The Gulf War pointed up the apparent willingness in the media to accept informational spoon-feeding from the White House and especially the Pentagon. The following comes from Extra! the journal of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, Volume 4, #3:

A recent study conducted by the University of Massachusetts' Center for Studies in Communication, found that the more people watched TV during the Gulf crisis, the less they knew about the underlying issues, and the more likely they were to support the war. When the research team tested public knowledge of basic facts about the region, U.S. policy and events leading up to the war, they discovered that "the most striking gaps in people's knowledge involved information that might reflect badly upon the Administration's policy'.

In a related piece, Extra!maintains --

The extent to which war reporting was controlled by the Bush administration was seldom detailed by the press and hence widely misunderstood by the public, which largely bought the argument that restrictions were necessary for some vaguely defined "security" reasons. Such arguments were belied by the Pentagon's arbitrary ban on coverage of coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base, and by the "48 hour news blackout" at the beginning of the ground war, a blackout that was abandoned as soon as the news turned out to be good for the Pentagon...

Extra! continues:

...I've never seen anything that can compare to it, in the degree of surveillance and control the military has over the correspondents," stated New York Times correspondent Malcolm Brown (Newsday 1/23/91). "When the entire environment is controlled, a journalist ceases to be a reporter...He works a lot like the PK [Propagandakompanien, the Nazi propaganda corps]...

"The key principle used by both Reagan and Bush is that if you can control where and when journalists (particularly TV journalists) can report, you can control the imagery and its emotional impact on the public. Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan's minister of photo opportunities, marveled at the Pentagon's media mastery: If you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media relations for an international event, it couldn't be done any better than this is being done."

Ironic that he should put it that way -- a few years back the Pentagon did send key information officers to an information-managing school put on by a P.R. outfit

Extra! notes that "the prime function of the pool reporting concept was to limit the imagery available to TV cameras. Thus we saw much heroic imagery of missiles rocketing off into the wild blue yonder; images of soldiers killed or wounded by friendly fire or "non-combat related accidents" were not considered suitable photo opportunities. As Howard Stringer, president of the CBS Broadcast Group reported,There are more people routinely killed across the spectrum of American television in a given night than you saw in any coverage of this war.

"...When Robert Fisk of the Independent tried to report without official permission on the battle of Khafji, NBC correspondent Brad Willis reported him to the Marines. You asshole, the NBC reporter told Fisk, You'll prevent us from working. You're not allowed here. Get out. Go back to Dhahran...

Reporters who tried to cover the war outside the Pentagon's press pools were sometimes detained and threatened by U.S. soldiers. Marines held a wire service photographer for six hours, threatening to shoot him if he left his car -- We have orders from above to make this pool system work, they told him. A French TV crew was forced at gunpoint to turn over to Marines footage of soldiers wounded at the battle of Khafji.

...Military officials had right of approval over final copy and footage...The censors were known to delete details that struck them as embarrassing -- the fact that stealth pilots were watching X-rated movies before bombing missions, for example...

The Center for Constitutional Rights, on behalf of a number of journalists, filed a lawsuit seeking the abolition of the restrictions on the grounds that there is no wartime exception to the First Amendment. But not only did mainstream media not join the lawsuit they hardly even reported on the suit.

One correspondent in Saudi Arabia told Newsday: "We have sort of become adjuncts of the government. The line between me and a government contractor is pretty thin."

According to Extra! writer Robert Krinsky, "In the weeks before President Bush dispatched orders to bomb Baghdad, CNN and network affiliates in Washington, DC, rejected efforts by the Military Family Support Network, a group of relatives of service-people who opposed the Gulf War, to purchase time for an anti-war TV ad. It is a very sad day when in these troubled times the media thinks the feelings of military families are too controversial to be broadcast, observed Alex Molnar, MFSN co-chair."

Clearly, when complaints about media management and censorship are aired in Newsday and in other publications, there is no consistent censorship of media -- but media critics would argue that the government, the Pentagon and Big Business simply censor where they can get away with it. And they get away with it with chilling frequency. The suppression we hear about is only the tip of an iceberg that is decidedly submerged.

* * *

As worrisome to me as Pentagon management of news sources, is the chummy understanding that exists between news media and the bigger corporations.

Indeed, sometimes the media is just a branch of some other kind of big business. General Electric is the owner of NBC. GE is also one of the biggest investors in nuclear energy. In March 1987, NBC News broadcast a special "documentary" entitled, "Nuclear Power: In France It Works." According to Unreliable Sources:"In an upbeat introduction to the so called documentary, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw neglected to state that his corporate patron is America's second-largest nuclear energy vendor, with 39 nuclear reactors in the U.S. and the third-leading nuclear weapons producer -- facts which gave rise to the moniker 'Nuclear Broadcasting Company' among disgruntled NBC staff."

NBC's report on nuclear energy was, well, glowing. With respect to the thorny problem of nuclear waste disposal, it concluded, "The French will probably succeed in their disposal plan for the same reasons the rest of the nuclear program works...The French have more faith than we do in the government's competence to manage the nuclear program, and the French government has had less tolerance for endless dissent."

"Unfortunately," Solomon and Lee tell us, "faith and lack of tolerance for dissent will not solve critical nuclear problems, even in France. One month after NBC aired its pro-nuclear broadcast, there were accidents at two French nuclear power installations, injuring seven workers...polls show a third of the French public opposing nuclear power. While the accidents were widely discussed in the French media and some U.S. newspapers, NBC did not report the story..."

NBC News' blatant conflict of interest, its willingness to act as a shill for nuclear power while pretending to do an objective documentary, is to me something chillingly close to Orwellian brainwashing. There was a kind of a priori censorship, in the case of NBC's hour long commercial for nuclear power, of any information that would reflect badly on the industry. Particularly shocking is the hint in the actual script of the broadcast -- "less tolerance for endless dissent" -- that significant degrees of dissent should no longer be tolerated.

Extra! reports that a Today show report on defective bolts in airplanes, bridges and nuclear plants was originally sharply critical of GE. Every reference GE was removed before the segment aired. And, "when NBC Nightly News runs 14 minutes of coverage on a new type of machine to detect breast cancer, it seems relevant to mention that GE produces the device. Although the network devoted the equivalent of half a newscast to the subject over three consecutive days, it never found time to mention that its corporate parent makes the expensive devices. Neither ABC nor CBS found the subject newsworthy..."

FAIR's Todd Putnam got a call from NBC's Today show saying they were interested in airing a story on consumer boycotts. She asked for information on the biggest boycott going on right now". It turned out to be the boycott of GE products prompted by GE's leading role in the production and promotion of nuclear weapons".

When told that the owners of NBC were the object of the biggest boycott in the country, Amy Rosenberg of the Today show responded, "We can't do that one. Well, we could do that one, but we won't."

And they didn't

* * *

More from Unreliable Sources:

Dependent on corporate sponsors for financial sustenance, TV Networks are under tremendous pressure to shape their products in a way that best accommodates the needs of their advertisers. I would say they are always taken into account, Herman Keld of CBS acknowledged...For the most part, however, advertisers wield influence by restricting and watering down show biz content...One way they do this is by yanking -- or threatening to yank -- financial support from certain programs...Corporate sponsors figure they are entitled to call the shots since they foot the bill -- an assumption shared by network executives, who quickly learn to internalize the desires of their patrons. For starters they are likely to frown upon programming that puts a damper on the 'buying mood' that advertisers require...

These are the principal guidelines, explicitly spelled out by big-league sponsors, that TV censors follow:

Make sure nothing in a script undermines the sales pitch for the advertised product. For example, a gas company sponsoring a TV version of Judgement at Nuremberg demanded that producers delete references to "gas chambers" from accounts of Nazi concentration camps. Pharmaceutical firms won't tolerate scenes in which someone commits suicide by overdosing on pills...

Portray Big Business in a flattering Iight. Procter & Gamble, which spends over a billion dollars a year on advertising, once decreed in a memo on broadcast policy: 'There will be no material that will give offense, either directly or indirectly, to any commercial organization of any sort.' Ditto for Prudential Insurance: 'A positive image of business and finance is important to sustain on the air.' If a businessman is cast as the bad guy, it must be clear that he is an exception...

Cater to the upper crust. To impress potential sponsors, ABC once prepared a booklet with a section called, "Some people are more valuable than others." If the elderly and low-income counted for more in the advertising department their particular concerns would figure more prominently in...TV programming.

Steer clear of overly serious or complex subjects and bleach out controversy whenever possible. Dupont, a major advertiser, told the FCC that commercials are more effective on "lighter, happier" programs..."You can't take up real problems seriously," complained Charles Knopf, a TV scriptwriter and former president of the Writer's Guild...

The 1988 season-opening episode of the dramatic series MacGyver was censored by ABC in response to complaints by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The episode in question included flashbacks of a shooting incident that took the life of MacGyver's boyhood friend. The show was to have closed with statistics as to how many children are killed each day in handgun accidents.

Things have opened up as far as four-letter words are concerned, but as far as political content goes, I don't see anything changing," said Tommy Smothers. The Smothers Brothers were recently back on the air -- twenty years after CBS cancelled them for expressing their views on the Vietnam War. In 1989, Smothers said, "four or five years ago, Lou Grant [Edward Asner] was put off the air because of his opinions on Nicaragua.I'm sure not going to start getting on their case now about getting out of Central America. I'll be out of work for another 20 years."

* * *

I recently taped an interview with one of the authors of Unreliable Sources, Norman Solomon. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Norman Solomon: The web of corporate control extends so widely now that keeping an independent media is really a battle...General Electric, for example, not only owns NBC, they're spread all over the national airwaves...They're buying major time on all the networks so the net result is there's one corporation with a huge amount of power over what's said and not said.

John Shirley: A lot of the censorship you were talking about often takes the form of something called spiking, right? Which is basically, it seems to me, cowardice. It's people afraid to risk their jobs.

NS: Yeah. We've been conditioned to believe that censorship only happens when it's imposed by a dictator...and yet in the United States we have censorship all the time that comes through the corporate mechanisms. And a lot of journalists are consciously or unconsciously naive about that form of censorship...If you work for a daily newspaper, your top boss is the interface between owners and the beat reporter. The executive editor unctions at the behest of the owners...A lot of the time I'll talk to a reporter who says "Well nobody ever told me what to write." There are a couple of problems with that response. One is that journalists are told what to write all the time, it's just couched in professional terms...it's euphemistically put. The other problem with that claim is that journalists have been pretty much conditioned to stay within narrow bounds. If you don't have to be told to stay within boundaries, then process. You stay inside the mental cage without having the door locked. If you do bolt, you find out what happens. And our book talks about people like Raymond Bonner, who covered El Salvador, and Francis Cera (who covered problems at the Shoreham nuclear power plant)...when they stepped out of line they were dumped off their assignment and given a demotion. That kind of object lesson is not lost on working journalists who are after all functioning in an industry that is contracting, and many newspapers have hiring freezes. We say in the book that, although there are many hardworking, intelligent journalists they are increasingly working in an industry that has as much to do with independent journalism as Safeway has to do with family farming. There's this whole corporate ambiance where it's not only Tom Brokaw deferring to the people who cut his paycheck at General Electric, but also there's a corporate sensibility in the workplace, in the newsroom, in the editing process, so that owners and managers in glass suites can't throw stones...Nobody at CBS is going to raise questions about the impact of corporate ownership on the news reporting of NBC [an issue that's been raised to reporters at other networks, with no luck] when CBS is owned by a real estate and tobacco tycoon.

We quote in the book an assistant managing editor at TV Guide whom I interviewed, who acknowledged that TV Guide doesn't go after the networks for their patty-cake treatment of the cigarette industry, because every issue of TV Guide has full-color cigarette ads. And here you have this conflict'of interest that is not being acknowledged...

JS: And in the current atmosphere where people are being laid off in the corporations, right and left, they might be more willing than ever to play ball...You know the major book publishers have been bought by huge conglomerates, in some cases oil companies, and I used to think it was just these multinationals doing a kind of knee-jerk investment thing, but now I wonder if they didn't do it in order to protect themselves -- to get control to some extent over books that might be threatening to them. I suppose that's just paranoia...

NB: No, I think you're being very realistic. The fact is, look at a corporation like Time-Warner which was a new entity after the merger in 1989. Time-Warner publishes many magazines, and an average rack in the store is nearly filled with Time-Warner magazines. Warnerof course has Warner books, films, videos. They can broadly, then, exclude media and creative efforts that don't "fit in." I think you're right that the publishing industry is increasingly dominated also by people like Gulf & Western...One of the problems is that not only do you have these corporations with their fingers in so many corporate pies, but also they're interlocking directorates so for instance the New York Times company has on its board of directors people who are also on the board of directors of major nuclear-invested utilities and the virtual hysteria of New York Times coverage in favor of nuclear power has something to do with the corporate interlock on their own board...

JS: Certain stories that made Bush nervous were spiked before his election, at ABC [the reports on Laxalt's attempt to squash an investigation of his financing the FBI's cover-up Raymond Donovan's organized crime connections; Reagan crony Charles Wick's involvement in nightmarish conditions at nursing homes he owned]...

NS: As we put it in the book, higher-ups at ABC got cold feet. We quoted Senior Producer Marion Goldin at ABC, "It was political pressure classic spiking..."

...Sometimes it happens on a particular broadcast where you would think censorship wouldn't occur. One example is the "The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute" concert in Britain in 1988, carried by the Fox Network and we quote Little Steven in the book [a performer in the anti-apartheid concert] as saying that when he got back to the USA and saw what was actually broadcast it was "a totally Orwellian experience"...What they cut out was political statements, and political songs.

JS: Right, it was censored by arch-conservative Fox-owner Rupert Murdoch who makes no bones about censoring anything that politically offends him. An atrocious outright censorship in this case.

NS: ...One of our challenges IS to call things by the right name, to call this corporate dominance censorship, a censorship which has a different style than stereotyped censorship but much the same function. In the book we quote Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, who says that the corporate executives are ready, willing and able to restrict the flow of information for their own purposes as much as any dictator anywhere on the planet.

JS: Some of the mechanism is probably a kind of cronyism sometimes, since they're cronies, the heads of big business and the people in government, and sometimes the business people literally are the government people -- they wear both hats. A lot of people in big business and government go to the same retreat, this place in Northern California...

NS: Bohemian Grove? Right.

JS: And they mingle there, Kissinger and the CEOs of major corporations and Reagan and the people from the New York Times andTime-Warnerit's realIy worrisome how much social life there is in common, between media, big business and government. And since someone s access to a government figure, to someone they need to get access to for photo ops and sound-bites and footage -- since that access relies on good relations with those people, they don't want to rockthe boat by running risky stories.

NS: Right...I think another key point is repetition and pursuit of a story. There can be a probing investigative piece put out but if there isn't a follow up the story tends to just die. And whether there's a follow up or not often depends on whether officials in high places are pushing the story. Actually this was the case in Watergate where you had some people in the CIA and elsewhere who wanted to bring Nixon down so there was a constant flow of information, and another irony is that investigative reporters such as Bob Woodward are often the most compromised -- because they have to have a constant quid pro quo, they have to be enmeshed in the web of sources that will continue to give them information...

JS: What about this PC Censorship business -- maybe it's paranoia but I noticed that articles about "Politically Correct pressure" appeared almost simultaneously in various major publications -- but only in the really big publications. It wasn't as if it was a grass roots thing, there was very little of that.

NS: The Political Correctness matter is one of the great frauds of recent years in the media. The real PC police are in the executive suits of the major news media of this country...They are the ones who decide whose opinions can be disseminated and reach the American people...It's a very typical inversion of reality. I would compare it to, in the Gulf War when the United States was dropping this horrendous quantity of bombs on human beings in Iraq -- yet the single pilot who's shot down, early on, is shown on the cover of Newsweek and portrayed as the Victim. That's an inversion. You go and incinerate thousands of civilians and the person who's dropping the bombs on them is the victim!

This PC thing -- the very forces who are trying to enforce their political correctness agenda on media are turning around and accusing the minority of trying to do the same thing. You're quite right: all of a sudden it was these major news magazines launching this ferocious assault on "political correctness" which was really an assault on affirmative action, on multicultural diversity, and it was an attempt to fight back against people expressing their own cultural realities -- people with very little power in the media, African Americans, Latinos, gay men, poor people...This ferocious attack on them under the banner of fight yet somehow the real enemies of free expression. It's an absurdity! Here you have George Bush with very Iittle criticism from the mass media making this huge speech from the University of Michigan where he attacks this supposed intolerance in campuses -- here's someone who wants to gag doctors from explaining abortion options to pregnant women, who is appointing Supreme Court judges who are cutting back on First Amendment rights, in practice, and expression are the supposed PC fanatics running around the campuses...I think the real "PC Police" are the mass media editors and powerful executives. We quote in our book, for instance, studies of the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and Nightline on ABC -- they are basically 90% white, 90% male, the guests on those programs are overwhelmingly of a conservative bent, and the programmers are the real PC Enforcers...

* * *

Unreliable Sources is a stunning, startling book, well documented and altogether a reliable source in itself. Another great source is Extra!, the journal of FAIR.

The truth will make you free. How free do want to be?

This article originally appeared in Gauntlet in 1992. FAIR is still very much in existence and you can find out more about it at http://www.fair.org and subscribe to Extra! at http://www.fair.org/extra/index.html

Unreliable Sources : A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (ISBN: 0818405619) by Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon is available from booksellers everywhere or click here to buy directly through this site from Amazon.com.

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