The filtering effect of the elements of the propaganda model on media performance should be similar to the effects of money on elections. In an important analysis of electoral processes, political scientist Thomas Ferguson (1995, pp. 28–29) argues that where those who fund elections agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on
10. Bonner (1984) is a brief account of how he was attacked by the Wall Street Journal for reporting on the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. Shortly after this attack the management of the New York Times removed him from his job.
11. Gans also contends that para-ideology is less biasing than other ideologies: “In the final analysis it encourages them [reporters] to be somewhat more open-minded than would an inte-grated ideology” (1979, pp. 277–78). This claim is unconvincing. Journalists who do not even recognize their bias are hardly likely to be more objective than those who do. The former need not makes any concessions for balance, as the truth is entirely clear.
that issue even if most of the general public might be interested in another option. By analogy, where those who own the media and their advertisers agree on an issue, the propaganda model would lead us to expect that the media will support the position of the owners and advertisers and not allow extensive debate and critical news on such a topic. As the owners and advertisers are important members of the market and will reflect any market consensus, this is tantamount to saying that the media position on such an issue will reflect the preferences of the market.
National Defense and the Defense Budget
The U.S. corporate community has supported a large military budget for years, be-cause it provides a great deal of valuable business directly, has been a source of major funding and subsidizing of new technologies, and provides the military forces that have opened up market opportunities for U.S. transnational firms. The benefits to ordinary citizens are less clear, and for years polls have shown that except in times of war or widespread fear or panic, the general public would like less defense and more education and other civil expenditures (for a major study see Kull 1996; for public opposition to excessive defense spending even during the Reagan era see Ferguson and Rogers 1986, pp. 19–24). However, given the corporate—that is, mar-ket—consensus, the major parties do not compete on this issue and the major media do not insist on candidates addressing this issue nor do they themselves address it.
This was reflected in the 2000 presidential election campaign, during which nei-ther George W. Bush nor Al Gore considered any tradeoffs between civilian and defense expenditures; indeed, they both proclaimed the need for enlarged defense funding and competed only on their declarations of devotion to defense and on the size and composition of proposed increases. Third party candidate Ralph Nader did call for cuts in the defense budget, but he was not allowed to participate in the na-tional debate with Bush and Gore. In justifying his exclusion from the debates, the New York Times (editorial, June 30, 2000) explained that the two major parties re-flected all the options the public needed. It noted that Nader did not need to run because the two parties offered a “clear-cut choice” so there was “no driving logic for a third-party candidacy this year.” The New York Times and the mainstream media in general followed the Bush-Gore lead in this matter, simply not allowing any serious discussion of the defense-civil society budget tradeoff. In doing this, the media may be said to have followed the market’s preference.
Globalization and Free Trade
The dominant members of the market have also been in the forefront of the global-ization process and in support of policies advancing that process, such as trade agree-ments and grants and backing for the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
The Media and Markets in the United States 71
and the World Bank. As in the case of defense versus civilian budgets, the corporate community and the general public have disagreed on these issues. As noted earlier, polls taken before the enactment of NAFTA showed substantial majorities opposed to its passage—and later to the bailout of investors in Mexican securities—but the elite favored enactment.
On these issues the mainstream media have aligned themselves almost uniformly on the side of the corporate community, supporting the trade agreements, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and fast-track authority both in editorials and in news coverage. The media’s position has been that free trade is good and brings benefits to people at home and abroad, and across class lines; that the trade agreements, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank serve free trade and the opening of markets and therefore deserve support; and that the opposition to these servants of free trade is based on the self-serving motivation of special interests and has no justification in economic analysis or the distribution of benefits and losses. The points seem so obvi-ous to the leading mainstream editorialists and journalists that they are impatient with counterclaims and repeat that “free trade is good” as a self-evident mantra.12
The use of the term special interests is itself revealing, pointing to the media’s own integration into the corporate community and the market. The media do not consider the corporate community, or its constituent parts that support free trade, to be special interests, but rather to represent the national interest. The special interests were admittedly people who might be losers in the free trade game, “predominantly women, blacks and hispanics” and “semiskilled production workers” (Lueck 1993), whose large numbers underlie the poll findings of majority opposition to NAFTA and other trade agreements. In one notable case Meg Greenfield, the op-ed column editor of the Washington Post, answering criticism of imbalance in the paper’s opin-ion columns on NAFTA, stated that “On that rare occasopin-ion when columnists of the left, right and middle are all in agreement. . . . I don’t believe it is right to create an artificial balance when none exists” (quoted in Kurtz 1993). However, with polls showing a majority of the public opposing NAFTA, the pro-NAFTA unity of the Post’s pundits simply highlights the huge class bias of mainstream punditry.
Another manifestation of the integration of media and corporate opinion on trade issues is displayed in the media’s willingness to join with advertisers in pushing for free trade. The most notable case was a three-part “advertorial” in the New York Times, beginning in April 1993, based on a solicitation by the paper to advertisers to
“present the positive economic and social benefits of NAFTA.” A leak of this solicita-tion led to some protests at the paper taking a definite stance on the issue in this
12. A front-page backgrounder in the New York Times (Passell 1993), cheerleads in a literal sense: “Free trade means growth. Free trade means growth. Free trade means growth. Just say it 50 more times and all doubts will melt away.” Needless to say this primer contains no voices that challenge the cheerleading.
manner, and subsequently at its refusal to allow dissenters from this support to place advertisements in these advertorials.13
The media have also done poorly in allowing any debate on free trade issues.
While occasionally admitting that there were losers as well as winners, they have been extremely reluctant to go into details on effects on labor bargaining power and inequality, and often explicitly or implicitly denied that there were any losers. They regularly used the friendly phrase free trade to describe arrangements that were first and foremost about investor rights, not trade, and failed even to mention those in-vestor rights. They have also persistently ignored the fact that intellectual property rights, like patents, are monopoly rights that interfere with the freedom of trade, and in urging the benefits of free trade to developing countries, the media have failed to acknowledge that all the great industrialized countries—including Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and United States—and the Asian Tigers used protectionism for extended periods to help them compete globally before taking off into sustained growth (Amsden 1989; Wade 1990). The U.S. media have not only failed to allow this argument to be made, they have even denied it and made the historical error of claiming that free trade was the route to such development (for an example of this error see Nasar 1991).
Free Trade and Democracy
The undemocratic and antidemocratic thrust of the media’s treatment of free trade issues goes well beyond their denial of labor’s right to try to influence legislation.
For example, critics of the ongoing globalization process have contended that the process has suffered from secrecy, decisionmaking behind closed doors, and lack of debate, as well as from the establishment of agreements and mechanisms that de-prive democratic governments of the rights to serve their noncorporate citizens. In the context of widespread public opposition to many of these actions, the pushing through of these agreements has arguably been an attack on democracy in favor of what Ralph Nader and other critics of corporate globalization have called a “corpo-rate bill of rights.” However, the market has favored these actions, and the media have followed in the market’s wake. They have never criticized editorially or given any but marginal attention to the secrecy, top-down character of the new laws and rules or their limiting effects on democratic rule.
Indeed, the mainstream media have positively lauded some of the antidemocratic effects of the new institutions and agreements. For example, one of the main argu-ments for NAFTA was that its would “lock in” Mexico to the “reforms,” making it
13. The Times letter of solicitation, dated April 6, 1993, and a letter of protest to the editor sent by 10 prominent media critics, was published in Lies of Our Times (1993, pp. 20–21).
The Media and Markets in the United States 73
impossible for its government to change course. Six of ten New York Times editorials on the NAFTA debate in 1993 mentioned this merit of the agreement. The fact that the Mexican leader who negotiated the agreement had won an election widely be-lieved to have been fraudulent did not affect the Times’ (or other media’s) view of the appropriateness of Mexico being locked in by the agreement.
After the onset of crisis in Mexico in December 1994, U.S. officials and economists pointed out that Mexico was now blocked from using import quotas and restricting access to foreign currency to protect itself, and would have to deflate painfully to reach a new equilibrium. The undemocratic character of this system of constraints never struck the U.S. mainstream media, as their news and opinions on this set of issues paralleled those of the general business community.
Although street protests are a long-recognized feature of the democratic process, the mainstream media’s treatment of the protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Que-bec, and Genoa have been almost uniformly derisive and hostile, with a clear pro-police and antiprotester bias and, most important, a regular failure to address substantive issues. In a throwback to their biased treatment of the protests of the Vietnam War era (Gitlin 1980; Morgan 2000), they have exaggerated protester vio-lence, played down police provocations and viovio-lence, and shown great complaisance at illegal police tactics designed to limit all protester actions, peaceable or otherwise (Ackerman 2000; Coen 2000; DeMause 2000). Even though the Seattle police resorted to force and used chemical agents against many nonviolent protesters well before a handful of individuals began breaking windows, both then and later the media re-versed this chronology, stating that the police violence was a response to protester violence.14
The media’s hostility to the protests, closely aligned with that of the rest of the corpo-rate establishment, caused them to display their devotion to the First Amendment in a way they never have when their own rights and privileges have been at stake.
The Chemical Industry
Another striking case of media support of markets is reflected in their treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. Because of the industry’s power, as well as the media’s receptivity to the demands of the business community, the media have normalized a system described by Carson (1962, p. 183) as “deliberately poisoning us, then policing the results.” Industry is permitted to produce and sell chemicals
14. Zachary Wolfe, legal observer and coordinator for the National Lawyers Guild, con-cluded that “Police sought to create an atmosphere of palpable fear,” and that anyone even trying to hear dissident views ran a risk of police violence “just for being in the area where speech was taking place” (quoted in Coen 2000).
(and during the 1990s bioengineered foods) without independent and prior proof of safety, and “policing” by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been badly compromised by underfunding and political limits on both law enforcement and testing (see Fagin and Lavelle 1996, chapters 4–5). A major study by the National Research Council in 1984 (Thornton 2000, pp. 99–100) found that health hazard data were unavailable for 78 percent of the chemicals used in commerce, and a dozen years later an Environmental Defense Fund update found that little had changed.
The government’s National Toxicology Program tests about 10 to 20 chemicals a year for carcinogenicity (but not for the numerous other possible adverse effects); mean-while 500 to 1,000 new chemicals enter commerce annually, and thus our knowledge base declines steadily.
This system works well for industry, because it wants to sell without interference, and leaves virtually all the research and testing for safety in its hands, allowing it to decide when the results are worth transmitting to the EPA. This is a classic fox guarding the henhouse arrangement. The system has worked poorly for the public, and the industry’s power to influence, sometimes even capture, the EPA has reinforced its inadequacy (Fagin and Lavelle 1996, chapters 4–5; Herman 1999, chapter 17). Never-theless, the industry often contends that the safety of chemicals is assured by EPA (or Food and Drug Administration) regulation,15 which the industry does its best to keep weak, and which, as noted, has failed to deal with the great majority of chemicals in the market.
With the media’s help the chemical industry has also gained wide acceptance of its view that chemicals should be evaluated individually on the basis of an analysis of their risks to individuals and individual tolerances. However, measuring such risks and tolerances for humans is extremely difficult, because controlled experi-ments are not possible, damage may not show up for many years, the forms of dam-age may not be known in advance, chemicals may interact with others in the environment and may be bioaccumulative, and the breakdown products of chemi-cals may have their own dangers. Furthermore, if thousands of chemichemi-cals enter the environment, many long-lasting, bioaccumulative, and interacting with other chemi-cals, a public policy that ignores their additive and interactive effects on people and the environment is deeply flawed and irresponsible.
Policy based on the precautionary principle, bitterly opposed by the chemical industry with the support of the U.S. government,16 would not allow chemicals to
15. Monsanto’s publicity director, Phil Angell, stated that “Our interest is in selling as much of it [a bioengineered product] as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job” (quoted in Pollan 1998).
16. At a January 2000 meeting on the biosafety protocol, the U.S. government’s insistence on WTO “good science” while the European Union was urging application of the precautionary principle almost broke up the meeting (Pollack 2000a,b).
The Media and Markets in the United States 75
enter the environment without full testing, would prohibit the use of chemicals that accumulate in human tissues and whose breakdown products are threatening or unknown, and would compel the use of nonthreatening alternatives for untested chemicals and those known to be risky where such alternatives could be found or developed at reasonable cost (for a good discussion of the case for applying the pre-cautionary principle see Thornton 2000, chapters 9–11).
In successfully avoiding application of the precautionary principle, industry spokespersons have argued that the existing system is based on sound science, but science does not tell us that industry has any right to put chemicals into the environ-ment that carry any risk at all, let alone telling us what risks are acceptable—these are political decisions. Furthermore, if the chemicals in the environment have not been tested for all relevant variables, such as their long-term effects on the immune system and reproduction, their potential carcinogenicity, and the effects of their break-down products on the environment, and none of them have been so tested, the politi-cal, not scientific, basis of sound science is evident.
The chemical industry has produced, and long denied, any harm from, innumer-able products—from tetraethyl lead in gasoline and PCBs in batteries to asbestos, the pesticide DDT, and the defoliant Agent Orange—that are now well established as seriously harmful, only withdrawing them (often only from domestic use) under overwhelming legal and regulatory pressure. For the products they have wanted to sell they have always found scientists who would testify to their harmlessness or who would note that claims of harm were not scientifically proven. A consistent sharp difference has been apparent between the results of industry-sponsored sci-ence and those of independent researchers working the same terrain. In addition, numerous cases of fraud in industry testing, industry use of testing laboratories that manipulated the data so as to find industry products acceptable, and political ma-nipulation to weaken regulatory standards have come to light (Fagin and Lavelle 1996, chapters 3–5; Herman 1999, chapter 17).
Despite these industry abuses of science, the media have largely accepted the industry’s claim that it supports sound science, in contrast with its critics’ use of junk science. For example, from 1996 through September 1998, 258 articles in mainstream newspapers used the phrase junk science, but only 21 (8 percent) used it to refer to corporate abuses of science, whereas 160 (62 percent) applied it to science used by environmentalists, other corporate critics, or tort lawyers suing corporations.
Seventy-seven (30 percent) did not fit into either of these categories (Herman 1999, p. 235). In short, the media have internalized industry’s self-legitimizing usage, just as they have normalized a status quo of caveat emptor (buyer beware) rather than of safety first.
In accord with industry domination of the media’s environmental perspective, the media portray the EPA as a powerhouse organization that is perhaps too aggres-sive and adversarial in its pursuit of the public interest. The reality—a seriously
underfunded organization, unable to do its job properly, sometimes captured and often driven to industry-friendly compromises—can only be grasped, if at all, by a close, often between-the-lines study of media reporting (see Fagin and Lavelle 1996;
Steingraber 1997; issues of Rachel’s Environment & Health Weekly). The media have normalized the fact that, contrary to the stated aim of the 1976 Toxic Substances Con-trol Act, the EPA has been unable to cope with the toxic chemical flood, and an esti-mated 75 percent of the chemicals in wide use have still not been tested for toxicity.
The media also do not pay serious attention to the evidence that the system of leaving safety testing to industry has failed. For example, in the course of a struggle with Monsanto between 1986 and 1990 about the company’s right to introduce Santogard, the EPA discovered that some years previously Monsanto had found nega-tive effects of Santogard in a study that the company had failed to submit to the EPA, contrary to law. Monsanto was fined US$196,000, although by law the fine should have been US$19.7 million (Reisner 1992). The company was then allowed to search for other delinquent toxicity studies, and turned up 164, for which it was fined an-other nominal $648,000. Realizing that an-other chemical companies were also probably failing to submit studies the EPA arranged an amnesty with the industry, promising only nominal fines for the next three years in exchange for the industry turning over previously hidden studies. Under this amnesty the industry produced some 11,000 documents (Reisner 1992; see also Rachel’s Environment & Health Weekly 1997). De-spite the implications, the media did not find this story of even passing interest.
For decades the chemical industry has fought against disclosure of the effects of its products on the grounds of proprietary information and the free speech right to be silent. Although full disclosure would seem especially urgent when products can harm and potential victims need to know as much as possible to deal with any dam-age, the industry has been remarkably successful in preserving its right to silence and the public’s right not to know. Worker knowledge of the effects of workplace chemicals came only after decades of struggle, and it was not until 1986, after Bhopal (and a leak of the same chemical in West Virginia), that Congress finally passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. The act was passed over furious industry opposition, with many key provisions passing by one vote.
Under the act the larger chemical producing firms were obliged to make public information about their releases into the environment of some 654 named chemicals.
The mainstream media did not find the industry’s resistance to informing the public, or the passage of the act and the act itself or its effects, of great interest. Steingraber (1997, p. 102) cites industry admissions that this enforced disclosure compelled in-dustry members to pay attention to the chemicals they were pouring into the envi-ronment, a point that would seem of enormous significance to public health. While the Toxic Release Inventory showed startling figures—several billion pounds of toxic chemicals released each year—even with the limited coverage of companies and chemicals, self-reporting, and many refusals to comply, you will look in vain in the
The Media and Markets in the United States 77
mainstream media for detailed reports of these releases, calls for better data, discus-sions of the health consequences of these releases, or indignation at a system that permits such large-scale emissions of poisons.
Since 1993 business has got 24 states to pass audit privilege laws, which give companies the right to carry out their own environmental audits, to report this infor-mation to state authorities along with promises to correct noted deficiencies, and then to be free of any requirement to disclose environmental information to the pub-lic or in court proceedings. EPA official Steven Herman (1998) states that such laws are “anti-law enforcement, impede public right-to-know, and can penalize employ-ees who report illegal activities to law enforcement authorities. They interfere with government’s ability to protect public health and safety. They prevent the public from obtaining potentially critical information about environmental hazards.” Once again, however, the mainstream media have been exceedingly quiet about this re-gressive process, giving the topic a few back-page articles, but without featuring this development or giving it critical editorial attention.
An important right-to-know issue has also arisen in connection with the new biotechnology products. Many consumers and environmentalists have insisted that the milk produced by cows given Monsanto’s growth hormones, soybeans, and other farm products that are bioengineered should be labeled as such. Vermont and other states have tried to legislate labeling, and a number of European coun-tries have been concerned about allowing such products entry as well as sale with-out labeling. Deeper problems are at stake here than disclosure to consumers, including animal and human health and ecological effects, but notably the U.S.
mainstream media do not consider any of these issues of great importance. They have been given back-page treatment at best, and no editorial criticism in the na-tional media. The New York Times editorially condemned the “food disparagement”
laws in the case of Oprah Winfrey versus the Texas cattle ranchers (editorial, “Free Speech about Food,” January 19, 1998), but neither it nor the other national papers have spoken out in favor of labeling bioengineered products. In these cases pro-ducer sovereignty apparently overwhelms any concern for either biological threats or the consumer’s right to choose.
The media have also regularly dismissed concerns about chemical threats as un-warranted scares, such as the alleged scares about dioxin and the danger of Alar on apples, but these and other scares often turn out to be based on genuine health haz-ards (Herman 1999, chapter 17). Meanwhile, the media rarely report on or examine in any depth the frequent evidence of the inadequacy of regulation and testing and of the real costs of the “chemicalization” of the environment (Herman 1999, chapter 17). For example, the International Joint Commission, a joint Canadian-U.S. venture dating back to 1978, was given the formidable task of trying to halt the flow of toxic chemicals into the Great Lakes. It reports each year that it is failing, and since 1992 has called for the ending of the manufacture of chlorine as essential to fulfilling its