From shniad@sfu.ca Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 10:12:18 -0700 From: D Shniad Reply to: pen-l@anthrax.ecst.csuchico.edu To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: [PEN-L:757] Edward Herman on the limits to free speech THE LIMITS TO FREE SPEECH 'Freedom of expression' in the West appears to be a civil right, but it is subject to major, often hidden, constraints. By Edward S. Herman In the West, people are normally free to speak and send messages at odds with conventional and official opinion, without censorship or other state interference. Even at this level, however, the periodic 'Red' scares and alleged 'national security' threats have provided the basis for secret police surveillance and harassment and politically based job purges and other forms of punishment for dissident thought. A deeper and more formidable limit arises from the nature and power of the dominant mainstream media and the forces that shape and constrain their messages. The western mass media are thoroughly integrated into the main institutional structures, with profound connections to the dominant transnational corporations (TNCs) and governments. They themselves are large, often global, profit-making organizations. In the United States, General Electric, a huge TNC in the weapons and nuclear reactor businesses, owns NBC, a major TV network; and Westinghouse, another large TNC in the weapons and nuclear reactor businesses, owns sizable radio and cable TV networks. All the major media depend on corporate advertising as their primary revenue source, and must provide a congenial environment for advertising. The dominant media also have close relations to government, which licenses TV stations, protects and advances media interests abroad, and constitutes a major information source to the media. In many ways the media and government support and depend on one another in a symbiotic relationship, and there is a revolving door of personnel between government and leading media firms. The result is that both news and entertainment messages that support dominant corporate and governmental interests flow through the media easily, whilst messages of dissent messages often make it only into publications and broadcasters that reach relatively small numbers. This system works extremely well in its service to the powerful. It gives the appearance of naturalness and freedom, with many media firms in action. It is hard to detect that they all operate on the same restricted premises and depend heavily on the same powerful sources; it is often not obvious that the dominant media are blacking out major areas of debate and inconvenient facts. Racist biases The United States is a deeply divided society, and racial prejudice affects domestic politics, foreign policy, and media performance. Even today, long discredited theories of black inferiority have reappeared and are given great publicity and credence, because they fit traditional racist attitudes and the demands of an elite that is unwilling to spend large resources to rectify great historic crimes and wrongs. These attitudes have long fed into foreign policy, especially that which involves Third World poor and coloured peoples. Such people are more easily conquered and killed if they can be portrayed as savage or inhuman, too primitive for democratic rule, and allocated what is seen as their proper role as servants of the West. Vietnamese and Iraqi casualties were implicitly but quite clearly given zero weight, valuations that were clearly reflected in the western media. Yet this racist dehumanization is never seen to be in contradiction with the Judeo-Christian ethic and 'higher' morality of the West. 'Love thy neighbour' need not extend to foreign enemies and the less human. It is likely that western support of IMF-World Bank 'structural adjustment policies' in the Third World that immiserate millions of poor people also rest at least in part on the same racist underpinning: a large fraction of the victims are coloured people who don't feel things as intensely as whites. Media patriotism The US mainstream media work with a profound but mainly unconscious patriotic bias that badly compromises their ability to transmit news about foreign affairs. In the case of each imperial venture the media operate with a set of patriotic premises: that their government tells the truth, has benevolent aims, and takes actions that are invariably justified by 'national security' threats along with its desire to do good. There is also a remarkable double standard in place: nobody but the pitiful giant, the United States, has a national security problem; and international law applies only to others, not to the United States itself. In the case of the US attacks on Nicaragua in the 1980s, the media did not laugh at the claim that that tiny country posed a threat to the United States, or that US officials were deeply concerned about the lack of democracy in Nicaragua. The fact that the United States had supported the dictator Somoza for 45 years, and that its leadership in the 1980s was entirely happy with dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Indonesia, and strove for closer relations with military governments in Argentina and Guatemala, did not suggest any questions to the media. In the case of the US invasion of Panama in 1989, the media were uninterested in the fact that its leader Manuel Noriega had been on the US payroll a few years back, or that the invasion was a violation of the UN and OAS charters. During the Gulf war, the US media served as a perfect public relations arm of the Bush administration as it fended off diplomatic solutions, covered up its prior appeasement of Saddam Hussein, and manipulated consent at home and in the UN for a completely one-sided and brutal massacre. The power of the western media to suppress, rewrite history, demonize and dehumanize enemies, and presume benevolent intentions and just causes on the part of their leaders, allows them to perform an Orwellian miracle: whatever the West does is justifiable, although occasional errors of tactical judgment (not intention) may occur. This power of self-deception reached its limit in the media's treatment of US intervention in Vietnam where, after a lengthy period of supporting French recolonization (1946-54), the USA then fought against self- determination for two more decades. When its puppet regime in the south collapsed, the USA virtually destroyed the Indo-Chinese peninsula to avoid 'losing' its hold on that distant Third World country. The mainstream media from beginning to end looked on the US effort as noble and virtuous, another struggle for democracy and against terrorism and aggression. The notion that the USA had no business trying to impose its own chosen rulers in that distant country, and was an aggressor fighting against self-determination, never struck the patriotic media. Human rights The western media claim objectivity, but their sources, ideological biases, commercial affiliations, and preconceptions of their home audiences make this a huge fallacy. They serve dominant western power interests and this has a profound effect on their treatment of human rights. For the western elites, human rights mean personal and political rights, not economic rights. But in most of the Third World, the basic human needs of food, shelter, medical care, and employment are inadequately met and constitute the first and most urgent demand of the majority. Arguably, the serving of these needs is a precondition to the meaningfulness of other rights. However, western elites, their own economic needs oversupplied, and striving to contain wage increases and government benefits to the world's masses, strenuously oppose definitions of human rights that include the meeting of basic economic needs. This conflict of interest is dramatically illustrated in IMF lending policy, which, reflecting the elite western world view, commonly requires a reduction in food, housing and medical subsidies, along with economic policies that generate unemployment. These terms serve the interests of foreign investors and some local capitalists, even as they threaten the basic needs of the majority and erode economic and social democracy. This conflicting view of appropriate policy -- and definition of human rights -- is becoming more acute in a new world order of greater corporate power and pressures on governments to further reduce attention to ordinary citizens in favour of improving 'competitiveness'. But even as regards the human rights recognized in the West, a remarkable double standard is maintained. State terror in enemy states is given great and indignant attention whilst state terror by governments serving western interests -- as in Guatemala, Turkey and Indonesia -- is discussed rarely and without indignation. Terror is identified and attended to according to political interest. Elections that serve to legitimate proper western servants are hailed as valid; those in enemy states are derided as a sham, irrespective of fact. ------- Adapted from a paper presented to the International Conference on Rethinking Human Rights organized by the Just World Trust and held in Malaysia in December 1994.