Status Updates From Inventing Reality: The Poli...

the New Left "underground" newspapers that sprang up during the late 60s were harassed and attacked by police, FBI, & CIA. News offices were broken into, ransacked, and even bombed; files & typewriters were stolen; telephones were tapped…

Newsstands were persuaded not to handle underground papers; landlords suddenly doubled the rent; & the IRS sought lists of contributors of radical publications for tax violations

“Even if the public is not persuaded by the message, it is "softened up" somewhat, making the next mobilization of bias much easier.

The story is never fully refuted in the press. A debunking report that might surface as the issue dies down never eradicates the effects of the original sensationalist headlines.

Factual refutations don’t cancel out the residual feelings of alien threat and sinister menace.”

“Most of the press is energetically receptive [to state-sponsored conspiracy narratives]. And it is the press that creates opinion visibility in the public arena, if not always opinion conviction among the public itself.

This opinion visibility, the visible images and audible opinions circulating in the media and among political leaders, lay the groundwork for specific domestic and foreign policies.”

“The Houston Post pleaded, "Let Hitler try his hand." CBS interviewed Frederick Birchall, who said the Nazis were not intending "any slaughter of their enemies or racial oppression in any vital degree."

With that keen eye for the irrelevant that is the hallmark of American journalism, he observed that Hitler was a vegetarian & a nonsmoker, attributes that were supposedly indicative of a benign nature."

“The press cannot completely ignore the realities that affect the daily lives of millions of people and hope to retain the public's trust. A press that does nothing more than propagate a narrow, right-wing ideology, ignoring economic problems to give only sunny reports on the health of the economy and sing hosannahs to the blessings of private enterprise…”

“hosannahs to the blessings of P.E” goes crazy

“Power is always more secure when co-optive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet.

“Their objective is not to produce an alert, critical, and informed citizenry but the kind of people who will accept an opinion universe dominated by corporate and governmental elites, almost all of whom share the same ideological perspective about political and economic reality.”

Washington Post's story of the May 3, 1981,
"March on the Pentagon", an example of how the press treats protests. The story describes demonstrators as a "loose coalition of groups whose causes range from gay rights to Palestinian autonomy." One might wonder why the Post singled out these two groups in a march protesting U.S. intervention in El Salvador and Reagan's cuts in social programs…

The history of the working class is one of struggle, involving strikes, sit-ins, lockouts, blacklists and violent encounters with company goons and state security forces... yet is seldom mentioned in the schools or portrayed in the mass media.
Journalist Studs Terkel concurs: "Working people themselves have no understanding of their past, no idea where the minimum wage or the 8-hour day came from."

Adam Hochschild, a columnist and editor of Mother Jones observes that investigative reporters working for small progressive publications run into little or no competition from mainstream journalists when digging into many important and revealing stories:

“There are more than 1,000 correspondents in Washington, D.C., falling all over each other trying to "develop sources" in the White House.…”

During 1973 - 1974 when the automobile industry was pressuring Congress to repeal the seatbelt and air-bag regulations, NYTimes publisher Sulzberger openly admitted that he urged his editors to present the industry position in coverage of safety & auto pollution because, he said, it "would affect the advertising." The auto industry was responsible for about 18 percent of ad revenues in 1973 and 1974.

In economic & class issues, most journalists are educated into a world view that supports the existing corporate system. Most journalism schools offer politically conventional curricula.

Under the name of "objectivity" and "professionalism," a journalist student can go through an entire program without ever raising critical questions about how and why the capitalist system functions & malfunctions as it does.

Gans mentions one reporter who considered arguing with an editor for deleting an uncomplimentary fact about the CIA but… she decided to save her scarce political capital for an issue about which she felt more strongly.

Many people who learn to hold their fire eventually end up never finding occasion to do battle. After a while anticipatory avoidance becomes a kind of second nature.

Networks, newspapers, & movie companies are run like all corporations in the US, by boards of directors composed of persons from the moneyed stratum of society… linked with powerful businesses, not public interest groups; with management, not labor; with think tanks & charities, not their grassroots counterparts.

Ford Motor Co has directors on the boards of the NYT, the Washington Post, & the LA Times

[The media] may not always mold opinion but they do not always have to. Its enough that they create opinion visibility, giving legitimacy to certain views & illegitimacy to others. The media do the same to issues that they do to candidates, raising some from oblivion & conferring legitimacy upon them, while consigning others to limbo… so that [discourse] extends from ultra-right to no further than moderate center.

The “selectivity” we exercise is not an antidote to propaganda, but may feed right into it, choosing one or another variation of the same establishment offering.

Opinions that depart too far from the mainstream are likely to be rejected out of hand. Our "selectivity" is designed to avoid information and views that contradict the dominant propaganda, a propaganda we long ago embraced as "the nature of things."