{"id":1064166,"date":"2023-06-04T16:53:24","date_gmt":"2023-06-04T16:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caitlinjohnstone.com\/?p=13006"},"modified":"2023-06-04T16:53:24","modified_gmt":"2023-06-04T16:53:24","slug":"15-reasons-why-mass-media-employees-act-like-propagandists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/06\/04\/15-reasons-why-mass-media-employees-act-like-propagandists\/","title":{"rendered":"15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):<\/a><\/em><\/p>

<\/iframe><\/p>\u2756<\/p>

If you watch western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the US-centralized empire, in almost the same way you’d expect them to if they were government-run propaganda outlets.<\/p>

The New York Times has reliably\u00a0supported every war the US has waged<\/a>. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly<\/a> on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against US-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria<\/a>, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan<\/a>. US media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9\/11<\/a>\u00a0months after the war began.<\/p>

That this extreme bias occurs is self-evident and indisputable to anyone who pays attention, but why<\/em> and how<\/em> it happens is harder to see. The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find.<\/p>

Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the US empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.<\/p>

Here are 15 of those factors.<\/p>

1. Media ownership.<\/h3>

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The most obvious point of influence in the mass media is the fact that such outlets tend to be owned<\/a> and controlled by plutocrats<\/a> whose wealth and power are built upon the status quo they benefit from. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 from the also-immensely-wealthy Graham family<\/a>. The New York Times has been run by the same family<\/a> for over a century<\/a>. Rupert Murdoch owns a vast international media empire whose success is largely owed to the US government agencies<\/a> with whom he is closely intertwined. Owning media has in and of itself historically been an investment that can generate immense wealth \u2014 \u201clike having a license to print your own money\u201d as Canadian television magnate Roy Thomson\u00a0once put it<\/a>.<\/p>

Does this mean that wealthy media owners are standing over their employees and telling them what to report from day to day? No. But it does mean they control who will run their outlet, which means they control who will be doing the hiring of its executives and editors, who control the hiring of everyone else at the outlet. Rupert Murdoch never stood in the newsroom announcing the talking points and war propaganda for the day, but you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of securing a job with the Murdoch press if you’re a flag-burning anti-imperialist.<\/p>

Which takes us to another related point:<\/p>

2. “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”<\/h3>

<\/iframe><\/p>In a\u00a0contentious 1996 discussion<\/span><\/a>\u00a0between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Marr, Chomsky derided the false image that mainstream journalists have of themselves as \u201ca crusading profession” who are “adversarial” and “stand up against power,\u201d saying it\u2019s almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the mass media of the western world.<\/p>\u201cHow can you know that I\u2019m self-censoring?” Marr objected. “How can you know that journalists are-\u201d<\/p>\u201cI\u2019m not saying you\u2019re self-censoring,\u201d Chomsky replied. \u201cI\u2019m sure you believe everything you\u2019re saying. But what I\u2019m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn\u2019t be sitting where you\u2019re sitting.\u201d<\/p>

In a 1997 essay<\/a>, Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn\u2019t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.\u201d<\/p>

3. Journalists learn pro-establishment groupthink without being told.<\/h3>

This “you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting” effect isn’t just some personal working theory of Chomsky’s; journalists who’ve spent time in the mass media have publicly acknowledged that this is the case in recent years, saying that they learned very quickly what kinds of output will help and hinder their movement up the career ladder without needing to be explicitly told.<\/p>

During his second presidential primary run in 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders <\/span>enraged the mass media<\/a>\u00a0with some comments he made accusing the Washington Post of biased reporting against him. Sanders’ claim was entirely correct; during the hottest and most tightly contested point in the 2016 presidential primary,\u00a0<\/span>Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting noted<\/a>\u00a0that WaPo had\u00a0published no fewer <\/span>than sixteen smear pieces<\/em> about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. Sanders pointing out this blatantly obvious fact sparked an emotional controversy about bias in the media which yielded a few quality testimonials from people in the know.<\/span><\/p>

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Among these were former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball and former Daily Caller White House correspondent Saagar Enjeti, who explained the subtle pressures to adhere to a groupthink orthodoxy that they’d experienced in a segment<\/a> with The Hill’s online show Rising<\/em>.<\/p>

\u201cThere are certain pressures to stay in good with the establishment to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism,\u201d Ball said in the segment. \u201cSo what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I\u2019m saying here really frankly applies to me too.\u00a0Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run. I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted,\u00a0but<\/em>\u00a0I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I\u2019m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThis is something that a lot of people don\u2019t understand,\u201d said Enjeti. \u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it\u2019s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it\u2019s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it\u2019s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn\u2019t go down that path in the first place.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cRight, and again, it\u2019s not necessarily intentional,\u201d Ball added. \u201cIt\u2019s that those are the people that you\u2019re surrounded with, so there becomes a groupthink. And look, you are aware of what you\u2019re going to be rewarded for and what you\u2019re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that\u2019s a reality.\u201d<\/p>

During the same controversy, former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen\u00a0published an article in\u00a0Salon<\/em><\/a>\u00a0titled \u201cMemo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias\u201d in which he described the same “groupthink” experience:<\/p>

“It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know \u2014 without being told \u2014 which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.<\/p>

 <\/p>

“No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective \u2014 selecting all the usual experts from all the\u00a0usual think tanks\u00a0to say all the usual things. Think\u00a0Tom Friedman.\u00a0Or\u00a0Barry McCaffrey. Or\u00a0Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who\u2019ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”<\/p><\/blockquote>

Matt Taibbi also jumped into the controversy to highlight the media groupthink effect,\u00a0publishing an article with Rolling Stone<\/a>\u00a0about the way journalists come to understand what will and will not elevate their mass media careers:<\/p>

“Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and\/or simplistic partisan storylines. Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.<\/p><\/blockquote>

And it is probably worth noting here that Taibbi is no longer with Rolling Stone<\/a>.<\/p>

4. Mass media employees who don’t comply with the groupthink get worn down and pressured out.<\/h3>Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network\u2019s Support For Endless War<\/p>

"And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself\u200a\u2014\u200abusy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play."https:\/\/t.co\/W4mpgxDQP0<\/a><\/p>

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 3, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>