The media's role in U.S. foreign policy.

• Author: Herman, Edward S.
• Position: Power of the Media in the Global System

WATCHDOG AND ADVERSARY MODELS OF THE MEDIA

Spokespersons for the media regularly portray them as the country's watchdogs, who "root about in our national life, exposing what they deem right for exposure," without fear or favor.(1) Such self-congratulatory statements are traditionally supported by reference to the Watergate exposures, which "helped force a President from office,"(2) and the media's news coverage of the Vietnam War -- allegedly so open and critical that it helped firm up popular opposition and forced the war's negotiated settlement.

Nonetheless, many factors -- discussed below -- contribute to make the mainstream media supportive of government policy and vulnerable to "news management" by the government. This is most evident in foreign affairs reporting, in which strong domestic constituencies contesting government propaganda campaigns are rare, and in which the government can employ ideological weapons like anti-communism, a demonized enemy or alleged national security threats to keep the media compliant. Thus in the 1980s the Reagan administration was able to demonize the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi as premier terrorist, Grenada and Nicaragua as U.S. national security threats and Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega as a villainous drug dealer, with a high degree of mainstream media cooperation.(3)

The media's generous self-appraisal is supported in a curious and indirect way by neo-conservative and business attacks, which have frequently charged that the media are dominated by a liberal elite, hostile to business and government.(4) The same Watergate-Nixon evidence and Vietnam War coverage, cited by defenders of the media as demonstrating their constructive role, is used by conservative critics to demonstrate media excess. Big Story, for example, purported to show that the media's coverage of the 1968 Tet offensive was inaccurate, adversarial and unpatriotic.(5) Cited often and without criticism, Big Story contributed to the now-conventional belief not only that the media was hostile to the war, but also that "the outcome of the war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen."(6) John Corry of the New York Times conceded that the media bias argued by Braestrup existed, but contended that it was thoughtlessness, not deliberate subversive intent, that brought about this result.(7)

These attacks, and half-hearted and compromised defenses have served the media well. They suggest that those in power feel pressed by the media and are not insulated from their "rooting about." The media's liberal defenders have also helped legitimize the media by the uncritical nature of their rebuttals to neo-conservative criticism. Thus, Herbert Gans, attacking neo-conservative charges that the media are dominated by a liberal elite, answered these critics in part by lauding the media's professionalism and objectivity:

The beliefs that actually make it into the news are professional values

that are intrinsic to national journalism and that journalists learn

on the job....The rules of news judgment call for ignoring story

implications....with some notable exceptions, including libel and

national security.(8)

A similarly constrained scope of debate is evident in Reporters Under Fire, a book on media bias in foreign affairs. In it, the media are accused by neo-conservative and right-wing critics -- Morton Kondracke, Ben Wattenberg, Daniel James, Shirley Christian and Allen Weinstein -- of an adversarial position to the U.S. government in their coverage of Central America in the 1980s, and to Israel at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. On the defensive, the liberals argued either that the media were evenhanded -- reporters Alan Riding and Karen De Young and academics William Leo Grande and Roger Morris -- or that their bias against Israel was a result of a double standard, according to which better things were expected of Israel -- Milton Viorst.(9) In each case, the agenda and limits of the debate were set by the neo-conservatives and spokespersons for the U.S. and Israeli governments, with the opposition at best denying the alleged adversarial bias.

Critical Analyses of the Media

In fact, the media do not root about and expose abuses freely and without discrimination -- an important possibility excluded from the debates just described. Rather, they serve mainly as a supportive arm of the state and dominant elites, focusing heavily on themes serviceable to them, and debating and exposing within accepted frames of reference.

The dominant media are themselves members of the corporate-elite establishment. Furthermore, media scholarship has regularly stressed the tendency of the media to rely excessively on the government as a news source and to defer to its positions. A classic and often-cited study by Leon Sigal showed that nearly three-quarters of the front page stories in the Washington Post and New York Times depended on official sources.(10) Bennett, Chomsky, Cooper, Solely and Spence have also quantified the media's extraordinary deference to official views during the Central American wars of the 1980s.(11)

Media analysts have long noted that the economics of the media push journalists into the hands of "primary definers," who offer a daily supply of supposedly credible stories.(12) Offbeat news and sources, in contrast, require careful verification for accuracy and, thus, resources. State Department and White House handouts are provided daily at the same place and do not require an accuracy check; they are news by virtue of their source. A symbiotic relationship tends to develop between primary definers and their regular beat reporters, who are rewarded for being cooperative and penalized for unfriendly reporting. These "old-boy networks" are reinforced by linkages between officials and senior managers and editors in the mainstream media.(13)

Structural aspects of the media also make them sensitive to the demands of the government. Contrary to neo-conservative analyses, the controlling media elites are the owners, not the reporters and anchors. The owners are extremely wealthy individuals or large corporations, such as Westinghouse and General Electric Company, with a major stake in the status quo and extensive social and business connections to other business and government leaders. They also depend on the government for television licenses, contracts to provide goods and services and support in overseas activities.(14) Furthermore, the media must sell their programs to advertisers, who are not likely to look favorably on "adversarial" messages.(15)

Given this kind of media, what is the explanation for business and neo-conservative complaints of adversarial and unpatriotic media? The business community and elite are not a monolith, and the mainstream media are not closely controlled by the "capitalist class," or even by the owners of the media, although they broadly reflect dominant class interests. Frequent disagreements crop up among these interests, and the media often criticize established institutions, their abuses and policies, although virtually never at the level of institutional arrangements themselves. The accusations and debates mentioned earlier are intra-establishment conflicts, in which the complaining parties -- while not necessarily badly treated -- are dissatisfied and have the resources to press for closer conformity to their views. The business community -- angry at the media's treatment of the Nixon-era bribery disclosures and the oil-price increases of the 1970s -- made its dissatisfaction known, directly by vociferous complaints and a barrage of publicity, and indirectly by the funding of critical analysts and institutions like The Media Institute and Accuracy in Media to press its case.(16) Similarly, neo-conservative critiques of the media on foreign policy issues have essentially objected to deviations from the official party line. This was evident during the U.S.-led 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media complained that the media were reporting facts that were not helpful to the war effort; Irvine's view was that the media should serve as public relations agents of the state and adjust the news accordingly. Braestrup's Big Story had offered a similar complaint about the Vietnam War: The media were too pessimistic during and after the Tet offensive.(17) Braestrup's documentation, however, showed that the U.S. military leaders were even more pessimistic than the media, but his premise was that a free press should act as a marketing agent for official policy when reporting on any national venture. The proper role of the mass media in the neo-conservative view was also implicit in Michael Ledeen's neo-conservative plaint about the media: "Most journalists these days consider it beneath their dignity to simply report the words of government officials--and let it go at that."(18)

It is noteworthy that in early 1988 the Soviet press was assailed by Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov for disclosing negative facts about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which he claimed "played into the hands of the West."(19) The Ledeen-Irving-Braestrup equivalents in the former Soviet Union would surely have supported Yazov's claim that the Soviet press was too liberal and "adversarial," as his criticisms of the Soviet press precisely fit their own for the U.S. media. In fact, the "adversary press" in the Soviet Union followed the party line in all essentials in 1988. Similarly, the mass media in the United States accepted that the United States fought to protect South Vietnam, sought democracy in Nicaragua in the 1980s and intervened in the war in the Gulf in 1991 to fight for the principle of non-aggression. The Bush administration wanted to censor the media during the Gulf War, not because they were adversaries, but for the reason implicit in Yazov's critique of the...