Realizing the limitations of the U.S. mainstream media

Totalitarian regimes control their people by bludgeoning and incarcerating them. (Don't we all remember Tiananman Square?) Critics of Western societies claim that democratic governments maintain approval for their actions through the "manufacture of consent," a cryptic and insidious form of propaganda.

"How?" you ask skeptically. By framing the debate, the theory goes. By setting up a debate between two opposing but acceptable views - one slightly to the left of government policy, and the other slightly to the right - the media can marginalize the radicals and legitimize the party line. Thus the debate surrounding the war in Vietnam was a debate of the hawks ("If we keep fighting we can win") vs. the doves ("It's too costly; we're fighting a losing battle"). The mainstream media neither questioned the government's right to interfere, nor the purpose of the interference. You can see the same framing of debate in the U.S. media's coverage of the "war on terrorism."

It doesn't have to be because the government controls the media, even if National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice did "suggest" that the networks broadcast only "abridged" versions of any future appearances by Osama bin Laden and friends. It's much more plausible that the big companies — media conglomerates included — control the government or that the U.S. media is an uncritical, ineffective vehicle for communicating current events. I won't assign causes to circumstances because I don't have the evidence. So let's forget about conspiracies for the moment and simply focus on the media coverage: Are we getting a fair shake?

Increasing numbers of Americans don't think so. Despite the fact that the United Kingdom is our strongest ally in this conflict, its media has been considerably more even-handed in covering the war in Afghanistan. For example, it was actually an "issue" in the United Kingdom when the bombing was preventing the aid trucks from reaching the 7 to 8 million refugees at risk of starvation. In U.S. news, a couple of simple statistics were buried deep in articles, but virtually no one realized that if the trucks didn't get in before winter hit (which is a lot earlier in mountainous Afghanistan than in balmy New Jersey), several hundred thousand — if not several million — civilians were sure to die. The more extensive U.K. coverage accounts for the fact that the Guardian (a major British newspaper) has received five times as many hits from Americans surfing the web since Sept. 11.

It certainly does appear that the mainstream U.S. media is framing the debate on the war. First, the media is supporting the war effort virtually unanimously, often zealously: News Corp executive Rupert Murdoch said, "We'll do whatever is our patriotic duty;" Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly said, "The U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble — the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, and the roads," and Rich Lowry, National Review editor, said, "America roused to a righteous anger has always been a force for good. States that have been supporting if not Osama bin Laden, people like him need to feel pain. If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution." Second, they are marginalizing contrasting views, as seen by CNN Chair Walter Isaacson's directive to his employees that it "seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship on Afghanistan." Third, media dissent has only arisen recently regarding merely the local side effects of the war — the loss of civil liberties — rather than the war's effect in Afghanistan.

So the American media is effectively fueling the U.S. war effort. But you don't have to look to the mainstream media to see the media framing the debate and marginalizing the "radicals" — that is, the dissenters. Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky '04's column of Nov. 15 — "Exposing the hate speech of the radical fringe" — disparaged the Princeton Peace Network because one member electronically circulated to other members a poem by "a Marxist and Black Panther" who brands "America and the West as co-equal terrorists with Osama bin Laden." Not only did the vast majority of the PPN have nothing to do with the posting of the poem, but the circulation of the poem does not even indicate approval of its content. In this incident, I fail to see grounds to discredit anyone, let alone an entire organization.

But I'm also guilty of marginalizing the "radicals," albeit unintentionally. Shamefully, I paraphrased another article to discredit Noam Chomsky as a radical pacifist. Belatedly, I looked for the the comment to which I'd referred but could find nothing more than "I'm strongly opposed to policies that are aimed at killing, I don't know how many, it could turn out to be millions of Afghans, who have nothing to do with the Taliban." Not exactly radical opposition. In the course of looking, I did find Chomsky's comments regarding a whole lot of interesting history about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and throughout Latin America. He also pleaded that we discuss the present "war on terrorism" in light of the U.S. intervention in Nicaragua — intervention that meets the U.S. definition of terrorism and was condemned by the World Court, the UN Security Council (except for a U.S. veto) and the General Assembly (except the United States and its allies, Israel and El Salvador).

Perhaps Chomsky is radical for suggesting that we should be suspicious of a nation that fights a "war on terrorism" but kills countless innocent Afghans because its government refused to give over bin Laden without some evidence of his involvement in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. But if that's the radical view, and the media comments above are mainstream, we'd do well to broaden our scope. British support for the war has fallen drastically and is now outnumbered by those opposed. If you'd like to find out why, you'll have to look further than CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox. Try the Guardian, the Independent, BBC, Fair.org or just search Google for "Noam Chomsky + Afghanistan." Even if our dangerous ignorance is not the result of a conspiracy, we've still got plenty of good reason to alleviate it. Surely we're educated and critical enough to decide for ourselves what constitutes a valid perspective. We don't need the purifying filter of the mainstream media. Kai M.A. Chan, a graduate student in the ecology and evolutionary biology department, is from Toronto, Canada. He can be reached at kaichan@princeton.edu.