Lauren McCain’s Reviews > Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media > Status Update

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

“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

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.