LIES THE MEDIA TELL US
INTRODUCTION
WHEN TWO OF MY CHILDREN, Kieran and Kaeleigh, were about five and three years old, they took part in a demonstration and protest in Chatham, Ontario, supporting some striking workers. This would have been in about 1996. There was marching and singing and guitar playing, and it was a good example of labour solidarity. In fact, one of the songs we sang was the labour anthem: "Solidarity Forever." The chorus goes like this: "Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, solidarity forever, the union makes us strong."
That evening when we returned home to Windsor, I was in the kitchen making dinner, and Kaeleigh announced she was going to the bathroom off the kitchen where, a few moments later I heard her singing in her sweet voice: "Unidarity forever, Unidarity forever, the human makes us strong." I was standing in the kitchen chopping vegetables, with tears streaming down my cheeks.
Over the years the kids have been to many demonstrations and protests, in keeping with our commitment to social justice. I remember young Kieran once made the front page of the Windsor Star, as he sat at a demonstration with his face sporting anti-Mike Harris stickers. I've always thought it's important to nurture values such as solidarity and equality, while trying to be careful not to be pushy: ultimately, everyone has to choose their own path.
The downside to all this became apparent early on, when the children would jokingly take up pretend placards and march around the kitchen shouting, "We want ice cream! We want ice cream!" If workers have rights, then children have rights too, don't they? Of course, parents are responsible for supervising children's nutrition, but some things are open to negotiation.
Ironically, those of us who discuss discipline, manners, and respect with our children are faced with a contradiction when we also want them to stand up for their rights, think independently, and question authority. As parents, "good behaviour" frequently translates into respectful silence as in the adage: "children should be seen and not heard." In my observation, a major part of child-rearing seems to involve teaching children to listen, obey, and conform, so they'll be less trouble to us as we go about our busy lives. I've thought of this as I've heard myself saying, "Do you have your listening ears on?" I've heard parenting gurus advise parents to hold the child's face with both hands, forcing them to look into your eyes and to listen and then to repeat what they're being told, to be sure they understand--and obey.
Here are three sample excerpts from a recent article in a parenting magazine:
If compliance is the goal, listening is certainly the first step: A child who hasn't heard dad tell him to unload the dishwasher isn't likely to do it…
Get down to your child's height and look him in the eye to be sure he gets the message.
Winnipeg's Sho McDowell, mother of Alexandria, nine, Daniel, seven, and Neil Andrew, five, has her own method to ensure her crew is truly listening: "My one and only trick is when I have something I want them to do, and I think they aren't listening, they have to repeat back to me what I said and what they think it means."1
Droopy Pants Legislation
I am a staunch advocate for teachers and our public school system. Of course, parents' desires for quiet, order, and compliance with one or two kids gets magnified many times when it comes to teachers struggling with education cutbacks and up to 35 active children in a classroom. One result is that conformity is the rule of the day in our schools. Like parents, some teachers or administrators hit the panic button when they see a kid with spiked or dyed hair, or a t-shirt with a slogan they don't like. We need rules preventing objectionable slogans and behavior, but it sometimes borders on the bizarre.
In 2004 and 2005, legislators in Florida, Virginia and Louisiana introduced three separate "droopy pants bills," in an attempt to outlaw baggy pants which allow teen's underwear to show. The Florida bill would have meant up to ten days in jail and a $50 fine. None of the bills were approved, but the fact that they were introduced is telling. The Virginia bill passed the house legislature, but was defeated in the State Senate.2 And at Greenbriar High School in Evans, Georgia, student Mike Cameron was suspended in 1998 for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt on a school-designated "Coke Day." The school was hoping to win $500 in a CocaCola-sponsored contest.3
Educators, like legislators, are looking for conformity. Students with C-grades don't raise an eyebrow, but arriving three minutes late means a trip to the principal's office. Those who don't conform are weeded out using a variety of techniques, from the fourth-grader who is labeled as a "behavioral problem," to more sophisticated methods at the university level. Noam Chomsky summed it up:
[G]iven the external power structure of the society in which they function now, the institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated--and as long as the schools fulfill that role, they'll be supported.4
So, the conformity seeps over from the behavioural area, to the academic content. Part of maintaining order becomes having students taking notes rather than asking questions. After all, if students can question your academic authority, might they not question your authority to discipline? This assembly- line model for learning leads to rote memorization and regurgitation. Students who do the best are those who can best parrot back what is sometimes merely dogma, to the teacher or professor. Questioning authority or otherwise causing trouble inevitably leads to one form or another of punishment, from a poor grade to time spent in the office. These lessons extend all the way up the ladder of education, from primary school to graduate school work.
Internalized Beliefs
A few years ago I was contacted by a doctoral student in sociology at a large comprehensive university in southern Ontario. After seven years of doctoral studies, his professors abandoned him, meaning that now he would never graduate. The reason? His dissertation results didn't agree with his professors' ideological bias. I read his dissertation and it was perfectly acceptable. He kept rewriting his thesis as instructed by his advisory committee, until he realized that what they really wanted him to do was to change his findings to agree with their political perspective. This student had integrity, and was rewarded with expulsion after seven years' work. As I write these words, he is enrolled in a doctoral program in Europe, has published several refereed journal articles from his dissertation, and expects to formally defend his dissertation later in 2007.
Faced with these sorts of demands, most graduate students naturally capitulate. What choice do they have, really? Ironically, this student was replicating research by American academic and famed dissident Noam Chomsky. I say it's ironic because Chomsky has actually warned students and academics that this is what will happen to them if they challenge the status quo rather than conforming.
Chomsky tells the story of Norman Finkelstein, a graduate student at Princeton who documented the fraud in a book which was popular and favorably reviewed, only to be punished by his professors and ignored by academic journals and the mass media. Even though Finkelstein was eventually allowed to graduate, he was ostracized and prevented from obtaining an academic position.5 After giving several other examples, Chomsky summarizes the situation:
[I]n the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork--and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous--or you know, too effective--they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young--they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools--that's the basic story of how it operates, I think (emphasis added).6
So, the higher up you go in academia, the more you learn to conform. And, as Chomsky notes, the people who teach in universities, part of the "intelligentsia," are the most indoctrinated of all, because it's our job to teach others to conform. In previous books I've referred to this conforming and obedient mindset as Common Sense or MediaThink, to underscore the key role also played in this process by the mainstream corporate media.
More than a half century ago in what was by far his best book, Marshall McLuhan criticized, somewhat enviously, the relatively vast sums of money spent on the "unofficial education system" of the mass media, particularly advertising.7 Increasingly, the formal education system of our schools has become a mere subset of the mainstream media, a process heightened by expanding corporatization, and privatization, which are part of the "external power structure" to which Chomsky refers.
A Disney View of History
One estimate has it that about 75 percent of classroom time and 90 percent of homework time is related to textbook use. University and school texts are predominantly mass-produced by the giant international publishing houses, with names like Time-Warner-AOL (Warner Books), Viacom (Simon & Schuster) and Bertelsmann AG (Random House, Ballantine, Bantam, Doubleday, Knopf, etc.) Four publishers dominate textbook publishing in the U.S., accounting for about 70 percent of texts.
As the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me writes, regarding American history texts, "the books actually make students stupid,"8 in part because children, like most adults, "do not readily retain isolated, incoherent, and meaningless data."9 Newspapers and magazines target teachers and students with "education" programs using media content to foment current and future readership. Canned content in the form of films, documentaries and regular television programs form an increasing proportion of the curriculum, with both good and bad effects. Students increasingly rely on the Internet and worldwide web for their research, and although there is good alternative information available, the bulk of the information--and information providers--are the same.
Academia is a place, ideally, where we can have reflection, study, even dreaming. This is where independent and critical analysis of society, the corporate, political, religious, artistic, commercial, and even educational aspects, may take place. With encroaching corporate sponsorship, government cutbacks, and "academic freedom" bills which do the reverse, this ability is being lost. In part, the corporate advertising money which McLuhan decried, has encroached, making education just another part of the corporate system. Now, some professors can be paid what the advertising people get, but at what cost? This is most clearly evident in the area of medical education, as we will see in Chapter Three.
Another gigantic problem with the education system is that there is nowhere to study issues of enormous significance to society. In universities, the disciplines or subject areas have been divided in a way that effectively precludes the pursuit of some very important questions. Economics departments study abstract mathematical models of how "free enterprise" economies potentially could work; political science departments study election voting patterns and electoral "horse race" statistics; sociology departments study crime in the ghettos, or gambling addictions.10 But in the age of corporate globalization, for example, what discipline is devoted to studying its impact on the world population, or alternatives? Who is studying and explaining the World Trade Organization, or the impact of trade agreements on jobs, or the environment, or sovereignty and democracy? These vital areas for study are all but ignored by mainstream academia, in favor of topics more suited to winning corporate and government grants, and promoting student employment. Critical analysis of the vitally important WTO, IMF, and FTAA is left to the paltry resources of a small number of dedicated researchers.11
Throughout the educational system, our textbooks and our teachers use what James Loewen calls, "a godlike tone," and as a result, it rarely occurs to students to question. He quotes a former student:
In retrospect I ask myself, why didn't I think to ask, for example, who were the original inhabitants of the Americas, what was their life like, and how did it change when Columbus arrived? However, back then everything was presented as if it were the full picture, so I never thought to doubt that it was.
As examples, Loewen uses the partial and biased portrayal of Helen Keller, who became a radical socialist, and went from being admired and celebrated, to being disparaged and condemned. Or, President Woodrow Wilson, a white supremacist who invaded and colonized Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haïti, and other countries. But U.S. textbooks say, "President Wilson was urged to send military forces into Mexico to protect American investments and to restore law and order." As a result, says Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, "most high school seniors are hamstrung in their efforts to analyze controversial issues in our society," they have what he calls, "a Disney view of history."
Why the title Lies the Media Tell Us? There are two reasons: in 1992 I wrote a book which discussed media portrayal of such issues as the Persian Gulf War, and the election and government by Bob Rae and the NDP in Ontario. The book's title was Common Cents, and I can recall one interviewer asking me what the title meant. Of course, this meant the interviewer hadn't read the book, because the title was explained in the introduction. (It was all about the common sense perspective, or conventional wisdom parroted by the news media. I used "cents" instead of "sense" to signal the economic context, the political economy of news media.) Next I wrote Democracy's Oxygen, and then co-wrote The Big Black Book, and then wrote MediaThink. For this book, I thought I'd just try to state the obvious, as jarring as it may be for some. After all, these examples clearly illustrate that the media are telling us lies. The second reason is that I wanted to connect the book to Lies My Teacher Told Me, because the very real sins of the education system are also the sins of the news media. And why wouldn't they be? Academics teach journalists and publishers alike. And every day, the news media teach professors, teachers, students, and everyone else.
Media Literacy
It's within this educational context that I introduced a media literacy course in the mid-nineties. I began teaching the course once a year to maybe fifty students. More recently, I've taught 400 students in a year, and it's usually around 300. The course is aimed at correcting for media biases, the lies media tell us. It's also partially in reaction to the conservative nature of academia itself, which largely tends to reinforce conventional wisdom, and teach conformity. I wanted to teach a course which would be an exception. Because this book covers a number of the topics in the course, it's written for my students. But it's also for curious members of the public, who are open to having their conventional views challenged.
In the course, I put forward some unconventional notions, such as, "we are all feminists," or "we are all environmentalists"--or at least, we should be. I think much of the blame for how we see feminism or environmentalism, rests with the mainstream media.12 (See Chapter Two.) I argue that pharmaceutical companies with the help of MDs and Hollywood celebrities--and some university professors --have turned us into pill poppers. And that it's a corrupt and despicable business. (See Chapter Three.) More controversially, I also dissect some of the entertaining animated films produced by Disney and others, pointing to their sometimes blatant sexism, racism, and stereotyping. Perhaps more challenging, I ask students to reconsider the stated foreign policy goals of the U.S., and increasingly Canada. Is it all about liberation and democracy, or access to oil? (Chapter Four.) And what about corporate globalization? Is it a Global Village, or Global Pillage? (Chapter Five.) And then, in the category of "what-drugs-is-this-prof-on?" I ask students to suspend their disbelief, and consider the possibility that: Canada is not a democracy, while Cuba is. I don't ask them to believe this heresy, but just to listen to some arguments and perhaps do their own investigation if they are interested. They don't have to adopt these views, but I ask them to be aware of the arguments. And just to consider the very possibility of what it might mean if this wild notion is actually true.
As Mark Twain said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure, that just ain't so."
NOTES
1. Donna Papacosta, "Now Hear This: From toddlers to teens, tips on talking to your kids," Today's Parent, Sept. 3, 2003. http://www.todaysparent.com/behaviordevelopment/allages/article.jsp? content=20030903_141855_4224.
2. Frank Cerabino, "Lawmakers took a pass on one stupid law," Palm Beach Post, May 11, 2005.
3. Liza Featherstone, "Hot-Wiring High School," The Nation, June 21, 1999. After students' rights groups got involved and held press conferences, high school officials backed down, admitted they made a mistake, and erased the suspension from the student's record.
4. Noam Chomsky, quoted in Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, The New Press, N.Y., 2002, p. 237.
5. Mitchell and Schoeffel, Understanding Power, p. 245.
6. Ibid, p. 249. Emphasis added.
7. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Ginko Press, Corte Madera Ca, 2001. (Originally published in 1951.)
8. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Touchstone, N.Y., 1995, p. 17.
9. A. B. Hodgetts and Paul Gallagher, Teaching Canada for the '80s, Toronto, OISE, 1978, p. 20, cited in Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 301.
10. Chomsky provides a few of these examples and then concludes, "In fact, there is no academic profession that is concerned with the central problems of modern society." Quoted in Mitchell and Schoefel, Understanding Power, p. 242.
11. Aside from Chomsky, a few examples would include: the indefatigable Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, Tony Clarke, Murray Dobbin, Michael Albert and colleagues at Z-Net, Michel Chossudovsky of Concordia, and Bruce Campbell and associates at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
12. I discuss Feminism in "Feminism Did It," MediaThink, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 2002.