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In two recently released videos and a classic book, linguist Noam Chomsky and documentarians Bill Moyers, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick turn the tables on big media, scrutinizing the growing uniformity of perspective in national news coverage and how it is often manipulated by powerful corporate and government forces. While Chomsky, a
In Free Speech for Sale, Moyers examines three industries with vast resources that used their access to the media to influence public opinion. He begins with Cindy Watson, a Republican North Carolina legislator. Her constituents complained that waste run-off from local hog farms fouled their air and water. She began to find ways to mitigate the problem, but when the freshman legislator came up for re-election, her campaign was buffeted by an elaborate and deceptive media campaign. Watson was outspent, outflanked and defeated. "They use all this legal trickery, [but] at its core, it's politics. It's companies -- who can't vote -- using their treasuries, their resources, to influence voting," said Bob Hall, research director of Democracy South, who followed the Watson campaign. Moyers then turns to the unraveling of the 1998 McCain Tobacco Bill. The tobacco industry poured $40 million into an advertising campaign designed to defeat it. According to sources in the film, the ads distorted the facts and misled the public about this major piece of tobacco legislation. The bill was derailed despite the strong support it once had both in Congress and in public opinion. Finally, Moyers turns to something even more fundamental: how the mass media controlled a story that focused directly on its own bottom line. "What are the implications for free speech," he asks, "when huge corporations attempt to influence the debate not by simply buying media time, but by buying the media itself?" That seems to be exactly what happened when big media companies set out to get Congress to enact the Telecommunications Act of 1996. One key provision handed the existing networks new and much more powerful HD channels for free, rather than auctioning them -- in what many thought would yield about $70 billion dollars for the federal government. But network news organizations, owned by the very corporations that had the most to gain in the giveaway, offered a virtual blackout on the bill even as their corporate owners were vigorously lobbying Congress for its adoption. The Telecommunications Act also allowed further concentration of media ownership in an industry already dominated by just a few corporate giants. Bert Neuborne, legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, comments on the First Amendment issues raised by the bill. "The First Amendment is aspirational," he says. "It's romantic. It says that the purpose is to create a world in which people can speak freely and equally to one another. And therefore there's an obligation to step in at some point and even the playing field so that individuals can actually have real discussions and real debates. Because what we've now got is not a real democracy with real debate, but we've got a plutocracy in which money talks." A central question raised by Moyers' documentary is the appropriateness of effectively unlimited freedom of speech for corporations. Corporations don't have the same rights as individuals -- they do not receive Fifth Amendment protections, for example. But as a result of a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, they now enjoy the same right to purchase media time to promote issues as individuals do. "I don't think most people," said Moyers in a recent interview, "give much thought to how the so-called marketplace of ideas is increasingly a function not of what people need to know as citizens, but what they can be sold as consumers." Throughout the film, Moyers uses clips from the relevant commercials to dramatically illustrate the way his subjects are able to frame the issues and shape public opinion. He asks whether unregulated, unexamined, expensive media campaigns are a threat to free speech or an embodiment of the right to declare one's viewpoint. His investigation into money and politics reveals the painful truth that free speech, and the likelihood that one will be heard, is guaranteed only to those who can afford it.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, an instant classic when published in 1988, and reissued last year, provides the scholarly basis for Bill Moyers' subsequent documentary. In the book, Chomsky and co-author Edward S. Herman argue that intentionally or not, media conglomerates almost always defend the economic, political and social agendas of groups that dominate American business and government. The book explains the performance of the news media in two ways. First, by looking at how the raw materials of reportage are crafted into what we see and hear as the news; and second, by analyzing the financial imperatives of the dominant media organizations. Chomsky and Herman show the overwhelming degree to which corporations and government agencies lavish millions of dollars on framing and filtering news events to suit
They then draw together case studies that document American media's consistent alignment with foreign regimes favored by the U.S. government, meticulously examining hundreds of news stories to illustrate the hidden biases of the dominant news organizations. Depending on where they live and whether their government is currently in favor, victims of political violence can be deemed "worthy" or "unworthy" of sympathetic media attention, elections can be "legitimate" or "meaningless," and events can appear to be crucial or simply nonexistent to American viewers. The second part of Chomsky and Herman's analysis looks at how financial interests contribute to a uniformity of perspective in mainstream news reporting. Big media's dependence on advertising dollars from manufacturers of consumer goods fosters a relationship that tends to exclude news coverage of issues and organizations that these advertisers find objectionable. One obvious example relevant to Guild members is negative coverage (or lack of coverage) of union issues. Chomsky and Herman argue that corporate advertisers go out of their way to avoid public scrutiny in the programming they underwrite. Why invite debate about economic issues that could inhibit profits? Such controversies could intrude upon the advertisers' central purpose, which is to sell goods. "In a system of high and growing inequality," the authors argue, "entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman 'games of the circus' that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo." For those who might find an entire book on the subject rough going, Achbar and Wintonick's 1993 documentary, now available on DVD and VHS, offers a funny and provocative introduction to Chomsky's thought on the media. Based on extensive interviews and archival footage (including a contentious debate with William Buckley), it makes his ideas accessible while preserving the richness of his thought. Taken together, both documentaries make for a disturbing look at the state of our democracy. Recent trends in media consolidation (see update) make these documentaries and Chomsky's research even more timely than ever. |
