MEDIA HITS By Timothy Ryan Collage by wa it Curtis Outlines of Reaqs Hit, v., transitive . Among the definitions for this versatile word, we find all kinds of cousins to image and action—wormholes of meaning—surprise, violence, success. To hit means to come into contact with forcefully, to strike, to deal a blow, to be sure. There are also the sports meanings, extrapolated from our history of conflict: to reach with a propelled object, to score, to perform successfully. Some of the articles, books and television productions discussed herein are: Manufacturing Consent—Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman Amusing Ourselves to Death—Neil Postman The Satanic Verses—Salman Rushdie “Inside M16”—Anthony Cavendish, Harper’s, Dec., 1988 “All the Congressmen’s Men”—Walter Karp, Harper’s, July, 1988 “The Intimidated Press”—Anthony Lewis, NY Review o f Books, Jan. 19,1989 ABC News—Peter Jennings, Anchor, June 3,1989 The Phil Donahue Show * By JAMI S Rt SION Then all the other slang and colloquialisms pile up next to each other, with no other relation or meaning: to come upon or discover, to attack, to achieve something sought, a dose of a drug, an effective remark, a successful or popular venture, a murder, to bum money or a favor, to sleep (e.g. to hit the sack). Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their recent book Manufacturing Consent, hit the media hard on this objectivity business. Where they live, you might say. Occasionally the relations between different news stories and media events seem emblematic to the underlying power structures in society that produce this studied artificiality. That’s when it hits me like a runaway freight. Mostly, the news and its presumed homogeneity leaves me somnolent. When it does hit hard—despite the distance in time, subject matter and ■medium—suddenly the relationships become clear, as if looking at just the right angle through a prism. This is precisely the kind of image the American media likes to present. In spite of the vaunted illusion of objectivity, truth sometimes can’t help but be revealed. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their recent book Manufacturing Consent, hit the media hard on this objectivity business. Where they live, you might say. Chomsky and Herman bring together facts on media coverage in Central America and Southeast Asia, Orwellian U.S. government disinformation and the inadequate and mendaciously “objective” reporting of major American media. Articles on El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan elections are placed next to each other on the front page, the pretense being that the fundamentally different filters on each story constitute some kind of homogeneous, consistently applied standard of objectivity. In Europe there is no chimerical notion—every paper, every magazine, has a deliberate point of view, takes a stand—and is unapologetic. Only here is the vaunted mantle of “objectivity” used to mask the alternative agendas, the institutional bias and commodification of perceptions that are a natural part of discourse in a post-industrial society. When 1 worked with CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) in New York in the early ’80s, I used to dislike the popular slogan, El Salvador is Spanish for Viet Nam. It seemed to belittle the language and oversimplify the complex differences not just between El Salvador and Viet Nam, but El Salvador and its Central American neighbors. Then, early in 1982, the New York Times’ correspondent Raymond Bonner, who had been leaving the rest of the national correspondents in a bar in San Salvador and going out into the countryside, sending increasingly perceptive reports from the battlefield, was replaced quite abruptly. After Bonner’s last piece from the field, the very next article from his replacement, Edward Schumacher, opened with his description of riding along with the Salvadoran military in a helicopter gunship, speeding over the jungle—hunting victory, confident, familiar.... El Salvador is Spanish for VietNam— the number one rule of the mass media is to make the image count. As Neil Postman said in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (excerpted in Clinton St., Summer, 1986), “Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.” In fact, objectivity is one of those peculiarly American red herrings that masks a whole range of truly objective conditions that never reach ,print or pixel. It’s a truism of the Right that the media is liberal and allpowerful, a monolith of power working its will with impunity and wreaking havoc on the business of government. Real debate about the self-relexive nature of media and government relations continues only on the Left, where not only is there no consensus, but different views point to fundamentally different relations between the press and government. Take a hit of this: In the U.S., the 29 largest media conglomerates account for over half of the output of newspapers and most of the sales in books, magazines, movies and broadcasting. These numbers are not simply coincidental. Of 95 directors on the boards of the 10 largest media It's a truism of the Right that the media is liberal and all-powerful, a monolith of power working its will with impunity and wreaking havoc on the business of governmeht. Real debate about the self-relexive nature of media and government relations continues only on the Left. companies, 36 have additional directorships in banks and 255 other ^companies. Chomsky and Herman’s thesis is that the relative commonality of elite interests running both the government and the bulk of the mass media in this country collide in a de facto fashion to create a willful distortion of truth and history. In this view, the mainstream media are corporate entities that function like any other corporation in the current political climate: the life of capitalism is a will to monopoly, and as with nature, which abhors a vacuum, so power relations follow suit. Any organization— government, religious, corporate— will expand its power to fill any vacuum or “environmental niche” that opens up. The late Walter Karp, in the July, 1989 Harper’s, takes another tack—that the media is so enslaved to the peculiar necessity of cultivating sources in positions of power that nothing is done to jeopardize those sources, from reporters on the beat on up to editors and publishers. The media are essentially creatures of government, easily manipulated, shills for power. In this view, there is no elite consensus, no conscious will by the media to help perpetuate a line of propoganda, as Chomsky and Herman see it. The media have no choice. The closest the mainstream media will get to acknowledging this are comments such as those from Anthony Lewis, a New York Times columnist, in an article, “The Intimidated Press” in The New York Review of Books in January, 1989: The press’ desire to look objective “has become a dangerous obsession of American journalism,” said Lewis. What this second view (the press’ docility, not complicity) does not acknowledge is the frank convergence GIANT BIGFOOT SAVES HUNTER’S LIFE IN ALASKA . . . I t speaks English / Albino baby is doomed to spend life in the dark Girl loses 98 lbs by meditation AN INIfRNATlONAt DAIH N(WS THECHRISTL between government policy and corporate agendas, especially in the area of foreign affairs. I think this convergence a true phenomenon, because it is complex, symbiotic, even incestuous. The briefest review of the history of American foreign and corporate policy in Central America points this up clearly. Aside from shared ideas and interest in maintaining the status quo, consider the added impact and leverage of advertising revenues, often generated by the same organizations whose directors sit on media boards. Beyond these arguments of how beholden the media is, however, Chomsky and Herman detail a far more dehumanizing function of the mass media, something at once obvious and astonishing. Peter Jennings, Saturday morning ABC News bulletin, June 3, 1989, reporting on the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, stated: “The Army is reported to be firing on the mob—that is, the people,” correcting himself amid the shifting landscape of foreign policy contortions. Chomsky and Herman describe this as the phenomenon of worthy versus unworthy victims in the mass media. Worthy victims are people who are perceived, for U.S. foreign policy interests, to be oppressed or subject to persecution by regimes unfriendly to the U.S. An unworthy victim is one whose torture and murder is highly inconvenient for the prosecution of 32 Clinton St.—Spring 1990
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