Michael Parenti - Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media

Parenti, Michael, 1933

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SECOND EDITION

MICHAEL PARENTI

ST. MARTINS PRESS

NEW YORK

Senior editor: Don Reisman
Managing editor: Patricia Mansfield-Phelan
Project editor: Suzanne Holt
Production supervisor: Katherine Battiste
Cover design: Michael Jung

Copyright 1993 by St. Martins Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

76543

fedcba

For information, write:

St. Martins Press, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

ISBN: 0-312-02013-9 (paperback)

0-312-08629-6 (clothbound)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parenti, Michael, 1933

Inventing reality : the politics of news media / Michael Parenti.

2nd ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-08629-6 (clothbound)ISBN 0-312-02013-9 (pbk.) 1. JournalismPolitical aspectsUnited States. 2. Journalism United StatesObjectivity. I. Title.

PN4888.P6P37 1992 302.23'0973dc20

92-50023

CIP

I am indebted to Peggy Noton, Gwen Glesmann, Sally Soriano, and Laura Cooley for the generous assistance they rendered at crucial times. My thanks to the St. Martins Press staff, especially my editor Don Reisman, Frances Jones, and Suzanne Holt for their efficient and thoughtful service in guiding the manuscript safely through hazardous editorial and production straitsand improving its quality along the way.

For their critical suggestions I wish to thank Earl S. Grow, The University of WisconsinMilwaukee, and Edward C. Uliassi, Northeastern Illinois University.

Encouraging and helpful comments from interested readers, too numerous to mention, regarding the first edition of this book gave me much of the resolve to write this updated and, I think, improved version. For this they have my gratitude.

SECOND EDITION

For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the news media. Indeed, what we even define as an issue or event, what we see and hear, and what we do not see and hear are greatly determined by those who control the communications world. Be it peace protestors, uprisings in Latin America, crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of us know of things except as they are depicted in the news. Even when we dont believe what the media say, we are still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They^are still getting the agenda,defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or rejecTTThe media exert a persistent influence in defining the scope of respectable political discourse.

Be this as it may, growing numbers of people are becoming increasingly aware that the media are neither objective nor consistently accurate in their portrayal of things. There seems to be a growing understanding that we need to defend ourselves by challenging the misinformation we are fed. In this book I will try to demonstrate bow the news media distort important aspects of social and political life and why. The presss misrepresentations are not usually accidental, not merely the result of the complexity of actual events and the honest confusions of poorly prepared reporters. While those kinds of problems exist, another kind of distortion predominates, one not due to chance or to the idiosyncratic qualities of news production or newspeople. The major distortions are repeatable and systemicthe product not only of deliberate manipulation but of the ideological and economic conditions under which the media operate.

One book cannot cover all that might be said about the media. I will concentrate on national and international politico-economic class issues, with some attention given to the racist and sexist biases in the media (dealt with in this chapter). I do not deal with the entertainment media and the many hidden ideological and political biases found therein. That subject is treated in my recent book Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainmentd In the pages ahead we will explore the way the press distorts and suppresses the news about major domestic and foreign events, the hidden and not-so-hidden ideological values, the influence of ownership, and the opportunities for dissent.

Rather than attempt a comprehensive canvassing of the news complete with statistical breakdowns and content analyses, I trace media performance along several basic themes, providing representative samples of how the press treats or mistreats a subject. A more systematic undertaking would have had the virtue of thoroughness and maybe increased precision of a sort, but it would have made for a very huge and dull volume. In any case, numerous systematic studies are cited and summarized in the chapters that follow.

This book concentrates on the more influential news media, specifically the three major networks: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), along with the New York Times and Washington Post (and their respective news services). These two newspapers, the Post and the Times, not only feed information to the public but to other news media as well. Occasional attention is also given herein to two newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and lesser publications and broadcast media. Taken together these various outlets compose what I alternately describe as the major media, the mainstream media, the corporate-owned press, the US press, the national media, or just the press and the news media. Throughout this book 1 use the terms news media and press synonymously to mean the printed and broadcast news organizations. It so happens that press is singular and media plural, but I mean the same by both.