed on all sides in Kosovo in the year prior to Nato bombing was 2,000. Philip Hammond of London’s South Bank University sums up the reality: “It seems reasonable to conclude that while people died in clashes between the KLA and Yugoslav forces... the picture painted by NATO – of a systematic campaign of Nazi-style genocide carried out by Serbs – was pure invention.” This evidence was available at the time, but ignored.

With talk of “moral crusades” and “humanitarian intervention” still ringing in the air, Indonesian troops – armed and trained by Britain and the United States - capped their slaughter of 200,000 East Timorese since 1975, with a further bloodbath following the August 30 referendum. Fully 85 percent of the population were evicted from their homes, 70 percent of the country was destroyed, and more than 100,000 East Timorese were held hostage in West Timor. The number of people slaughtered in 1999 remains uncertain, but between 5-6,000 people were killed even before the referendum.

About this very real genocide, the US and British governments had nothing to say: Blair and Clinton – both self-declared “moral crusaders” - fell suddenly silent. The media somehow failed to notice, or to find any significance in the fact that Indonesia was an important trading partner. In 1999, The New York Times used the term ‘genocide’ 85 times in reference to Kosovo, and 9 times in reference to East Timor.

Servility to the government line sometimes reaches comical extremes. At the beginning of the Gulf War, the Financial Times explained that the conflict came about “not because of US hubris and imperialism, or because of oil”, but “because the annexation of Kuwait was an act intolerable to a world which cannot live in peace if the integrity of nations is treated so casually”. Fine words, except that in December 1989 - just eight months before the invasion of Kuwait - the US had, itself, illegally invaded Panama. The Times agreed, as did the Independent, which suggested that oil was not the issue; instead, we were perhaps witnessing “a revival of American idealism” which might “once more become relevant to the best hopes of mankind”.

Today, the fact that the hopes of half a million Iraqi children under five have been permanently extinguished as a result of Western sanctions, draws occasional comment, but none of the sustained coverage and invective reserved for the crimes of official enemies. Russia’s demolition of Chechnya has been met with similar indifference. If the killing had taken place during the Cold War, we can be sure that political commentators would have lined up alongside their political masters to declare outrage at the ‘barbarism’ and ‘inhumanity’ of Putin and his generals. Now that Russia has opened its doors to Western business, shoulder shrugging and “constructive engagement” are the order of the day.

While Britain has recently experienced the worst floods in living memory, and climate-related disasters have increased ten-fold around the world, the media remains silent on the true source of opposition to urgently needed cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Both the US Chamber of Commerce and the US National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) are openly opposed to the Kyoto Protocol. The NAM website, for example, candidly states: “We oppose the Kyoto Protocol and urge the President and Congress to reject it.”

Nevertheless, UK media coverage prefers to talk in terms of “US opposition”, passing over the corporate identity of the obstructionists. In the Independent, Geoffrey Lean even insisted, “the good news is that industry is ahead of politicians”. The New Scientist wrote: “Arguably, it is now business rather than governments that are leading the drive against greenhouse gases. If American industry is moving this way, it’s unlikely that Bush will oppose it.”

The trend is clear and consistent: the corporate media arm of the corporate system tends to report in ways that boost elite corporate and state interests. In a world quite possibly suffering terminal damage as a result of unrestrained corporate activity, this silencing of society may well prove decisive.

David Edwards, 2,100 Words, December 2000