Ideological Hegemony

Thought Control in American Society

April 4th, 2004

In June 2003 a Washington Post-ABC News poll found about 1 in 4 Americans (incorrectly) believed Iraq had used weapons of mass destruction during the recent war with the United States. [1]  A separate poll in the same month found 34% of Americans believed the United States had already found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. [2]  In September another poll found 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9-11. [3]  Even the Bush administration has been forced to admit that these claims are not true.  These misconceptions are the outcome of a system of thought control called ideological hegemony.  Hegemony operates through many mechanisms including the media, education system, newspeak, and others with the primary function of maintaining support for the dominant socio-economic system in the United States.

In all class societies, the ruling class can maintain control through violence and/or ideology.  If the majority can be persuaded that the rule of the ruling class is legitimate then it can be maintained with less violence.  Examples of ideologies that serve this function include the divine right of kings, social Darwinism, and Marxism-Leninism.  All of them acted to legitimize the rule of specific elites in certain societies and helped those elites maintain power.  Some hierarchical societies rely more on violence, others rely more on ideology.  The United States relies more on ideology, although a certain degree of force is used.

In Russia prior to 1905 there were a number of large peasant revolts over the centuries that could have potentially threatened the power of the monarchy.  However, all such revolts did not see the monarchy as the problem.  They assumed that it was various “bad apples” which caused their problems, not the social system.  The rebels believed the oppressive actions the monarchy took were the result of bad advisers, corrupt officials or other glitches in the system - but never the outcome of having a monarchy.  This belief that the monarchy was not to blame, the system just needed a few reforms, helped prevent the system from being overthrown as most rebellions against the monarchy didn’t seek to overthrow it.  The monarchy did not fall until after most stopped believing that the problems were the result of “bad apples” rather than being inherent in a monarchical system.

Ideological hegemony in the United States operates in a similar manner.  Certain fundamental principles are never questioned - capitalism, private property, the state, imperialism, and other assumptions.  So long as those fundamental principles are not questioned debates can rage back & forth and all sorts of different positions can be formulated.  The more vigorous the debate is the more it will tend to shore up the status quo as it will make society seem more open and pluralistic than it really is.  Thought is bounded, with liberalism on one end, conservatism on the other end, and various other ideologies in-between (libertarian capitalism counts as being within this spectrum).  The legitimacy of private property, the state, etc. is always assumed.

For example, it is generally assumed that most U.S. military interventions into other countries in recent history are intended to be benevolent.  Some may argue that such interventions don’t have the positive effects their supporters desire or that they aren’t worth the costs, but the assumption that the U.S. acts with benevolent intentions, even if it makes mistakes sometimes, is assumed to be true.  Similar assumptions are made about capitalism, the state, etc.  Some may argue these things need to be reformed but the vast majority assumes they are legitimate.  So long as that assumption is held by a large majority of Americans the system will be secure, just as the monarchy was secure in Russia when the vast majority assumed its legitimacy.  Anyone dissatisfied with the status quo will end up being drawn to various reform schemes, voting for different politicians and the like instead of supporting the overthrow of the system.

These assumptions are both shared by the vast majority of Americans and transmitted to the populace through a variety of mechanisms.  In an important sense hegemony, once established, is self-perpetuating.  Those who believe in these ideas, to varying degrees, tend to advocate and promote them, passing them on to others and to the next generation.  These values are also transmitted, often indirectly, in movies, novels, scholarship, entertainment and other forms of communication that reaches large numbers of people.  This isn’t necessarily intentional or explicit.

Critics play an important role in perpetuating ideological hegemony.  If even the most ardent critics of the current regime share these basic assumptions then it will serve to reinforce those assumptions.  If even they share these assumptions then even fewer will question them, as doing so would seem insane.  Those dissatisfied with the status quo will tend to become involved with movements and ideologies that accept these fundamental principles and therefore will not represent much of a threat to the dominant socio-economic system.

The kind of ideological hegemony that operates in America is different from the mechanisms used by totalitarian states to maintain control.  Totalitarian societies tend to rely more on violence to control the population, although they usually also have an ideology to support the status quo.  The United States does occasionally use violence to control dissent, such as the frame up of Sherman Austin, and has around 100 political prisoners. [4]  However, force is not used against dissidents on nearly the scale it is in totalitarian states, where dissidents are systemically rounded up.  Most dissidents in the United States can criticize the government with low odds of going to jail for it.  So long as their ideas are kept marginalized, so long as the vast majority continues to believe in the system, dissidents do not represent much of a threat to the status quo.  Allowing most dissidents to exist, but marginalizing their views, actually strengthens hegemony because it makes the system seem freer and more open.  In a totalitarian system the spectrum is narrower and all dissent is suppressed, while the ideological hegemony that exists in the United States just marginalizes dissent, instead of suppressing it, and acts to insure that most people continue to believe in the system.

Neither ideological hegemony nor the existence of an elite ruling over the United States is some giant conspiracy.  They are both the outcome of the way American society is set up and a long historical evolution.  Hegemony is the result of the way the media, education system and other institutions are structured and have evolved.  The structure of the system is such that those who are outside the liberal-conservative spectrum tend to be weeded out when rising up the hierarchy for positions involved in perpetuating ideology (editors, teachers, etc.), not as the result of a conspiracy but as the result of the way the system operates, and those who are not weeded out are marginalized.  Whenever any society is divided into hierarchies (rich and poor, powerful and powerless) an elite is formed consisting of those on the top of the hierarchy.  Several centralized, hierarchical institutions including large corporations, a powerful military and a bureaucratic state run the United States.  Those on the top of these institutions, what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the power elite, have far greater power, wealth and prestige than those below them. 

Hegemony operates through many institutions and mechanisms.  The news media reinforces it by emphasizing facts that are consistent with the liberal-conservative spectrum while downplaying facts that might cast down on it.  The education system reinforces hegemony by training the population to obey authority and indoctrinating children with the fundamental principles underlying hegemony, principles which they usually continue to believe as adults.  Both of these largely exclude dissident views.  Hegemony is written into the very structure of our language, through a process called newspeak.  And there are also other elements to hegemony, but these are the main ones addressed here.  In addition, some of these institutions have functions other than directly reinforcing hegemony.  The education system is a kind of Keynesianism and the media helps create artificial scarcity, for example.  These other functions are not examined here, the focus is on how each of these institutions acts to create and reinforce ideological hegemony.

The Media

There are many models about how the news media works.  One is the “fair and objective” model that asserts that, for the most part, the media objectively and fairly report on the events of the day and give an accurate picture of reality.  Overall, coverage is balanced and does not reflect any ideological bias.  One variant of this is the idea that the media are highly critical of the powers that be and act to expose government or corporate abuse & wrongdoing.  Another model is the “liberal bias” theory, which asserts that the media is biased in favor of liberalism.  A third theory is the propaganda model, which asserts that the media as a whole is neither liberal nor conservative but acts as propaganda for the interests of business, political and military elites.  Within the media, the “fair and objective” model is the theory promoted the most.  The “liberal bias” theory is not promoted by the media as much, but one can still find it advocated within the media.  The propaganda model almost never referred to within the media and most of the exceptions are criticisms of it.  The evidence favors the propaganda model by a large margin, and overwhelmingly disproves the “fair and objective” model.

In the United States the media are for-profit companies and usually owned by other large corporations.  Those who manage and control these corporations, the business elite, have common interests with other members of the business elite and with the state.  The media are also dependent on other corporations for advertising, from which they derive their main revenue.  The products they produce are not their shows; the products they produce are audiences, which they sell to advertisers.  Advertisers tend to prefer wealthier audiences to poorer ones because wealthier ones are more likely to be able to afford their products and to be able to buy larger quantities of their products.  You don’t see many advertisements geared towards homeless people.  Thus what the media produces tends to be geared towards attracting the affluent, and tends to go along with their prejudices and beliefs.  The media also depends disproportionately on the government as a news source.  These factors act to mold what the media reports.  Coverage tends to stay within the liberal-conservative spectrum; things outside of it are marginalized.  Unlike a totalitarian system, they aren’t necessarily 100% excluded but are marginalized.

Corporate ownership of news media creates a huge conflict of interest.  Shortly after ABC (including the ABC radio network) was acquired by Disney Jim Hightower’s leftist talk show, which was very critical of Disney, was cancelled. [5]  In 1998 ABC cancelled a 20/20 story that investigated allegations that Disney allowed known child molesters to gain employment at Disney World without a background check. [6]  Things aren’t always that direct, though.  Only the wealthy can afford to set up a newspaper with a wide circulation or a major news network.  Others are excluded, and so the news tends to reflect the views of the wealthy owners while the less wealthy tend to be excluded even if there is no explicit censorship policy.

The dependency on advertising for revenue also influences coverage.  A survey of 55 members of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers at the society’s 1992 conference found that 80% believed advertiser pressure was a growing problem and that 45 percent knew of instances where news coverage was compromised by advertiser pressure. [7]  In 2001 NBC agreed to run ads for Amazon.com during certain programs, including news programs like Today, on NBC, CNBC and MSNBC in exchange for a percentage of the sales generated.  Riverside, California’s Press-Enterprise had a box in their March 8th, 2001 newspaper that read, "more than 125,000 daily Press-Enterprise readers have eaten at a Mexican restaurant in the past 30 days. Advertise your restaurant in Riverside and San Bernardino for under $250.00 and get a free feature story." [8]  The influence of advertisers isn’t always this direct and explicit, though.  A publication which ran stories critical of corporate power and which questioned the dominant socio-economic system could not expect to get much advertising from those same corporations, even if such stories were only a small percentage of content.  It would be unable to compete in the marketplace, thus the pro-corporate publications tend to dominate the media.

The media is also dependent on its supply of “raw materials” (information), which tend to come disproportionately from the government and, to a lesser extent, big business.  For example, the allegations about President Bush going AWOL when he was in the National Guard were known for years and circulated in left-wing circles in the run up to the 2000 election but were mostly ignored by the media.  It wasn’t until early 2004 that the media paid much attention to this, because a powerful democrat (John Kerry) decided to bring it up and attack Bush with it, causing it to become a big issue.  The media implicitly takes the point of view of the American government, referring to government military forces as “our” troops and “our” fighters, as if the networks owned them.  They identify with the actions of the state.  The invasion of Iraq provides another example of this.  Sixty-three percent of sources on the leading news programs (ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer) in the first three weeks of the invasion were government officials or ex-officials, giving it a strong pro-war slant.  Anti-war sources made up 10% of all sources and only 3% of US guests.  Polls at the time showed over 25% of Americans were anti-war. [9]

There are many other examples of these factors acting to slant the news.  There is a major controversy over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but this is not the first time in recent memory that a President’s excuse for war has been proven false.  Clinton bombed Yugoslavia over the allegation that it was committing genocide in Kosovo, but a subsequent NATO investigation found fewer than 3,000 corpses, both civilian and military, on all sides.  NATO’s own figures state that 2000 people died on both sides in the year of fighting prior to the bombing.  Just as there is little evidence to support the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, there is also little evidence to support the claim that Yugoslavia was engaging in genocide in Kosovo. [10]  This failure to find evidence of genocide did not cause a controversy for Clinton, nor did the discrediting of Bush the first’s lies over the Gulf War create a controversy.  This is because of the guerrilla war against American troops in Iraq, which did not happen in Yugoslavia or the Gulf War.  The insurgency has both kept Iraq in the news and caused a large portion of the elite (including the business class that owns and funds the media) to come to the conclusion that the invasion was a mistake and/or Bush bungled it.  Opposition politicians and dissatisfied government officials have brought attention to the failures to find WMDs and other controversies surrounding the war by criticizing Bush for it.  In Yugoslavia and other cases politicians & government officials didn’t criticize President Clinton over the fraudulent nature of his pretexts for war, and so after the war the media followed the lead of the government and devoted little coverage to it.  Government officials & ex-officials still dominate news coverage, both positive and negative.  Seventy-six percent of all sources in stories about Iraq on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News in October 2003 were current or former government or military officials. [11]

In the summer of 2003 the media started raising the issue of Bush’s “16 words” in his state of the union address alleging that Iraq sought to buy uranium from “a country in Africa.”  The documents used to support this assertion were shown to be a crude forgery by the International Atomic Energy Association in March, but the media didn’t pay much attention to it until the summer.  The reason is that prominent democrats ignored it until the summer when they used it to attack Bush, at which point the media then started paying attention to the story.  The Democrats act as a left-wing limit to debates within the media and the republicans a right-wing limit.  If they both agree on something then there is usually little debate on the issue.

Western media rarely reports the names of the various groups engaged in the guerrilla war against the US occupation.  This aids the government’s propaganda that they are all “Saddam remnants” and “foreign terrorists.”  Here is a partial list of groups involved in the insurgency:

• Al-Anbar Armed Brigades

• Al-Faruq Brigades

• Armed Vanguards of Mohammad's Second Army

• Black Banner Organization

• General Command of the Armed Forces, Resistance and Liberation in Iraq

• General Secretariat for the Liberation of Democratic Iraq

• Harvest of the Iraqi Resistance

• Iraqi Communist Party-Al Cadre

• Iraqi National Islamic Resistance

• Iraqi Resistance Brigades

• Jihad Cells

• Liberating Iraq's Army

• Mujahideen Battalions of the Salafi Group of Iraq

• Muslim Fighters of the Victorious Sect (aka, Mujaheddin of the Victorious Sect)

• Muslim Youth

• Nasserites

• National Iraqi Commandos Front

• Patriotic Front

• Political Media Organ of the Ba‘ath Party (Jihaz al-Iilam al-Siasi lil hizb al-Baath)

• Popular Resistance for the Liberation of Iraq

• Saddam's Fedayeen

• Salafist Jihad Group

• Snake Party

• Sons of Islam

• Unification Front for the Liberation of Iraq

• Wakefulness and Holy War

• White Flags [12]

As one can see just by looking at the names on this list, there are a variety of different groups involved in the insurgency; they are not all “Saddam remnants” and “foreign terrorists” as the government claims.  Most groups can be divided into three different factions: the loyalists (who are pro-Baathist/pro-Saddam), Islamists (who want to build a Muslim theocracy in Iraq), and nationalists (who are secular & anti-Saddam but want the US out).  Examples of the loyalists include Saddam’s Fedayeen & Political Media Organ of the Ba’ath Party, of the Islamists Armed Vanguards of Mohammad’s Second Army & Al-Faruq Brigades, and of the nationalists General Secretariat for the Liberation of Democratic Iraq & Al-Anbar Armed Brigades.

Discovering this isn’t hard even if you have few resources, just search the web for “Iraqi insurgency” and you’ll discover plenty of information.  The major news organizations, who have enough resources that they could actually go to Iraq and directly report on these groups if they wanted to, do not report on the facts of these groups because they rely almost entirely on U.S. government sources for their information about the insurgency, and government sources rarely mention the names or ideologies of these groups.  The failure to report on these resistance groups further illustrates the media’s tendency to take government statements at face value.

These cases aren’t limited to the Iraq war.  A classic example is the Cambodia/East Timor comparison.  Both Cambodia and East Timor experienced genocides at about the same time yet received very different media coverage.  In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge won a civil war against the US-backed government, after suffering from large-scale US bombing of the country that killed several hundred thousand Cambodians.  The Khmer Rouge was a brutal dictatorship that murdered huge numbers of Cambodians.  In 1979 the Khmer Rouge were forced out of power by an invasion from Marxist-Leninist Vietnam, which brought their genocide to an end.  The US supported the Khmer Rouge’s subsequent guerrilla war against the Vietnamese in order to hurt Vietnam, but it failed to bring the Khmer Rouge back to power.

In December 1975 Indonesia invaded and took over East Timor, with U.S. support.  Indonesia’s following genocide in East Timor slaughtered between a fourth and a third of the population.  The worst of the genocide occurred in the first 5 years after the invasion.  The U.S. supported the invasion & genocide and supplied East Timor with most of the arms used to carry it out.  As atrocities increased the U.S. flow of weapons increased, to insure that the killings could continue and Indonesia wouldn’t run out of weapons.  All that was necessary for the U.S. to stop this was to cut off the supply of weapons.  The government in Indonesia at the time was actually put in power by a CIA coup in 1965 that resulted in the murder of between 500,000 and a million Indonesians.

These two genocides occurred at the same time and had many similarities but had very different media coverage.  Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was an official enemy and coverage of the genocide there was extensive, with little skepticism towards atrocity claims.  Coverage of the genocide in East Timor was far less and largely just regurgitated State Department and Indonesian lies.  Media coverage declined as the atrocities in East Timor worsened.  When they reached their highest point coverage declined to zero.  Between 1975 and 1979 the New York Times gave 70 column inches to Timor but 1,175 column inches to Cambodia.  The New York Times is on the liberal end of the spectrum and tends to be more critical of U.S. foreign policy than many of its competitors.  To this day, most Americans have never heard of the genocide in East Timor.  When official enemies commit atrocities the media plays it up, but when the U.S. commits atrocities the media plays it down.

There are many other examples of this pattern of marginalizing U.S. atrocities while emphasizing enemy atrocities.  In the 1990s the U.S. supported genocide in Turkish Kurdistan.  While suppressing the insurgency of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.), which was fighting for an independent Kurdish state, the Turkish state murdered tens of thousands of innocent Kurds, destroyed over 3,000 villages, and outlawed the Kurdish language.  The U.S. supported all this and provided 80% of the weapons to do it.  This genocide received relatively little coverage and most of the coverage it did receive failed to make the link to U.S. funding of genocide.  One of the standard pieces of war propaganda against Iraq was that Saddam “gassed his own people.”  The people he gassed were also Kurds.  Between 1990-1999 the term “genocide” was used by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time to describe the actions of Iraq against the Kurds 132 times, while it was used by the same publications to describe the actions of Turkey against the Kurds only 14 times.  When an enemy, like Iraq, murders Kurds it gets lots of play but when an ally, like Turkey, murders Kurds it gets less play. 

At the end of this genocide in Turkey the U.S. led a NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, using the pretext that Yugoslavia was committing genocide in Kosovo.  Turkey is a NATO member; the claim that NATO attacked Yugoslavia because it was committing genocide when one of NATO’s own members was committing genocide is not credible.  The media’s focus on the alleged genocide in Kosovo (which was later shown to be greatly exaggerated, after they stopped paying attention) can be contrasted with the downplaying of US-supported genocide in Turkey.  In 1999 & 1998 the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time used the term “genocide” to describe Yugoslav actions in Kosovo 220 times, while the same number for Turkey’s genocide against the Kurds was 14. [13]  The large focus on refuges fleeing Kosovo can also be contrasted with the ignoring of refuges fleeing Afghanistan during the US-Taliban war a few years later.

This disparity applies not only to genocide but also to the murder of dissidents.  On October 19th, 1984 Polish police murdered the priest and dissident Jerzy Popieluszka.  American media gave this brutal murder extensive coverage, much of it well deserved.  In the 18 months after the murder, the New York Times published 1183 column inches and 78 articles (10 on the front page) on it, Time and Newsweek gave it 16 articles and 313 column inches, and CBS news aired 46 news programs, 23 evening news programs on it.  On March 18th, 1980 the head of the Catholic Church in El Salvador, Oscar Romero, was murdered by the US-backed dictatorship in El Salvador for his outspoken criticism of that dictatorship.  It received much less coverage from American media.  In the following 18 months the New York Times printed 16 articles and 219 column inches on it, Time and Newsweek 3 articles and 86.5 column inches, and CBS news aired 13 news programs, 4 evening news programs on it.  In fact, the murder of 100 religious dissidents by US-backed dictatorships in Latin America between 1964-1985, including 4 American churchwomen, received less total coverage than the murder of Jerzy Popieluszka.  In the 18 months following each murder/disappearance the New York Times printed 57 articles (8 on the front page) and 604.5 column inches, Time and Newsweek 10 articles and 247.5 column inches and CBS aired 37 news programs, 16 evening news programs on these 100 murders.  The murder of a single priest by an official enemy, in this case a Soviet satellite state, received more coverage than the murder of over a hundred dissidents by US-backed dictatorships in Latin America. [14]

There are many other examples of the media whitewashing or ignoring US-backed dictatorships.  In the ten years prior to the overthrow of the US-backed dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somozo, U.S. television (all networks) devoted one hour of coverage to Nicaragua, all of which was on the 1972 earthquake.  Between 1960 and 1978 the New York Times had a grand total of 3 editorials on Nicaragua. [15]  When the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza in 1979 coverage increased and the media began demonizing the Sandinistas.  Sandinista human rights abuses, atrocities and dictatorial behavior were far less than the preceding Somoza dictatorship and the surrounding US-backed dictatorships (which relied on extreme state terror to maintain control), but were given far more attention by the media.

Many facts that would make the government look bad, not only US-backed dictatorships, tend to be ignored or downplayed.  One of the less publicized conclusions of the official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was that the U.S. backed Islamist terrorists in Bosnia in the early ‘90s and flew in weapons and Mujahideen (Muslim fundamentalist terrorists) from Afghanistan to Bosnia.  This was one facet of the US-NATO campaign to dismember Yugoslavia into several Western client states.  The groups the U.S. supported in this operation were some of the same people it would later fight in its so-called “war on terrorism” several years later.  There were reports on this finding in European media, [16] but I have been unable to find a single report on it in American media.

Bosnia was not the first place the U.S. supported Islamist terrorists; the US also did it earlier against the USSR in Afghanistan.  The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of South Vietnam have many similarities.  In Afghanistan the U.S.S.R. claimed that it had not invaded, that it was invited in by the legitimate government to defend it from terrorists sponsored by Pakistan and the United States.  Of course, the government that “invited” the USSR in happened to be a Soviet satellite state.  Once in the USSR overthrew the Afghan government whenever it wouldn’t go along with Moscow’s orders.  In Soviet mythology there was no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was instead a Soviet defense of Afghanistan.

In South Vietnam the U.S. also claimed that it didn’t invade but was invited in by the legitimate government to defend it from terrorists sponsored by outside forces.  Of course, the government that “invited” the U.S. in happened to be an American satellite state.  Once in the U.S. repeatedly overthrew the South Vietnamese government whenever it wouldn’t go along with Washington’s orders.  In American mythology there was no American invasion of South Vietnam, there was instead an American defense of South Vietnam.

The stories spun by each government were very similar, as were the invasions themselves.  In Afghanistan American media ridiculed Soviet propaganda & lies and called the invasion what it was, an invasion.  Soviet media adhered to the government line.  In the invasion of South Vietnam American media never called it an invasion, instead they adhered to the US government line that it was not an invasion.  The common myth that the media were anti-war is just self-serving propaganda (see chapters 5 & 6 of Manufacturing Consent by Edward Heman & Noam Chomsky).  In reality the media overall stayed within the government paradigm, viewing it as a defense against foreign sponsored guerrillas.  Criticism of the war within the media was limited to the idea that it was a “mistake,” that this “defense of South Vietnam” was not worth the costs and based on an erroneous analysis.  This differs from the position of the peace movement which argued that it was an invasion that was fundamentally immoral and wrong.  The later position was largely excluded from the debate within the media.

While American media correctly referred to Soviet satellite states as satellite states on many occasions, American satellite states were never identified.  When the USSR invades other countries and makes them do its bidding those are (correctly) called Soviet satellite states but when the US invades other countries and does the same thing not only are they not called satellite states but the invasions often aren’t called invasions.

The groups fighting against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, supported by the U.S., were predominantly Muslim fundamentalist terrorists (Mujahideen), many of whom would later go on to fight against the US.  Bin Laden was among their ranks, as were many other people who the F.B.I. claims are members of Al-Qaeda.  During their war with the U.S.S.R. the Mujahideen used many terrorist tactics, including targeting of civilians, assassination of soviet officials, and throwing acid into the faces of unveiled women.  While they were doing this against the U.S.S.R. American media identified them as “freedom fighters.”  They were the good guys in Rambo 3.  After they started doing the same thing to the U.S. American media started calling them “terrorists” instead of “freedom fighters.”  Enemies are identified as “terrorists” and allies as “freedom fighters” even if their tactics remain the same.

One should not get the impression that American media functions as a totalitarian system, however.  The system functions primarily as self-censorship.  Because totalitarian press censorship is not in place there is occasional “leakage” of things through the media that do not otherwise conform to the liberal-conservative paradigm.  For example, on November 26th, 2003 the Washington Post website held an online discussion with Noam Chomsky on his latest book, Hegemony or Survival. [17]  Noam Chomsky is an anarchist sympathizer and probably the best-known dissident in the United States.  In a totalitarian system his views would be completely excluded and suppressed.  Instead, American media marginalize it to the point where only a tiny number will come across it but do not 100% exclude it.  This can actually make the system more effective, as it makes the system look more open than it really is and disguises its function as a form of thought control.

The inverse of the marginalizing of dissidents is the media’s tendency to rely disproportionately on the powerful and to reflect their views.  Between January 1st, 2001 and December 31st, 2001 more than one third of the quoted Americans (and more than one fourth of the sources) on ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and CBS Evening News were elite Washington politicians.  Seventy-five percent of those politicians whose partisan affiliations could be identified were Republican, twenty-four percent were Democrat, and only one percent was third party/independent.  James Jeffords, the centrist Vermont Republican who defected to the Democrats and was temporarily an independent during the transition, made up 83 percent of the independent sources quoted.  The 9-11 attacks increased the reliance on Republican sources.  Prior to it Republicans were 68 percent, Democrats 31 percent and independents 1 percent.  After the attacks, Republicans were 87 percent, Democrats 13 percent and independents .1 percent.  The slant towards Republicans is due to the fact that they control the executive branch of the government and the media tend to rely on it more, making more quotes, etc. from the President, members of the cabinet, etc.  When that is factored out, the ratio of sources is 51% Republican, 48% Democrat and 2% third party/independent.  George Bush alone was 9% of all quoted sources and 33% of all partisan sources.  Of the “experts” used as sources, corporate representatives and economists were the most common (at 7% each), while non-governmental organizations and organized labor were quoted very little (3% and .2%).  Representatives from big business were quoted 35 times more often than representatives of labor.  While business & economic issues made up 15% of total coverage, only 1% of total coverage was on labor issues and in labor stories business association representatives (26%), economists (19%) & politicians (15%) were quoted far more often than labor representatives (2%).  These news shows also tend to rely disproportionately on men and whites. [18]

This distortion of the news in favor of the powerful happens not only in foreign policy but also on domestic issues, such as the “anti-globalization” protests against the W.T.O., I.M.F. and World Bank.  The media, not “anti-globalization” activists, invented the label “anti-globalization.”  The press generally prefers to focus on sensationalist reports of alleged protester violence and assorted side issues rather than look at the critique of these institutions offered by activists.  When there is no protester violence or property destruction the media largely ignores the story (even if there’s lots of police violence) but when there is violence or property destruction by protesters the media covers it while mostly ignoring the issues they are protesting.  The average consumer of news would have very little idea of what the I.M.F., W.T.O. and World Bank is, let alone why many oppose them.  On April 16th a story on the front page of the Washington Post, reporting on the demonstrations against the I.M.F. & World Bank, discussed activists “body odor,” claimed that “the fad factor cannot be denied” and incorrectly claimed that the protests were "a demonstration without demands."  It was actually a demonstration with demands that the Washington Post (and most of the rest of the media) chose to ignore, preferring to focus on activists’ “body odor,” drinking habits, and fashion.  The media often refers to opponents of “free trade” as “anti-trade,” which is a misrepresentation because most are not against all trade, just the form of trade currently being practiced.

The New York Times ran five opinion pieces against the April 16th anti-I.M.F./World Bank demonstrations and none in favor.  Opinion pieces in the Washington Post against the demonstrations totaled 3,780 words while supporters of the demonstrations had 1,825 words.  In addition, when “anti-globalization” views get in the media they are usually from the moderate wing of the movement.  The more radical segments are almost universally ignored.  Anarchists played a major role in these demonstrations yet anarchist views were almost never portrayed accurately in the media and anarchist opinion pieces never ran in the major papers.  Instead anarchists were portrayed as crazed bomb-throwing advocates of chaos.

The focus on violence is also very one-sided.  For the media, protester violence is a big deal but police violence is not.  Police can bring body armor, tear gas and other weapons and the media thinks nothing of it, but if protesters brought the same equipment the media would demonize them over it.  Police are rarely referred to as violent, even when they are violent towards protesters or others.  They are assumed to be legitimate.  Police violence is played down (and usually isn’t even called violence), while alleged protester violence is emphasized and denounced.  According to an ACLU report on demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle that began on November 30th:

For several days, it was illegal publicly to express anti-WTO opinions in a large section of downtown Seattle. … Scores of citizens reported being prevented by police from engaging in peaceful, lawful expression within the zone.  Police ordered citizens to remove buttons or stickers from their clothing, confiscated signs and leaflets, and blocked citizen entry to the core of downtown … Despite police and media descriptions to the contrary, the protests during the WTO conference did not constitute a riot.  They were noisy and disruptive, yet demonstrators were overwhelming peaceful.  Not so the police. … [police] approved the use of tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and clubs against people who were demonstrating peaceably, against demonstrators who had not received or who were trying to obey police orders, against bystanders, and to quell disturbances the police themselves had provoked. … The Seattle Police Department used massive amounts of tear gas against crowds even when such use was not necessary to protect public safety or the safety of officers. … [Police] used pepper spray repeatedly against nonviolent protesters who posed no threat to public safety or to the safety of officers. … Rubber bullets were used against people who posed no threat. … rank-and-file officers engaged in acts of brutality … The police made hundreds of improper arrests, detaining for days people who would never stand trial. … Individuals arrested during the anti-WTO demonstrations were mistreated and witnessed others being mistreated by jail officers. [19]

This sharply contrasts with the picture painted by the media of officers reacting against rioting protesters.  The media inverted the chronology – putting the destruction of corporate property by a minority of activists before the use of pepper spray & tear gas by police, and portraying police violence as a reaction against it.  Numerous eyewitnesses have reported that the police started attacking demonstrators prior to the destruction of corporate property and Detective Randy Huserik, of the Seattle police, admitted that pepper spray was used on non-violent activists prior to the attacks on corporate property.  The media instead blindly regurgitated a pro-police story. [20]  The media’s description of the destruction of corporate property as “violence” also shows how they implicitly assume the legitimacy of property rights.

Similar patterns existed in coverage of other “anti-globalization” demonstrations.  In the demonstrations against the G8 in Genoa, Italy the media largely ignored the positions of the demonstrators, again focusing excessively on violence, and whitewashed police brutality (who shot and killed one protester).  During the demonstrations the media blindly regurgitated police defenses of their actions, but when these were exposed to be frauds the media ignored it.  Pietro Troiani, a senior police officer, admitted to planting bombs with demonstrators in order to justify a raid on activists but American media didn’t run a single story on it. [21]

PBS and NPR are structured a little differently but tend to stick to a similar line as commercial media.  Although not directly owned by corporations, they are dependent on corporate funding and also receive significant funding from government sources, including the Corporation for Public Sources.  As such they tend to slant things in manner similar to the rest of the media, although they are on the liberal end of the spectrum and aren’t always as bad as some other outlets.

For example, twenty-six percent of sources on all weekday broadcasts of “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition” on NPR from September through December 1991 were government sources.  Fifty-three percent of Washington-based stories were led with a quote major administration official or a member of congress.  Representatives of organized citizen groups and public interests experts made up only seven percent of sources.  Twenty-six out of twenty-seven regular commentators were white and only twenty-one percent of sources were women. [22]

The sources on PBS’s NewsHour during the Kosovo conflict were slanted in favor of the government.  Between March 25 and April 8 1999 critics of the NATO bombing made up 10% of sources.  Only six percent of sources were Yugoslavian government officials, Serbians or Serbian-Americans, the groups most likely to criticize the NATO bombings.  Non-Serbian American sources against the bombing made up 4% of sources.  Thirty-nine percent of sources and 42% of live interviewees were current or former government officials.  Albanian refugees and spokespeople from the Kosovo Liberation Army (the CIA-backed NATO proxy army) made up another 17% of sources. [23]

Local media and student media overall tend to follow a similar line as corporate media but because they are structured differently do not always do this 100%.  In some cases large corporations directly own local news sources and in those cases they operate the same as the rest of the media.  In other cases they are owned by small businesses and are not owned by the elite.  The elite usually does not own student-run news sources, either.  However, both of these tend to follow the focus of the major (corporate-owned) news media.  If something is on the front page of the New York Times and other major corporate media the local/student editors will tend to put that on their front page as well, and focus attention on it.  In addition, they tend to rely on government sources, are dependent on advertising as a source of revenue, and are susceptible to pressure from the local business community, local government and/or school administration.  These tend to act to constrain coverage within student and local media.  Leakage is a little easier in these media, however, as they are not directly owned by big business.  While a letter to the editor advocating Communism would have a very difficult time being printed in the major papers, local and student media are sometimes more open to printing various dissident views.

The effect of all this is to inhibit an understanding of events in the world in a manner that benefits the power elite.  It is not totally effective but has a successful record.  The Center for Studies in Communication of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst conducted surveys that found:

those who watched the most television on the Gulf War were the least informed about basic facts of life in the region. Among the most frequent watchers, 32 percent thought Kuwait was a democracy; only 23 per cent were aware that there were other occupations in the Middle East besides Iraq's, and only 10 per cent had heard of the intifada, the most sustained revolt in modern Middle East history.  When queried as to which three nations vetoed the recent United Nations resolution calling for an international peace conference (the United States, Israel, and Dominica), 14 per cent correctly identified the U.S., but another 12 per cent thought it has to be Iraq. The Center's polls showed that only 13 per cent of these TV viewers were aware of what official U.S. policy was toward Iraq before the August 2 invasion. [24]

An October 2003 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) looked at three common misperceptions among the public: that Saddam Hussein was directly link to the 9-11 attacks, that weapons of mass destruction have already been found in Iraq, and that world opinion favored the US-led invasion of Iraq.  Massive evidence disproves all three misperceptions and even the Bush administration admits they are false.  It found that belief in these misperceptions correlates with support for the war.  These misperceptions are a by-product of the propaganda offensive launched by the Bush administration in late summer 2002 which attempted to use 9-11 to justify the war and successfully convinced Americans that Saddam was a grave danger to America who supported terrorism, had a deadly weapons arsenal to use on the US, etc.  It also piggybacked on negative perceptions of Iraq created by earlier war propaganda under Clinton & Bush the first (while the US was supporting Saddam there wasn’t anti-Iraq propaganda from the government, but after the U.S. came into conflict with Iraq Saddam was demonized as “the next Hitler”).  That propaganda campaign was blindly regurgitated by the media, which, with a few exceptions, showed little skepticism towards it until after the completion of the invasion.  By September 2003 70% of Americans had come to believe that Saddam was directly linked to 9-11.

The PIPA study also found that, for most news outlets watching more news did not decrease belief in these misperceptions and for some news outlets belief in these misperceptions actually increased as more news was watched, showing again the media’s role as purveyor of misinformation that benefits the powerful.  Belief in these misperceptions varied depending on one’s news source.  Fox News had the worst record, with 80% of viewers believing one or more misperceptions.  NPR & PBS had the best record, but even they did poorly with 23% of viewers believing one or more misperceptions. [25]

NPR & PBS, the sources that produced the lowest amount of those misconceptions, also happen to be among those sources most frequently singled out by conservative critics alleging the media has a “liberal bias.”  Much of the evidence in favor of the “liberal bias” model is flawed and most of what isn’t fits better with the propaganda model (of media subservience to the powerful) than with the “liberal bias” model.  The basic theory behind the liberal bias model is that most journalists are liberal and they tend to reflect this in their reporting.  Surveys have found that most journalists are moderates, not liberals, [26] but even if we disregard this the model is faulty because it doesn’t take into account where power lies.  The average journalist doesn’t have a great deal of control over the media; power is concentrated in the hands of the corporations who own the media.

In addition, liberals support capitalism, the state, private property, and the right of the U.S. to intervene in other countries, as do conservatives.  Liberals support the main features of the current system; they just want to make a few modifications.  As liberals, conservatives and centrists all support capitalism (and the state, etc.) the number of journalists who believe in those things vastly outnumbers those who don’t.  By their logic, the media should have an extreme pro-capitalist (and pro-statist, etc.) bias that vastly dwarfs the alleged liberal bias.

A liberal bias, or the appearance of it, would actually help support the system as it would more firmly limit thoughts within an ‘acceptable’ range.  If the media is seen as being liberal, adversarial, and extreme in their opposition to power then anyone who questions its basic assumptions (private property, etc.) will be seen as going completely off the planet.  Accusations of the media having a “liberal bias” help to discipline the media and ensure that it continues to reinforce hegemony.  Whenever it departs from the liberal-conservative line critics of the “liberal media” pounce and pressure it back in line.

One example of this is the book Bias by Bernard Goldberg, a number one New York Times bestseller, which advocates the “liberal media” theory.  The book is very poorly researched and doesn’t even have footnotes/endnotes, a bibliography, or an index.  Most of his assertions have little evidence to support them, just vague impressions. Goldberg does not give numbers or specific examples of biased coverage, but just makes broad generalizations. [27]  Some assertions actually support the propaganda model more than the liberal bias model, such as the claims that news organizations are mainly focused on profit and oriented towards whites.  Many quotes are not footnoted or endnoted and do not give enough information to look them up.

Most of his assertions are focused towards the centrist and liberal wings of the media.  It is true that certain segments of the media are liberal (the New York Times, NPR, and others) but it does not follow that the entire media are liberal.  The appendix of bias includes editorials he published in the Wall Street Journal accusing the media of having a liberal bias.  Does the Wall Street Journal have a liberal bias?  Do talk radio and Fox News?  He presents no evidence to support such a claim.  Showing that even the more conservative sections of the media are liberal is important to prove his case – if even they are liberal then obviously the rest of the media is liberal.  The inverse holds true for the model presented in this essay, that the media is subservient to the powerful.  If that is the case then even those publications that tend to be more critical of the powerful, like the New York Times, should tend to slant the news in favor of the powerful.  Evidence to show that this is the case was presented earlier, such as the East Timor/Cambodia comparison.  Goldberg, however, fails to present evidence to show that the conservative wing of the media (Wall Street Journal/Fox News/Talk Radio) is biased against conservatives.

Some may object that corporate media gives people what they want and the current state of journalism, biased or otherwise, is the result of people wanting it.  This is based on the myth that anything having to do with a market is a reflection of “what people want” and somehow democratic.  No doubt slaves, bought and sold on the market, would have disputed such an idea.  Markets tend to skew towards those with more wealth because more profit can be made by catering to their desires and needs.  It’s “one dollar, one vote” and those with more dollars have more influence.  In the case of the media the customers are not the general public but advertisers.  Those advertisers tend to prefer customers with more wealth because they can sell more products that way.  Thus the media tends to reflect the views & prejudices of the advertisers, the wealthier strata they are oriented towards and the business elite that controls the media.

In addition, there are several examples of media bias not reflecting the views of the general population.  In the invasion of Iraq, only 10% of sources used were anti-war while over 25% of the population was anti-war (see above).  In the debate on healthcare in the early ‘90s the media mainly presented the debate as one between Clinton’s proposals and his conservative opponents.  The majority of the population favored the single-payer option but, with a few exceptions, the media largely ignored that idea.  The debate was restricted and excluded the position supported by the majority of Americans. [28]  These show that the media is not simply reflecting public opinion.  Although the media is often effective at molding public opinion, it is not always so as demonstrated by the healthcare debate.  Americans didn’t decide that they don’t want to know the names and platforms of the various groups fighting the guerilla war against American troops in Iraq.  Nor did people decide that they didn’t want to know about the US-sponsored genocide in East Timor.  They couldn’t have – most didn’t know about it because the media gave very little coverage to it.

This media system didn’t just appear out of thin air, it has been evolving for a long time.  In the late 19th century as industrial capitalism was taking hold and industry was being concentrated into smaller and smaller hands the media also became more concentrated.  Large corporations began buying out newspapers and/or withdrawing advertising from publications that were too critical of corporate power.  This wasn’t the result of a giant conspiracy of business owners but of many people acting in similar ways because they were in similar situations.

The First World War was a major step towards creating the media system we have today.  The Wilson administration, “established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.” [29]  The Creel Commission pioneered public relations techniques used to manipulate public opinion and the use of corporate media to whip up war hysteria.  It found that flooding news channels with “facts” (official information) allowed them to control news coverage.  During the war the government stepped up censorship and actively suppressed anti-war publications and groups, many of which were socialist or anarchist.  The previously growing Socialist Party was broken, never to recover, and the anarchist-leaning Industrial Workers of the World was turned into a shell of its former self.  Repression against dissidents continued after the end of the war as similar propaganda techniques were used to create the Red Scare.  By attacking dissident organizations and publications this repression accelerated the concentration of the media into corporate hands.

As modern new media came about government intervention also played a significant role in keeping it primarily under corporate control and loyal to the government.  In the late 1920s the predecessor to the Federal Communications Commission granted licenses to operate radio stations primarily to commercial sources, largely excluding non-commercial stations.  Prior to that there was relatively little regulation of radio and non-commercial groups, especially educational institutions, tended to dominate radio.  Over the next several years there was a popular movement attempting to reverse this decision but it was defeated. [30]  Similar principles favoring corporations over non-profit organizations were later followed for television station licenses.  Corporations dominate broadcasting because the state chooses to have corporations dominate broadcasting.  Government policies and laws, such as the 1996 Telecommunications act, along with various subsidies, including the use of publicly owned airways free of charge, have continued to influence to structure of the media up to the present day.

Most of this is the result of the way the media and society is organized; heads of the media don’t get together in a big smoke-filled room and scheme how to fool Americans.  Bias is the outcome of the institutional structure of the media, not some giant conspiracy.  Some groups do consciously attempt to manipulate the media and sometimes these take the form of conspiracies (a group of people working together in secret to achieve some goal).  For example, the CIA has been known to infiltrate media organizations and keep journalists on its payroll.  It “also owns dozens of newspapers and magazines the world over.” [31]  The CIA altered the movie versions of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” to tone down Orwell’s “pox on both houses” message, making them more anti-Communist and less anti-capitalist. [32]  In 1999 CNN allowed Army PSYOPS officers (government propaganda experts) to work in the news division at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters. [33]  CNN eventually admitted this, [34] but most of the media ignored it.  These are exceptions to the norm, however.  Most media bias is the outcome of institutional structure.  That same structure also makes it easier for powerful groups to manipulate the media through conspiracies or other means, magnifying their effect.

The Education System

Another important part of hegemony is the education system, which serves two functions.  Its primary function is to train and indoctrinate the populace so that it is obedient and docile, enabling political and economic elites to rule with less resistance.  A secondary function is to train skilled workers necessary for the economy and to school future members of the ruling class.

The primary purpose of the public education system, what Bob Black calls “youth concentration camps,” is not to encourage independent thought or anything like that but to make us stupid and submissive.  The whole structure of public schools is designed to train students to obey authority.  School is a hierarchically structured organization; masses of students are subordinated to a few – teachers, administrators, etc.  They are trained to follow orders from a young age, to sit in nice neat rows, to get in line, and so on.  Children are raw materials who are to be ranked, graded, and processed into “respectable citizens” who do not question the dominant socio-economic system or create too much trouble for the elite.  Children who are taught from a young age to obey authority, especially in a bureaucratic setting like public schools, will be more used to obeying authority as adults.  The system does not work perfectly, and not all are one hundred percent obedient by the time they become adults, but it works well enough to maintain the present system.  A school system in which many students obey the will of a few teachers and administrators is well suited to a socio-economic order in which many workers obey the will of a few bosses and capitalists.

The structure of schools encourages emotional and intellectual dependency.  Students are dependent on the teacher to decide out what is to be learned, when it is to be learned, and (mostly) how it is to be learned.  They do not investigate things themselves, with control over their own intellectual development but are dependent on the teacher to determine the course of study.  Students are thus trained to allow others to do their thinking for them, which is well suited to a society in which a small minority dominates the majority.

Schools also reproduce the class structure.  Certain educations are deemed better than others and those educations are distributed along wealth lines, with the wealthier getting the better educations.  The kind of education you receive opens and closes doors for you.  Those with better educations get better jobs, better opportunities, and other privileges.  “Refined” (ruling class) language and manners tend to be passed on to children of the ruling class, via school and other mechanisms, while less “refined” language and manners are passed on to children of the lower classes.  Those with the less “refined” language and manners are discriminated against in many areas.  Tests are tilted in favor of those from the top levels of American society in multiple ways, including the tendency to draw from examples more familiar to rich children than poor children.  This is the case even if the authors of the tests don’t intend it.  Such individuals tend to come from the higher levels of society and so tend to draw on examples from their own experience, not poor peoples’ experiences.  Schools attended by the wealthy tend to have better funding than poor schools.  Research by Ray Rist and others have shown that teachers tend to give wealthier children better treatment than poorer children, often without realizing it or intending to do so. [35]

What is taught in public schools also reflects its role as indoctrination center.  This is especially true with regard to those areas that affect social philosophy, such as history, economics, and civics.  Decisions on what should be in textbooks, what guidelines to teach, etc. are not in the hands of teachers nor are decisions made on the basis of scholarship.  Public schools are state entities; actual power lies with the state.  In some places local school boards have a considerable amount of power, in others state governments have more power, but in all cases power lies with the state.  It, after all, owns, runs and funds the schools.  In addition several state entities not directly connected to schools, including the courts and several federal agencies (including the Department of Education), have influence over the schools.  A number of non-state institutions also have influence over schools.  Several private institutions, generally funded by the wealthy, have a high degree of influence over schools including the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations.  They played an important role in creating the modern public school system and continue to influence it today.  Large corporations also influence schools, both through the fact that they are usually the producers of school materials and also because they have a considerable degree of influence over all government decisions.  Frequently these corporations act through organizations like the Business Roundtable.

Power is fragmented across several different hierarchical institutions, all of which are controlled by elites that share common interests with each other.  This acts as a set of filters, insuring that schooling overall teaches ideas within the liberal-conservative spectrum and ignores or disparages ideas outside it.  Various groups can attempt to mobilize to influence school decisions on textbooks, what to teach, etc. but the structure of the system is such that overall the results end up reflecting elite ideology (remaining within liberal-conservative ideology).  Those with more resources can more easily pressure and influence school decision making centers, giving a huge advantage to those with the most resources (the wealthy and powerful).  Thus influence on schools is largely restricted to elite factions or those who can gain the backing of an elite faction.  Those outside elite interests, those outside the liberal-conservative spectrum, do not have the resources of elite factions (but are opposed by all elite factions, each with far more resources) and so have a small impact on schooling.  Thus what is taught in schools largely reflects elite interests and is restricted to ideas within a narrow spectrum; ideas outside of that spectrum are marginalized.

The limited spectrum of views can be seen clearly from how history is usually taught in public schools.  History is greatly warped and slanted to reinforce the dominant socio-economic order; historical scholarship that contradicts this (and there is a considerable amount of it) is ignored.  Both racism (as distinct from slavery) and anti-racism tend to be invisible. [36]  The origins, causes and evolution of racism are rarely analyzed.  White complicity in slavery tends to be minimized, paying more attention to the slaves than the owners.  When discussing Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, or Martin Luther King Jr. their socialist beliefs are usually swept under the rug, as are the white supremacist beliefs of Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and other historical figures.  The many atrocities committed by American foreign policy (such as C.I.A. coups in Zaire, Guatemala, Iran, Chile and elsewhere) are usually ignored or portrayed as “mistakes.”  Influences on U.S. foreign policy are usually ignored in favor of portraying the US as an “international good guy” always acting on behalf of human rights, democracy, and humanitarianism as a supremely moral force.  The U.S. is portrayed as always having benevolent intentions; if the results go wrong it was a “mistake” perhaps caused by misunderstandings.  Especially when looking at recent history, government repression like COINTELPRO is downplayed or ignored in favor of portraying the United States as “the land of the free.”  The positives of the government tend to be played up while the negatives are played down.  The role of class in US history is also downplayed.  The alleged “middle class” character of the United States is usually emphasized, portraying the U.S. as a meritocracy.  Nearly the entire country is depicted as middle class (an obvious absurdity), giving no real analysis of class structure.  Labor history is usually relegated to events fifty or more years ago, as if class had disappeared.  Overall, the picture it tends to paint is a rosy picture of a great nation progressively overcoming obstacles.  The views of professional historians are cast aside to distort history in such a ways as to foster loyalty to the government and dominant socio-economic system.  For a more in-depth look at the trash that passes for “history” in public schools, see Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen.

The central function of public schools as indoctrination centers can also be seen in the teaching and textbook guidelines passed by many states.  Texas’s education law states that, “textbook content shall promote citizenship and understanding of the essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, emphasize patriotism and respect for recognized authority, and promote respect for individual rights.”  Textbooks “shall not encourage life styles deviating from generally accepted standards of society,” nor shall they “include selections which serves to undermine authority,” or “which would cause embarrassing situations or interference in the learning atmosphere of the classroom.”  Thus, Texas’s textbook laws explicitly state that textbooks should not teach children to think for themselves and form their own opinions but that they should believe in the dominant socio-economic system.  Most states have similar guidelines, although not all are as explicit and there are significant variations. [37]

Texas and California tend to dominate the textbook market both because they have large populations (and therefore order more textbooks) and also because of the way they select textbooks.  Some states leave textbook selections entirely up to the local school boards.  The state governments in California, Texas, and elsewhere centrally regulate what textbooks are allowed, drawing up lists of books that are acceptable to use in classrooms.  This gives them greater bargaining power which therefore gives them greater influence over textbook manufacturers.  As a result their textbook guidelines have a disproportionate influence over the textbooks used in other states.

California’s textbook guidelines are more liberal than Texas’s but it still remains well within the liberal-conservative spectrum, and is oriented more towards indoctrinating children instead of enabling children to understand different theories and form their own conclusions.  California’s textbook law states that, “governing boards shall include only instructional materials which, in their determination, accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society, including … the contributions of both men and women … the role and contributions of [various ethnic groups] … the role and contributions of the entrepreneur and labor in the total development of California and the United States.”  The last part is slanted against the idea that labor did all the contributing (entrepreneurs are just parasites) and against the inverse idea.  It also says that, “instructional materials for use in the schools … shall include only instructional materials which accurately portray … Humanity’s place in ecological systems and the necessity for the protection of our environment,” [38] which is slanted in favor of liberal environmentalism.

The Content Standards for California Public Schools says that students are to:

Explain how economic rights are secured and their importance to the individual and to society (e.g., the right to acquire, use, transfer, and dispose of property; right to choose one's work; right to join or not join labor unions; copyright and patent). … Discuss the individual's legal obligations to obey the law, serve as a juror, and pay taxes. … Understand the obligations of civic-mindedness, including voting, being informed on civic issues, volunteering and performing public service, and serving in the military or alternative service.

Students are also to “describe for at least two countries the consequences of conditions that gave rise to tyrannies during certain periods (e.g., Italy, Japan, Haiti, Nigeria, Cambodia).”  The United States is never labeled a tyranny.  They also include patriotic indoctrination: “[students are to] Understand the unique character of the American Revolution, its spread to other parts of the world, and its continuing significance to other nations.”  The standards also support the American state in foreign policy: “[students are to] Analyze the causes of the Cold War, with the free world on one side and Soviet client states on the other, including competition for influence in such places as Egypt, the Congo, Vietnam, and Chile.”  To identify one side as the “free world,” an American propaganda term, indicates that the schools are to teach that the American side was the good side.  It also requires one to ignore many facts, or to completely redefine freedom, since there were numerous brutal dictatorships in the US camp during the Cold War (Pinochet’s Chile, Brazil under military rule, fascist Spain, etc.).  It also identifies “Soviet client states” yet says nothing about American client states.  The view that the Soviets were the good guys, or that both sides were equally bad, is excluded.  Instead there is the standard view of the US as “international good guy.” [39]  Thus, although California is on the more liberal end of the spectrum, it is still firmly within the liberal-conservative spectrum and acts to indoctrinate students to believe in property rights, government, and the other “fundamental principles” upon which the hegemony is built.

This is true of many other states as well.  Colorado’s Academic Standards state:

In grades K-4 what students know and are able to do includes … describing the purposes of government … describing what life would be like without law and order … Explaining why the power of a government should be limited … explaining the importance of respect for individuals, property, rule of law and civic responsibility … [and] identifying important individual economic, personal, and political rights (for example, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, right to own property).

For grades 5-8:

what they know and are able to do includes … explaining major ideas about why government is necessary (for example, promote the common good, protect individual rights, safety, order) … explaining how the United States Constitution is a vehicle for preserving liberty, yet allows for change … explaining how law protects individual rights and promotes the common good … [and] identifying and applying criteria useful in selecting political leaders at local, state, and national levels.

In grades 9-12 “what they know and are able to do includes … identifying the scope and limits of rights (for example, all rights have limits).”

There are many ideas about what “the purposes of government is.”  Marxists think the purpose of government is to maintain class domination; it is a means by which the ruling class suppresses the other class(es).  Anarchists think it is a means by which a minority dominates the majority.  These ideas, however, are outside the liberal-conservative spectrum and so are generally not taught.  Instead the belief that government is necessary to promote the common good, protect individual rights, protect safety, and ensure order are taught.  Instead of exposing students to many different theories and encouraging them to think for themselves, beliefs that reinforce support and obedience to the state are taught while excluding beliefs that do not reinforce that obedience (such as anarchist or Marxist theories of the state).  The rationale given in the beginning of the section on economics openly admits that one of its purposes is to indoctrinate students into believing in capitalism:  “Students need an understanding of basic economic concepts in order to become … productive members of the workforce; and … promoters of the free enterprise system.” [40]

Occasionally, a teacher may stray from these standards and teach ideas outside the liberal-conservative spectrum, but the overall trend is to keep ideas within state-capitalist ideological hegemony.  A number of institutional constraints make deviation outside the liberal-conservative spectrum difficult for any public school teacher.  The school board and/or state government, not the teachers, selects textbooks.  As such they almost always stay within the liberal-conservative spectrum, conflicting with the attempt of a dissident teacher to break out of that spectrum.  Standardized testing also helps enforce obedience to the liberal-conservative line.  There is a large school bureaucracy that can be used to pressure and discipline a teacher if s/he starts teaching anything outside of ideological hegemony.  Most teachers themselves accept the ideas of hegemony and so don’t even consider attempting to teach anything outside it.  Allowing a small number of dissident teachers to exist, and to occasionally deviate from the liberal-conservative line in the classroom, doesn’t really threaten the system.  It’s only a threat if such things grow too fast or become too big.

Private schools usually operate within the liberal-conservative spectrum as well.  Such schools are often for-profit operations, owned by capitalist companies, and are thus controlled by people with a vested interest in preserving the dominant economic system (capitalism).  Their main customers also tend to come from groups with more income (lower income groups usually cannot afford it), who are more likely to support the dominant socio-economic system.  Government regulations can also act to pressure private schools to reproduce bourgeois ideological hegemony.

Colleges and universities function a little differently.  Their main function with regard to students is to train highly skilled workers, future managers/coordinators, and members of the ruling class.  They still act as indoctrination centers, but this is not their primary function as in k-12.  Control over teachers and what is taught is not quite as tight as in K-12.  Professors can choose what textbooks they will use and have a much greater degree of control over what they teach, unlike K-12 where local school boards and/or state governments exert a greater amount of control over textbooks and what is taught.  Tenure makes it easier for professors to take positions outside the liberal-conservative spectrum with fewer negative consequences.  As a result there is a somewhat greater diversity of views taught and dissident views are not suppressed quite as thoroughly as in K-12, although liberal-conservative ideas are still overwhelmingly dominant.  This slightly greater amount of dissent allowed within universities is still small enough that it doesn’t really threaten the system.  Whenever dissent grows too large purges are launched to suppress it, such as the infamous blacklists during McCarthyism.

Universities serve another function separate from its relationship to students.  They generate ideologies and theories that help to prop up the status quo.  Many of those ideologies are eventually filtered through the rest of society and used to justify the socio-economic system.  Those intellectuals who depart from the liberal-conservative line generally have a much more difficult time getting their ideas to the general public, as the media, education system, etc. tend to filter such ideas out but those within the liberal-conservative spectrum more often have their ideas spread to other parts of the population.  During the First World War the government found that if they could convince the educated classes that their war propaganda was true those classes would further disseminate the propaganda and help bring the rest of the country around to the government’s position.  To this day the intelligentsia acts in a similar manner.  If they can be kept indoctrinated then it will magnify the effects of ideological hegemony.

As with the media, some conservatives have alleged that colleges & universities are dominated by liberals and discriminate against conservatives, maintaining a “hostile environment” against conservatives.  David Horowitz and his “Students for Academic Freedom” (an appropriately Orwellian name) are probably the best-known conservatives pushing this view.  They have called for the hiring of more conservative teachers and for schools, and the state, to enforce rules allegedly designed to prevent this discrimination against conservatives.  There are problems with their data purporting to show that liberals outnumber conservatives, but even if we ignore that their own data undermines their position.  Their data indicates that liberals, conservatives and those in-between constitute the overwhelming majority of professors.  Liberals believe in capitalism and the state, as do conservatives and those in-between.  Hence capitalists (and statists) are the overwhelming majority; by Horowitz’s logic colleges have an overwhelming pro-capitalist bias, one far larger than its alleged liberal bias.  Yet none of them have a problem with this.

The real aim of Horowitz & co.’s drive is to suppress views to their left and to make colleges more closely follow the neoconservative line.  They have no problem with the “hostile environment” that colleges have towards supporters of Stalin or Mao.  “Free speech zones” and the like are used at least as much against the radical left as against conservatives, yet they have said nothing about this.  Nor have they complained about the capitalist indoctrination in K-12 schools, which is vastly greater than in colleges. Conservative professors vastly outnumber anarchist professors, yet the same people who have called for hiring more conservatives on the grounds of “intellectual diversity” have no problem with this slant against anarchists.  Economics classes overwhelmingly teach that market capitalism is the best system and ignore or denigrate economic paradigms outside of neoclassical economics.  Political science classes overwhelmingly teach support for the state, including the idea that the United States is a democracy, and ignore or denigrate views opposed to it.  Horowitz & co. have no problem with all this.  They don’t have any objection to having a “hostile environment” towards unpopular ideologies, just so long as it isn’t conservatives who are being targeted.

They frequently group anyone to their left, including Marxists & anarchists, with “liberals” even though there’s a huge difference between liberals and these (mostly marginal) radical left groups.  The Young Conservatives of Texas, University of Texas Chapter (yct at ut) is one of the many groups campaigning against this alleged “liberal bias” on campus.  They compiled a “watch list” of professors who allegedly use the classroom for political purposes. [41]  It includes Harry Cleaver, an autonomist Marxist – far to the left of even Lenin. [42]  In 2003 the chairman of yct at ut was Austin Kinghorn, who complained about a professor he had which claimed the United States is “a worse terrorist threat than the 9/11 terrorists."  He cites it as an example of this “liberal bias” and complains that, "there was no opposing view presented." [43]  Regardless of whether such a view is true or not, it is a small dissident viewpoint you rarely hear in the media or even from most teachers.  Austin Kinghorn doesn’t complain that the opposite view, that the United States isn’t a terrorist state, almost never has the opposing view presented when it appears in media, schools, or elsewhere.  It’s only with things to their left that these neocons get upset.  If they really valued “intellectual diversity” they would be pushing for marginalized far left groups to be promoted, not suppressed, as that would increase “intellectual diversity.”  The fact that they don’t shows that this isn’t really their aim.  The driving force behind it is an attempt by neoconservatives to suppress and restrict groups to their left.  By grouping marginal dissident groups with liberals and demanding the influence of both be curtailed they are effectively attempting to suppress dissidents and narrow the spectrum.

It didn’t always work this way.  Previous class societies had different systems of thought control but the modern public education system in the United States didn’t really come about until the late 19th century.  Although flawed, the school system that grew in the first seventy years after independence was capable of teaching literacy and basic skills.  Historical data shows that “by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States [among the non-slave population] was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered.” [44]  Children are not the inherently incompetent people modern Americans assume they are.  The U.S. Navy’s first Admiral, David Farragut, got his first command when he was twelve years old.  Such things were not uncommon; people were considered adults at an earlier age two hundred years ago.  Adolescence is a relatively recent construction, a production of the rise of the modern public school system.

That system arose not because the old system was ineffective at teaching basic knowledge and skills but because new forms of control were needed.  After the civil war the last remnants of pre-capitalist systems were wiped out and industrial capitalism grew The rise of industrial capitalism brought with it intense class struggle between the capitalist class and the rapidly enlarged, and impoverished, working class.  Numerous waves of strikes repeatedly spread across the nation; militant labor unions like the Knights of Labor and the I.W.W. arose and powerful socialist & anarchist movements spread.  In 1888 the Senate Committee on Education stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes." [45]  Several mechanisms emerged to control the working class, one of which was the creation of today’s forced, rigid, potential-destroying education system as a means of training workers to be uneducated and docile.  Schools were made compulsory (everyone is to be indoctrinated) and consolidated into much larger units for mass schooling.  Major changes were made to course content (including the replacement of history with “social studies”), “scientific management” & social Darwinist ideas were applied to schools, as were ideas based on Pavlovian conditioning & the Taylor system, and a large school bureaucracy grew to control the students & teachers.  Sections of both the right and the authoritarian left, including liberals and Fabians, played a major role in the creation & evolution of this system.

The liberal thinker John Dewy, who played a significant role in the creation of this system, in 1897 said, “every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.” [46]  President Woodrow Wilson expressed a similar goal in a speech to businessmen: “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” [47]  William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote in his book The Philosophy of Education, “ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.” [48]  In the same book he wrote, “the great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.” [49]

Large corporations, various business associations and corporate-funded foundations such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Foundation, the Ad Council, the Business Roundtable, the Carnegie foundation and the Rockefeller foundation played a significant role in bringing about the modern public school system.  James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, wrote that the change to the modern public school system had been demanded by, "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process." [50]  One of these foundations, the Rockefeller Education Board, spelled out its goals:

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. [51]

In 1913, after a year of testimony, a congressional investigation into the role of corporate foundations in education found that:

The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation. … The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny. [52]

In 1954 another congressional investigation into the same issue began, but pressure from big business and a hostile media campaign forced it to end prematurely.  Before it was shut down, it came to these tentative conclusions:

The power of the individual large foundation is enormous.  Its various forms of patronage carry with them elements of thought control.  It exerts immense influence on educator, educational processes, and educational institutions.  It is capable of invisible coercion.  It can materially predetermine the development of social and political concepts, academic opinion, thought leadership, public opinion.  The power to influence national policy is amplified tremendously when foundations act in concert.  … This Interlock has some of the characteristics of an intellectual cartel.  … It has ramifications in almost every phase of education.  It has come to exercise very extensive practical control over social science and education.  …  The power of the large foundations and The Interlock has so influenced press, radio, television, and even government that it has become extremely difficult for objective criticism of anything the Interlock approves to get into news channels – without having first been ridiculed, slanted and discredited. … These foundations and their intermediaries engage extensively in political activity, not in the form of direct support of candidates or parties, but in the conscious promotion of carefully calculated political concepts. [53]

These investigations were conducted when two different parties were in power and separated by many decades.  Both had similar findings, were ignored, led to no action or change in the system and have now been effectively erased from history.  In contemporary debates about education these investigations and their conclusions are completely ignored outside dissident circles.

Once again, none of this is some giant conspiracy.  It is the outcome of the way the education is set up.  The very structure of the education system causes it to act this way.  Most of the people who originally set it up were quite open about what they were doing and believed that setting up schools like this was the right thing to do.

Newspeak

Newspeak is the manipulation of language to reinforce the dominant power structure.  The term comes from George Orwell’s book 1984 in which newspeak is created by a totalitarian government in order to control the population.  Newspeak is not unique to modern society but has existed in many other hierarchical societies.  In many cultures language tends to be manipulated in such a way so as to reinforce the dominant power structure (which benefits the elite).  For example, there are many pejorative terms to refer to women (bitch, whore, cunt, slut, etc.) but few that refer to men.  This both reflects and reinforces part of the power structure, patriarchy (men having more power than women).  Language manipulation that benefits those with more power tends to come about because those with more power control the means of communication and because, in many societies, there is a strong tendency to see everything in terms of one’s own society.  In the U.S. the media and education system help perpetuate newspeak but it is not limited to just these institutions; it is used by most people on a regular basis as part of their normal speech.  In some cases governments or corporations intentionally create elements of newspeak to further their agendas, in others it evolves without conscious intentional manipulation.  Newspeak works in many different ways to inhibit thought processes and reinforce the current system.

One common way this works is giving terms of political discussion an ‘official’ dictionary definition while using the term in a different way.  Words and phrases are thus constructed so as to conceal their actual meaning.  For example, look at the phrase “conspiracy theory.”  Officially, this refers to a theory that attempts to explain something as the result of a conspiracy – of certain people intentionally working together in secret to achieve some goal, usually an immoral or illegal goal.  This is not how the term is actually used, however.  In practice the term “conspiracy theory” applied only to theories not supported by the government as a way of discrediting them.  The official explanation for 9-11, that Al-Qaeda did it, is a conspiracy theory.  Al-Qaeda is allegedly a network/group of evil Muslims working together in secret to launch attacks against the United States and other targets because they “hate freedom.”  This is the very definition of a conspiracy theory; if anyone other then the government put forth this Al-Qaeda theory it would be labeled a conspiracy theory.  Whether it is true or not is irrelevant; a conspiracy theory that is true is still a conspiracy theory.  But the Al-Qaeda theory is never referred to as a conspiracy theory; only theories not backed by the government are called conspiracy theories.  The term “conspiracy theory” in newspeak thus has a double definition: the official definition and the unofficial definition, how it is actually used.  “Conspiracy theory” is a term applied to any theory that clashes with the official government version as a way of discrediting that theory.  Even theories that aren’t conspiracy theories in the technical sense, such as institutional theories (theories which explain certain events as the result of the set up of the social system rather then individuals working together in secret), are sometimes called “conspiracy theories” by their critics as a way of shutting off thought.

The term “terrorism” is another example of newspeak.  In practice this is just a pejorative term for any group that happens to oppose the United States.  The C.I.A. has engaged in assassinations, arson, bombings, overthrowing governments, targeting of civilians, and numerous other acts which would be considered terrorist if engaged in by an official enemy yet the C.I.A. (outside of radical literature) is never called a terrorist organization.  When Muslim fundamentalists, including Bin Laden & co, were fighting the U.S.S.R. (and client states) they were called “freedom fighters.”  Now that they have started fighting against the U.S. (and client states) they are now called “terrorists.”  While fighting the U.S.S.R. they would target civilians, assassinate government officials and throw acid in the faces of unveiled women.  They commit similar atrocious acts while fighting against the United States.  Yet it was only when they started fighting the U.S. that they were called terrorists; before that they were called freedom fighters.  They went from ally of the U.S. government to enemy of the U.S. government, and thus went from freedom fighter to terrorist.  What changed was whose side they were on, not what methods they used. [54]

The use of euphemisms can also become a form of newspeak.  By substituting one word with another word that sounds better the power structure can make certain things sound better.  For example, during World War Two the United States had a “department of war” which played a big role in organizing the U.S. war effort.  As the Cold War started it was merged with the department of Navy to form the “department of defense.”  Most of what the department of defense does isn’t really defense; it’s the use of military force abroad.  They switched from “department of war” to “department of defense” because defense sounded better and made it easier to gain public support.  The term “defense” is commonly used as a substitute for “military” or “war” in a manner like this (and not only by the U.S.).  For example, talk of “military budgets” today is rare; instead the term “defense budget” is used.  This euphemism puts the state and military in a more positive light.

When referring to U.S. satellite states the term “ally” is used instead of “satellite state” to obscure the fact that the US is dominating other countries, making US imperialism look like something other than imperialism.  This is not done with official enemies – the U.S.S.R.’s satellite states were always (correctly) called satellite states.

The term “Communism,” has also been subjected to newspeak, especially during the Cold War.  In common usage this is a vague term used to demonize all sorts of different ideas.  It is a generic bogeyman that during the Cold War was used to describe most U.S. enemies.  In practice any person or group that believes the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people it rules, and which opposes U.S. government policy, is likely to be labeled “Communist.”  They can be church groups, student unions, or whatever but if they subscribe to this heretical idea and oppose U.S. policy they’ll be called Communists.  It is not necessary to be a Marxist, have a favorable disposition towards the U.S.S.R., or advocate central planning to be labeled a “Communist.”  Even groups that explicitly support capitalism can be labeled Communist.  For example, the Arbenz government in Guatemala, which was overthrown by a C.I.A. coup in 1954, explicitly called for the creation of a modern capitalist economy - yet it was labeled Communist.  None of the countries commonly called “Communist” (U.S.S.R., China, etc.) ever claimed to be communist – they claimed to be in a transition to communism called the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  The term “communist” in common usage is just an extremely vague term used to demonize a large set of groups who disagree with American policies.

Democracy is an example of what is called a glittering generality.  It's an extremely vague term that sounds good but doesn't mean much at all.  Almost everyone says they advocate democracy.  North Korea claims to be a democracy; so did Saddam's dictatorship and so does the United States.  All of these countries had elections and all are actually ruled by a small elite.  The U.S. is always identified as a democracy but enemies of the U.S. are never called democracies, even when their political system is very similar to the US.  At the time of the C.I.A. coup Guatemala’s government was partly inspired by the U.S.’s government but it wasn’t called a democracy in the U.S. – it was demonized as a “Communist dictatorship.”  Israel is usually identified as a democracy but Iran is not, even though they have similar forms of government.  Both are theocratic republics that hold semi-free elections, abuse human rights, and have a limited degree of civil liberties.  But only Israel is identified as a democracy, because it is U.S. client state, while Iran is not called a democracy because it is opposed to the United States.  Advocating democracy is like advocating "good things" - it's a vague term that sounds nice but means little.

Another way newspeak works is through simply defining terms in such a way that it becomes very difficult to think about certain ideas.  For example, take capitalism.  Capitalism is an economic system based on wage-labor.  In capitalism the majority of the population has to sell their labor (usually through working at a job) in order to make a living.  They sell their labor to the capitalists, those who own the means of production, either directly or through an organization controlled by capitalists (such as a corporation).  This can be differentiated from other economic systems, such as feudalism, where most people don’t have to sell their labor but are serfs subordinated to a lord, or slavery, where most don’t sell their labor but are completely owned (and bought and sold) by a master.  Newspeak obfuscates this by confusing capitalism with trade (or markets).  In newspeak ‘capitalism’ becomes synonymous with ‘trade’ or ‘markets.’  Trade has existed in many societies from primitive villages societies to slave states to industrial capitalism.  To claim they are all practicing the same system is absurd.  There is obviously a great deal of difference between the economic systems of the United States, a capitalist country, and the Roman Empire, a slave society, even though both had a great deal of trade.  The newspeak definition of capitalism equates these two very different economic systems.  By taking such an overly broad definition of capitalism the newspeak definition of capitalism makes it very difficult to talk about capitalism in the non-newspeak sense (an economic system based on wage-labor).  By equating capitalism with trade, and denying us a term to describe an economic system based on wage-labor, newspeak makes a critique of capitalism much more difficult to talk about, thus protecting the status quo.

Similar to capitalism, newspeak also gives the state (or government) an overly broad definition, which has the effect of making it difficult to talk of abolishing the state.  The state is an organization with a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the legitimate use of violence.  It is a centralized hierarchical organization that uses armed bodies of people with a top down chain of command (such as police and militaries) and coercive institutions (such as courts and prisons) to force those within its territory to obey it.  The newspeak definition equates the state with organization, thereby obfuscating what exactly the state is and making critiques of it difficult to conceive.

Newspeak also defines the term ‘anarchy’ to mean complete chaos.  Anarchy comes from the Greek and literally means ‘no rulers.’  There is a well-developed body of anarchist theory that advocates not chaos, but a society organized by voluntary non-hierarchical associations.  The equation of anarchy with chaos is nothing more than a smear used to discredit a radical philosophy.  Most who equate anarchy with chaos have read little or no anarchist theory and do so only because ideological hegemony pushes that equation (through the media, schools, newspeak, etc.).  Several centuries ago democracy & republics were also equated with chaos, just as anarchy is today.

An unusual case of newspeak is that of “political correctness.”  Many movements seeking to break down certain hierarchies, such as the women’s movement or the black liberation movement, recognized that language is constructed in such a way so as to reinforce the hierarchy they are fighting against and, as part of their attempt to weaken that hierarchy, attempted to modify language so that it does not reinforce the hierarchy they are campaigning against.  For example, anti-racist movements have succeeded in making the term “nigger” no longer acceptable for whites to use and getting most people to acknowledge its racist meaning.  With a few exceptions, however, these goals have not been achieved.  The majority of the successful modification of language intended to weaken newspeak (and its reinforcement of the power structure) has been on minor things that don’t really threaten the hierarchies they are attempting to undermine.  Most have been limited to racial and sexual hierarchies as well; newspeak that reinforces class and statist hierarchies (such as the selective use of the term “terrorism” noted earlier) has been virtually untouched.

The phrase “political correctness” was originally a term used by leftists to make fun of each other.  It referred to excessively following the party line of one of the various left-wing, usually Marxist-Leninist, sects.  It didn’t become popular among the mainstream until the right seized on the term.  They used the term to refer to the (mostly unsuccessful) attempts of various liberation movements to modify language so it did not reinforce the hierarchies they were fighting against.  The right claims that “political correctness” is an attempt by “totalitarian leftists” to engage in thought control, and portray it in a manner similar to how newspeak has been portrayed in this essay.  Virtually any group campaigning for greater racial or sexual equality will be accused of being “politically correct.”  Some on the right use the term so broadly that it refers to anything they disagree with.  In practice the accusation of “political correctness” operates in a manner similar to how they claim supporters of “political correctness” behave – as a way of demonizing certain actions and a form of thought control.  The manipulation of language to support the power structure (such as the selective uses of the terms terrorism, communism, and defense) is never identified as “political correctness” outside of radical circles.  Newspeak is the manipulation of language to reinforce the power structure, while “political correctness” (outside of dissident circles) is a pejorative term for reducing newspeak or any other modification of language the user does not like.

The Objectivity Myth   

The idea of “objectivity” is also used to reinforce ideological hegemony.  Ideas and sources outside the liberal-conservative spectrum are dismissed as “un-objective,” “biased,” “inflammatory,” or sometimes “extremist.”  Only the ideas & sources within the liberal-conservative spectrum are considered “objective.”  Sometimes this is also used by groups within the liberal-conservative spectrum against each other, such as a conservative denouncing a liberal’s position as “biased” (or vice versa).

For example, journalist Christian Parenti was invited to talk on the March 2nd, 2004 edition of PBS’s News Hour with Jim Leher.  Leher asked Parenti whether bombings in Iraq would make the American job there harder.  Parenti’s response was:

I would think so. I would think that we have to look at some of the deeper causes as to why there's so much frustration. Why are Iraqis so angry and willing to point the blame at the U.S. after this sort of bombing? A lot of it has to do with the failure of meaningful reconstruction. There still is not adequate electricity. In many towns like Ramadi there wasn't adequate water. Where is all the money that's going to Halliburton and Bechtel to rebuild this country? Where is it ending up? I think that is one of the most important fundamental causes of instability, is the corruption around the contracting with these Bush-connected firms in Iraq. Unless that is dealt with, there is going to be much more instability for times to come in Iraq. [55]

Two days later Leher issued an on-air apology for this, claiming that the discussion on Iraq was not “as balanced as is our standard practice.”  PBS later indicated that it was Parenti’s comments, quoted above, which were the source of this “lack of balance.”  Nothing Parenti said was factually inaccurate, nor did PBS claim it was.  Several months earlier New York Times reporter John Burns expressed support for the occupation of Iraq on the show.  In September 2002 Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Iraq in 1990 had plans for invading Saudi Arabia, which was shown to be a lie more then a decade ago, but Leher did not attempt to correct Rumsfeld’s factually inaccurate statement.  In neither case was there an apology for this “lack of balance.”  This illustrates how the idea of “balance” is used as a way of limiting thought within a certain spectrum.  When individuals express support for the occupation of Iraq, or government officials like Donald Rumsfeld make false statements, these don’t need to have an opposing view presented to “balance” them.  When Bin Laden opponents are on they don’t need to be balanced with Bin Laden supporters.  But when someone too critical of the status quo, as Christian Parenti was, is on then they need to be “balanced” with an opposing view.  If someone deviates too far from the ‘party line’ then an opposing view needs to be presented to refute it but those who adhere to the ‘party line’ do not need an opposing view presented.  That is what being “fair and balanced” really means in its actual implementation.

Another example is the treatment of the internet.  One is supposed to be wary of news on the internet because “anyone can put anything up.”  This idea is repeatedly promoted in the media, schools and elsewhere.  It is true, but it is also true of television, radio, newspapers and most other sources of information.  The only real qualification to put something on the TV, etc. is that you are rich enough to afford to do so.  Critical thinking, and a healthy degree of skepticism, should be applied to everything, not just things on the internet.  To be more critical of things on the internet as opposed to things on TV, etc. is implicitly to assume that rich people, and organizations controlled by rich people, are more credible than non-rich people.  There is no reason to make such an assumption.

There is no such thing as a values-free source, as values-free is itself a value.  Every source of news must decide what stories should be covered, which to ignore, which should be emphasized and which should not.  Sources do not have the resources to cover every single story equally and even if they did it would produce an information overload, making it not very useful to the average reader.  The only way to really understand what’s going on in the world is to read a variety of different sources with different points of view (and not just multiple corporate sources – they all represent more or less the same point of view).

Closely related to this is the cult of moderation.  Moderation is often held up as a virtue and politicians (and others) rush to portray themselves as “moderates” while portraying their opponents as “extremists.”  Very few people who call themselves moderates actually take a truly moderate position.  Few self-described moderates advocate a moderate amount of slavery; even though that’s the position you arrive at if you take their philosophy seriously.  To advocate absolutely no slavery at all is an extremist position, as is advocating massive amounts of slavery.  A genuine moderate position is between the two extremes, in favor of a moderate amount of slavery.  What is really meant by “moderate” is not actually being moderate (few do that), but advocating the status quo.  The praising of moderation is really the praising of support for the status quo, which obviously reinforces the dominant socio-economic system.

It is not uncommon for those who have been highly indoctrinated into the liberal-conservative paradigm to reject ideas outside the liberal-conservative spectrum on the grounds that such ideas are “biased,” “un-objective,” “subversive,” “inflammatory,” “aren’t even-handed,” “lack balance,” etc.  Accusing something that openly argues for a particular conclusion of arguing for a particular conclusion (“being biased”) is a rather strange accusation.  Such an accusation is only relevant if the thing being accused claims that it is not arguing for a conclusion (which is the case with the media & education system).  Calling something a theory a name does not refute that theory.  The accusation of something being “biased,” “lacking balance,” etc. is itself “biased” (promoting an opinion).  There’s nothing wrong with promoting particular ideas and arguing for those ideas, so long as you’re open about what you’re doing.  Any argument against such a position would be arguing for a particular idea and so is self-refuting.  These are not rational arguments but reflect the kind of incapacity to think about issues found in fanatical religious cults.

The same standard applies to this essay.  There’s a difference between an individual article, essay, website, etc. arguing in favor of something and a social system which acts to systemically exclude certain ideas while enabling others to monopolize the press, schools, etc.  There exists a social system that acts to indoctrinate the majority of the population into believing the liberal-conservative paradigm, but it does not follow from this that the liberal-conservative paradigm is false.  Hypothetically, it might be the case that there exists this system of thought control and some ideology within the liberal-conservative spectrum happens to be correct.  This is not the case, but refuting the liberal-conservative paradigm is outside the scope of this essay. The media filters information by emphasizing facts that support the liberal-conservative paradigm, such as genocide in Cambodia and Iraqi atrocities against the Kurds, while downplaying or ignoring facts that harm the liberal-conservative paradigm, such as genocide in East Timor and Turkish atrocities against the Kurds.  The education system acts to promote belief in the liberal-conservative paradigm and discourage belief in theories outside the liberal-conservative spectrum.  These ideas also happen to support the position of the elite and reinforce support for the dominant socio-economic system.  Whether liberal-conservative ideas happen to be correct and whether ideological hegemony exists are two separate issues.  Even if it could be shown that a philosophy within the liberal-conservative spectrum were correct this would not change the fact that there exists a social system, hegemony, which acts to indoctrinate the populace into believing in those ideas.

Notes
1  http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23974-2003Jun23?language=printer
2  http://www.pipa.org/whatsnew/html/new_6_04_03.html
3  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06-poll-iraq_x.htm
4  For a partial list of political prisoners, see http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/pplist-alpha.shtml
5  http://www.fair.org/extra/9512/hightower.html
6  http://www.conservativenews.org/InDepth/archive/199810/IND19981014g.html
7  Lawrence Soley, Extra!, July/August 1997 http://www.fair.org/extra/9707/ad-survey.html
8  http://www.fair.org/reports/ff2001.html   
9  Steve Rendall & Tara Broughel, Extra!, May/June 2003 http://www.fair.org/extra/0305/warstudy.html
10  http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/freezer1.htm
11  http://www.fair.org/extra/0403/iraq-study.html
12  Sources: http://www.freearabvoice.org/ http://www.wbai.org/artman/publish/article_530.php http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/watch/policywatch/policywatch2003/751.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_insurgency.htm http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/aug31/fp1.asp http://www.jihadunspun.net/articles/18122003-Iraqi-Resistence/ir/ailatir03.html http://www.neravt.com/left/ http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Iraqi_insurgency&redirect=no
13  Herman, Manufacturing Consent p. xxi
14  Herman, Manufacturing Consent p. 37-86
15  Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, p. 40
16  Richard Aldrich, Guardian, 22 April, 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,688310,00.html
17  http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/03/sp_books_chomsky112603.htm
18  Ina Howard, Extra!, May/June 2003 http://www.fair.org/extra/0205/power_sources.html
19  http://www.aclu-wa.org/ISSUES/police/WTO-Report.html
20  Seth Ackerman, Extra!, January/February 2000 http://www.fair.org/extra/0001/wto-prattle.html
21  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2636647.stm
22  http://www.fair.org/reports/npr-study.html
23  http://www.fair.org/reports/kosovo-sources.html
24  Quoted in Commissar of the Free Press http://struggle.ws/issues/war/afghan/pamwt/media.html
25  http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/10/06/0396325 http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Press.pdf http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf
26  http://www.fair.org/reports/journalist-survey.html
27  Steve Rendall & Peter Hart, Extra!, March/April 2002 http://fair.org/extra/0203/goldberg.html
28  Naureckas, p. 157-170
29  Chomsky, Media Control http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9103-media-control.html http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/MediaControl_excerpts.html
30  McChesney, Rich Media, p. 189-225
31  Zepezaur, p. 52
32  http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/031800-02.htm
33  http://www.counterpunch.org/cnnpsyops.html
34  http://www.fair.org/activism/psyops-response.html
35  Henslin p. 332-335
36  See Loewen, p. 137-199
37  Quoted on Delfattor, p. 139
38  Quoted on Delfattor, p. 125-126
39  The content standards are available online at http://www.cde.ca.gov/standards/
40  Colorado’s Academic Standards are available online at http://www.cde.state.co.us/index_stnd.htm
41  This list is available at http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/yct/watchlist.html
42  Some of Harry Cleaver’s writings can be found online at http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/hmchtmlpapers.html
43  The Washington Post 24 November 2003, Texas Conservative Students List Professors "Too Politicized" by Karin Brulliard http://www.refuseandresist.org/police_state/art.php?aid=1177
44  Gatto, p. xvi
45  Quoted on Gatto, p. 153
46  Quoted Gatto, p. xxviii
47  Ibid., p.38
48  Ibid., p. 106
49  Ibid., P. 106
50  Ibid., p. 321
51  Ibid, p. 45
52  Ibid, p. 252-253
53  Ibid, p. 255
54  See my essay “The Myth of the War on Terrorism” http://question-everything.mahost.org/Socio-Politics/TerrorMyth.html
55  http://www.fair.org/activism/newshour-parenti.html

Sources:
Accuracy in Media (AIM) http://www.aim.org
Bias by Bernard Goldberg
Censors in the Classroom by Edward B. Jenkinson
The Chomsky Reader edited by James Peck
The CIA’s Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer
Commissars of the Free Press http://struggle.ws/issues/war/afghan/pamwt/media.html
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Iserbyt
Dumbing US Down by John Gatto
Essentials of Sociology by James M. Henslin
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) http://www.fair.org
The Fair Reader edited by Jim Naureckas & Janine Jackson
It’s the Media, Stupid by John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney
Lexis-Nexis
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky
The Media and Politics edited by Paul A. Winters
Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul
Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert W. McChesney
A Social History of the Media by Asa Briggs and Peter Burke
The Underground History of American Education by John Gatto
What Uncle Sam Really Wants by Noam Chomsky
What Johnny Shouldn’t Read by Joan Delfattor