Status Updates From Inventing Reality: The Poli...

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."

The media, like major political parties themselves, treat campaigns not as an opportunity to debate issues, but solely as a competition for office. The focus is on the race itself with little thought raised about what the race is supposed to be about.

By focusing on contest rather than content, the media make it difficult for the public to give intelligent expression to political life and to mobilize around issues.

Candidates learn that if they take a stand on controversial issues, the press is less likely to convey the position itself over the controversy arising from the position.

The media create conservative effects by slighting the issues and focusing on candidate image. Even when attention is given to issues, it is usually to conjecture on how the candidate used them to help his image and advance his electoral chances.

Recessions are treated as natural, albeit unfortunate, events akin to earthquakes or droughts… The contradictions of capitalism are seldom dwelt upon in the media.

Slums are caused by people who live in them, not by real estate speculators, fast-buck developers, tax-evading investors, and rent-gouging landlords.
Poverty is a problem of the poor, who need to be taught better values & a more middle-class lifestyle.

how the press serves the privileged is found in how it treats the underprivileged:

The poor are most likely to receive coverage during Thanksgiving & Christmas when some are administered turkey dinners, the message being that there is comfort & shelter even for the more unfortunate among us.

The class dimensions of the women's struggle & the Black struggle are simply not a fit subject for the mainstream news media.