Censored 2012 (55 page)

Most disturbingly, the Supreme Court decision of the
Citizens United
case locked this situation into place in the US for the foreseeable future.

If our argument so far is accurate, we would see a government-media complex revealing itself by the practices of either or both. So what can we see from the corporate media behavior that might indicate this government-media complex, informed by neoliberal philosophy?

1. There is no willingness on part of media to criticize government policies beyond general questions. For example, “Will the war be winnable?” instead of “Is the war right?”
   
2. More strikingly, in nearly every case, the mainstream media accepted forthrightly, and even touted as facts, the Bush administration’s assertions regarding Iraq.
   
3. The “opponents” of the war permitted onto mainstream media only questioned the pragmatics of the war—e.g. the cost versus the good, the length of stay in Iraq, etc.
   
4. The corporate/mainstream media ignore critically important stories that do not play to the doctrines held by the elites. For example, this
   Project Censored
   book is necessarily based on the complex of elite power. Additionally, there is no media coverage of the illegal and wholly unethical and oppressive actions of the Coca-Cola Company in Mexico. For example: firing longtime employees so as to withdraw their pensions by forcing them, literally at gunpoint, to sign a pre-crafted resignation form; and closing plants in Mexico, then reopening the next day
   under a different name, and rehiring the same workers, but now at entry-level wages, etc.
   ²³
   
5. All debate is maintained within corporate-acceptable range: no direct attack on the policy and ideology behind the war is permitted.
   
6. The permitted statement of “lessons” from the Iraq debacle are quite narrow: the war was entered into “because of intelligence error,” or “stupidly,” or “without properly assessing costs or consequences,” etc., and not because of its unethical nature or its illegality (in both cases, the “supreme crime” of aggression).
   
7. There is no question of the right of the US to interfere or invade other countries.
   
8. The antiwar movement is—and has been, beginning in 1991—excluded from news and/or consideration in the media.
   
9. The “9/11 Truth” movement is marginalized, and no open and public investigation of the events of September 11, 2001, is permitted.
   

Of the many things we citizens might do to battle against the government-corporate media complex, there are two that will functionally ground such battles.

First, media reporters and analysts need to return to the use of critical thinking tools. This has long since been abandoned by corporate media, but if one simply returns to the Founders and examines the esteem to which they held the ability to think rationally and logically (e.g. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine), one cannot help but advocate this method of reviewing government policies and statements. For starters, let us propose three platforms for critical thinking:

1. General questions directed at institutional authorities concerning their use of power, especially
   “qui bono?”
   This question is the litmus test of whether a government is
   truly democratic or not;
   
2. Deep questions directed toward, and resulting from, analysis of institutional structures themselves, especially the values inherent to those structures in comparison with ethical values and values of justice, which they will indubitably proclaim as their own as well;
   
3. A willingness to critique and even criticize agents, not just institutions. A well-founded critique of agency follows from the presupposition that persons are moral beings, not just cogs in the machine of state or media. Once this agency perspective is introduced through moral lenses, one is in a stronger position to critique individuals who are acting as agents of state, media, and industry.
   

Second, media reporters and analysts should return to ethical foundations, recognizing universal principles that humans naturally embrace. Two such principles stand out. First, we must recognize freedom as a necessary part of being human. For example, John Locke, in his second
Treatise of Government
, maintains that liberty is a fundamental natural right, and that “one who would take that away declares war on me.” Further, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his
Discourse on Inequality
, maintains that our nature is “intelligent, free,” and rational, with freedom being “the most noble of man’s faculties.”

The second necessary ethical principle that needs to be re-embraced is the principle of equality. In fact, we need to recognize that without equality, there is no liberty. Equality is fundamental to our human
and social
nature. The thinkers just named above would all agree with this. So would Wilhelm von Humboldt, who said that “the isolated [person] is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered.”
²⁴

This notion of equality is diametrically opposed to the inequality demonstrated by both neoliberalism and the propaganda model of the government-media complex. Here, ideological control of the population done through propaganda only serves to demonstrate that the current structures of daily American life are neither equitable nor peaceful, but are designed to maintain the institutional structures of inequality.
²⁵
The inequality embraced by neoliberalism has had the consequence of “massive increase in social and economic inequality,
a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest peoples and nations, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy, and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy.”
²⁶

In conclusion, the propaganda of the government-media complex is directly contradictory to human nature, and to be watchful of it, with the right critical tools, is the task of every truly democratically free citizen. In this regard, we may conclude with Humboldt: “Whatever does not spring from a man’s choice, or
is only the result of instruction and guidance
, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature.”
²⁷

DR. ROBERT P. ABELE
holds a PhD in philosophy from Marquette University and MA degrees in theology and divinity. He is the recipient of numerous scholarships and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to the U.S. Naval Academy for the study of war and morality (2004), and the Illinois Council of Humanities Scholarship, for his work on the issues of freedom and democracy (2003). He is the author of four books:
A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act
(2005);
The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq
(2009);
Democracy Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic Experiment
(2009),
Patterns of Dominance
(forthcoming this fall, 2011), and
War and Its Limits: East and West
, forthcoming this spring (2012). He has written numerous articles on politics and U.S. government foreign and domestic policies. He recently has contributed eleven chapters for the forthcoming
Encyclopedia of Global Justice
, from The Hague: Springer Press (October 1, 2011). The chapters are entitled: “Noam Chomsky,” “Propaganda,” “Oil; “Language and Justice,” “The Hague Convention,” “The Geneva Conventions,” “State Terrorism,” “Torture,” “Global Justice and the Invasion of Iraq,” “Conspiracy Theory,” and “Capital Punishment.” Dr. Abele is an instructor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in Pleasant Hill, California, in the San Francisco Bay area.

1
. The following article is an adapted transcript of a talk given at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, on November 16, 2010, for Project Censored. Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored, moderated the evening.

2
. The term “the Fourth Estate” is historically a sociopolitical group that is not officially part of the government structure. The etymology of the term is uncertain, but as applied to the media, it was probably first used by Thomas Carlyle, in his 1840 book entitled
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Six Lectures: reported with emendations and additions
(Nabu Press, 2010; reprinted from Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library, 2005).

3
. It is important to note that Chomsky himself denies that there is any connection between syntactic and socio-political analysis. I do not agree with this assumption, but this is not the proper forum for discussion of such views.

4
. For a further discussion of this issue, see Abele,
A User’s Guide to the USA PATRTIOT Act and Beyond
.

5
.
Bernays, 11.

6
. Ibid., 16.

7
. Chomsky, “Force and Opinion,” 8.

8
. Bernays, 16, 37, 109.

9
. Chomsky, “Force and Opinion,” 8–10.

10
. Chomsky, “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?” 1–4.

11
. Chomsky and Herman,
Manufacturing Consent
, 31; the issue is summarized in Chomsky, “Force and Opinion,” 10. For further information, see Herman, “The Propaganda Model,” 1–3, 7–9; Cromwell, “The Propaganda Model: An Overview.”

12
. For detailed examples of this, see Abele,
The Anatomy of a Deception
.

13
. Roberts, “The Impotence of Election.”

14
. Lafayette, “CBS Profits Rise.”

15
. James, “NBC Universal Profits Bounce Back Signaling GE Agreed to Comcast Sale at Market Bottom.”

16
. McChesney, 2. See also Chomsky,
Profit Over People
.

17
. Ibid.

18
. Nozick, 33.

19
. Ibid.

20
. McChesney, ibid.

21
. For a further discussion of Coca-Cola’s illegal actions, see
www.killerCoke.org
.

22
. Roberts, “The Impotence of Elections.”

23
. See
www.KillerCoke.org
.

24
. Humboldt, 98.

25
. For more information see Herman,
Manufacturing Consent;
and Laffey More in
Manufacturing Consent;
see also Laffey, “Discerning the Patterns of World Order: Noam Chomsky and International Theory after the Cold War,” 596.

26
. McChesney, 1.

27
. Humboldt, 28.