WORLD AFFAIRS

Manufacture consent, muzzle dissent

Speech in America has become less free. The government pays some of its partisans in the media to speak in its voice, while those who question it face societal rebuke.

ON January 25, 2005, the well-regarded Pew Centre for the People and the Press released a comprehensive study of the media ("More Voices, Less Credibility"). The report showed that while most Americans continued to tune in to some form of news on a daily basis, they did so with little faith in the objectivity of the media. Whereas in 1985 one in seven Americans did not trust the media, by 2004 the figure rose to one in three. "The erosion of trust," the Report emphasised, "has affected virtually all news organisations, and has occurred among virtually all demographic groups." The population now gets its news from what appear to be highly partisan news outlets: if you are a Republican, or else conservative or libertarian, you might tune in to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, whereas liberals generally tune in to CNN (Cable News Network). Young people, who may not have congealed political opinions, appear to get their news not from the bona fide news channels, but from news-comedy shows. Comedian Jon Stewart's The Daily Show is a frequent source for young men in particular, who get their news from it more often than from any other part of the media.

The day after the report's release, on January 26, President George W. Bush held one of his rare press conferences. An otherwise charitable press corps asked Bush what he thought of his administration's admission that it had paid journalists to write favourable reports on his policies. Most recently, the Department of Education acknowledged that it had paid $240,000 to the syndicated journalist Armstrong Williams to trumpet the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. In a contract between the Department and Williams, the journalist promised to "regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts", and to host frequently the Secretary of Education on his widely watched satellite television programme.

The Williams scandal followed the revelation that commentators Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus had received $21,500 and $10,200 respectively from the Department of Health and Human Services to "advise" it on the government's marriage promotion idea. Earlier, that Department had even manufactured journalists, paying actors to be "Karen Ryan" and "Mike Morris" in promotional advertisements for a prescription drug law. The U.S. government's watchdog General Accounting Office's spokesperson Susan Poling said of these "video news releases": "What is objectionable is the fact that the viewer has no idea their tax dollars are being used to write and produce this video."

When asked of the Williams' case, Bush smiled and said blandly: "There needs to be a nice, independent relationship between the White House and the press." He then called upon the next reporter, Jeff Gannon, the bureau chief for Talon News Service. Gannon, who had become a familiar player in the press corps, once more asked a question favourable to the President and one that attacked the integrity of the Democratic Party. "How are you going to work - you said you're going to reach out to these people - how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" "Gannon", it turned out, is actually Jim Guckert, who worked for a news organisation that some consider to be a front for the Republican Party. Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of New York suggested in a letter to Bush that Gannon-Guckert had been planted into the infrequent White House news conferences to ask the President favourable questions.

The public's distrust of the media predated the release of these stories. According to the National Opinion Research Centre, the decline in credibility took place in the 1990s. Some of this might be attributed to the rise of the Internet as an alternative to corporate news outlets, but it could also be because of the rise of highly partisan corporate news houses, particularly the rightward Fox News. Fox's imprimatur, "Fair and Balanced", and a barrage of books and talk radio shows from the Right that complained of liberal bias in the media perhaps provoked the distrust of the traditional outlets. The onslaught from the Right not only crippled the so-called liberal media, but it additionally dented the public's trust in the idea of media objectivity or media fairness. Partisanship is now the order of the day. Since the Right is in command of the main institutions of the U.S. government, any criticism of the Right is seen to be biased whereas a defence of it is patriotic. An example of this is in the firestorm over a comment made by CNN's news executive Eason Jordan.

Two days after the release of the Pew Report and the day after the Bush-Gannon "press" conference, Jordan took his seat at a panel in Davos, Switzerland. At the World Economic Forum, Jordan sat with U.S. Representative Barney Frank, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, BBC World Service's Richard Sambrook and U.S. News & World Report's David Gergen. The panel took up the issue of the death of 63 journalists in Iraq. Jordan criticised the idea that journalists had become "collateral damage", because the term implied accidental death. He said, rather, that both resistance snipers and the U.S. military had perhaps deliberately targeted journalists. When Frank defended the military, Jordan backed off from that part of his statement but insisted that the U.S. military had made any investigation of the deaths of journalists by its fire almost impossible. Within days, Jordan had to resign from CNN.

During the flap over Jordan's comments, another controversy erupted at the central New York school, Hamilton College. The college had invited Ward Churchill to a give a talk at its Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture. One of Churchill's essays on 9/11, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens", provoked fury in the right-wing radio and television media shows, which began to threaten Churchill's life and career.

In that essay (which later became a book), Churchill argued that those who worked in high finance in the World Trade Centre should not be seen as innocent victims of terrorism. Their work, he argued, had razed the planet and rendered it into a desert of frustration against the United States. His attack on their "innocence" read like this: "To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it." Just as Adolph Eichmann had only managed the train schedules for the Holocaust, Churchill argued, those who worked in high finance simply signed the death warrants on the means of survival of the planet's people.

The Right picked up on the phrase "little Eichmanns" and went after Churchill. Hamilton cancelled its event on February 1, Churchill had to resign as Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, and the Governor of the State moved the Reagents of the college to investigate Churchill's scholarly work towards a revocation of his tenure. The chill from the Churchill case has travelled across the country, as critical speech is now increasingly equated with treason. The right-wing commentator Bill O'Reilly called for a review of all tenured professors, whom he called "little Ayatollahs", while another right-wing talk show host, Michael Savage, demanded that Churchill be either tried for treason or deported.

Churchill's defenders came in on the side of free speech and on academic freedom. While the persecution of Churchill does raise such questions, the events in the last week of January bring up a wider problem: an attack on dissent by both the partisans of state policy, and of the corporate media. The cases of Jordan and Churchill are not dissimilar in this regard. While the furore took over the airwaves, John Perkins published his widely discussed book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins, who had worked for three decades as an international consultant, revealed how he had helped "bankrupt the countries that received [World Bank] loans so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favours, including military bases, U.N. [United Nations] votes, or access to oil and other natural resources."

From his insider's perspective, Perkins asked, "And we wonder why terrorists attack us?" A few days later the International Federation of Journalists accused the U.S. government of a "culture of denial" over its murder of journalists. Such texts repeated the sort of arguments made by Churchill and Jordan. While others held these views, Churchill and Jordan became the public targets of a campaign against dissent.

Speech in America has become less free. The government pays some of its partisans to speak in its voice, while those who question the government face societal rebuke. All wars do not have the public's acquiescence to censorship. After the 1991 war on Iraq, the Pew Report shows, only 34 per cent felt that press criticism of the war was unpatriotic, whereas in late 2003, that figure grew to 63 per cent. The majority might distrust the press, but even then they want it to be loyal to the policies of their government. Pew ends its report on an ambivalent note: "One thing is certain: The fate of the news, as always, will rest with its audience." But, with the increased pressure on critical speech, with payment for favourable coverage and with the growth of the right-wing media machine, it seems unlikely that the "audience" can have much power in the process.

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