Slouching Toward Pressology

 

 

 

Carlin Romano

emingway famously de?ned courage as ?grace
under pressure." Change the de?nition to ?lack

of grace under pressure? and you get a rough
idea of what substitutes for the C-word among press
critics. Like most members of well-educated professional
groups, the working Lieblings face constant incentives
to temper their self-critical thoughts, to go along for
the ride, to wink at their hypocritical peers. The ?Isn?t
it outrageous?? indignation of past giants, such as
George Seldes, gets replaced by the ?Isn?t it some-
thing?? complacency of the boys and girls on the bus.

Among contemporary writers on the American press,
no so completely avoid the inbred media soli-
darity of most journaliStic press critics as do Noam
Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. In Tbe Political Econ-
omy of Human Rigbts (1979), and in many books
authored separately, both thinkers force business-as-
usual reporters and readers to confront the puffed-up,
selfcongratulatory posture of the press that turns so
many ordinary Americans against it?courageous watch?
dog of bad government, fair-minded champion of the
public weal, quotidian conscience of America.

Both men predictably suffer for their boldness. Mot/yer
Iones titled its recent pro?le of Chomsky ?Noam is an
Island?; the article, written by Jay Parini, detailed, with
only slight exaggeration, how ?his work is no longer
reviewed?as it once was?in the mainstream press,?
how the New York Review of Boo/es, once his largest
forum, ?quietly dropped him from its list of contribu~
tors? in the midseventies. For defending the freedom
of expression of Robert Faurisson, the French writer
who claimed Nazi gas chambers didn?t exist, Chomsky,
who teaches at MIT, lost many die-hard supporters.
Noting this decline of support, the mainstream press
increasingly feels comfortable labeling him a kook: Glenn
Frankel, Jerusalem correspondent of the Was/Jington
Post, and a generally sober-minded reporter, recently
described a Chomsky essay on the Middle East as a
?breathlessly deranged 51-page diatribe.? Meanwhile,
Herman, while teaching (like Chomsky) in one of the

 

Carlin Roniano, literary critic of tbe Philadelphia Inquirer,
writes a regular column for tbe Village Voice Literary Supple-
ment. He is currently a visiting scbolar in tbe department of
pbilosopby, Columbia University, and a fellow at tbe Gannett
Center for Media Studies, wbere be is writing a boo/e about
tbe links between pbilosopby and journalism.

citadels of American corporate capitalism-the Wharton
School?exerts little pedagogic in?uence on his institu-
tion or professional colleagues.

Yet a unique feature of their public reputation remains
the chill Chomsky and Herman get from fellow leftists.
Parini, a sympathizer and admirer, casually refers to
Chomsky as a ?sober fanatic.? Todd Gitlin, another
sympathizer, likens Chomsky?s books on politics and
the press to ?a crazy patchwork quilt of quotations
from journals and newspapers. . . . He never goes directly
to the source.?

Past readers of Chomsky/Herman know the style
and tone. One imagines the work spewing forth from a
disciplined, yet impassioned graduate student, sitting
in the midst? of a vast library, the spools of Times
microfilm piled high on the camel shelves. The student
enters citations deftly, pushes the offending coverage
into impressive bulldozer piles, adds an intermittent
sarcastic remark, but largely keeps to clerkish packaging
of the printed material. The eeriness of the style grows
from the absence of other voices?let alone the din of
the newsroom?~that can mix with or respond to the
Chomsky/Herman loud3peaker. This clip-job approach
to press criticism?virtually total reliance on library
material, and a refusal to quote journalists on why they
report what they do?contributes to the mainstream
dismissal of Chomsky?s and Herman?s books as puri-
tanical screeds. Newspaper people hear an endless
drum solo??Unfairness: The Cambridge Concert??
and turn elsewhere.

Chomsky tends to?respond, as Parini notes, ?that he
is not a journalist. He is a critic of US. foreign policy,
and as such he goes to the proper sources: newspapers,
National Security Council documents, and other histor-
ical records.? Chomsky believes that ?pressology??the
study of journalism as a full-blown social institution??
can be a social science about reportage that doesn?t
have to report?it can merely cite. One reaction by
establishment book review media to this methodology
has been to marginalize Chomsky and Herman. The old
tactic called for muf?ing them with the sounds of silence.
The new one, intended to avoid the charge of blacklist-
ing, relegates them to inside back pages and cramped
space, where a reviewer?s countercitation can discredit
them. Neither solution acknowledges their importance.

The Chomsky/Herman frame of mind?the sheer

41

 

 

 

nerve to attempt systematic analysis and to articulate
unpopular thought with regard to the press?is more
precious than the journalism junkie?s widely valued
devotion to facts and anecdotes, offering the best soul
around which to build a living discipline. Press critics
too often mirror their subjects? reluctance to analyze
rather than collect?they ignore the structures of power
that transcend the running news story, the 'terrorist
incident, and the diplomatic initiative of the moment.
Chomsky and Herman, to their credit, never lose sight
of the ideologies implied in the script.

Yet the Chomsky/Herman methodology?selectivity
in choice of data, dogmatism about basic principles,
contempt for the historical conditions of social practices,
and Frankfurt School pessimism about improving the
media?is like a pistol trained constantly on its propo-
nents? feet. Those who share the authors? moral aims,
but part company on their methods, need to do more
than wonder aloud about why the cart has such a bad
methodological horse in front of it. They need to put
the nag to sleep.

And a nag it is, disguised as a thoroughbred named
?Spectacular Bid.? Much as he denies the connection,
Chomsky (whose in?uence must be seen as the operative
one here, over Herman?s) approaches journalism as he
approached language?as a phenomenon with a core
of universal and innate processes unaffected by day-to-
day practice. At the same time?perhaps because the
amorphous state of pressology differs profoundly from
the regimentation of linguistics when he produced his
groundbreaking work?Chomsky has coasted on the
matters that make or break an intellectual discipline:
assumptions and ?rst principles about concepts (for
example, the notion of propaganda, or the role of the
press in the state), and messy facts on the ground. The
trick for sympathizers is to get Chomsky and Herman
into the press box and out of the micro?lm room.
Other recent books in the area, such as Mark Hertsgaard?s
On Bended Knee: Tbe Press and [be Reagan Presidency
1988), a attack
on press obeisance to the perceived Great Communica-
tor, and Mitchell Stephens?s A History of News
(1988), can help push both authors past clip-?le limita-
tions. But ?rst the weakness of the Chomsky/ Herman
manufacturing process, and of its raw materials, needs
setting out.

keeping with their past media analysis, Chomsky
and Herman argue in Manufacturzng Consent (1988)
that US. mass media conform to a propaganda
model whose ?societal purpose? is ?to inculcate and
defend the economic, social and political agenda of
privileged groups that dominate the domestic society
and the state. The media serve this purpose in many

42 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3

ways: through the selection of topics, distribution of
concerns, framing of issues, ?ltering of information,
emphasis and tone.? Rejecting the ?standard conception
of the media as cantankerous, obstinate and ubiquitous
in their search for truth and their independence of
authority,? Chomsky/Herman see them rather as ?effec-
tive and powerful ideological institutions that carry out
a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance
on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-
censorship, and without signi?cant overt coercion.?
They concede that the US. media ?do not function in
the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian
state. Rather, they permit?indeed, encourage?spirited
debate, criticism and dissent, as long as these remain
faithfully within the system of presuppositions and prin-
ciples that constitute an elite consensus, a system so
powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness.?

In chapters titled ?Worthy and Unworthy Vic-
tims,? ?Legitimizing Versus Meaningless Third-World
Elections: El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua,? ?The
KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope: Free Market
Disinformation as ?News,?? and ?The Indochina Wars
in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia,? Manufacturing Consent
seeks to prove these overarching theses by examining
major media coverage. Brie?y, the book argues that the
propaganda system dictates weak coverage of victims
of US. client states but strong play for victims of US.
enemies. Similarly, the press criteria for successful demo-
cratic elections in client states are less stringent than
those for enemy states, such as Nicaragua; and both
sets of criteria tend to re?ect State Department policy.
The press?s willingness to adopt Clare Sterling?s analysis
of John Paul near assassination as a leftist rather
than rightist plot, despite numerous holes in her story,
again demonstrates the press?s subservience to capitalist
and imperialist US. state policy. So does its selective
account of the US. role in Indochina?s war, despite its
self?anointed role as ?adversary? of the US. government
in later years.

Many of Chomsky and Herman?s vieWs on particular
patterns of coverage hit home: that characterizations of
El Salvador?s regime as centrist and reformist mislead,
that the Sterling theory of the Bulgarian connection looks
like Swiss cheese, that reporters depend too much on
of?cial statements, that media accounts of the Cam-
bodian tragedy tend to excuse the US. for its massive
bombing before the Khmer took over. Chomsky and
Herman?s account of how the US. media tend to shift
the criteria of a ?legitimizing? election according to the
ideology of the country involved, convinces, and their
insistence on focusing attention on US. policy toward
Indonesia during the massacres of its people ?lls a
disgraceful gap in press coverage. As press critics, they
make sense. As press theorists, they founder. A sample

 

 

 

of their exegetical style shows why.

A key assumption of Chomsky/Herman interpretation
is that American government of?cials and Times re-
porters rarely experience a decent impulse in formulating
or reporting foreign policy. Because the authors always
take blackhearted motives for granted, they avoid using
quali?ers. Thus, words like ?suppress? and ?support?
do yeoman duty.

Times reporter Joseph Treaster?s story on the funeral
of Archbish0p Romero of El Salvador doesn?t mention
a mimeographed statement by twenty-two Church leaders
on the mayhem that took place, so the account plainly
?was suppressed by Treaster.? Did Treaster get the
mimeograph in time to use it? Did he question it?
Did an editor cut a reference to it? Who knows? Not
Chomsky and Herman. But that doesn?t brake their
accusation. Such assumptions pervade the whole book.
Any piece of information that should have appeared in
a paper but didn?t was ?suppressed.? Any government
with which the United States maintained relations, and
to whom the United States provided aid of some form,
is one the US. ?supported.? Sometimes Chomsky and
Herman stretch. American of?cials ?cheerfully supplied
and supported? Indonesia?s generals in their massacre
of their in the 19605. Did the authors put
a smile meter on these of?cials? If they were reporters
on a serious newspaper, Chomsky and Herman would
get booted in a day.

A second rule of Chomsky/Herman hermeneutics is
to ignore particular personal and journalistic data that
might interfere with their desire for systemic, rather
than individual, explanations. Consider the authors'
long discussion of why the murder of Polish priest Jerzy
Popielusko, a victim ?worthy? of reportage on the
Chomsky/Herman model, received extensive media
attention while priests murdered in the US. ?client
states? (and thus ?unworthy? victims) got little.

The authors complain that

the New York Times featured the P0pielusko case
on its front page on ten different occasions. By
contrast, the public wonld not have seen mention
of the names of Father Augusto Ramirez Monastiero,
father superior of the Franciscan order in Guatemala,
murdered in November 1983, or Father Miguel Angel
Montufar, a Guatemalan priest who disappeared in
the same month that Popielusko was killed in Poland,
or literally dozens of other religious murder victims
in the American provinces.

They further complain that Time: stories about murders
of ?unworthy victims? in Latin America, such as those
about the American nuns, ?lacked any details or dramatic
quality that might evoke sympathetic emotion,? while
the paper reported the circumstances of Popielusko?s

death in grisly detail. Chomsky and Herman talk of
?the suppression of the degrading and degraded use of
the nuns? underwear.?

or the authors, media submission to US. im~

perialism explains the coverage. It doesn?t matter

that the executive editor of the Times, Abe Rosen-
thal, was a former Time: correspondent in Poland, won
his Pulitzer there, and took great interest in the country.
It doesn?t matter that reporting panties stuffed into a
corpse?s mouth might not get past the taste hurdles of
the Times" copy desk. It doesn?t matter that, apart from
the issue of political systems, Polish affairs have tradi-
tionally been considered of greater interest to the Times?
readership than have Guatemalan affairs, because of
ethnic and European cultural links.

According to Chomsky and Herman, the claim is
sometimes made that unworthy victims are so treated
by the US. mass media because they are killed at a
great distance and are so unlike ourselves that they are
easy to disregard. Poland, however, ?is farther away
than Central America, and its cultural and business
links with the United States are nor so great as those of
Latin American countries in general.?

Unfortunately, the judgments that Guatemala?s tradi-
tional cultural links with the US. are greater than those
of Poland, and that strict geographical distance deter-
mines a newspaper?s coverage policy, play into the hands
of Chomsky/Herman enemies by strengthening the sense
that Chomsky and Herman are off-key academics, un-
familiar with newspapers except as readers, who don?t
understand journalistic decision making. At times,
Chomsky and Herman seem almost eager to method-
ologically undermine themselves. For instance, while
they insist on the irrelevance of individual intentions
behind the stories they cite, they repeatedly and numb-
ingly employ vocabulary to fault their
targets. Time is guilty of ?amazing dishonesty and
hypocrisy.? The media ?are ?deceitful,? ?cynical,? ?docile,?
?unthinking,? ?overcome by jingoist passion,? accus-
tomed to ?servility? and ?subservience,? ?loyal agents
of terrorism.? If the media are intentionally as corrupt
and slavish as Chomsky and Herman claim, one wonders
why the two of them bother with such moralistic criti-
cism. Isn?t it a waste of time to write books like these,
just as it would be to rebuke Stalin for being a pill?

Here is where Chomsky?s methodological pedigree
suggests a surprising answer in the negative. It is not a
waste of time if you view journalism the way Chomsky
views language?and journalism. Recall the outlines of
Chomskean linguistics. The ?transformational grammar?
revolution that Chomsky initiated in 1957 with Syntactic
Structures came within the part of the ?eld, already
dominant in the US. profession at that time, called

SLOUCHING TOWARD PRESSOLOGY 43

 

autonomous linguistics?the part holding that language
can be studied as if it were a purely physical phenom-
enon, apart from history or the beliefs and intentions
of its speakers. Chomsky?s breakthrough involved posit-
ing people?s innate linguistic endowment?the existence
of a ?universal grammar? with deep and surface struc-
tures, of rules that generate possible sentences, and of
transformational rules that govern the passage from
one level to another. But all of this research took place
within the part of language held to be isolable from
present or historical practice. In Ferdinand de Saussure?s
classical distinction, language can be divided into langue,
the structural relationships intrinsic to all language, and
parole, the speech of particular speakers. In Saussure?s
famous musical analogy, langye constitutes the score,
parole the performance. Chomsky introduced the terms
?competence? and ?performance? to express a related
distinction, but the basic belief remained unshaken?
that the crucial process of language, falling under compe-
tence, could be analyzed and understood largely apart
from empirical instances of performance. In fact, much
of Chomsky?s early work in linguistics stood in opposi-
tion to the ?eld?s earlier obsession with collecting and
concentrating on raw empirical data.

The fatal ?aw of Chomsky?s pressology is that he
transfers his frame of mind from linguistics to the press:
he isolates langue and competence (the press as universal
institution, mechanically manufacturing its ideological
product) from parole and performance (the countless
living agents of the press, conditioned by their histories
and values, making snap judgments and an occasional
re?ective decision). Just as the of a par-
ticular informant can?t undermine Chomsky?s linguistic
theories under the rules of that game, so the rules of the
propaganda model bar the explanations of a particular
journalist for why he or she covered something. The
drum solo that newspaper peOple hear as ?unfairness?
undoubtedly sounds different to the formalist behind
the snare and cymbals. Chomsky probably hears some-
thing like Schonberg?s logarithmic ?Verklarte Nacht?
arranged in the key of ?My Way.?

oreover, Chomsky?s tendency in linguistics
to adopt rather than scrutinize fundamental

philosophical concepts?however much he
weds innovative techniques of transformational grammar
to them?surfaces in his pressology as well. His absorp-
tion in linguistics of such notions as ?innate idea? or
?mind? is mirrored by the free ride he and Herman
give to the charged buzzword, ?propaganda.?

The title of their book, Manufacturing Consent, plays
off the well-known article by Edward Bernays, ?The
Engineering of Consent,? which continued Bernays?s
lifelong attempt (largely successful) to establish public

44 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3

 

relations and calculated persuasion as a legitimate and
valuable process of democracy. Indeed, the issue of
prOpaganda?s relation to democracy, posed repeatedly
in this century by Bernays and Harold Lasswell, requires
subtle assessment. As Peter Kenez points out in The
Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass
Mobilization, 1917-1929 (1985), ?propaganda? dates
back to 1622, when Pope Gregory XV established a
College of Cardinals to supervise the spread of the

 

Chomsky approaches journalism as
he approached language?as a
phenomenon with a core of universal
and innate processes ana??ected
hy day-to-a?ay practice.

 

faith overseas. Called the Congregatio de Propaganda

Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of Faith), it

simply delivered a point of view, albeit a powerful one.
Kenez writes that

propaganda became a pejorative word only when
man accepted as inevitable that human beings would
disagree as to the proper organization of society.
Under these circumstances, we suspect that our
enemies achieve their successes by underhanded
methods of persuasion, that is, by propaganda. An
unquali?ed hostility to propaganda, nevertheless, is
not . Prepaganda is nothing more than
the attempt to transmit social and political values in
the hope of affecting pe0ple?s thinking, emotions,
and thereby behavior. The intent of in?uencing
others is hardly objectionable. When we think we
disapprove of propaganda, it usually turns out that
we really object to its goals or methods.

He adds,

We human beings have dif?culty accepting that
others see the world differently than we do and that
they dismiss as nonsense the notions that seem
eternal verities to us. Here the concept of propaganda
helps us out. It is consoling to believe that others
disagree with us because they have been misled by
self-interested, sinister and wicked agitators.

Serious press criticism needs to address such a view,
not evade it with an end run. But Chomsky and Herman
demonize the word. To be sure, they?re not alone in taking
traditional political concepts for granted when they write
about the press. For all the vaunted revival of political
philosophy in the past twenty years, the role of the press

(Continued on p. 120)

 

 

then? It is not a politically dangerous philosophy, at
least not in the short term. Many of its manifestations
are intellectually sloppy, but that is true of most popular
trends of thought. Inasmuch as Campbell points to a
deeper archetypal level of reality and an inner life that
needs to be nourished, he is encouraging people to live
a nonmaterialistic life, a life that looks beyond short-
term pleasures to the individual?s true inner will. These
are basically harmless features. But because, by eliminat-
ing ethics and authority, he diminishes the practical
impact of the theological concept of transcendence,
and thereby shortcuts the spiritual path, Campbell?s
approach undercuts Jewish values (and perhaps all seri-
ous spiritual traditions) in the long run. The Jewish
path is rich and sensuous, intimately connected with
the life energy that Campbell extols; but it is also
deeply imbued with a sense of the transcendence of
God. This means that humility is a primary value, a
top-priority character trait. It also means that, through
the path of receptivity and humility, true creativity and
compassion can emerge. Jews af?rm the wondrousness
of life, as does Campbell, and we also stand in awe of
something more. Cl

SLOUCHING TOWARD PRESSOLOGY
(Continued from p. 44)

in the state, and ancillary concepts such as propaganda,
have been ignored by mainstream political philosophers.
Yet various intellectual traditions?Marxism, American
liberal sociology of the ?fties and sixties, ?mass-society?
analysis on the Continent?offer insights into the system
that Chomsky and Herman take for granted. It is pre-
cisely a thinker such as Chomsky, gifted at peering
through to ?rst principles, who can?t be excused his
shortcuts here.

Retooling Chomsky/ Herman pressology requires recog-
nition that in the study of journalism the citation of press
stories is necessary but not suf?cient reportage?and
in no way a science. Because j0urnalists enjoy enormously
greater discretion in writing stories than informants (in
linguistics) do in speaking standard sentences, the notion
that the text alone can provide the data for pressology?
as Chomsky assumes well-formed sentences can for
linguistics?makes no sense. The whole sloppy back-
ground of intentions and values and history needs to be
brought into play. Bad for science, perhaps, but good
for truth. Thankfully, On Bended Knee and A History
of News provide such sloppy background. Each repeat-
edly suggests why a ?propaganda mode of the US.
mass media is too simplistic.

On the surface, one would expect Hertsgaard?s book
to bolster Manufacturing Consent at every point. Based
on some 150 interviews with key players from the national

120 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3

press and the Reagan administration, On Bended Knee
documents Michael Deaver?s and James Baker?s attempt
to manipulate press coverage, their frequent successes,
and the response of journalists.

Of?cially, Hertsgaard echoes the line like a studio
apprentice of one of the great Renaissance masters,
instructed to paint a ?School of Chomsky? miniature
with persuasive detail. The Reagan ?propaganda appa-
ratus? comes out of ?witless malevolence.? Leading jour-
nalists ?allowed themselves to be used.? Hertsgaard
contrasts the coverage of El Salvador and Poland and
castigates the mass media?s failure to emphasize that
Salvadorans, in the controversial 1982 ?showcase? elec-
tion, didn?t get their identity cards stamped if they
didn?t vote. He deems White House reporters a ?palace
court press? disposed to con?ne its naughtiness within
relatively narrow limits,? and he goes so far as to say
that ?for the American press, truth was not truth, and
fact not fact until the government said so.?

et, unlike Chomsky and Herman, Hertsgaard

plunges into the real world Of journalism and

government, coming across points of view that
threaten to subvert his own. In one minor heresy against
the propaganda model, Hertsgaard acknowledges that
while journalists are ?inclined toward obedience from
the start,? the lies of Vietnam and Watergate changed
that, and ?self-respect, if nothing else, demanded of
journalists a more skeptical attitude toward what they i
were told.? Thus the Reagan White House had to ?en-
gineer? mass consent by devising concrete strategies of
a sort Chomsky and Herman never attend to.

One technique that the White House used was to 
repeat endlessly whatever theme the administration
wanted to push. Another was the ?smiling stonewall??
limiting access in order to foil undesirable stories. A
third was to call the networks frequently in order to
provide spins on the news, to push the administration?s
?line of the day.? A fourth aimed to provide so much
information and help (like phone banks and good visuals)
on stories the White House wanted covered that report-
ers faced a choice between getting the White House?s
story quickly and struggling to do an alternate, almost
certainly more critical story that would take much greater
time and effort. Hertsgaard?s attention to j0urnalism?s
practical side, while corroborating the toothless quality
of White House reportage, nonetheless undermines the
Chomsky/Herman view of why such reportage takes
place?often not because of ideological subservience
to authority, but because of TGIF thinking.

Hertsgaard?s attention to the formulas and techniques
of reporting (objectivity requires reporters to ?attribute
all statements of fact to a recognized expert or author-
ity?) also shows that much of the problem Chomsky

 

 

 

 

and Herman ascribe to evil intentions results from
unexamined habits and incompetence. As Hertsgaard
writes, ?Many journalists tend to regard strenuous chal-
lenging of the government as an improper violation of
the rules of objectivity.? Unless the opposition party or
some private faction leads with criticism of government
action, the press will not initiate it on its own. Ben
Bradlee concedes to Hertsgaard: [W]e have not devel-
oped a way to say to the reader, ?The President spoke
last night, but he told a lie.??

However, Bradlee?s ?Var/Jington Post colleague, Robert
Kaiser, suggests that the way hasn?t been developed
because the equipment isn?t there: ?In the media at
large there is no intellectual center of gravity. The prac-
ticing Washington press corps lacks intellectual self-
con?dence? to dig deep in its questioning. As a result,
cagey of?cials like former presidential assistant Richard
Darman (now heading the Of?ce of Management and
Budget for the Bush administration) can rest con?dent
that mainstream journalists will emphasize personality
over substance, and supply all the Te?on any president
needs. A Hertsgaard quote from Darman shows how
thoroughly administration of?cials recognize and con-
descend to the intellectual inadequacy of the press:

The Te?on phenomenon is a function of the fact
that when there?s a problem with substance, the
press doesn?t say there?s something wrong with
Reagan?s policies. They say party A in the White
House is ?ghting with party about the policy. It
tends to insulate the President from substantive
criticism and convert it into personality stories
about conflicts between individuals within the ad-
ministration beneath the level of the President.

In the end, the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model
?nds itself'challenged by everyday realities of newspaper
reporting and management. Did the New Times,
for instance, devote extensive coverage to Reagan?s
Bitburg visit because, as Joseph Goulden reported in
his recent Fit to Print (1988), the president?s decision to
visit so irked executive editor Abe Rosenthal that he
ordered incessant attention? Would the Time: of the
seventies and eighties have been a vastly different paper
if Harrison Salisbury had beaten out Rosenthal for the
top job? Chomsky and Herman?s current propaganda
model can?t accommodate such minutiae, just as it can?t
accommodate the continuing mainstream presence of
left-leaning journalists like Robert Scheer and Sydney
Schanberg. Similarly, it fails to address another challenge
voiced by mainstream editors and producers in Herts-
gaard?s book: the editor-in-chief or executive producer?s
insistence on keeping a paper or news operation in the
?center,? which means that if American culture moves
to the right, the middle has to move as well.

 

In this regard, the sweeping perspective of Stephens?s
A History of News shows why the mainstream boss?s
attachment to centrism and service journalism, as well
as Chomsky and Herman?s despair with a press that
expresses establishment values, need to be analyzed
and evaluated in the broader context of political theory.
Stephens casts his over journalism history and ?nds
the same sensationalism, the same avidity for the new,
the same attempt of the powerful to control the mes-
sengers and criers, the same need for attribution and
stereotype when forced to report confusing events
under pressure, the same expression of a society?s
common sense.

And while his fresh-from-the-press examples, from
primitive word-of-mouth to cable, keep the entertain-
ment level high (for example, news of important deaths
traveled so slowly in the Middle Ages that people could
impersonate deceased celebrities like Joan of Arc), a
profound, unromantic honesty about the origins of the
newspaper lends refreshing realism to his book and poses
an obstacle for opponents of mainstream journalistic
propaganda. As Stephens documents, newspapers owe
their origins to the need for commercial news, for news
of interest to businessmen and the elite. Hertsgaard
may criticize ?the American media?s relentless, ahistorical
insistence on focusing on what is new rather than what
is important,? but even he recognizes that the press,
?for commercial reasons,? will always treasure ?the new

above all else.?

It fact, Stephens establishes, the mundane details

of the Roman Empire?s acta a?z'uma populz' Romam'

(daily transactions of the Roman people) and the
Fugger newsletters of the sixteenth century came long
before any notion of the paper as an aggressive social
critic. Stephens extrapolates on this point in a compelling
way. He de?nes news as ?new information about a
subject of some public interest that is shared with some
portion of the public.? A newspaper, he says, traditionally
contains ?what is on a society?s mind,? and ?tends of
necessity to be a temperate, if not conservative medium.?
Newspapers express the common view, the consensus,
the ?predominant values? of a society?not the social
criticism that looks to the future. ?.To think a society?s
thoughts is to belong to that society,? writes Stephens.
?News provides the requisite set of shared thoughts?
and ?a kind of security.? 

Indeed, that?s one reason news organs become mass.
When Hertsgaard reports that new CBS of?cials sent a
message to the troops, ?Don?t be negative about the
President, people don?t want to hear that,? he adduces
the item as knockdown evidence of how the media put
ratings before responsibility. But placed in the perspec-
tive of Stephens?s history, one can wonder whether the

TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 121

 

 

 

 

 

mass media?s responsibility isn?t just that?not to get out
of step with the people. ?Art may dare to draw the un-
conventional out of the conventional,? writes Stephens,
but ?news does the opposite. . .. The journalist?s work
 is to squeeze raw reality into familiar, easy to com-
prehend themes.? Whereas Chomsky and Herman savage
the press for toadying to the government, Stephens
accents the positive, noting how ?a successful system of
news can help keep a society oriented in the same
direction.? Newspapers that provide a consensus view
of their society and the world can keep a society from
tearing itself apart. Nor is this a new view. Melville
Phillips, the literary editor of the Philadelphia Press,
said as much in The Making of the Newspaper (1894),
an anthology of essays he edited. popular newspaper,?
he wrote, ?in its good and evil reports, is n0thing more
than the suf?cient supply of a popular demand; it is, in
a sense, the voice of the people, whether that be the
voice of God or not.?

If we accept Stephens?s account of the mainstream
press as historically accurate, Chomsky and Herman?s
castigation of the press for not serving as avant-garde
critic of society?s beliefs needs stronger support. Why
shouldn?t that role be played by the opinion press
Chomsky and Herman refer to as ?marginalized?? Their
use of ?marginalized,? interestingly, betrays casual accep~
tance of an establishment view of what?s central and
what?s marginal. What theory of the state obliges news-
paper readers to swallow hectoring of their nation in
local papers? Mind you, there may be one. But Chomsky
and Herman don?t provide it. They don?t argue for why
mainstream journalism should ?t into their preferred
division of labor rather than the present one.

Chomsky and Herman ultimately bypass Antonio
Gramsci?s important point that a society?s established
cultural views must be changed before its institutions
re?ect new ones. That means persuading the public of
one?s beliefs. Chomsky, Herman, and even Hertsgaard
to a degree, tend instead to wring their hands and
complain that their ideas don't leap full~sized into major
media. (In fact, their side gets more access than it
admits. During the campaign, on September 21, the
Times, a b?te noire of all three, gave Hertsgaard the
largest part of its op-ed page to lambaste the ?electoral
press? for functioning ?more as a rubber stamp than as
a check and balance on President Reagan?) One can
hardly imagine Gramsci expecting that kind of leap?
he?d consider it leapfrogging. Here, all the traditional
questions about the American left?s real commitment to
mass persuasion come home: whether the left cares more
about talking to itself than about converting middle-
class Americans, whether it suffers from the elitist view
of the intellectual?s role familiar in so many later strains
of Marxism.

122 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3

In an interview published two years ago in The
Chomsky Reade); an anthology of his political writings,
Chomsky sounds proud that virtually no one agrees
with him. That?s nothing for a committed intellectual to
be proud of. Chomsky and Herman often excuse them-
selves for their failure to in?uence mass opinion by
suggesting that their ideas?for example, that we were
defending ?nothing beyond our right to impose our will
by violence? in Vietnam, that the US. ?invaded? South
Vietnam, that the US. committed genocide?are ?com-
pletely beyond the range of the thinkable? in American
culture. On the contrary, they?ve been thought about
often, and often rejected. The failure of more journalists
to accept the traditional Chomsky/Herman view of re-
cent world politics constitutes a failure on Chomsky?s
and Herman?s part, as intellectuals, to argue well enough
to convince people. Moreover, Chomsky can?t pretend
that he has had no access to the inside players of mass
journalism. As Harrison Salisbury reported in Without
Fear or Favor (1981), Chomsky used to lunch regularly
in Cambridge with a group that included then Boston
Globe editor Thomas Winship.

So Chomsky/Herman pressology comes to an impasse.
Yet the spirit of the times is on their side. Books and
articles on the press now routinely take for granted the
once fringe view that the press operates as an agent in
the news, not as an outside observer. As critics of the
press, Chomsky and Herman constitute an authentic
vanguard, declaring by their extradisciplinary scholar-
ship that American intellectuals must take the mass
press seriously.

But a further obstacle remains to breaking mainstream
American journalism wide open?the ongoing resistance
of American intellectuals to direct partz'czpattbn in the
mass press. Is it too fanciful to urge Chomsky and
Herman to take leaves from their privileged professorial
positions and do some enterprise reporting themselves?

To prod Critical Legal theorist Roberto Ungar into

writing for the law page of the Times? To demand that
young intellectuals do something similar?

To be sure, mainstream journalism won?t welcome
them, let alone recruit them. More likely, it will frisk
them, attempt to con?scate their ideological equipment,
seek to shunt them into commentary rather than report-
age. Systems of power don?t endure without good gate-
keeping. But neither do systems of power fall without
a little courageous, pigheaded in?ltration. And a truly
trenchant pressology won?t amount to anything until
academic press critics understand deadlines, copy desks,
telex debates, visa snags, and the vagaries of interviewing
people in a foreign language. A truly trenchant press
won?t exist until intellectuals accept reporting as a
worthy trade that bolsters rather than retards their
interests.

 . Wr- . g. 1.. 
?(as uq?EL-?ww-m tar-meuwm-yy ?we

  

 

 

 

 

 

The model for intellectual critics of the press should
be Santa Cruz?s Michelle Anderson, the beauty pageant
contestant who played by .the rules long enough to
make it to the ?nals of her California competition, then
unfurled a banner protesting beauty pageants as de-
grading to women. If such mole-like subversion can be
accomplished without its double agents going down in
?ames, pressology will triumph, and mainstream
journalism will change sooner, and for the better, rather
than later. In the end, freedom of the press belongs to
those who work in it. 

VISITING THE BURNT HOUSE
(Continued from p. 47)

Of course we understand. Don?t yOu see? Itit not true
what tbey say about us. Moved by the generosity of
and her parents, by the pleasure of our new
friendship, I didn?t ask the questions I might have
asked. It would have been easier to raise those questions
with people I knew much better?or mm at all.



few kilometers down the road from Auschwitz
A is Birkenau?Brzezinka in Polish?where larger

crematoria were built after the small One at
Auschwitz was found insufficient. This is the place where
the railroad tracks ended, where selections were made
at the ramp, where millions of Jews from all over Europe
went directly to their deaths. We expected the route to
Birkenau to be well-marked, but we couldn?t ?nd a
single road sign, though we drove around for nearly an
hour asking directions. Finally an old farmer piling
clover into the trunk of his car guided us to the red
brick guard tower that marks the entrance. The camp
is enormous. Unlike Auschwitz, it has been abandoned.
Nothing is left of the people, the bundles, the fear, the
smoke. Nothing but empty barracks of brick and wood.
And miles of grass.

At Point Reyes near San Francisco, not long ago, I
visited the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake and walked
along the fault line: here?s where the earth shifted;
here?s where the ground opened. Birkenau is such a place.
Grass is healing, says my husband, quoting a German
expression he learned from his father: ?Lars grass dariiber
wacbsen.? I quote back Carl Sandburg, a poem I learned
in grade school: am the grass; I cover all.? (The grass
covers his uncle Karl at Verdun, one of the European
battle?elds that Sandburg names.) I remember being
disturbed by Sandburg?s poem when I was a child. I
hadn?t yet realized adults could forget something that
mattered; I used to think they remembered everything.

 

 

 

A child?s initiation into the adult world is a series of
such awakenings. When I told my young son, as mothers
do, never to take candy from a stranger, he replied,
with genuine puzzlement: didn?t know grown-ups be
bad.? The grass comes and covers what grown-ups would
rather not remember. Is that what ?healing? means?



More than forty years have passed since the Holocaust.
Some people would like to file it away under ?Atrocities,
Twentieth-Century,? where it seems less terrible. But
for most people I know, the feelings aroused are still
raw. I wonder how long the sensation of pain will last.
Jews have a long memory, but even for Jews the destruc-
tion of the Temple has stopped hurting. We visit the
Burnt House in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans in
70 A.D., with a kind of historical curiosity. Imagine:
you can actually see pieces of charred wood and pottery!
The bones of a woman?s hand! In two thousand years,
Jews may look back and talk about Auschwitz as we
talk today about the destruction of the Temple. But
how shall we talk about it now?

We are still gathering the potsherds. In the State
Jewish Museum in Prague, housed in a number of
buildings that were once synagogues, you can see cere-
monial objects, textiles, manuscripts, early printed
books, Bohemian glass?the remnants of a thousand
years of Jewish life in Bohemia and Moravia, confiscated
by the Nazis. A millennium reduced to a handful of
objects in glass cases. When you look at these relics,
when you admire their colors or proportions, you forget
for a moment that they are objects shorn of context.

The context is beyond recovering; we can only guess
at it from scattered evidence. At Budapest?s Jewish
Museum, our Hungarian Jewish guide pointed to a
photo of a fourth-century Jewish tomb with a knobby
menorah and the inscription, ?God is One,? explaining
with some pride: ?There were Jews living here in the
Roman period; the Magyar invasion didn?t take place
until the tenth century.? The pathos of that claim: We
were bere?rst. And look at this photo: aJewish delega-
tion to the wedding of King Matthias in 1476, the Jews
dressed like gentiles, like nobles, sword on hip. We
could look like tlaem when we wanted to. Jewish army
of?cers in World War I, phOtographed in the field on
Rosh Hashana in their uniforms and striped prayer
shawls: We were loyal citizens. A rabbi blessing King
Charles IV in 1918: We were important; our blessing
mattered. Jewish athletes, a student choir, an ice cream
vendor: We led normal lives; we were like everyone else.
Those voices reverberate in the half-empty museum
with their boast, their apology.

Yet with so much lost, one is grateful that something

TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 123