The Liberal Media: Fact or Fiction? Part 4

A week-long look at bias in mainstream American media

Part 4: "Manufacturing Consent"   

by Tyrone L. Heppard 

   According to conservatives, the media bias stems from the liberal attitudes of the journalists and reporters who write the news. That would mean that the power structure flows from the bottom up, and the presidents and CEOs have no responsibility for the content of the news it provides people.  

   This line of thinking is ridiculous for two reasons. Number one, the major TV news outlets are owned and operated by some of the most powerful multi-nationals in the world. To say companies like Disney and General Electric have the bulk of their power concentrated at the bottom rather than at the top is highly unlikely. Like it or not, the television news industry is a business, and any business attempting to run things in this fashion would fail almost instantly.

It's a sick sad world we live in when Mickey Mouse is a corporate overlord

   Also, just like most successful businesses, TV news outlets are run by conservatives. This is what’s expected from Fox News, but CNN, ABC, CBS and even MSNBC are all run by conservatives; people who are on the same page as William Krystal, Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter and Frank Luntz. All of these folks are very opinionated, very famous and, of course, very conservative.

   Now, “The Myth the Liberal Media” is a documentary released in 1998 and it’s based off of a theory posed by MIT’s Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman from the Wharton School of Business.  Justin Lewis of the University of Massachusetts backs them up as they examine the major TV news outlets and explain how and why the owners of media outlets find it necessary to keep up the illusion of a liberal media bias.

   Chomsky would agree with conservatives when they say the media elite works to promote an agenda, but it is hardly liberal. Instead, the goal is to perpetuate the myth of a liberal media so people are distracted from what those at the top of the power structure are doing while making sure the bottom line isn’t affected – just like any other business.

   We all know that the media play an important role, not just in the lives of citizens, but in the way that they influence in the democratic process. Not only does the news tell us what we should be concerned about, it tells how we should feel about these things. TV news outlets are extremely important in this process because they’re usually the primary source people use to base/back up their opinions.

Because the media has this ability to shape our opinions and influence the way we think, one of the first questions we must ask ourselves is if the information that we are receiving is coming from a neutral source. Is it a source with a varying range of opinions and viewpoints, or does it tend to promote the interests of some, while ignoring the voices of others?

   Unfortunately, it looks as if the latter is true, and according to the experts, those who say there is a definite liberal media bias do this regularly. The Herman-Chomsky theory suggests that not only is there no evidence to prove that a liberal media bias exists; but that if there is a bias, it’s blatantly coming from those on the right or those who find themselves right of center. Chomsky explains:

"No! That's a bad dog! I'm the Decider!"

   “There’s been massive research documenting the fact that the media are extraordinarily subordinated to external power. Now, when you have that power, the best technique is to ignore all of that discussion – ignore it totally – and to eliminate it by the simple device of asserting the opposite. If you assert the opposite, that eliminates mountains of evidence demonstrating that what you’re saying is false; that’s what power means.

   And the way you assert the opposite is by just saying, “The media are liberal”. Now the question we discuss is are the media too liberal or are they not too liberal. Now that we’ve narrowed the agenda to the one acceptable question, “Are the media too liberal”, let’s have a look at the way it’s argued. If you want to show that, you would look at the media product and you would try to demonstrate that it reflects a slant or distortion supporting a liberal agenda.”

   He goes on to say that once this question is the one dominating the conversation; there is no way to show a liberal media bias exists, let alone to prove a news organization is promoting one effectively. “Nobody does this; that would take a little work,” says Chomsky. “And besides if you did it, you’d immediately fall on your face because it works the other way. So what’s done is to produce a proposal which is so idiotic that you have to wonder at the cynicism of the people who are it putting forth and their contempt for the population.” Sounds a lot like Romney’s 47 percent comment, right? Don’t worry; I’ll get to that later.

 The proposal that Chomsky is referring to here is exactly what we did in Part 2; referencing the way that journalists tend to vote. Even though there is a tendency for journalists to vote democratic, it tells us nothing about who controls the media output. With that being said, whether a TV news outlet is liberal or conservative is irrelevant for two reasons.

   One, it doesn’t matter if a journalist is a democrat or a republican; they are still a part of the same institutional structure. They are parts of the whole that make up our socio-economic base known as capitalism. It doesn’t matter if the person holding the microphone voted for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama this year. If she works for CNN, her job is to boost CNN’S ratings. Period.

   Secondly, according to Herman and Chomsky, the question we really need to be asking is not how liberal (or conservative, for that matter) the media is, but does the media actually have the ability to freely express opinions from whatever source objectively?

   Chomsky and Herman would say, “No.” This is because conservatives have been propagating this idea of a liberal media bias for so long people are starting believe that what we hear from reporters is actually controlled by those reporters; not the owners and advertisers and conservative think tanks who work with them. As Lewis says in the documentary, that’s, “a bit like saying the workers on the factory floor decide what the car industry produces”.

   The experts in the documentary also talk about “filters”. By this, they mean that with so much information out there, it’s impossible to talk about all of it, so it’s up to the people putting the news together to decide what is going to be a part of the news for that day and what’s not. That’s not the problem; in fact, that’s to be expected from anyone working in the news business.

   The real problem becomes apparent when we ask that specific question: “is the media free”? We find out that in most cases it’s not, and that while conservatives swear up and down there’s a liberal tilt in the media, the real bias is coming from the people who own the media outlets and the advertising firms that do business with them. The CEOs and public relations guys are the ones making the rules; journalists are forced to play by them.

Tomorrow: Part 5: Anatomy of a Calamity