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A Brief History of Propaganda and Media Control

Whoever controls the flow of information garners incredible power over the public. This statement is easy to understand and is becoming more relevant with every passing day.

For an excellent brief history of the subject CLICK HERE.

fanks for the link...will read and post later

I picked up this interesting article on Media control from http://pilger.carlton.com/media, its about how the media can hurt normal people. Long but worth the read.

quote:

'A CULTURAL CHERNOBYL' John Pilger's exposes are not just limited to the clandestine operations of international governments. Not even his own profession can escape the same ruthless treatment as many a Western politician. In this section, taken from a chapter of his most recent book Hidden Agendas, Pilger unveils how editorial content is often governed by the immoral motives of media moguls and how those distorted truths can have devastating effects of the lives of everyday people. "There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and morepower. All the rest is meaningless." Napoleon Bonaparte Eddie Spearitt and his son, Adam, went to a football game in Sheffield on April 15, 1989. They had been caught in trafficband had just enough time to find places in the allotted Liverpool terraces at Hillsborough stadium. Adam was fourteen and a devoted Liverpool supporter; and this was a critical FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest. 'We were so excited,' said Eddie. 'It was only when the crowd in the pen really began to build up that I got frightened.' The ancient turnstiles became a bottle-neck as 5,000 Liverpool fans sought to gain entrance before the kick-off. When the police eventually opened the main gates, instead of directing the fans to the open terraces, they sent them into the crowded pen. Eddie and Adam were crushed in each other's arms. Adam was one of ninety-six fans who died. The subsequent inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor left no doubt where the blame lay. 'The real cause of the Hillsborough disaster', he said in his report, 'was overcrowding� the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control.' By the following Tuesday, the editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, had convinced himself that the tragedy had been caused by Liverpool 'football hooligans'. When he sat down to design his front page, he scribbled 'THE TRUTH' in huge letters. Beneath it he wrote three subsidiary headlines: 'Some fans picked pockets of victims' � 'Some fans urinated on the brave cops' � 'Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life'. The story described how 'drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims' and 'police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon'. A dead girl was abused and fans, said an unnamed policeman, 'were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead'. A Tory MP, whose sole source was the police, was quoted. None of it was true. There was no hooliganism. People were vomiting and behaving strangely because they had been crushed and traumatised. Others died because senior police officers failed to understand that the fans inside the pen were fighting for their lives, not trying to 'invade' the pitch. 'THE TRUTH' was the opposite. Like much in MacKenzie's Sun, it was clearly intended to pander to prejudice. Other journalists on the Sun appeared to know this instinctively. 'As MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people,' wrote Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie in their history of the Sun, 'a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring � It obviously wasn't a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it - they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it � It was a "classic smear".' I met Eddie Spearitt and two other Hillsborough parents: Phil Raymond, whose son Philip, also aged fourteen, died, and Joan Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher, twenty-six, and Kevin, sixteen. We sat with coffee and sandwiches in a large sunlit room in the Philharmonic pub, which overlooks Liverpool. Those who try to justify the substitution of a free press with a circus press that speaks to prejudice and 'gives people what they want', might listen to Eddie and Phil and Joan. 'As I lay in my hospital bed,' Eddie said, 'the hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It's bad enough when you lose your fourteen-year-old son because you're treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then I've had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During thirty-one days of Lord Justice Taylor's inquiry no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life.' Joan Traynor said that ITN had asked permission to film the funeral of her two sons. She refused and asked for her family's privacy to be respected. The Sun invaded the funeral, with photographers shooting from a wall. The picture of her sons' coffins on the front page of a paper that had lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that, eight years later, she has difficulty speaking about it. 'Is that what a newspaper is meant to do?' she asked. Phil Hammond said, 'Like Eddie, the family kept the papers away from me. I've still got the papers in a white nylon bag in the loft. Take one of the Sun's lies; they said fans were robbing watches and money from the dead laid out on the pitch. I'm the secretary of the Family Support Group and every family has been in touch with me about that accusation. All of them have accounted for the possessions of their loved ones. Nothing was stolen. [The Sun said] that fans were urinating on the bodies. We got all the clothes back; they hadn't been washed; none of them smelt of urine. But some mud sticks, doesn't it, and there is always someone willing to pass it on. The Sun hurt us, and hurt us badly. We've had to defend the name of our loved ones when all they did was go to a football match and never come back.' In the days that followed the tragedy, Billy Butler, a popular Radio Merseyside disc jockey, became a voice for Liverpool's grief and anger. 'There were newsagents calling in,' he told me, 'assuring people they would not stock the Sun. They were writing on their windows, "We do not have the Sun here". There was a public burning of the Sun in Kirkby. Caller after caller said they were boycotting the paper, and the boycott is still going on today. It's a marvellous way that ordinary people have to show their power, and this city used it." Unlike the homes of the Hillsborough families, Kelvin MacKenzie's suburban home was not 'staked out' by a press mob. His chauffeured Jaguar routinely collected him every morning and took him to the Murdoch fortress at Wapping, east London, where, surrounded by razor wire and guards, he caught the lift to his windowless office and did not leave until the Jaguar took him home again. However, sales of the Sun on Merseyside were falling fast, down by almost 40 per cent, a loss that would cost News International an estimated ?10 million a year. When the Press Council subsequently condemned the Sun's lies, and the boycott intensified, Murdoch ordered MacKenzie to respond publicly. BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend was chosen as his platform. The 'sarf London' accent that was integral to MacKenzie's persona as an 'ordinary punter' was now a contrite middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4. 'It was my decision', said MacKenzie, 'and my decision alone to do that front page in that way, and I made a rather serious error.' In 1996 MacKenzie was back on Radio 4, this time in a very different mood. 'The Sun did not accuse anybody of anything,' he said aggressively. 'We were the vehicle for others ?' The Sun's treatment of the Hillsborough tragedy was typical not only of its record of distortion, but of its cruelty. The rich and famous have been able to defend themselves with expensive libel actions; the singer Elton John won damages, before appeal, of ?1 million following a series of character assassinations. But most of the Sun's victims are people like the Hillsborough parents, who have had to suffer without recourse. Turn the pages of back copies of the Sun and the pattern is clear. Here are a few examples taken at random. A man who had undergone a heart transplant operation was vilified across several pages for having left his wife fifteen years earlier. This was published while his recovery was in the balance. People who perform exceptional public duty and are celebrated as popular heroes for rescuing somebody or tackling a criminal are ritually 'knocked down' when something in their private lives is revealed. They are then branded 'love cheats' and 'rats'. Minorities are a favourite target. A bishop was vilified for being gay, a lesbian for being 'unfit' to care for children. Racial stereotypes are routinely promoted; an Asian in the 'soap' EastEnders was defamed as 'small, greasy and cheap'. A Sun editorial about Australia's bicentenary celebrations, headlined, 'THE ABOS: BRUTAL AND TREACHEROUS', was described by the Press Council as 'inaccurate, unjustified and unacceptably racist'. The disabled are mawkishly pitied; Simon Weston, the soldier who suffered terrible burns in the Falklands War, was the subject of a faked 'interview', which invited readers' revulsion for his disfigurement. The disabled are mawkishly pitied; Simon Weston, the soldier who suffered terrible burns in theFalklands War, was the subject of a faked 'interview', which invited readers' revulsion for his disfigurement. Unlike journalists, politicians are said to be 'fair game' if they are found to be hypocrites. The Labour politician Tony Benn is not a hypocrite, but his principles are anathema to Murdoch. Benn was declared 'insane' in a malicious Sun story whose 'authority', an American psychologist, described the false quotations attributed to him as 'absurd'. The Thatcher Government's campaign against 'loony' London councils, which probably helped turn the Labour Party in on itself and away from progressive policies, was based substantially on a long-running series of inventions and distortions in the Sun. The person ultimately responsible for this is Rupert Murdoch. More than any proprietor since Lord Beaverbrook, Murdoch prides himself on his ability to choose the right people to edit his newspapers. He remains in close contact with all of them. Kelvin MacKenzie was his 'favourite editor'. Under MacKenzie, the profits from the Sun allowed Murdoch to build his television empire. Murdoch personally approved, or approved of, much of MacKenzie's unscrupulous behaviour, such as the 'GOTCHA' headline. When journalists on The Times, sister paper to the Sun, expressed their concern about the damage done to the paper's reputation by the publication of the bogus Hitler Diaries, Murdoch replied, 'After all, we are in the entertainment business.' The ethos Murdoch wanted to build in his papers was demonstrated early in his career. In 1964, his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Mirror, published the diary of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl under the headline, 'WE HAVE SCHOOLGIRL'S ORGY DIARY'. A thirteen-year-old boy, who was identified, was expelled from the same school. Shortly afterwards, he hanged himself from his mother's clothesline. The girl was subsequently examined by a doctor from the Child Welfare Department and found to be a virgin. The 'diary' was the product of a fertile adolescent imagination. Richard Neville, one of the editors of Oz, went to see the boy's family and was moved by their grief, and angered by the circumstances of his death. 'It seemed', he wrote in his autobiography, '[that some] publishers could get away with murder ? or almost.' Neville later confronted Murdoch with the consequence of his newspaper's behaviour and was told, 'Everybody makes mistakes.' In the very few interviews he allows, Murdoch is often defensive about the product that has built his multi-billion-dollar empire. In 1967, on the eve of his departure for Fleet Street, he told ABC Television in Sydney, 'I'm not ashamed of any of my newspapers at all, and I'm rather sick of snobs who tell us they're bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants, who call themselves liberals or radicals and want to impose their taste on the community.' In London, Murdoch encouraged this view of himself as an 'outsider' persecuted by 'snobs'. These 'snobs' would later include the House of Commons and the broadcasting regulatory authorities, which consistently denied him access to British television. Murdoch himself came from an Anglocentric elite. He went to the most exclusive 'public school' in Australia, Geelong Grammar (Prince Charles was sent there), then to Oxford. His parents' numerous establishment connections were available to him. His mother, Dame Elisabeth, a wealthy dowager, has long bestowed her patronage on a range of cultural interests. There can be little doubt that she would find a paper like the Sun abhorrent, as would Murdoch's wife, Anna, a devout Roman Catholic. Murdoch's American biographer, Thomas Kiernan, is one of the few outside his circle who has known him personally. His book Citizen Murdoch, was written with the co-operation of Murdoch and his family and friends. 'The contrast between the private Murdoch and the business Murdoch is quite astounding,' Kiernan told me. 'I used to play tennis with him quite often and for someone who publicly is so anti-elite, he is very elitist in his manner. In his office, he is like a field-marshal: demanding, abrupt, short-tempered. But in his private life he maintains very high standards and has rigid values, high values, and demands that his children and his friends keep to these. On the other hand, in the media, he destroys standards. This has long been true of his newspapers. The infection is insidious. Even the New York Times will quote the Star, a supermarket tabloid he started, and one of America's two main sleaze merchants. The Star may well have got the story from the Sun, and around the Murdoch circuit it will go, and before you know it, some awful fiction becomes received truth. Now it's television's turn and the danger is already there. 'In the United States he has a lot of direct influence in the programming of his Fox network, which relies on sleaze. He already has turned news into entertainment, with paparazzi with video cameras chasing celebrities down the street: that's basically a Murdoch invention in the US. Those who run TV news fear they're going to have to go downmarket even more than they have, just to keep up with Murdoch. It's as if everything he touches becomes desensitised, like the horror displayed every day on his front pages; after a while, we get used to it. 'Now set that against his private life where the influence of his wife, Anna, is very important. When I was close to both of them, she was very critical of what he was doing. When he turned the New York Post into a version of the Sun, he did so without Page Three Girls, because his wife put her foot down and told him she didn't want their three young children walking past news-stands and seeing the topless girls on their dad's paper. She didn't want them to suffer at school or the family to have social disapprobation as they established themselves in New York.' Reiner Luyken, a prize-winning journalist on the respected German newspaper Die Zeit, has reported from Britain for almost twenty years. He is the author of a series of perceptive articles about Murdoch's impact in Britain, entitled 'A Cultural Chernobyl'. 'The most striking effect of Murdoch is self-censorship,' he wrote. 'Self-censorship is now so com-monplace in the British media, that journalists admit to it without blushing.' We met outside the gates of Murdoch's headquarters at Wapping, which Luyken called 'a journalistic penitentiary' and a 'new brave new world'. 'If you look closely at this place,' he said, 'if you look at the electronic bars, the wire on the perimeter, the patrolling guards, you must ask yourself, "How can information and ideas flow freely in such a place?" Wapping is a factory for making money, yet it has become a kind of media model. Whether you read the Daily Mirror or the Telegraph or turn on the BBC, you get the feeling that the purpose of the enterprise of journalism has been turned on its head and the new ethic is that journalism is a commodity, purely to generate money. This is the Murdoch effect. Wapping is a cultural Chernobyl, spewing its poison across the whole journalistic landscape.' The experience of Murdoch's 'new brave new world' leaves many of the journalists on his papers with an abiding ambivalence about him. Some will insist they were never told what to do, that there was never a 'line' - when the truth is that it was never necessary to tell them: they knew and accepted what was required of them. Roy Greenslade, a critic of Murdoch, was Kelvin MacKenzie's number two on the Sun. 'As a young man,' wrote Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie, '[Greenslade] had embraced revolutionary Maoism. In his early days he had been a militant in the National Union of Journalists Chapel ? But he had watered down his politics to the point where he could take a senior job on the avowedly Thatcherite Sun with few qualms.' Greenslade was a witness to many of MacKenzie's 'triumphs', such as his jingoistic fabrication of much of the Falklands War coverage. When MacKenzie called on his staff to cross the picket line representing the 5,900 printers, secretaries, librarians and cleaners sacked by Murdoch in 1986, Greenslade crossed it. In 1995, no longer employed by Murdoch, Greenslade mounted a devastating attack on the ethos of Wapping, writing one of the most cogent explanations for the success of the Sun: Murdoch had seized the time [he wrote], the old values of a discredited Establishment were crumbling. An energetic working class had cast off deference as an aberration of generations past. Television was god ? What was once said only in the pub or the intimacy of your bedroom would be published in your soaraway Sun [which] latched on to the permissiveness of the age. Then, as the years passed, it perverted that ethos of liberalism for its own ends. It cultivated sex, yet decried sexual licence in its leading articles. It lured readers to play bingo for huge prizes while lecturing them on the vice of a something-for- nothing society. It encouraged people to sell their sexual secrets while holding them up to ridicule. It cultivated the shallow world of celebrity as a cynical circulation device. It pushed back the boundaries of taste and decency while wringing its hands at the decline of standards. It employed the language of the lager lout while lambasting the growth of youth culture. Its politics were opportunistic, conjoining the radical and the reactionary to extol the virtues of Margaret Thatcher, the supreme mistress of cultural philistinism. Greenslade called this 'the degradation of the newspaper form [in which] the old notion of a public service press was replaced by newspapers as machines of private profit'. He described the scramble among broadsheets as well as tabloids, to ape the 'sales-winning formula ? accommodating the cult of celebrity, games and television promotions [in which] sleaze is a national pastime, tackiness is stylish, the lowest common denominator is the bottom line. And the bottom line is all that counts ?' Greenslade told me his article (in the Literary Review) was 'a recognition that much of what I took part in was wrong'. 'You're fired up by taking part in the technical process of producing a newspaper,' he said. 'It's like the way [Nazi] Germany was ? when you're taking part in the technical process, you are blinded in many ways to what you're actually doing. You're so worried about the next story, the next feature, filling that page and so on, that the overall thing eludes you ?It isn't as bad as Germany was, but I do think that you divide labour in the way they did and you do your own little bit ?' Greenslade met Murdoch on several occasions. 'He's not the Dirty Digger figure he's painted,' he said. 'He's an educated person. I found him to be a totally rational person, not just in financial terms but in the sort of questions he asked: "Will this sell? Should we give them more sports? Have we any sex surveys?" He asked questions in such a way that you didn't actually think of the connotations ? but when it got to politics, well ? 'There was a dinner in London around the time the Berlin Wall came down, and Murdoch was utterly defiant, saying we in the West must keep a grip on the nuclear weaponry. You had right-wing executives of the Sunday Times arguing that there ought to be some kind of peace dividend, and he was saying, "No, no" and all the time quoting someone he called his "political adviser ?" When he was asked who this was, he replied, "Richard Nixon ?" ' In David Hare's play about the press, Pravda, the Murdoch figure, Lambert Le Roux, comments, 'Upmarket, down-market, it's all the same stuff!' In the play's final line, Le Roux is clearly referring to Wapping when he says, 'Welcome to the foundry of lies.' One of Murdoch's achievements has been to instil the same values throughout most of his organisation, in Britain and across the world, especially in his tabloid and broadsheet newspapers which are produced side by side at Wapping. Murdoch acquired The Times and the Sunday Times in 1981 after long and agonised negotiations during which he agreed to the appointment of 'independent directors' on the board of Times Newspapers. He also gave 'personal guarantees' that he would not interfere in the editorial content of either paper. The whole performance lacked only the arrival of the March Hare. While dispensing these 'guarantees' to politicians and the Great and the Good, Murdoch told Thomas Kiernan, 'One thing you must understand, Tom. You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear, and once the deal is done you don't worry about it. They're not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said was not what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they're made to look bad, and they can't abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass.' And so it came to pass. John Biffen, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the Thatcher Government, decided not to refer Murdoch's bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, despite the commission's rule that a company owning a newspaper with a circulation of more than half a million had to be thoroughly investigated before it could acquire another paper. An exception could be made only if it looked like the newspaper up for sale might otherwise close down. Certainly The Times was not financially secure, but the Sunday Times was profitable and had the prospect of making a lot of money. However, Biffen accepted highly contentious figures that 'proved' the Sunday Times was a loss-maker. His decision was made all the more remarkable by the fortune the paper has since delivered unerringly to Murdoch. Just as this was about to be contested in court, Murdoch offered further 'guarantees' of editorial independence, this time to the journalists. He accompanied this with a 'warning' that the present owners would close the papers unless he bought them. 'At one stage during the battle for Times Newspapers,' wrote Christopher Hird and his co-authors in Murdoch: The Great Escape, 'a member of the staff consortium trying to buy the Sunday Times rang an old friend working as an adviser to Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. Playing on the government's apparent commitment to competition, he urged a halt to the Murdoch takeover. He was told to stop wasting his time. "You don't realise, she likes the guy." ' When the takeover came to be discussed by a Cabinet committee, Thatcher chaired the meeting. Murdoch was, in effect, being rewarded for his papers' 'years of loyal support'. The result, as Michael Leapman wrote, 'was a no-contest takeover [with] all the external appearances of an establishment "fix" of the kind Murdoch affects to despise.' His mother, Dame Elisabeth, told the BBC, 'Britain will perhaps learn to know that he's a pretty good chap.' Unlike the unpretentious Sun, the Sunday Times from time to time carries serious journalism, even genuine scoops, although these are sometimes difficult to discern from journalism that appears serious. Since Murdoch acquired it, the Sunday Times has borne much of the burden of the promotion of his interests and ambitions. In the 1980s, the paper consistently attacked the BBC and ITV, which were seen as obstacles to Murdoch's frustrated television plans in Britain. He made the editor, Andrew Neil, head of his satellite television company, Sky. Described as 'cross-fertilising' by a Murdoch executive, this has long been a feature of the Murdoch press all over the world. In Neil's 470-page book, Full Disclosure, arguably one of the most sustained boasts in autobiographical history, the author devotes fewer than thirty words to the Sunday Times's most notorious, scurrilous and destructive smear campaign - against the journalists and broadcasters who made the 1988 current affairs programme, Death on the Rock, for Thames Television. This investigation was highly significant because it lifted a veil on the British secret state and revealed its ruthlessness under Thatcher. In describing how an SAS team had gone to Gilbraltar and murdered four unarmed members of the IRA, the message was clear: the British Government was willing to use death squads abroad in its pursuit of the war in Ireland. Death on the Rock also posed a threat to the political and media consensus on the war in the north of Ireland, and Margaret Thatcher did not forgive Thames Television for its transgression. Having frequently attacked the ITV 'monopoly' in commercial television, her echoes of Murdoch were vociferously covered in the Sunday Times. When the govern-ment rounded on Thames for what it called the 'distortions' of Death on the Rock, the Sunday Times appeared only too willing to give vast amounts of space to a series of wholly spurious, politically motivated charges. An eye-witness to the murders, Carmen Proetta, who appeared in the programme, described how she saw two unarmed people shot at close range and offering no resistance. They had their hands in the air, either in an act of surrender or in reaction to the shootings. She heard no warning. The Murdoch press, in company with most of Fleet Street, subjected her to a torrent of lies and personal abuse. She was falsely accused of being involved in vice and drugs and of being 'anti-British'. The Sun described her as 'The Tart of Gib'. The Sunday Times coverage was different in one respect only: there was more of it. Of over ?300,000 in libel damages eventually paid to Carmen Proetta, more than half was paid by the Sunday Times in an out-of-court settlement. According to the producer of Death on the Rock, Roger Bolton, one of the reasons Andrew Neil decided to settle was that 'on the first day in court a former journalist for the Sunday Times was ready to give evidence about the way her copy, sent from Gibraltar, was misrepresented by Mr Neil's editors'.2 3 In a memorandum sent to the features editor Robin Morgan, the reporter, Rosie Waterhouse, accused her own paper of being 'wide open to accusations that we had set out to prove one point of view and misrepresented and misquoted interviews to fit - the very accusations we were levelling at Thames'. She later resigned. An inquiry conducted by a former Tory minister, Lord Windlesham, vindicated the programme's accuracy and integrity. The Sunday Times's branch of the National Union of Journalists called for an inquiry into the paper's role in the affair, specifically Andrew Neil's. There was none. Under the new system of allocating ITV franchises instituted by Thatcher, Thames, one of the most innovative of the major companies, lost its licence to broadcast. 'From the start,' wrote Hugo Young, political editor of the Sunday Times when Murdoch took it over, 'the omens were bad. During their first visits to the building, Murdoch and his associates made clear their hostility to Sunday Times journalism and their contempt for those who practised it. The journalists collectively were stigmatised as lead-swinging, expense-padding, layabout Trotskyites. Each of these epithets was uttered in my hearing by senior Murdoch executives. The political label was especially emphatic, wholly removed though it was from reality. Reports from El Salvador which allowed for any possibility that US foreign policy was in error were clearly potent evidence that the Commies had the Sunday Times in their grip.' Once acclaimed for its journalistic and political independence, the Sunday Times was quick to reflect its master's world view. The largest rally ever staged by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which drew as many as half a million people, was dismissed beneath the headline, 'SUNSET FOR CND'. Coverage of the 1984-5 coal strike was crudely slanted to depict the miners as violent, intransigent and at odds with their leaders, an 'enemy within': the essential elements of the government's propaganda. To the Sunday Times, wrote Hugo Young, 'the strike was a Marxist plot'. The paper's international coverage was reduced to that of 'a mid-Atlantic cheerleader'.26 A published interview with Ronald Reagan bore striking similarity to a Sun 'exclusive': that is, it never took place. Salman Rushdie, in hiding and threatened with assassination by an Iranian fatwa, was subjected to a front-page, personalised, one-sided, Sun-style attack by his estranged wife. Michael Foot, the former leader of the Labour Party, was accused, across the front page, of being a 'KGB spy', an 'exclusive' which was followed by the announcement that Foot was to be paid 'substantial damages': a familiar post-script to 'investigations' that had once been the paper's pride. No corner of the Sunday Times has escaped contamination. In a section entitled 'Culture', a television reviewer, Adrian Gill, unleashed a stream of gratuitous abuse about a documentary I had made on the Murdoch effect on Fleet Street and the Daily Mirror in particular. As part of his 'review', Murdoch's man viciously attacked the retired Daily Mirror writer and critic Donald Zec, whom he accused of breaking into Marilyn Monroe's home in the 1950s. Soon afterwards, Gill's page was dominated by the standard Sunday Times apology and retraction. In the 'Style' section there was a regular feature, 'Relationship of the Week', in which Chrissy Iley, photo-graphed in a shiny black coat, sneered and speculated about a chosen couple, quoting hearsay about them. Mysteriously, it disappeared one Sunday and never came back. In the same week, Murdoch was named 'Humanitarian of the Year' by the United Jewish Appeal Foundation in New York. His award was presented to him by Henry Kissinger. When Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contri-bution to 'peace' in Vietnam, the great American satirist Tom Lehrer said he was retiring because, clearly, satire was now obsolete. The 'Humanitarian of the Year' reaffirmed this.28 Murdoch's move to the 'new brave new world' at Wapping took place on January 24, 1986. Virtually overnight, more than 5,000 employees were abandoned. The print unions, Kelvin MacKenzie told Sun journalists, 'haven't got us by the balls any more'. In exploiting resentment of the unions' power and abuses, such as the 'wildcat' stoppages that had lost millions of newspapers, and the 'Spanish practices' that allowed some people to pick up two pay packets, Murdoch was able to persuade most of his journalists to go to Wapping. For many, this came as a welcome justification; for while there was truth in many of the stories about the unions, it was also true that newspaper managements operated their own corruption - on perks alone - and it suited them to look the other way. In my experience, the majority of compositors, linotype operators, machine-room workers and others were honest people who worked hard in antiquated, filthy and often dangerous conditions, especially in the old Sun and News of the World headquarters in Bouverie Street. They were paid well compared with other workers; and in scandalously low-paid Britain that fact was enough to make them enemies. In 1985, Brenda Dean was appointed General-Secretary of SOGAT, representing the industry's clerical and ancillary workers. 'It's time the myths surrounding Wapping were swept away,' she told me. 'The first thing Murdoch made clear to me was that if I could deliver an agreement on new levels of manning, he could do business with the unions. Of course there was some resistance to new technology. But this came from people who had worked in the industry all their lives and were not permanent employees. Quite a few had no pension provision. If they lost their jobs they wouldn't get other employment. They wanted to know what was in it for them. But there is a world of difference between that view and saying we couldn't conclude a deal. We could. The great majority wanted agreement. There is no doubt about that.' The unions had already successfully negotiated a comprehensive agreement with the new chief executive of the Daily Mirror, Clive Thornton. Staffing would be reduced, new technology introduced and no strike action would be taken for three years. In seeking a similar deal with Murdoch, the unions were told that News International planned to produce a new paper, the London Post, at Wapping. The unions by and large welcomed this and put forward their proposals for an 'all-in new technology deal'. On January 2, 1986, Tony Britton, the assistant general manager of News Group Newspapers Limited, publishers of the Sun and the News of the World, wrote to Tony Isaacs, the senior machine-room union official, 'The company has agreed [to the union's proposals] ? and has given assurances that no regular employee need make himself available for volun-tary redundancy.' To which Isaacs replied, 'It is with pleasure that I can advise you that my Chapel [has] accepted Manage-ment's proposals that embrace the [Wapping] plant.' Unknown to Dean, Isaacs or any other union official, Murdoch had been secretly moving non-union staff into Wapping for months and was discussing with his senior executives how they could sack the thousands who had been given 'assurances' that their jobs were secure. In a letter to News International managing director Bruce Mathews, Geoffrey Richards, the senior solicitor advising Murdoch, proposed precisely how they might 'dispense with the work-forces'. 'The cheapest way', he wrote, 'would be to dismiss employees while participating in a strike . . . The idea is to catch as many employees in the net as possible and it seems to me this will be done best if the dismissals take place at the weekend ?' What he was saying was that, under Thatcher's new anti-trade union laws, workers who struck during 'negotiations' could be sacked instantly and would lose their redundancy entitlements: a huge saving to the company. There was no longer any mention of the London Post, which began to sound more and more mythical, a ploy for the 'real game', as Murdoch insiders called the trap being set. 'We were tricked,' said Brenda Dean. 'We had agreements that were at the point of being signed and the management suddenly were holding off signing them. We had even agreed to a third redundancies in some areas.' In fact, Dean had conceded more than any Fleet Street General-Secretary previously had dared to. Tony Dubbins, of the National Graphical Association, which represented typesetters, had gone even further by agreeing the principle of direct computerised type-setting by journalists at Wapping, although it effectively undermined the very existence of his union. Only signatures were needed. The stalling continued as Murdoch's men waited for the signal to implement 'Project 800', a top-secret plan described by Murdoch at a meeting of his executives in New York as 'our dash for freedom'.32 When the unions finally realised they had been tricked and their agreements were worthless, they called a ballot and went on strike. 'We had given him an olive branch', said Dubbins, 'and he'd broken it in two and beat us around the head with it.' As 'negotiations' technically were still in progress, the workforce could be dismissed without compensation. Thus, almost 5,500 people were sacked, many of them lifelong employees. 'I feel deeply and personally bitter', said Dean, 'on behalf of the thousands of our people who stood on the picket line at Wapping for more than a year and have since been forgotten. The dimension of the unseen human tragedy was shocking. We had people who came with their families, their children; they wanted to take part in a peaceful demon-stration. They wanted to say to Murdoch, "You've not only done this to me, you've done it to my wife and kids." But the Metropolitan Police clearly had other instructions. They were there to protect the newspapers, to see that Murdoch got the Sun out, and the rest of his publications. We called them "paper boys", and that was exactly what they were. 'To achieve this, they acted in a most brutal way - as the subsequent inquiries confirmed. I saw many people deliber-ately beaten up by the so-called riot police. The journalists who came along were shocked by what they saw. The police went for decent, straightforward trade unionists as if it was a civil war situation. One of our people was killed by one of Murdoch's lorries, and the lorry didn't even bother to stop. There were several nervous breakdowns. Marriages broke up. Strong men I knew, and I don't mean physically strong, but men with leadership, turned bitter. It broke them. People entitled to unemployment benefit didn't receive it. I'm not only talking just about the relatively well paid, but cleaners, canteen workers, who outnumbered the printers four to one ? It was as if the British state had joined forces with Murdoch against us ?' In the days and weeks that followed the 'dash for freedom', the television news showed surreal images of journalists alighting from Murdoch company buses. They queued to show the security guards their new identification cards, which described them ignominiously as 'consultants'. They passed through ten-foot electronically operated steel gates, set in spiked walls topped with coils of barbed razor wire. Several would try to run inside, squinting into searchlights that covered the perimeter of their new workplace. These were journalists on publications which, between them, commanded the greatest newspaper readership in the English language. They had been ordered to go to Wapping or be sacked. They were not consulted; and all their agreements with the management were dishonoured. 'I used to think how intimidated they looked,' said Dean. 'One always regarded the journalists as the thinking people; and if they'd thought for half a moment, they actually had a power that weekend they'd never had before. Without them, those newspapers would not have come out. Journalists lost a lot of their pride then, and their self-confidence. They came and went, with many having to lie face down on the floor of the coaches with the blinds drawn. It was not an image that sat comfortably with journalists when you read that there were others who risked their lives to get the story and tell the truth.' Thirty-eight journalists refused to go to Wapping. Among the handful from the Sun was Eric Butler, a crusty sports sub-editor whose nickname was 'Scoop'. After forty-two years in Fleet Street, he was less than three years from retirement. 'I knew it meant the end of my career,' he said, 'but there was no alternative for me. What Murdoch did was industrial gangsterism; the people he sacked had given him loyal service and helped him make a lot of money. He offered the journalists ?2,000 to cross the picket line. For that they could keep their job, but not their self-respect. 'Ellen, my wife, took a call one night and it was one of my mates, who said, "Eric will change his mind, won't he?" and she said, "No he won't. More to the point, I don't want him to change his mind." I thought it was strange so many journalists were suddenly saying they had no time for the printers. Yes, we had our disagreements, but it was on both sides; they were blokes making a living just like us. There were a lot of good people among them. We had a great office football team: the journalists and the printers together. Then out of the blue my mates were saying they hated the printers. Did they? Or were they trying to excuse what they were doing? 'I stood on that picket line for a year, in freezing cold a lot of the time, and I watched my old mates go in and out in the coaches, and I never saw one of them again. And yet later on so many of them were disillusioned, or were kicked out by Murdoch. They'd served their purpose. It must have been sad for them.' David Banks was assistant editor of the Sun at the time of Wapping. 'We lived on adrenaline', he said, 'and on defiance ? the defiance of the moment and the fact that the mob were at the gates, that it was us or them.' I asked him if he had lain on the floor of the coaches that took the scab journalists through the picket line. 'Oh, I did, I did ?' he replied. 'It wasn't pleasant. You knew the bottles and the bricks coming against the side of the coach were meant for you; and the fact that the driver then had to race through miles of darkened docklands, just to escape the anger. All of that had its effect ? After a while it dawned on me that I wasn't part of a cavalcade of knights on white horses: that there was a serious anti-social side to what I was doing. In the end, I decided on balance that, despite the fact that little people were being hurt, it was all worth while to save a great industry.' Murdoch, who slept on a campbed at Wapping for almost two weeks, tried to engender the spirit of a 'crusade' against the infidels at the gates. Andrew Neil contributed to this by waving his champagne glass at the pickets, although in a television interview he compared the appearance of his new offices to that of 'a concentration camp'. Sun journalists at first enjoyed a view of the Thames. This was soon closed down, apparently for security reasons, then there was no view at all. This hermetically sealed atmosphere contributed to what John Murray, Murdoch's 'personal counsellor', described as a 'certain mental uncertainty among the more sensitive members of the staff'. Murray, an Australian and confidant of Murdoch, was flown to London to 'help with the transition'. I asked him about Murdoch's reputation for ruthlessness. 'Look,' he said, 'at that high level business principles can come across as ruthlessness. But let me give you another picture of the man. There was one day when a group of people were retiring - they hadn't been sacked, I hasten to add - and I asked Rupert to come down and say a few words to them. "Certainly, John," was his immediate reply. Well, he thanked them for their work and their contribution and when he was finished, one of the union leaders put his hand up and said, "Mr Murdoch, we know about your great kindness in looking after your chauffeur, who died recently, and I want to express on behalf of the unions, our appreciation for that." As he and I left the room, he said, "John, I've got a feeling they were surprised: that they don't really think I'm a kind man." ' In 1989, Murdoch disclosed that he was a born-again Christian. He said he foresaw a major religious revival in Britain in which his papers would play their part by maintaining 'high moral values'.

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A few months earlier the Sun had devastated the lives of the Hillsborough families. 'I'm very much aware of Rupert's Christian values,' said John Murray. 'Actually the move to Wapping was like the crossing through the Red Sea, and Rupert was like our biblical leader ? it was the passage from the old Fleet Street, from Egypt through to the formation of a new people. It was a bit like the Holocaust. I mean, the state of Israel was born out of the Red Sea and the passage of the Holocaust . . . and so the whole newspaper world has been revolutionised here in the UK since that crossing. Even today I don't think journalists want to hark back to the flesh pots, if you like, of Egypt . . . to the old Fleet Street. They know that's over and now we've got the promise of the modern world.' What Murdoch got from Wapping was money. He saved millions of pounds in the redundancy payments the new Thatcher laws ensured he did not have to pay the people he sacked. His wages bill was instantly cut by ?45 million. Using cheap, non-union labour - many of them unemployed and unskilled teenagers bussed secretly to Wapping from Southampton - he increased his profits from ?39.1 million in 1985, the year before the move, to ?98.3 million two years later and ?675 million in 1990. This gave him the money to pay the interest on loans he had borrowed in March 1985. Had his 'dash for freedom' failed, it is highly unlikely he would have been able to pay these debts. He had gambled hugely. With borrowed money he had bought six Metromedia television stations in the United States. These formed the basis of a new network, Fox, with which he planned to challenge the primacy of the great American TV networks. With his 'Wapping revolution' won, he folded his campbed and took Concorde to Washington to collect his American citizenship, which he needed to own both newspapers and television stations. This had been 'fast-tracked' by the Reagan administration, the President having expressed his 'deepest appreciation' to Murdoch for his newspapers' support.36 'It is almost impossible to underestimate the importance of Wapping in the history of the Murdoch business,' said Christopher Hird, one of the authors of Murdoch: The Great Escape. 'If Murdoch hadn't moved to Wapping, he probably would have gone bust. It's as simple as that.' Murdoch boasted that his 'revolution' would bring what he called 'a new dawn of freedom' to the British press, a flowering of independent newspapers. The opposite hap-pened. Of four national newspapers launched in the mid-1980s, Today, the Correspondent, News on Sunday and the Independent, only the Independent barely survives, its independence circumscribed by its majority shareholder, the Mirror Group. There is now less diversity and less independence in the British press than ever before, while Murdoch's power has never been greater. At the time of Wapping, Alf Parish was the senior London official of the printing union SLADE, which has since merged with the NGA. He negotiated directly with Murdoch. 'I smile at the irony,' he told me. 'Many of the corporate people who supported Murdoch are now the recipients of his aggressive-ness, based on the tremendous financial power he acquired as a direct result of Wapping. Breaking the unions was just the first step. He's now wielding a big stick in a price-cutting war against his old allies. Think of the provincial newspaper owners who supported him and how he shows his gratitude. Every time he cuts the price of one of his national newspapers, so the circulation of the major provincial papers is affected.' Today, Rupert Murdoch controls 34 per cent of the national daily press and 37 per cent of the Sunday market. In cutting the cover price of his newspapers, and absorbing the losses in his global empire, he controls effectively a rigged market, in which those rivals without his sources of cash are likely to fail. 'It is clear to me', Andrew Marr, the then editor of the Independent, told me, 'that Murdoch is engaged in a process of trying to create a de facto newspaper monopoly in Britain and that the politicians are well aware of it and are not prepared to do anything about it. Murdoch told Sir David English that he believed there would be three surviving newspapers - the Daily Mail, The Times and the Sun, and that would be it. The price war is his way, in part, of achieving that. It was designed to destroy the Independent and to cripple the Hollinger Group that owns the Telegraph, and after that he'll go after the rest. The reason he can do it is that he has enormous profits pouring in from satellite TV. Everyone I know in politics and the media understands this. Everyone knows the dangers ? and I have no faith in the politicians doing anything about it.' If Murdoch's prediction is correct, two of the three remaining national newspapers will be owned by him. It is a prospect diligently attended by establishment silence. In the 'debate' about Europe in Parliament and the media, it is significant that there has been none about the press. Yet the structure of much of the European press offers alternatives. In France, anti-trust media laws prohibit any individual or group from owning newspapers with more than 30 per cent of combined national and regional sales. In Germany, a cartel office sees that minority shareholders in newspapers have rights to veto the decision of a block majority. In Sweden, a Press Support Board, independent of government, ensures the health of a range of newspapers. In none of these countries does the existence of specific legislation restrict the freedom of the press. The source of this information is a Labour Party discussion document, Freeing the Press, published in 1988. It called for a right of reply and legal aid on libel cases. It proposed a Right to Distribution, similar to that in France which allows small imprints to reach the bookstalls - in contrast to Britain, where small-circulation papers like Tribune have been excluded. Most important, it recommended the establishment of a Media Enterprise Board similar to the Swedish Press Subsidies Board, which provides 'seed' funds for new newspapers committed to protecting editorial independence. (Of 165 newspapers in Sweden, 70 receive direct subsidy from the board.) The inclusion of such proposals on a legislative agenda of the Blair Government is inconceivable. Tony Blair's New Labour is in many respects a creation of the Murdoch press and the rest of the right-wing media. The dedication of the Blair leadership to appeasing the Labour Party's traditional enemies has been unprecedented. From the day he became leader, Blair, ghosted by his press secretary, Alistair Campbell, has written frequently for the Sun and the News of the World. A common strand in these articles has been Blair's respect for Thatcher's legacy and his determination, in effect, to carry on her work Shortly after the death of his predecessor, John Smith, Blair and his wife Cherie were invited to dinner by Murdoch and his wife Anna. Two dinners followed. Then, in July 1995, the Blairs flew to Australia, their first-class fares paid for by Murdoch. Blair was the principal speaker at a News Corporation conference at the Hayman Island resort, which is owned by Murdoch. From the blue Newscorp lectern Blair spoke about 'the need for a new moral purpose in politics' that would meet the 'moral challenge' facing the British people. Murdoch nodded his approval; the two men, after all, are Christians. This 'moral challenge', Blair went on, 'is every bit as pressing as the economic challenge - the two are linked.' He named two politicians who had met the 'economic challenge'. They were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who had put 'a greater emphasis on enterprise' and had rewarded 'success'. Murdoch clapped enthusiastically. After all, Reagan and Thatcher had been his favourites, and he had helped to elect them. Blair then got to the point. This 'economic challenge', he said, also applied to the owners of the press, whose 'enter-prise' was challenged by government regulations. He was referring to the 'cross-ownership' rules that prevent very powerful individuals and interests from controlling both newspapers and television companies. 'There is an obvious requirement', he said, 'to keep the system of regulation [of the media] under constant review. The revolution taking place makes much of it obsolete. This is the mass multi-media society [and] we have real concerns about the role of the new media regulator, which is to be given immense power under the [then Tory Government's] proposals.' Murdoch greeted his guest as he stepped down, shaking his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented, 'Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life.' Long before its election, the Labour leadership exchanged roles with the Tories as the supporter of media monopolies. A frequent sideshow in the House of Commons was provided by a bemused Tory minister responsible for the media, whose plea for a modest threshold of cross-ownership was routinely opposed by Labour. 'The whole point', wrote Labour's broadcasting spokesman, Dr Lewis Moonie, in Murdoch's Sunday Times, 'is to ensure the creation of bigger companies.' Moonie told me he regarded Murdoch as a 'visionary'. 'The extent of the ties that developed between New Labour and News Corp has never been fully revealed,' wrote Andrew Neil in his autobiography. 'In addition to regular meetings between the two top men, a network of contacts has been established between senior company executives and Labour front benchers. Even the Murdoch family was brought into the act. Lachlan, the son Murdoch has been grooming as an heir apparent, met Blair and got on well with him, as [did] his father. Elisabeth, the daughter Murdoch thinks Lachlan should have to compete with for the succession, was also introduced to senior Labour figures . . . She took to calling Peter Mandelson "my dear friend". More serious contacts were established in regular meetings between Rupert's top managers and advisers and Blair's men . . . Blair in power has so far exceeded Rupert's expectations.' 'What'll it be,' an Australian politician was once famously asked, 'a headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?' When Tony Blair landed at Sydney on his way to meet Murdoch on Hayman Island, he was met by Paul Keating, then Labor Prime Minister, who owed much of his rise to power to Murdoch. Keating coached Blair on what Murdoch liked to hear: 'deregulation' was his favourite hymn. The state of the Australian media provides a model for and a glimpse of the future in Britain. Of twelve daily newspapers in the various capital cities, Murdoch controls seven. Of ten Sunday papers, Murdoch has seven. In Adelaide, Murdoch has a complete monopoly. He owns the daily, Sunday and local papers and all the printing presses. In Brisbane he controls all but some suburban papers. In other words, of the daily papers published in the capital cities, where the great majority of the population lives, two of every three copies sold are Murdoch papers. Three of every four Sunday papers sold are Murdoch's. The only comparable media baron is Kerry Packer, who owns most of the magazines Australians read and the dominant television network among the three commercials. Until December 1996, the Canadian Conrad Black, in con-trolling the Fairfax Group, controlled most of the rest of the city press. With his departure from the Australian scene, the Howard Government tried at first to steer the Fairfax papers into the eager arms of Packer, then backed away after a backbenchers' revolt. At the same time Murdoch was seeking control of a commercial television channel by way of com-pensation. Pay TV is still in its infancy, but Murdoch and Packer look set to dominate it. This is largely due to the Labor Governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, whose Thatcherite policies offered inspiration to 'new' Labour in Britain. As Treasurer, then Prime Minister, Keating was the architect of media deregu-lation. In November 1986, Keating announced legislation to 'restructure' commercial television. Under the old regulations no one could own more than two television stations. Now the government proposed that one owner could command an 'audience reach' of 75 per cent of the population. This would mean that the nation's fifty television stations, which had been spread among 25 owners, would be taken over by a handful of conglomerates, notably those with numerous and often conflicting commercial interests. Not since the dawn of the television age had there been such a contraction of ownership. At the same time, with Wapping out of the way and a foothold gained in American television, Rupert Murdoch was turning his attention to his native land. He had long wanted to fulfil a 'dream' and buy the country's biggest newspaper group, the Herald and Weekly Times, which would allow him to dominate the press. However, Murdoch faced the twin obstacles of the Foreign Takeovers Act and the Australian con-stitution. Having recently renounced his Australian citizenship in order to further his American ambitions, he faced the obstacle of a law that restricted foreign ownership of the press. Moreover, Section 51 of the constitution gives Parlia-ment the authority to prevent concentrated ownership of any section of Australia's small and often fragile economy. Clearly, as the Australian saying goes, he needed a 'mate'. On November 13, 1986, three weeks before he flew to Melbourne to make his bid for the Herald and Weekly Times, Murdoch's A u s t r a l i a n newspaper unexpectedly attacked the conservative opposition to Hawke's Labor Government. Shortly before that editorial appeared, Murdoch met Paul Keating in the United States, where they discussed the prob-lems of media ownership. On their return to Australia, they met again, this time with Bob Hawke, the Prime Minister, pre-sent. Within days, Murdoch's senior executives were left in no doubt that his papers now supported the Labor Government. Murdoch exuded a new public confidence. When it was pointed out to him at a press conference that the chairman of the Trade Practices Commission, a regulatory body, had said that his takeover of the Herald and Weekly Times might contravene the law, he said, 'That is not an insurmountable problem.' Neither was the Foreign Takeovers Act nor the constitutional safeguard a 'problem' any more. The only remaining 'problem' was a law that prevented Murdoch from owning television and radio stations which were part of the Herald and Weekly Times empire. Murdoch dealt with this by vanishing. His Australian company, News Limited, announced his disappearance in the following press release: 1. Although Mr Murdoch was formerly a director of News Ltd, he is no longer a director and he holds no office in the company. 2. Mr Murdoch has no authority to speak on behalf of or to bind News Ltd. The ruse beckoned endless court action, so Murdoch tried another. Now in de facto control of the Herald and Weekly Times, he arranged the sale of its television and radio interests before he took it over officially. That one worked. The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, although pressed by the Australian Journalists' Association to investigate the deal, was outmanoeuvred and, with no encouragement from the government to do otherwise, simply gave up. For his part, Prime Minister Hawke had only to remain silent to acquiesce. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bill Hayden, and the Opposition spokesman on communications, Ian Macphee, called for a public inquiry into the Murdoch bid, to no avail; Hayden was silenced by the Cabinet and Macphee was visited on a Sunday morning by his frantic leader, John Howard, who had interrupted a holiday to tell him that under no circumstances was Murdoch to be offended. On both sides of the Australian Parliament the silence was contagious. One MP told me at the time, 'The hostility of Murdoch would mean my political death. So I shut up and I'm not proud of it.' Elsewhere few dogs barked. Coverage by the non-Murdoch media of such an historic shift in power was primarily of the isn't-Rupert-clever-school. The Australian Press Council all but disintegrated as a result of the Murdoch takeover. With seven of its members representing the proprietors, their vote blocked a proposal for an inquiry. The chairman, Hal Wootten, a former judge, resigned in protest, saying bitterly, 'Allowing Murdoch to assume control of Australian newspapers was unparalleled outside totalitarian countries. The Federal Treasurer [Keating] could stop the takeover if he wanted to . . . in this case it is a man who has renounced his citizenship to further his worldwide power, and who makes no secret of the fact that he intends to make personal use of his control of newspapers.' When Hawke finally spoke about the sale, he and Keating had been entertained by Murdoch on his estate a short drive from Canberra. Ian Macphee refused to accept the govern-ment's silence and, under the Freedom of Information Act, requisitioned from Keating's office the Foreign Investment Review Board's recommendations. Six of the eight pages he received were blacked out and stamped 'Commercial. In confidence'. One paragraph, released two years later, indicated that the Board had opposed the takeover. Hawke denied this, and Keating still refused to release the full report, declaring the episode 'over'. At the root of Murdoch's financial power is his talent for manipulating tax laws. At the beginning of the 1990s his Australian parent company, News Corporation, paid tax of less than two cents in the dollar. In 1996, the Australian Financial Review calculated that Murdoch's tax bill was $A300 million less than the amount he would have paid had he been taxed at the statutory rate of 33 per cent.46 However, this pales against his savings in Britain, where, in the decade to 1996, Murdoch's News International paid virtually no tax on recorded profits of almost a billion pounds. None of this is against the law. Murdoch's great skill lies in the way he moves capital and profits around the world, speci-fically to and from the books of 'letter-box companies' in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands and the Netherlands Antilles. This is his secret empire: an ever-changing number of subsidiary companies that trade in circumstances bewildering to all but the most creative accountants. In 1994, for example, an 'off-the-shelf' Murdoch sub-sidiary, News Times Holdings, paid almost a billion and a half pounds for News Publishers, a Bermuda-registered shell company also owned by Murdoch's News International. Why was this unheard-of company worth so much money? Why should a Murdoch subsidiary buy a Bermuda-registered com-pany owned by its parent company? The answers lie in the now standard practice by multinational corporations of creat-ing 'virtual companies' in order to avoid tax. Murdoch is reputedly the cleverest of them all. Although in 1997 his companies were being investigated by tax authorities in Britain, Australia and Israel, it was unlikely that any action would be taken against him. 'This government will not tolerate any action by companies which rip off the rest of the community,' said Paul Keating in 1987: a year in which the Australian Tax Office estimated that, by shifting profits to tax havens, News Corporation and other Australia-based com-panies had cost Australian taxpayers $A1.2 billion in lost revenue. 'Murdoch is not like you and me,' said Christopher Hird, one of the few journalists to have investigated Murdoch's tax affairs. 'We work, we pay our taxes. Murdoch lives by different rules. His companies use the services that we provide, they use the roads to carry their newspapers around, they use the health service for their employees to use when they're ill. They benefit from all the things that our society provides, but they feel no sense of obligation to make a contribution to that. On the contrary, they see it as a challenge to avoid paying taxes. They are a different class of people. They are the over-class, the ones who want to rule the world, and they don't want to pay us for the privilege of doing so.' It is the scale of the hypocrisy that is difficult to grasp. Murdoch's newspapers incessantly attack people who are not meeting the 'moral challenge': that is, those who do not speak the Sun's language on 'morality and family life'. These are mainly the minority among the poor who, usually out of desperation, 'fiddle' the social security system out of a few extra pounds. Impoverished single mothers are a frequent target. They are labelled 'scroungers'. The Sun has campaigned for their child support to be cut, arguing that the saving would allow a five pence cut in taxes.50 No mention is made of the fact that big business in Britain owes ?23 billion in uncollected tax. Because Murdoch's companies pay so little tax, papers like the Sun are, in effect, subsidised by the public purse and are scroungers on a grand scale. In 1996, the Independent asked the Labour Party leader-ship what it planned to do about Murdoch's taxes, or lack of them. Gordon Brown, then Shadow Chancellor, had fre-quently denounced 'fat cats' and promised they would be taxed 'fairly'. When asked about Murdoch's taxes, neither he nor other members of the Labour front bench were available for comment. Alistair Darling MP was eventually put forward as spokesman. 'You can't be subjective,' he said. 'You must never design a tax system to get at one person. It is a matter of fundamental principle.' The fear of offending Murdoch was evident early in 1997 as Murdoch began to take control of the 'digital revolution' in television. He has monopoly ownership of the 'black box' technology which you buy and put on the top of your TV set. If you have a satellite dish, this will eventually bring in 200 digital channels. At the very least, it will provide a further thirty terrestrial channels. Murdoch formed British Digital Broadcasting in partner-ship with the two biggest ITV companies, Carlton and Granada. The Independent Television Commission (ITC) subsequently granted the consortium the franchise to broadcast the first digital channels, even though it said it was 'more attracted by the innovative programme proposals' of the rival bidder, Digital Television Network. The group got the licence because it promised to buy movies and sports coverage from Murdoch's BSkyB and so draw more viewers. The twist was that Murdoch himself was ordered by the ITC to sell his shares - a curiously coy demonstration of the regulator's power as Murdoch will still be effectively in charge. He will draw 70 per cent of the revenues, control the electronic programme guide and, most important, he will have gained the foothold so long denied him in British terrestrial television. The political reaction in Britain has been silence, or fatuities about the ineluctable nature of progress. 'The consumer can sit back', said a Guardian editorial, 'and wait to be positively spoilt for choice.' The 'choice' was demonstrated in the programming offered by the new consortium. There is 'tele-shopping', 'Animal Planet', sport and old movies and old costume dramas and old sitcoms. The current affairs and documentaries planned are, says the prospectus, 'linked to law and order, and to Sky News in the morning'. The remains of the eclectic range of British television are to be replaced by the equivalent of a shopping mall, where, beneath the bright packaging, most of the goods are the same. There is nothing adventurous and little that has not been seen before, over and again, in one form or another. The words of Murdoch's rival, Ted Turner, owner of the 24-hour Cable News Network, come to mind. 'We're a lot like the modern chicken farmer,' he said. 'They grind up the feet to make fertiliser, they grind up the intestines to make dog food. The feathers go into the pillows. Even the chicken manure is made into fertiliser. They use every bit of the chicken. Well, that's what we try to do with the television product.' In Doug Lucie's play The Shallow End, inspired by the and another about news bulletins read by stammerers. He then said that television news should follow the tabloids and 'with more channels there will be more TV, from more points of view'. He described the main television news programmes as 'dull and regimented clones of each other, working to news values light years away from the interests of the great swathes of the population'. He was not challenged on either of these statements. Yet when MacKenzie was its editor, the Sun discouraged 'great swathes of the population' from defending their 'interests'. In the world of the Sun and the News Bunny, ordinary people are merely passive consumers of the trifling, the puerile, the trashy and the pornographic. They are never a political force; for the only 'politics' permitted is specious indignation about false demons and worship of the consumer gods and their priests. Old people are of no account, unless they serve as victims. Young people are morons or drug-dealers. The solidarity of working people seeking their rights is redundant - like them. MacKenzie's audience of fashionably suited marketing men listened attentively to his aggressive banalities. It was clear they did not regard him as a buffoon in a dirty mac. They made a point of calling him 'Kelvin'; this, after all, was the man who made the Sun a 'success': a term whose boundaries are determined by profit and naturally exclude the likes of Hillsborough. Indeed, a certain respect was in the air. Mark Damazer, the editor of BBC TV News, was almost deferential in conceding that 'Kelvin has certainly got a point, in the narrow sense. Certainly, as the spectrum expands, there is no reason for all the news programmes to be pitched quite so high up the scale, there is a case for different approaches.' He hastened to add that the BBC was not heading downmarket. Such assertions rarely suggest that all the population - old people as well as young people, disabled people as well as able people, earnest people as well as the light-hearted - have a right, under the charter of the corporation they own, to expect a truly representative service. At the same time, regulated, commercial television has a vital place; my own television career has been spent entirely in the commercial sector. Some of the best drama, current affairs, documentaries and children's programmes in the world have been produced by Britain's ITV network. That, too, is now threatened. A former executive of the American National Broadcasting Company, Sonny Fox, put it bluntly. 'The salient fact today', he said, 'is that commercial television is primarily a marketing medium and secondarily an entertainment medium.' The former vice-president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Arnold Becker, was even more forthright. 'I'm not interested in culture,' he said. 'I'm not interested in pro-social values. I have only one interest. That's whether people watch the program. That's my definition of good, that's my definition of bad.' As Thomas Kiernan points out, the undisputed 'pace-setter' of this view is Murdoch's Fox network in the United States, whose transmission began with the 'live' broadcast of the voice of a woman about to die in a blazing building. The Thatcher Government's Broadcasting Act of 1990 brought about a television 'revolution' as significant as Wap-ping. By introducing market ideology directly into ITN's gathering and presentation of news, 'for the first time in British broadcasting', wrote Franklin, 'news had to make a profit'.56 Jon Snow, the presenter of Channel 4 News, called this 'news under siege'. 'Ratings will be the determinants', he wrote, 'because the money comes from advertisers. Within a couple of years, there could be no serious analytical news programmes on American TV and that is the way we are heading.' Something similar has happened in radio. The Broadcasting Acts of 1990 and 1996 almost doubled the number of Independent Local Radio (ILR) stations. The government's stated aim was that 'market forces' would trigger greater choice and diversity. 'In reality,' wrote Franklin, 'the policy outcome has been precisely the opposite. The market penalises those who stray too far from the mainstream; ILR stations offer a dull, homogeneous and predictable output . . . a rather unwholesome diet of muzak seasoned with newszak.' Again, mostly silence has greeted these radical changes in the way millions of people are to be allowed to perceive and interpret their world. Media sections in the broadsheet newspapers occasionally allow dissenting voices, but that is not their purpose. Like the media itself, they are essentially marketing vehicles, whose primary interest is not serious journalistic scrutiny of the industry, but formulaic 'media village' tittle-tattle, something on circulation figures, something from the what-I-had-for-breakfast school of journalism and perhaps a 'controversial' interview with a wily political 'spin doctor'. The reason why journalists are so malleable is rarely discussed. Media stories, no matter how incestuous and trivial, are now so popular with editors they are no longer confined to their specialist section. The Guardian filled three pages of its tabloid section with a 'profile' of Tina Brown, editor of the New Yorker. This was 'market' or 'shopping mall journalism', written largely in American marketspeak. 'As new-broom editor of the fusty New Yorker', it began, 'Britain's Tina Brown has had both brickbats and bouquets. Held in awe by some as a very big cheese in the Big Apple, to others she is Stalin in high heels ? Tina is what marketing men call a breakout star [who] can command a table in any New York restaurant at any time.' However, her 'commitment curve' is 'brutal'. And so on. Market ideology's division of humanity into 'new' people (good) and 'old guard' (bad) was duly honoured. The perfor-mance would not have been out of place in the tabloids.5 9 Tabloid stories now appear often on the news pages of the broadsheets. The front page of the Observer carried, in large type, Lynn Barber's gratuitous abuse of the actress Felicity Kendal - 'IF A MAN SAYS HE FANCIES HER, I TAKE IT AS A SIGN HE IS SEXUALLY DEFUNCT'. Inside, in her 'interview', Barber noted that Kendal's 'hands are hideous knotted bony claws with crimson talons'. What her subject had done to deserve such cruelty was never explained. It would have fitted comfortably into the News of the World. Some journalists have been mesmerised by Murdoch and his ethos. There is widespread admiration for the Sun, the sort that comes from vicarious middle-class flirtation with low-life. Murdoch's semi-official biographer and faithful defender, William Shawcross, described the Sun's fatuous sound-bites as 'witty'. Forget the lies and the devastation of people's lives: this is the sensibility of the late 1990s, the way of the reactionary tide. A 1996 history of the popular press, Tickle the Public by Matthew Engel, exemplifies this. The author describes the infamous Sun headline 'GOTCHA' as 'a cultural reference point' and exudes an almost missionary zeal in persuading us that Kelvin MacKenzie has been misunderstood. Although MacKenzie 'behaved obnoxiously', he wrote, 'he is not an obnoxious man'. On the contrary, he can be 'endearingly vul-nerable'. Indeed, he only abused people because his own journalistic 'standards were very high'. For here was an editor with 'a natural, instinctive flair for turning raw information into highly readable stories ?' Endearing anecdotes about the great man follow, the sort that 'cling ? to all really great journalists'. Here Engel can barely contain himself. 'Mac-Kenzie was a sort of genius,' he effuses. 'No other word will do.' As for Murdoch's 'revolution' at Wapping, this 'did indeed give journalists new freedom'. Freedom to do what? Engel does not say. Freedom certainly to carry on falsifying and pillorying while suppressing the truth of the most sustained political attack on ordinary people in modern times? He does not say. In 1975, Murdoch's Australian conducted a campaign resembling a vendetta against the reformist Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam. The conservative Opposition, led by Malcolm Fraser, had paralysed the Australian Senate, blocking bills providing legislative authority for the govern-ment's annual spending. The Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, was on the verge of sacking Whitlam and triggering a constitutional coup d'?tat. The Australian urged on Fraser and Kerr during the critical period before Kerr finally acted. Journalists' copy was slanted and rewritten as the country's only national newspaper clearly assisted in the despatch of the elected government. The journalists rebelled, and seventy on the Australian's staff wrote to Murdoch: 'The Australian has become a laughing stock. Reporters who were once greeted with respect when they mentioned the Australian have had to face derisive harangues before they can get down to the job at hand.' They told him they could not be loyal to a 'propaganda sheet'.63 Murdoch ignored their letter, and Kerr dismissed Whitlam. The journalists went into the streets and burned copies of their newspaper in the centre of Sydney. They were joined by hundreds of passers-by. Nothing like this had ever happened before in Australia. 'Since when did any democrat admire great power used for private advantage?' wrote David Bowman, a former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald and one of the few Australian journalists publicly critical of Murdoch today. 'The danger is that the media of the future, the channels of mass communication, will be dominated locally and world-wide by the values - social, cultural and political - of a few individuals and their huge corporations. Democrats ought to fight to the last ditch against what Murdoch and the other media giants represent.' Like any emperor, Murdoch is clearly anxious to establish his dynasty, especially in the land of his birth. When age has finally caught up with him, his heirs will still need to manipulate politicians in order to bypass laws so that the empire continues to prosper. So the 'grooming' of his offspring, has begun in earnest. In 1996, a 'Sir Keith Murdoch Memorial Lecture' was instituted, honouring Lachlan's grandfather, a famous jour-nalist. The first lecture was given by Lachlan, who emphasised that his parents were Australian and that he was the product of both Australian and American cultures. In fact, he was born in Britain and brought up in the United States. As part of an accompanying propaganda drive to establish both acceptance and respectability for the heir, pictures of Lachlan and his father appeared, Maxwell style, in the Adelaide Advertiser. They looked out from the front page, from the sports pages (Murdoch owns the TV rights of Super League football) and from the business pages. 'The danger for the Murdochs', wrote David Bowman, 'is that [Rupert Murdoch's] disappearance will stiffen the back-bone of the politicians in Canberra. Only Canberra can break the Murdoch grip on the Australian press . . . His special place of power and privilege in Australia, arranged for him by Paul Keating, was made possible to a large extent by the rose-tinted view the public held of Murdoch personally. With time, reality is sinking in and he is increasingly viewed not as the Aussie who took on the world and won, but as a foreigner-by-choice who is in this country for what he can get out of it.' 65 With his son at his side, Murdoch described himself as an Australian. He seemed not to understand that in an immi-grant society the renunciation of citizenship is not viewed kindly, particularly when the reason is the circumvention of laws in the country of adoption. He also had the audacity to call for 'tax reform' in a country where he pays minimal tax. The letters pages of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald (which he does not yet own) lit up with anger. 'How dare Rupert Murdoch use the term "us" and "we" when referring to Australia?' was a typical response. Another was: 'Will somebody please remind Mr Rupert Murdoch that he is no longer an Australian. He sold his birthright, for money, and therefore renounced his right to a say in how this country is run.' Public opinion can be a bewildering phenomenon, even to powerful individuals who believe they understand it, even own it. In his seminal book about journalism, The Captive Press, David Bowman compares Murdoch's growing power, and its accompanying silence among politicians, with the rise of Alfred Hugenberg in Germany in the 1920s. 'Hugenberg is reliably estimated to have enjoyed control or influence over nearly half the German press by 1930,' he wrote. 'His philosophy was right-wing nationalist, and accordingly he helped block the spread of democratic ideas in Germany, to that extent weakening the Weimar republic and paving the way for the triumph of the Nazis.' This theme is taken up by Reiner Luyken, the Die Zeit journalist who coined the expression 'cultural Chernobyl'. 'The laws of supply and demand worked well for Hitler,' he told me. 'He no doubt gave many people what they wanted. Does that mean that supply and demand is an immutable law? Does that mean that, as journalists, we listen to the Murdochs and always look over our shoulders, wondering if we are giving the readers what they want, regardless of the demands of principle and of honest journalism? Of course not. As a German I know that Britain not only won the war, but brought freedom back to Germany. This freedom allowed us to establish newspapers whose main concern was not what the readers wanted, but truth and contributing to democracy. Not to further this objective, not to cling to it as if it were life itself, is surely an abuse of something that has been created with the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers.' Hugh Cudlipp went further. 'I look to the journalists on the lousiest of our newspapers', he wrote, 'not to do the dirty work.'

quote:

Mr. CALLAWAY: Mr. Chairman, under unanimous consent, I insert into the Record at this point a statement showing the newspaper combination, which explains their activity in the war matter, just discussed by the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. MOORE]: �In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States. �These 12 men worked the problems out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers. �This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States Army and Navy, and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes. �This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of the stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March, 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the Army and Navy under false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is that it is 'patriotism.' They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people.� - Rep. Callaway (Texas) Congressional Record, Vol. 54, Feb. 9, 1917, p.2947

quote:

Mr. Bush clearly believes what he said: The War On Terror is an in escapable calling of the generation now in charge. Like many of you, I want to support him in that work. I want to do my part. But the President makes it hard. He confused us by going after Sadaam Hussein when villian behind the mass murder of 911 was Osama Bin Ladin. He seems not to realize how his credibility has been shredded by all the false and misleading reasons to put forth to justify invading Iraq. Lyndon Johnson never recovered from using the dubious events at the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to go to war in Vietnam, and even if Mr. Bush wins reelection this November, he too will eventually be dragged down by the powerful undertow that inevitably accompanies public deception. The public will grow intolerant of partisan predators and cronie capitalists indulging in a frenzy of feeding at the troughs in Baghdad and Washington, and there will come a time when the President will have no one to rely on except his most rabid allies in the right wing media. He will discover too late that you cannot win the hearts and minds of the public at large in a nation polarized and pulvarized by endless propaganda in defiance of reality. - Bill Moyers

Took at class at school this semester called , Critical Media Analysis. Talked about alot of these issues, specifically the influence of the elite over the mass media.

DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ
DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ
DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ
DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ
DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ

"It may be good to possess power based on strength, but it is better to win and hold the heart of a People."

Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for People's Entertainment and Propoganda

quote:

Originally posted by InTranzd DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ

YEP and agreed - but one would hope this is common knowledge.

I've always been a believer in the old adage:

"Believe half of what you see and none of what you read."

Paperclip

Monarch

mkultra

It is sad that the media is so good at what they do. The majority of the people actually believe in what they say as the truth.

I was delving into some older articles regarding the media's role in foreign policy and I came across this gem, written a couple of years after the first Persian Gulf war.

It's insights struck me as exceptionally poignant. This isn't anything that you would read about in today's political climate, especially seeing as how the Neo-cons have played such a large and continuing part in the suppression of honest reporting.

Yeah, I already know that it's long, so don't bother complaining.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The media's role in U.S. foreign policy.
(Power of the Media in the Global System)


Journal of International Affairs; 6/22/1993; Herman, Edward S.



Conservative critics give the impression that the media is unpatriotic and subversive in its foreign policy coverage, and the press responds by saying that it is pursuing truth in reporting without regard to national bias. However, the national media is heavily dependent on the government for information that is deemed credible. Consequently, the press most often defers to the government and criticizes its position only within parameters that are acceptable to the government and its notion of national security. The established media is more akin to a public relations arm of the US government.

WATCHDOG AND ADVERSARY MODELS OF THE MEDIA

Spokespersons for the media regularly portray them as the country's watchdogs, who "root about in our national life, exposing what they deem right for exposure," without fear or favor.(1) Such self-congratulatory statements are traditionally supported by reference to the Watergate exposures, which "helped force a President from office,"(2) and the media's news coverage of the Vietnam War -- allegedly so open and critical that it helped firm up popular opposition and forced the war's negotiated settlement.

Nonetheless, many factors -- discussed below -- contribute to make the mainstream media supportive of government policy and vulnerable to "news management" by the government. This is most evident in foreign affairs reporting, in which strong domestic constituencies contesting government propaganda campaigns are rare, and in which the government can employ ideological weapons like anti-communism, a demonized enemy or alleged national security threats to keep the media compliant. Thus in the 1980s the Reagan administration was able to demonize the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi as premier terrorist, Grenada and Nicaragua as U.S. national security threats and Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega as a villainous drug dealer, with a high degree of mainstream media cooperation.(3)

The media's generous self-appraisal is supported in a curious and indirect way by neo-conservative and business attacks, which have frequently charged that the media are dominated by a liberal elite, hostile to business and government.(4) The same Watergate-Nixon evidence and Vietnam War coverage, cited by defenders of the media as demonstrating their constructive role, is used by conservative critics to demonstrate media excess. Big Story, for example, purported to show that the media's coverage of the 1968 Tet offensive was inaccurate, adversarial and unpatriotic.(5) Cited often and without criticism, Big Story contributed to the now-conventional belief not only that the media was hostile to the war, but also that "the outcome of the war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen."(6) John Corry of the New York Times conceded that the media bias argued by Braestrup existed, but contended that it was thoughtlessness, not deliberate subversive intent, that brought about this result.(7)

These attacks, and half-hearted and compromised defenses have served the media well. They suggest that those in power feel pressed by the media and are not insulated from their "rooting about." The media's liberal defenders have also helped legitimize the media by the uncritical nature of their rebuttals to neo-conservative criticism. Thus, Herbert Gans, attacking neo-conservative charges that the media are dominated by a liberal elite, answered these critics in part by lauding the media's professionalism and objectivity:

The beliefs that actually make it into the news are professional values that are intrinsic to national journalism and that journalists learn on the job....The rules of news judgment call for ignoring story implications....with some notable exceptions, including libel and national security.(8)

A similarly constrained scope of debate is evident in Reporters Under Fire, a book on media bias in foreign affairs. In it, the media are accused by neo-conservative and right-wing critics -- Morton Kondracke, Ben Wattenberg, Daniel James, Shirley Christian and Allen Weinstein -- of an adversarial position to the U.S. government in their coverage of Central America in the 1980s, and to Israel at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. On the defensive, the liberals argued either that the media were evenhanded -- reporters Alan Riding and Karen De Young and academics William Leo Grande and Roger Morris -- or that their bias against Israel was a result of a double standard, according to which better things were expected of Israel -- Milton Viorst.(9) In each case, the agenda and limits of the debate were set by the neo-conservatives and spokespersons for the U.S. and Israeli governments, with the opposition at best denying the alleged adversarial bias.

Critical Analyses of the Media

In fact, the media do not root about and expose abuses freely and without discrimination -- an important possibility excluded from the debates just described. Rather, they serve mainly as a supportive arm of the state and dominant elites, focusing heavily on themes serviceable to them, and debating and exposing within accepted frames of reference.

The dominant media are themselves members of the corporate-elite establishment. Furthermore, media scholarship has regularly stressed the tendency of the media to rely excessively on the government as a news source and to defer to its positions. A classic and often-cited study by Leon Sigal showed that nearly three-quarters of the front page stories in the Washington Post and New York Times depended on official sources.(10) Bennett, Chomsky, Cooper, Solely and Spence have also quantified the media's extraordinary deference to official views during the Central American wars of the 1980s.(11)

Media analysts have long noted that the economics of the media push journalists into the hands of "primary definers," who offer a daily supply of supposedly credible stories.(12) Offbeat news and sources, in contrast, require careful verification for accuracy and, thus, resources. State Department and White House handouts are provided daily at the same place and do not require an accuracy check; they are news by virtue of their source. A symbiotic relationship tends to develop between primary definers and their regular beat reporters, who are rewarded for being cooperative and penalized for unfriendly reporting. These "old-boy networks" are reinforced by linkages between officials and senior managers and editors in the mainstream media.(13)

Structural aspects of the media also make them sensitive to the demands of the government. Contrary to neo-conservative analyses, the controlling media elites are the owners, not the reporters and anchors. The owners are extremely wealthy individuals or large corporations, such as Westinghouse and General Electric Company, with a major stake in the status quo and extensive social and business connections to other business and government leaders. They also depend on the government for television licenses, contracts to provide goods and services and support in overseas activities.(14) Furthermore, the media must sell their programs to advertisers, who are not likely to look favorably on "adversarial" messages.(15)

Given this kind of media, what is the explanation for business and neo-conservative complaints of adversarial and unpatriotic media? The business community and elite are not a monolith, and the mainstream media are not closely controlled by the "capitalist class," or even by the owners of the media, although they broadly reflect dominant class interests. Frequent disagreements crop up among these interests, and the media often criticize established institutions, their abuses and policies, although virtually never at the level of institutional arrangements themselves. The accusations and debates mentioned earlier are intra-establishment conflicts, in which the complaining parties -- while not necessarily badly treated -- are dissatisfied and have the resources to press for closer conformity to their views. The business community -- angry at the media's treatment of the Nixon-era bribery disclosures and the oil-price increases of the 1970s -- made its dissatisfaction known, directly by vociferous complaints and a barrage of publicity, and indirectly by the funding of critical analysts and institutions like The Media Institute and Accuracy in Media to press its case.(16) Similarly, neo-conservative critiques of the media on foreign policy issues have essentially objected to deviations from the official party line. This was evident during the U.S.-led 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media complained that the media were reporting facts that were not helpful to the war effort; Irvine's view was that the media should serve as public relations agents of the state and adjust the news accordingly. Braestrup's Big Story had offered a similar complaint about the Vietnam War: The media were too pessimistic during and after the Tet offensive.(17) Braestrup's documentation, however, showed that the U.S. military leaders were even more pessimistic than the media, but his premise was that a free press should act as a marketing agent for official policy when reporting on any national venture. The proper role of the mass media in the neo-conservative view was also implicit in Michael Ledeen's neo-conservative plaint about the media: "Most journalists these days consider it beneath their dignity to simply report the words of government officials--and let it go at that."(18)

It is noteworthy that in early 1988 the Soviet press was assailed by Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov for disclosing negative facts about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which he claimed "played into the hands of the West."(19) The Ledeen-Irving-Braestrup equivalents in the former Soviet Union would surely have supported Yazov's claim that the Soviet press was too liberal and "adversarial," as his criticisms of the Soviet press precisely fit their own for the U.S. media. In fact, the "adversary press" in the Soviet Union followed the party line in all essentials in 1988. Similarly, the mass media in the United States accepted that the United States fought to protect South Vietnam, sought democracy in Nicaragua in the 1980s and intervened in the war in the Gulf in 1991 to fight for the principle of non-aggression. The Bush administration wanted to censor the media during the Gulf War, not because they were adversaries, but for the reason implicit in Yazov's critique of the Soviet media -- to avoid of any inconvenient or negative reports.

Criteria for Evaluating the Media's Role in Foreign Policy

There is a strong elitist tradition in the United States concerning the proper roles of the government and ordinary citizens in the conduct of foreign policy. In this tradition, the most notable exemplar of which was the journalist Walter Lippmann, the public is seen as stupid, volatile and best kept in the dark, with policy left in the hands of a superior elite who can better judge the national interest.(20) Government officials regularly look upon themselves as the best judges of the national interest and the public and media as obstacles to be overcome or managed.(21) This view fits with the contemporary neo-conservative opinion that the media are properly an arm of the government. The difference is that the liberal-elite tradition recognizes and allows debate and disputes among the elite. In the neo-conservative view, even dissenting elites are a subversive and unpatriotic threat. Both, however, share the view that the public has no legitimate role in determining foreign policy.

These views are blatantly undemocratic. The mainstream media themselves, in principle, espouse the view that they are responsible for informing the public, thereby enabling it to properly assess policy and potentially influence decision making. As instruments of a democratic order, they should be condemned -- and in theory would condemn themselves -- if they served as tools of the government, deprived the public of essential information and, in effect, sold government policy.

Assuming that the media should serve a democratic polity, then they ought to inform the public on the major issues of the day with sufficient context, depth and honesty, for the public to be able to make thoughtful judgments and influence the course of policy making. As all governments lie and manipulate evidence, a democratically oriented media would not take government claims at face value and allow themselves to become another propaganda arm of the government. They would try to establish the substantive reasons for actions and not accept nominal claims as valid. They would be alert to double standards and selective use of criteria and evidence to justify policy. They would carefully evaluate claims of the probable effects of proposed policies. Finally, they would follow up on foreign policy actions to see whether the claimed objectives were met; they would not allow the government to mobilize support for a policy action, carry it out and then drop the subject.

Paired Case Studies in Media Foreign Policy Performance: Human Rights Violations, Plane Shoot-Downs and Third World Elections

In the several short cases analyzed here, it will be shown that the media followed a double standard in accord with a state agenda, even though this often required that they contradict themselves and ignore relevant information that was incompatible with the agenda. The more extended case study of media coverage of the Persian Gulf War that follows examines the issues to which the media should have paid attention -- in the interest of giving the public essential information -- in comparison with what the media did report.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration strove to mobilize the U.S. public in support of a massive increase in arms expenditures and a more aggressive policy toward the Soviet Union. It also sought to help regimes under siege by orchestrating insurgencies in El Salvador and South Africa -- among others -- and to aid "freedom fighters" attacking governments it opposed, as in Angola and Nicaragua. These policies required media support, as the need for additional arms was dubious, some of the regimes under siege were massive human rights violators and the freedom fighters were sometimes difficult to distinguish from plain terrorists.

The U.S. media have frequently allowed themselves to be mobilized to serve the government's agenda and foreign policy goals.(22) Thus, for example, the Polish government's crackdown on Poland's Solidarity movement from 1980 to 1982 was assailed furiously by administration officials and the mainstream media. The Turkish military government's equally or more brutal crackdown on Turkey's union movement about the same time was ignored by the U.S. government and was barely noticed by the mainstream media.(23)

Perhaps even more revealing was the treatment by U.S. government and media of the Polish police's killing of the activist priest Jerzy Popielusko in October 1984, in comparison with coverage of the murders of religious leaders and activists in Latin America. Popielusko's murder was given spectacular attention and treated with furious indignation, sufficient to put the Polish government on the defensive and compel the trial and imprisonment of the officers involved. The mainstream media were much less attentive to human-rights violations in U.S.-client states and often ignored them altogether, with the result that such murders interfered minimally with U.S. policy support of the regimes perpetrating the violence.(24)

An examination of the coverage of Popielusko's murder in comparison with the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and four U.S. religious women in El Salvador in 1980 and 95 other priests murdered by state agents in U.S.-client states in Latin America was particularly revealing. The hypothesis that Popielusko's murder would receive more attention and indignation was not only confirmed for the individual victims, but the leading U.S. media also gave more coverage to Popielusko's murder than to all 100 victims in the U.S.-client states taken together, even though eight of the 100 were U.S. citizens.(25)

Media treatment of civilian-airliner shoot-downs affords another interesting comparison of media performance. The Soviet shoot-down of Korean Airliner flight 007 on 1 September 1983 occurred during a period when the Reagan administration was eagerly attempting to demonize the Soviet Union. The administration seized this opportunity to tar the Soviets as brutal and ruthless, and it organized a worldwide publicity campaign and boycott. The mainstream media joined the campaign with enthusiasm and passion, expressing great indignation and employing invidious language, such as "barbarian," "savage" and "cold-blooded murder," insistently pursuing the question of responsibility of high Soviet officials, and rejecting Soviet claims that the plane was on a spy mission, and that they were unaware that it was a civilian aircraft.(26) A New York Times editorial at the time asserted that "There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner."(27)

When the Israeli air force shot down a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973, however, the U.S. mass media never used dramatic language. It was termed only a "tragic accident," and the New York Times editorial on that occasion stated that "No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week."(28) The government and media together in this case kept publicity and indignation at a minimum.

Similarly, when the USS Vincennes shot down Iranian Airliner 655 on 3 July 1988, there was no invidious language employed or indignation expressed by the mainstream media, and it turned out that there were conceivable excuses for at least one nation "shooting down a harmless airliner." The victim could have been asking for it, or it could have been a "tragic error." The New York Times editorial in this case concluded that "The onus for avoiding such accidents in the future rests on civilian aircraft: avoid combat zones; fly high; acknowledge warnings."(29 )The mainstream media's focus in this case was on the "anguish" of the navai personnel ordering the shoot-down. The coverage was such that, according to opinion polls at the time, a majority of the public believed the downing of the civilian airliner was justified.(30)

The service of the media to the state agenda in these cases extended beyond the differential levels of publicity and double standards to the abandonment of any concern for truth. Thus, in the case of the Soviet shoot-down of flight 007, the Reagan administration lied in claiming that the Soviets knew they were shooting down a civilian plane. This was finally acknowledged by the media in 1988, when Congressman Lee Hamilton disclosed the relevant information based on a Freedom of Information Act inquiry, which the media itself had never made.(31)

In the case of the Iranian Airbus, the press, having accepted the government line of "tragic error," but with some onus on the Iranians for having flown an airliner in a provocative way and having failed to answer signals, even failed to follow up on the facts when they were thrust upon them. Thus, in an article in the September 1989 issue of the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, David R. Carlson, Commander of the USS Sides, an escort frigate in the vicinity of the Vincennes at the time, wrote that he was disgusted with the apologies for the act, the attempts to blame the shoot-down on the Iranians and the idea that the Vincennes was "defending herself against an attack," which he said was based on a series of lies. According to Carlson,

When the decision was made to shoot down the Airbus, the airliner was climbing, not diving; it was showing the proper identification friend or foe -- IFF (Mode III); and it was in the correct flight corridor from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. The Vincennes was never under attack by Iranian aircraft. There was no targeting being done by the Iranian P-3....The conduct of Iranian military forces in the month preceding the incident was pointedly nonthreatening....[Well before the shoot-down, the Vincennes' actions] appeared to be consistently aggressive, and had become a topic of warroom conversation....|Robo Cruiser' was the unamusing nickname that someone jokingly came up with for her, and it stuck.(32)

The story was sensationally newsworthy: An on-the-scene naval officer suggested that the shoot-down was not a "tragic error" but was based on the trigger-happy characteristics of a Rambo-like commander, and that the talk about Iranian errors and provocations was untrue. At the time, the Washington Post did publish a back-page article on the Carlson report, in which George Wilson suggested that Carlson's statements were "certain to refuel the controversy generated by the shooting."(33) But Wilson was wrong: The New York Times, which had accepted the official version of the incident, placing blame on the Iranians and focusing on "tragic error," did not touch the story, and no controversy ensued. Not until a July 1992 investigation by Newsweek and ABC News' "Nightline" did the full story become known in the mainstream media.(34)

Another topic on which comparative data sheds light on the subservience of the media to the government's foreign policy aims is the handling of Third World elections in places of conflict. Some such elections are looked upon favorably by U.S. officials, and sometimes -- as in the Dominican Republic in 1966 and El Salvador in 1982 and 1984 -- the elections were even organized by U.S. officials, as a means of legitimizing the governments in place. In other cases, as in Nicaragua in 1984, the U.S. government sought to discredit an election that threatened to legitimate the Sandinista government, which U.S. officials were trying to overthrow.

El Salvador in 1982 and 1984, and Nicaragua in 1984, thus provide a virtually controlled experiment in media integrity or submissiveness. The U.S. government promoted the Salvadoran elections as marvels of democratic advance under adverse conditions, while trying to undermine and discredit the Nicaraguan election as a sham, even though facts did not support claims of superiority of the former election. In the case of El Salvador, the U.S. government agenda stressed the importance and excellence of the election. They focused on the long lines of smiling voters, the size of the turnout, rebel opposition and alleged efforts at disruption. Additionally, they downplayed the absence of fundamental conditions of a free election, such as the freedoms of press and assembly; the ability of all groups to run candidates; and freedom from state terror and coercive threats.

During the Nicaraguan election, the U.S. government agenda was exactly reversed. It called for a focus on the fundamental conditions and disregarded long lines, turnout and so on. This example is more telling because the basic conditions for a free election were more favorable in Nicaragua than in El Salvador. In El Salvador, the dissident media had been literally destroyed in 1980 and 1981, and more than a score of journalists had been murdered between 1980 and 1984.(35) In contrast, no journalists had been killed in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and the opposition newspaper La Prensa, while harassed and censored, continued to publish.(36) Furthermore, in El Salvador, state terror reached dramatic levels, with hundreds of unarmed civilians killed each month during the two years prior to the March 1982 election and scores killed just before the one in March 1984.(37) No comparable state killings occurred in Nicaragua before its 1984 election. In Nicaragua, right-wing candidates ran without fear of murder, while all the left-wing candidates in El Salvador were on army death lists and could not safely run -- nor was it intended that they run. Finally, voting was required by law in El Salvador, but not in Nicaragua. This made the voter turnout less meaningful in El Salvador than in Nicaragua, especially in light of the atmosphere of fear and state terror in the former.

It is highly significant, therefore, that the mainstream media followed the U.S. government's agenda in the two sets of elections, without notable deviation. They gave intense coverage to the Salvadoran elections, played up the long lines and turnout -- but without mentioning the voting requirement -- and stressed alleged rebel attempts to disrupt the elections. Yet these media completely bypassed the absence of the basic conditions needed for a free election. For the Nicaraguan election, the mainstream media ignored the turnout and efforts of the Contras -- and the United States -- to disrupt the election. They focussed incessantly on the trials and tribulations of La Prensa and the complaints and eventual withdrawal from candidacy of Arturo Cruz, who -- it was later disclosed -- was on the CIA payroll.(38)

In its 28 articles on the 1984 Salvadoran election, for example, the New York Times never mentioned freedom of the press or the ability of candidates to run without fear of murder; whereas in its 21 news articles on the Nicaraguan election in that year, eight (38 percent) discussed free speech and assembly; six (29 percent) discussed freedom of the press; and 11 (52 percent) discussed the freedom of candidates to run in the election.(39)

What makes this tabulation so telling is that the media, in following the government agenda, not only failed to look at whether the basic conditions of free elections were present in the favored countries, but they also asked different questions in the two sets of elections. The mainstream media then followed the government in finding that the Salvadoran elections had legitimized the government, which was democratic and "elected," whereas the Nicaraguan government was found by the media to be illegitimate and "unelected," despite the technical and substantive superiority of the Nicaraguan election. The gearing of media newsmaking to the propaganda demands of government policy could hardly have been closer.

TELEVISION WAR IN THE PERSIAN GULF

The Grenada and Panama invasions during the 1980s and the Gulf War in 1991 were mlitary successes, but disastrous media failures. In part, the failures were a result of military restrictions on access, but the media did not react to these official constraints by more aggressive investigative and reporting efforts in areas open to them, nor did they struggle very energetically to get the restraints removed. In the cases of Grenada and Panama, once the great military triumphs over two of the tiniest countries in the world were completed, and officials turned their attention elsewhere -- the mainstream media dutifully did the same.

The Gulf War was a larger scale effort, with greater international dimensions, and its preparation and the war itself were of longer duration, even though the imbalance of forces between the West and Iraq was overwhelming. This meant that there was more room for debate and public discussion before the outbreak of hostilities. The main attention in what follows will be on this early period before the Gulf War, when the media could have fostered a democratic debate on issues of war and peace.

Phase I: 2 August 1990 to 15 January 1991

Following the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq on 2 August 1990, the Bush administration very quickly decided to use this invasion for President George Bush's political advantage, by compelling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait "with his tail between his legs,") in Defense Secretary Richard Cheney's memorable phrase.(40) This required fending off all attempts at a negotiated settlement that would have allowed Saddam a dignified exit, and readying the public for war.

The media's role was crucial in this public relations and propaganda exercise. The Reagan-Bush administration had actively supported Iraq's aggression against Iran from 1980 to 1988; and the Bush administration continued to aid and appease Saddam Hussein through 31 July 1990. On 25 July 1990, a week before the invasion, April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, had assured Saddam that the United States had no opinion on his conflict with Kuwait. And on 31 July, John Kelly, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs -- the highest-ranking Bush official directly concerned with Middle Eastern affairs -- told a congressional committee that the United States had no obligation to defend Kuwait.(41) Numerous CIA alerts that Iraq was amassing troops on the Kuwaiti border and that an invasion was imminent did not cause the Bush administration to issue a warning. It was important for Bush's freedom of action that both his virtual go-ahead to the August invasion and the prior appeasement policy be buried. The media obliged, by giving these issues negligible attention.(42)

As Bush was allegedly taking a high moral stance against "naked aggression," it was also important that the background of Reagan-Bush support of Iraq's aggression against Iran be ignored. Furthermore, less than a year before Iraq's invasion, the Bush administration had invaded Panama, in violation of the U.N. and Organization of American States (OAS) Charters and in the face of a U.N. oppositional majority, vetoed by the United States. South Africa had been ordered to leave Namibia by U.N. resolution and World Court judgment from 1968 -- and regularly invaded Angola from Namibia from 1975 into the 1980s. But Reagan-Bush policy in that case was "quiet diplomacy" and "constructive engagement," with the United States supporting a "linkage" between South Africa's gradual withdrawal from Namibia and the departure of Cuban troops from Angola. Israel was also in long-standing violation of Security Council orders to leave the occupied territories, which had not led to cutbacks in massive U.S. aid, let alone sanctions or bombing. Attention to these double standards would have called into question the purity of Bush's insistence that aggression could never be allowed to stand. The media obliged by rarely, if ever, allowing these matters to surface.(43)

Similarly, the media avoided a number of other issues that would have inconvenienced the administration. The United States had long failed to meet its legal obligations to U.N. financing, had withdrawn from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and was far and away the dominant user of the veto against U.N. attempts to oppose violations of international law. It simply ignored a 1986 World Court decision that its attacks on Nicaragua constituted an "unlawful use of force." In the case of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, however, with the Soviet veto and military capability no longer an obstruction, the United States was able to mobilize the United Nations to attack this particular violator of international law. The administration's double standard here and the turnabout in treatment of U.N. authority were dramatic, but were essentially ignored in the mainstream U.S. media, which reproduced the U.S. official view that the United Nations was finally resuming its proper role in maintaining the peace.(44)

In addition to the decontextualization of issues just described, the Bush administration depended heavily on U.S. mass-media cooperation in its various strategies for mobilizing consent, all of which involved the use of traditional propaganda techniques. One such technique was the demonization of Saddam Hussein, who, like Qadhafi and Noriega in earlier years, was made into the embodiment of evil and "another Hitler." Effective propaganda required that the mass media repeat these claims and disclose the evidence of the new villain's evil acts, but avoid mention not only of any positive features of his rule, but also that the villain was nurtured for a long time by the U.S. government and treated with parallel apologetics by the mainstream media -- as a "pragmatist," with the evils now featured, then glossed over.(45) Demonization was accompanied by new atrocity stories, often inflated and sometimes wholly fabricated. A classic was the alleged Iraqi removal of several hundred babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals following the occupation. This story, created by a Kuwait-financed propaganda operation, was accepted and transmitted without verification by the mainstream media, and was still repeated by CNN and others long after it had been shown to be a complete fabrication.(46)

An important part of the Bush administration's Gulf War program was to place a large U.S. force in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. This allowed the media to focus on military maneuvers, and to bond them and the public with U.S. soldiers facing a ruthless enemy. This was accomplished, first, by claiming that Iraq was planning to invade Saudi Arabia. This claim was almost certainly a propaganda lie, as Iraq consistently asserted that it had no such intention, had insufficient troops and supplies for such an operation, and such action would have been a suicidal declaration of war against the United States. The U.S. mainstream media nevertheless accepted the official version without question and quickly urged vigorous military action against Iraq.(47)

Having put a large U.S. force in place, the Bush administration enlarged it substantially, immediately after the November 1990 elections. With U.S. soldiers in the region, the media cooperatively spent a large portion of their organizational resources in exploring military deployments, possible scenarios of war and the conditions and opinions of U.S. soldiers. This not only diverted attention from real issues, but also readied the public for war.

The most important official lie and greatest media service to the war policy was on the question of diplomacy. Crucial to the Bush strategy was averting a diplomatic solution, as noted by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: The diplomatic track needed to be blocked, lest negotiations "defuse the crisis" while allowing Iraq "a few token gains."(48) The administration therefore carefully subverted an early Arab effort at resolution of the crisis.(49) Iraq itself, taken aback by the Bush administration's furious reaction, made at least five diplomatic approaches and proposals, all summarily rejected by the United States.(50) The French and Russians also tried to open diplomatic lines, to no avail.(51) In this process, the mainstream media served administration policy by giving minimal attention to these diplomatic efforts and their immediate rejection by the United States. In the end, when the Bush administration kept repeating that the United States had tried and exhausted the diplomatic option, the media also accepted this as true.(52)

The significance of this lie and its media support is highlighted by a national public opinion poll reported in the Washington Post in January 1991.(53) It indicated that two-thirds of the U.S. public favored a conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict, if that would lead to an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait -- though the poll was biased against a positive response, as it indicated that the Bush administration was opposed to the proposal. About one week earlier a diplomatic proposal had been floated by the Iraqi government, supported by the exiled Iraqi democratic opposition,(54) which embodied the elements of the resolution supported by at least two-thirds of the U.S. public. The Iraqi proposal was flatly rejected by the Bush administration, and went virtually unreported by the U.S. mass media. That is to say, the media suppressed and failed to allow or encourage a debate on a political solution favored by the public. Instead, it allowed the administration to pull the country into war, based on a media-sustained lie that all the diplomatic routes had been exhausted.

Phase II -- The War. 16 January to 27 February 1991

During the war proper, access to military personnel was closely controlled by a system in which journalists were selected, organized into pools and accompanied by military personnel, making for exceptional reliance on government handouts. The aim was to get the media to focus on the new of U.S. weaponry, to convey the image of a clean war, to minimize images of human suffering and to give the impression of war-makers in full control of the situation.

The result was one of the great successes in the history of war propaganda. The media were incorporated into a system of serious censorship with only mild protests,(55) focused throughout on precisely what the censors wanted, and helped produce a genuine war hysteria. The control of information by government "couldn't be done any better," stated Michael Deaver, the number two image-making official in the Reagan administration.(56) Douglas Kellner, in his extensive examination of media coverage, concluded that the mainstream media presented incredible PR for the military, inundating the country with images of war and the new high-tech military for months, while the brutality of war was normalized and even glamorized in the uncritical media coverage. Throughout the Persian Gulf TV war, the culture of militarism became the mainstream culture after a period when war and the military were in disfavor.(57)

During the war, the media passed on innumerable rumors and official and unofficial fabrications concerning the size of Iraq's forces in Kuwait and chemical and other arms capabilities, alleged exclusive Iraqi responsibility for oil spills, the number of Iraqi hostages taken from Kuwait in the final Iraqi exodus and the legitimacy of U.S. targeting.(58) Although it was clear from official statements during the war that the United States was deliberately destroying the infrastructure of Iraq beyond military necessity, the media rarely, if ever, examined this or discussed its compatibility with the U.N. mandate or international law and morality. When U.S. officials adamantly claimed that an infant-formula factory destroyed in Baghdad actually made biological weapons, the U.S. media accepted this as true, despite the fact that CNN reporter Peter Arnett's and Iraqi officials' denials of these claims were confirmed by numerous independent sources.(59)

When the U.S. military engaged in its final orgy of massacre on the so-called Highway of Death, destroying thousands of fleeing Iraqi soldiers and, almost surely, thousands of Kuwaiti hostages and other refugees, the U.S. media provided an apologetic cover: They averted their eyes to a maximum degree, failed to discuss the use of napalm-fragmentation bombs and fuel air bombs, stressed that the fleeing Iraqis were "looters," ignored the large numbers of hostages and refugees -- although they had given close attention to the earlier claims of Iraqi hostages taken from Kuwait -- and repeated the official explanation that it was important to destroy Iraq's military capability. At the same time, they failed to note the limited U.N. mandate and international law condemning the slaughter of fleeing soldiers, and the burial of large numbers of them in unmarked graves.(60)

Phase III -- The Aftermath: 28 February 1991 to the present

The euphoria following the pulverization of an overmatched Third World country continued for some months but eventually faded as neglected domestic problems came to the fore, and as the results of the war came under closer scrutiny. Belated attention was given to the earlier appeasement policy and the Bush administration's role in building up Saddam Hussein's military establishment, although almost nothing was said of the administration's virtual invitation to Iraq to invade Kuwait and its subsequent complete refusal to allow a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. The fact that the "allied" military effort stopped short of removing "another Hitler" but left him with just enough arms to crush dissident and oppressed Kurds, Shi'ite Iraqis and any democratic opposition was noted, but its full implications were not discussed. There was some publicity given to the fact that the Bush administration and the CIA had encouraged the Kurds to fight, but virtually none was given to the administration's refusal to provide arms to them in their fight against Saddam Hussein.

Although the United States was again selling arms to the Middle East on a massive scale, this was barely noted in the media and was not contrasted with earlier pious claims about bringing a new era of peace to that area of the world. The media touched very lightly on the fact that the fight for democratic principles did not include bringing democracy to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Little attention was paid to the retaliatory killings in Kuwait, which may have exceeded the inflated and indignantly publicized Iraqi executions of Kuwaitis.(61)

Most notable in the aftermath coverage was the continued attention to Iraq's obstructions and refusals to allow inspections, overflights and destruction of its military resources. This was the basis for the continued limitations on Iraqi trade and oil sales and made more difficult its recovery from the "near apocalyptic conditions" reported by a U.N. team in June 1991.(62) In perfect accord with the U.S. foreign-policy agenda, the media paid almost no attention to Iraqi civilian hunger, sickness and death, but focused unrelentingly on Iraq's alleged foot-dragging on weapons control.

In sum, in the three phases of the Gulf War, U.S. mass media coverage was to an extraordinary degree a servant of official policy. In the crucial months before the war, they allowed themselves to be managed in the service of war mobilization and failed to provide the factual and opinion basis for public evaluation. Then and later the mainstream media served ongoing government policy, not the democratic polity.



CONCLUDING NOTE

Both structural analysis and empirical evidence of media performance support the view that the mainstream media tend to follow a state agenda in reporting on foreign policy, and that their alleged adversarial posture reflects tactical differences among the elite, along with factional demands that the media function as a public relations arm of the government. The real problem, however, is the already high level of subservience to government agendas and the media's consistent failure to provide context, and to encourage or even to allow debates extending to fundamental criticism. These failings are incompatible with the media's acknowledged obligation to serve the informational needs of a democracy.


(1.) See Anthony Lewis, "Freedom of the Press-Anthony Lewis Distinguishes Between Britain and America," London Review of Books, 26 November 1987.
(2.) ibid.
(3.) These processes in the cases noted are spelled out in Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989) and Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London: Verso, 1991).
(4.) For an exposition of the neo-conservative view, see Michael Ledeen, Grave New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, "Media and Business Elites," Public Opinion 4, no. 5 (October-November 1981) pp. 42-4; Michael Novak, "The New Elite in an Adversary Culture," Business and the Media, Conference Report, Yankelovich, Skelly & White, 19 November 1981, pp. 8-11.
(5.) Peter Braestrup, Big Story (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977).
(6.) Robert Elegant, as cited in an Accuracy in Media (AIM) rebuttal to the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series "Vietnam: A Television History," AIM episode entitled "Inside Story Special Edition: Vietnam Op Ed," 1985. For a critical examination of Braestrup's book, see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) chapter 5 and appendix 3.
(7.) John Corry, "Is TV Unpatriotic or Simply Unmindful," New York Times, 12 May 1985, section 2, page 1.
(8.) Herbert Gans, "Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?," Columbia Journalism Review, November-December 1985, pp. 32-3; and Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) pp. 185-6.
(9.) Landrum Bolling, ed., Reporters Under Fire: U.S. Media Coverage of Conflicts in Lebanon and Central America (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985). For a full analysis of the confined scope of the debate in this work, see Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, pp. 161-77.
(10.) Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1973) p. 48.
(11.) For a discussion, with citations to these and other authors, see Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 1989, pp. 76-9; also, Lawrence Solely, The News Shapers (New York: Praeger, 1992) passim.
(12.) Primary definers are major news sources who, by virtue of their importance as sources are able to define what is newsworthy. The term is used and explained in Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 53-76. See also, Herman and Chomsky, pp. 18-20, and sources cited there.
(13.) Herman and Chomsky, pp. 8-16; solely, chapters 2, 3 and 10. (14.) During the Gulf War, apart from the need for licenses, the television networks were in the midst of an effort to get the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to allow them to participate in syndication profits, from which they were barred by FCC rule. Opposing government policy during the Gulf War would have been very risky from a profit-maximizing perspective. See Danny Schechter, "Gulf War Coverage," Z Magazine (December 1991) pp. 22-5. (15.) On the constraining power of advertising, see Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
(16.) See Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); A. Kent MacDougall, Ninety Seconds To Tell All: Big Business and the News Media (Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981). MacDougall tells the story of a Los Angeles Times reporter calling an oil company president to clarify a news release, to be told: "Just run it the way I sent it in, sonny," p. 36. On the corporate system's funding of oppositional forces, see John Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984); and Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 26-8.
(17.) Braestrup, vol. 1, pp. 158ff and passim.
(18.) Ledeen, p. 111.
(19.) Bill Keller, "Soviet Official Says Press Harms Army," New York Times, 21 January 1988, p. A3.
(20.) Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932, reprinting of 1921 edition) pp. 31-2, 248.
(21.) Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963) chapter 5.
(22.) Other examples falling into this category that regretfully cannot be discussed here for lack of space would include: Libyan terrorism, contrasted with the treatment of South African terrorism; the Soviet "terror network"; the alleged Soviet-Bulgarian involvement in the assassination attempt against the Pope in May 1981; the Soviet military threat; and the Soviet arms buildup.
(23.) See Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1982) pp. 208-9.
(24.) At the time of this writing, the U.S. mainstream media were reporting on the U.N. investigation of Salvadoran state murders, expressing dismay that the Reagan administration lied and covered up the violence. But the mainstream media awoke too late, and they have failed to point out their own crucial role in not doing for the Salvadoran victims what they did for Popielusko. See, for example, Clifford Krauss, "How U.S. Actions Helped Hide Salvador Human Rights Abuses," New York Times, 21 March 1993, pp. 1, 10.
(25.) Herman and Chomsky, chapter 2, table 2-1, especially pp. 42-6. This chapter shows, for example, that Popielusko got 1183 column inches in the New York Times, versus 201 for the four murdered U.S. religious women and 605 for the 100 client-state victims taken together. It also shows that the quality of treatment was different; that is, the client state victims were treated more antisiptically and their injuries treated with minimal drama, so that they did not get humanized as Popielusko did. An earlier study by this writer of media attention to human rights victims in the former Soviet sphere and in U.S.-client states also showed that Soviet victims were given vastly greater attention than victims in the U.S. sphere of influence. See Herman, Real Terror Network, table 4-1, p. 197.
(26.) For a discussion and illustrations of the dichotomous levels of publicity and word usage in connection with this and other plane shoot-downs, see Edward S. Herman, "Gatekeeper Versus Propaganda Models: A Critical American Perspective," in Peter Golding, Graham Murdock and Phili Schlesinger eds., Communicating Politics: Mass Communication and the Political Process (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986) p. 181-95; Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990) pp. 278-83.
(27.) New York Times, editorial, 2 September 1983, p. A18.
(28.) New York Times, editorial, 1 March 1973, p. 40.
(29.) "In Captain Roger's Shoes," New York Times, editorial, 5 July 1988, p. A16.
(30.) Lee and Solomon, p. 281.
(31.) "The Lie That Wasn't Shot Down," New York Times, editorial reporting the Hamilton findings, 18 January 1988, p. A18.
(32.) David Carlson, "The Vincennes Incident," Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, September 1989, pp. 87-92.
(33.) George Wilson, "Fellow Officer Faults USS Vincennes Skipper," Washington Post, 1 September 1989, p. A4.
(34.) "Sea of Lies," Newsweek, 13 July 1992, p. 29.
(35.) Herman and Chomsky, pp. 97-8.
(36.) For a good discussion of these comparative conditions and media treatment of them, see Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, pp. 41-3.
(37.) Herman and Chomsky, pp. 105-7.
(38) First disclosed in the Wall Street Journal, 23 April 1985, this CIA funding was admitted by Cruz himself in Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Contra Looks Back, Finding Much to Regret," New York Times, 8 January 1988, p. 3.
(39.) For a full tabulation and discussion, see Herman and Chomsky, pp. 132-7.
(40.) Richard Cheney, "Remarks of Defense Secretary Richard Cheney on American Defense Preparedness," Federal News Service, 10 December 1990.
(41.) On the pre-war appeasement of Saddam Hussein, see Murray Wass, "Who Lost Kuwait?," Village Voice, 16-22 January 1991, pp. 60ff .
(42.) Basic sources cited here are: Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner and Herbert I. Schiller, eds., Triumph of the Image: The Media's War in the Persian Gulf -- A Global Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); and John McArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).
(43.) Kellner, pp. 89-97 and passim. (44.) See Chomsky, "The Media and the War: What War?" in Mowlana, Gerbner and Schiller, pp. 60-61. (45.) On earlier media apologetics for Noriega, see Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 150-58; and Lee and Solomon, pp. 316-17; on the earlier whitewash on Saddam Hussein, Scott Armstrong refers to him as "the man who charmed the pants off many American leaders and journalists in the 1970s," providing citations from Evans and Novak, the Washington Post and New York Times, in "Sixty-Four Questions in Search of an Answer," Columbia Journalism Review, November-December 1990, pp. 23-4.
(46.) Kellner, pp. 67-71.
(47.) ibid., pp. 13-29; and Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, Secret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf War, pp. 110-47.
(48.) Thomas Friedman, "Confrontation in the Gulf: Behind Bush's Hard Line," New York Times, 22 August 1990, p. 1.
(49.) See Kellner, pp. 30-1; and Salinger and Laurent, pp. 110-14. (50.) Kellner, pp. 31-7.
(51.) ibid., pp. 37, 318-35.
(52.) ibid.; and Thomas Friedman, "Pax Americana: What the United States Has Taken on in the Gulf, Besides a War," New York Times, 20 January 1991, sec. 4, p. 1. Friedman reported the urgency for the administration of avoiding diplomacy, as noted in the text above, then later repeated without qualification, in the 20 January article, the administration claim that it had exhausted all diplomatic options -- "Now that diplomacy has failed and it has come to war..." -- a wonderful illustration of a reporter's doublethink capability. (53.) Charles Krauthammer, "War and Public Opinion," Washington Post, 11 January 1991, p. A21. This poll is discussed in Chomsky's chapter in Mowlana, Gerbner and Schiller, eds., pp. 58-9.
(54.) ibid., pp. 55-6. This opposition vigorously opposed the Bush administration's war policy. The Bush administration, however, was not interested in and did not encourage or even talk about this opposition; and the media followed in line.
(55.) The process of integration is well discussed in McArthur, especially chapters 1 and 5.
(56.) Alex S. Jones, "War in the Gulf," New York Times, 15 February 1991, p. A9.
(57.) Kellner, p. 421.
(58.) ibid., chaps. 3-5.
(59.) ibid., pp. 203-6.
(60.) ibid., chap. 9. After the war was over it was also disclosed that the U.S. military had buried alive hundreds or even thousands of Iraqi soldiers by bulldozing in their trenches with sand cover -- in another episode of doubtful legality as well as morality. The U.S. mainstream media, which had failed to pick up this process as war news, gave it minimal attention and an apologetic twist when disclosure finally came in September 1991. See Nancy Watt Rosenfeld, "Buried Alive," Lies of Our Times, October 1991, pp. 12-13.
(61.) Kellner, pp. 399404,429-30.
(62.) See Patrick E. Tyler, "U.S. Officials Believe Iraq Will Take Years to Rebuild," New York Times, 3 June 1991, p. A1.

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lol!

Mass Media is quickly becoming the wooly mammoths of the Information Age...

@Trancer-X:




Thank you.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave

Frederick Douglass

Bump.

Good articles from people.

quote:

There are growing domestic social and economic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of doing anything about them. If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the last ten years -- I include here the Democratic opposition -- there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal population, jails, deterioration in the inner cities -- the whole raft of problems. You all know about them and they're all getting worse... In such circumstances you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and Gypsies. You had to crush them to defend yourselves. We have our ways, too. Over the last ten years, every year or two, some major monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against. There used to be one that was always available: the Russians. But they're losing their attractiveness as an enemy, and it's getting harder and harder to use that one, so some new ones have to be conjured up... So it was international terrorists and narco-traffickers and crazed Arabs and Saddam Hussein, the new Hitler, is going to conquer the world. They've got to keep coming up, one after another. You frighten the population, terrorize them, intimidate them so that they're too afraid to travel and cower in fear. Then you have a magnificent victory over Grenada, Panama, or some other defenseless Third World army that you can pulverize before you ever bother to look at them -- which is just what happened. That gives relief. We were saved at the last minute. That's one of the ways in which you can keep the bewildered herd from paying attention to what's really going on around them, keep them diverted and controlled....

Sickening, but shamefully true. This article is quite the read.

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very interesting articles

Where the hell is Trancer-X anyways? He posted some great material at times.

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Originally posted by shaolin_Z Where the hell is Trancer-X anyways? He posted some great material at times.

the government finally got him.

Noam Chomsky is the man. Necessary Illusions is an amazing book detailing the important role that media plays to help government hide their atrocities abroad for their own separate agenda. I own the book, read it partially ... All referenced. Somehow I dont see much criticism of Chomsky, other than ignorance - Noam really knows what he's talking about. I gotta buy the rest of his books and videos ;-)

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN the government finally got him.

The CIA "suicided" him?

The mass media companies are buisnesses, and thus they are driven by buisness interests, which are profits. There is information that gets reported on everyday, but if the same information is reported by many different outlets, how will a media company earn profits. Well, that's when political theater, and opinions, and rocketfire debate that accomplishes nothing and raises bloodpressures starts forming. It's not the information you report that's important anymore, it's how you report it, whether the information is real or not, whehter it's just opinion or fact. I think the public can't determine the line between opinion and fact anymore, it's so blurred by rhetoric and theatre that people can believe anything that's reported.

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