MEDIATHINK
Introduction
SOME LIES TO EXPOSE
"My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing." George Orwell
In the 1940s British author and journalist Eric Arthur Blair wrote a book of fiction titled 1984, in which he warned that if citizens were not vigilant the State could come to control our actions, and possibly even our thinking. Blair, who wrote under the pseudonym of George Orwell, produced a book which, like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations before it, became a bible for those who claimed to deplore government intervention of all sorts: from the free marketers to libertarians to cold war warriors, and even, lately, the U.S. National Rifle Association. In the intervening half century these forces have been vigilant, keeping both eyes on Big Brother, ensuring that governments don't grow too strong and beating them back at every turn, all the while championing what they see as the contradictory notions of individualism and personal freedom.
But as with Adam Smith, Orwell's work was oversimplified, misinterpreted, and used for selfish political purposes. For example, suppose that George Orwell was actually a socialist. Of course, this notion doesn't make 'sense,' because it is beyond the boundaries of MediaThink, but in fact it is quite true. Here is what Orwell wrote about the matter in 1947: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." This doesn't make 'sense' because Orwell is the champion of those mentioned above, who oppose government intervention in the economy: the rabid anti-communists who have equated socialism with communism and communism with totalitarianism. Their goal has been the distortion of socialism and communism and identifying both with the real and imagined horrors in the former Soviet Union, which was neither. Hence, if Orwell is a socialist, then he becomes the very thing he is famous for ridiculing and satirizing in 1984, and in Animal Farm, and elsewhere. That's why it doesn't make 'sense' that Orwell was a socialist, although in fact he was. In the contemporary U.S., socialists and even liberals are now lumped together with 'communists,' truncating the ideological spectrum and political debate itself.
The reason for doing this is simple: it reduces matters to the Manichaean, 'black and white' terms which are an essential element of propaganda and manipulation. If liberalism and its alleged bedmates are 'bad,' then capitalism, democracy and neo-conservatism, which are also equated, and are the only alternative, must be 'good.' In the days of the Cold War, this could simply be represented as a choice between the Russian bear and the American eagle, as repression versus freedom, or by the popular catch phrase: "better dead than red."
In the meantime, another work by Orwell has gone largely unmentioned. In fact, it was the preface Orwell wrote to Animal Farm, which was excised from the original publication and only surfaced later with his original manuscript. Rather than writing about totalitarianism in Russia, in his preface Orwell was writing about voluntary literary censorship in Britain at the time, a topic which was much less fashionable. Orwell noted that, "Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban." This may be accomplished, he said, "because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact." He explained that,
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
As for why this was the case, Orwell left little doubt: it had to do with media ownership. The reasons are "easy to understand," he wrote, even at that time in the 1940s. "The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics."
A contemporary example of the type of orthodoxy to which Orwell referred, is on the matter of Quebec sovereignty. Aside from some of the French-language media in Quebec, this concept is universally treated as an abomination. Incredibly, over the course of more than twenty years, I cannot recall a single Canadian news item, opinion column or editorial which treated self-determination for Quebeckers in a favourable or even neutral manner: all have been heavily biased against separatism. Regardless of what position you take in this debate, should there not be some diversity of views? Of course, self-determination for "ethnic Albanians" is a different matter, as we see in Chapter Three. Now, there is unanimous support for the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, championing a militant separatist movement known as the Kosovo Liberation Army.
In recent years, a partial list of other topics which have received orthodox coverage would include: representations of Canada as a democracy where the majority rules, free trade, feminism, national debt, immigrants, tax cuts, various 'conflicts' or wars, social program slashing, Native Canadians, globalization, welfare recipients, labour unions, competitiveness, the homeless, and protesters. In Canada, as author Linda McQuaig has documented so well, we've seen the manufacture of deficit hysteria as an excuse for slashing the social safety net. Deficit hysteria was also a generalized strategy for reducing the role of government in society, increasing unemployment, driving down wages, emasculating welfare programs, undermining public health care and public education, and otherwise attacking the young, poor and downtrodden. Of course, once the annual deficits were eliminated by the neo-liberals in Ottawa, the governments of Ralph Klein in Alberta , Mike Harris in Ontario, and elsewhere, it became necessary to identify a new pretense: globalization. This became the rationale for major tax cuts, and legislation outlawing even liberal economics: the occasional deficit budgeting prescribed by John Maynard Keynes.
Instead of offering diverse perspectives on events and issues, the corporate media portray an increasingly myopic and orthodox picture of the world around us. The consistency with which they do this has its consequent, intended effect on public opinion and policy formation. American critic Michael Parenti has summed things up succinctly:
[M]edia bias usually does not occur in random fashion; rather it moves in more or less consistent directions, favouring management over labour, corporations over corporate critics, affluent Whites over low income minorities, officialdom over protestors, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market 'reforms' over public sector development, U.S. dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist social change, and conservative commentators and columnists over progressive or radical ones.
This is what I mean by the term MediaThink--it is just what the word implies--media owners, managers and workers' way of thinking, of seeing and representing events in the world around us. I coined the term a few years ago as a broader equivalent to 'group think' or the way in which people in groups tend to think alike. It is Orwell's "orthodoxy," and Antonio Gramsci's "common sense." Are these MediaThink perspectives absolutely universal and monolithic? Usually not. As is most apparent in the detailed analysis in Chapter Four of coverage by The National Post, alternative perspectives usually are available, but marginalised, and overwhelmed.
Three major questions to ask about the corporate media are: 1. How is it that they go about lying to us? 2. Why do they do so? And 3. What is it that they tell us and don't tell us? This is the second in a trilogy of books which began with Common Cents, written in 1992. Looking back nearly a decade, little has changed, only the names and places. Brian Mulroney has morphed into Jean Chretien, and Bush Senior into Bush Junior. Ken Thomson begat Conrad Black, who begat Israel Asper. Instead of Kuwait, we have Kosovo: like the alliteration, the methods and goals are still intact. Common Cents examined media portrayal of events such as the Gulf War, the first Ontario NDP government, and the Oka crisis. In these five case studies in this book, I attempt to show how media portrayals fall dismally short of presenting an accurate account of events, as Orwell would have it: the dishonesty of wealthy men on certain important topics. Furthermore, there is a quite discernable and consistent bias to the framework they provide, reflecting their class, gender, race, and corporate ties. MediaThink looks at East Timor independence, the war in Kosovo, the portrayal of women, feminism on the Supreme Court, and people of colour.
Democracy's Oxygen, which I wrote in between in 1997, focused on how and why rather than what. The questions of how and why, and what is to be done, are of course important ones, but the need for continuously documenting the orthodox bias, of continuing the work of George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, I.F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky, is, in my view, predominant.
I have spent more than twenty years now, studying, writing and teaching university students about the media. Initially, students are understandably resistant to the notion that "the media," (by which I mean corporate media) are lying to us. In fact, in my experience, beginning university students are far more closed to this idea than are older adults. This resistance is not surprising: it's a reflection of the myths and values propagated in the media, and in which students have been steeped, directly and indirectly, their entire lives. They too, indeed most of us are imbued with MediaThink.
There appears to be no end to the greed on the part of the elite. On the other hand, however effective propaganda and manipulation are, they do have limits. This is becoming apparent in the predominantly peaceful but persistent anti-globalization protests since APEC in Vancouver in 1997, continuing with Seattle in 1999, Windsor, Ontario in 2000, and Quebec City and Genoa, Italy in 2001. This movement, these young people, represent the future resistance to the orthodoxy of MediaThink, and the increasingly greedy, oppressive and violent powers behind it. This will be examined in my next book.
James Winter, Twin Oaks, Pelee Island Ontario, August, 2001