We are given not what we need but what we want. The mass media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern of the mass media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.
"This," Mills wrote, "is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain."
At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions, including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in the mass media.
Those who work in the mass media, as I did for two decades, are acutely aware of the collaboration with power and the cynical manipulation of the public by the power elites. It does not mean there is never good journalism and that the subservience to corporate power within the academy always precludes good scholarship, but the internal pressures, hidden from public view, make great journalism and great scholarship very, very difficult. Such work, especially if it is sustained, is usually a career killer. Scholars like Norman Finkelstein and journalists like Webb and Assange who step outside the acceptable parameters of debate and challenge the mythic narrative of power, who question the motives and virtues of established institutions and who name the crimes of empire are always cast out.
The press will attack groups within the power elite only when one faction within the circle of power goes to war with another. When Richard Nixon, who had used illegal and clandestine methods to harass and shut down the underground press as well as persecute anti-war activists and radical black dissidents, went after the Democratic Party he became fair game for the press. His sin was not the abuse of power. He had abused power for a long time against people and groups that did not matter in the eyes of the Establishment. Nixon's sin was to abuse power against a faction within the power elite itself.
The Watergate scandal, mythologized as evidence of a fearless and independent press, is illustrative of how circumscribed the mass media is when it comes to investigating centers of power.
"History has been kind enough to contrive for us a 'controlled experiment' to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened," Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."
"By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged."
The righteous thunder of the abolitionists and civil rights preachers, the investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the Chicago stockyards, the radical theater productions, such as "The Cradle Will Rock," that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a voice to ordinary people, the labor unions that permitted African-Americans, immigrants and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great public universities that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private power, are no longer part of the American landscape. It was Webb's misfortune to work in an era when the freedom of the press was as empty a cliche as democracy itself.
"I believe newspapers are great mental shapers," Mister Mister says. "My steel industry is dependent on them really."
"Just you call the News," Editor Daily responds. "And we'll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border." Editor Daily and Mister Mister sing:
"O the press, the press, the freedom of the press. They'll never take away the freedom of the press. We must be free to say whatever's on our chest -- with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no for whichever side will pay the best."
"I should like a series on young Larry Foreman," Mister Mister tells Editor Daily. "Who goes around stormin' and organizin' unions."
"Yes, we've heard of him," Editor Daily tells Mister Mister. "In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen."
"Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with. And look up his past till at last you've got it on him."
"But the man is so full of fight, he's simply dynamite, why it would take an army to tame him," Editor Daily says.
"Then it shouldn't be too hard to tame him," Mister Mister says.
"O the press, the press, the freedom of the press," the two sing. "You've only got to hint whatever's fit to print; if something's wrong with it, why then we'll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and a ho-nonny-no. For whichever side will pay the best."
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