Today's Stories

April 28, 2009

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

April 28, 2009

Predictable Distortions

Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

By JEFF NYGAARD

On April 8th, 2009 the news broke in the U.S. media of “a riveting high-seas drama [in which] an unarmed American crew wrested control of their U.S.-flagged cargo ship from Somali pirates ... and sent them fleeing to a lifeboat with the captain as hostage.” Those are the words of the Associated Press, but such breathless coverage was ubiquitous in this country, with endless references to “the scourge of piracy,” and headline assertions that “Pirates Are Terrorists.”

In a review of Marcus Rediker’s 2004 book Villains of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, scholar Tim Sullivan of Cedar Valley College in Texas had this to say in his review of Chapters Seven and Eight (the emphasis was in the original):

“[These chapters] present ‘golden age’ piracy as an early example of class warfare, pitting pirates against the emerging nation-state and the rise of capitalism. . . . The influence of powerful merchant companies on state politics becomes evident as Rediker explains how pirates had to be declared hostis humani generis (the common enemies of mankind). Piracy, he reminds us, was above all, a crime against property (specifically vessels of large merchant companies) and, therefore, against all property owners and law abiding citizens. Pirates were evil monsters, not heroes, as the Reverend Mather informed his parishioners, and any who sympathized with them were, themselves, sinners.”

So, in 1725 pirates were declared hostis humani generis. Now, in 2009 we’re told that “pirates are terrorists,” with the “terrorist” label being the modern designation for a “common enemy of mankind.” There’s a very useful lesson here about how modern media functions as a conduit for propaganda. First let’s look at how that profit dynamic works, and then we’ll get to the pirates.

The Profit/Propaganda Dynamic in the Media

In 1928, when those words were written, movies were the dominant mode for reaching a mass, national audience. Substitute the concept of “mass media” for “American motion picture” in the above quotation, and consider that the principle doesn’t change: The key here is “meeting market demands.” For mass media to be successful—then and now—they have to refrain, as Bernays says, from “stimulating new ideas.” In other words, they have to be highly attuned to what he calls “broad popular tendencies,” and what I call internalized, or “Deep” Propaganda.

The man sometimes known as “The Father of Public Relations,” Edward L. Bernays, wrote these words in his classic 1928 book “Propaganda” (page 166):

“The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize, and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions.”

In 1928, when those words were written, movies were the dominant mode for reaching a mass, national audience. Substitute the concept of “mass media” for “American motion picture” in the above quotation, and consider that the principle doesn’t change: The key here is “meeting market demands.” For mass media to be successful—then and now—they have to refrain, as Bernays says, from “stimulating new ideas.” In other words, they have to be highly attuned to what he calls “broad popular tendencies,” and what I call internalized, or “Deep” Propaganda.

Since modern media organizations pay the bills by selling advertising, and advertisers need to reach consumers, this means that the desired audience of an advertising-based media organization will be consumers. And the preferred consumers will not be just any old consumers, but will be the ones that have some money and are the most likely to spend it on their advertisers’ products.

One of the ways that media organizations succeed in building and maintaining relationships with their desired audience is by basing their stories on premises that are the most comfortable to the most people. This means sticking, by and large, to “conventional wisdom,” which tends to be made up of the most uncontroversial ideas held by the largest number of people. This is so because the alternative—using challenging or unconventional premises upon which to base a news story—will induce in many people a dissonance that will tend to corrode the trust upon which every media organization relies.

Notice that “truth” doesn’t really enter into the equation. The important thing is that most people have ideas about the right and natural “order of things” and media organizations want to reflect these pre-existing ideas. The legitimacy of these ideas is then tacitly affirmed by the repetition, and the cycle perpetuates itself. Beyond the upset that new or challenging ideas tend to cause in the target audience, such ideas have the additional disadvantage of requiring justification, which would take valuable time and/or space in the limited geography of the newspaper or news broadcast. For all of these reasons, editors and reporters who stay in the business for any length of time tend to produce stories that tread upon well-traveled paths.

Ed Bernays’ words quoted above are from 1928, so we can see that all of this has been true for nearly a century. A similar point was made 77 years later, by Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Speaking to the New York Times in 2005, he said: “Media coverage both shapes and reflects public opinion.”

Here’s where people often get confused. Does the media shape public opinion? Or does it simply reflect the opinions that people already have? It’s both, and the recent media frenzy about Somalian pirates will illustrate the point quite nicely.

Failed States and Failed States

My state of Minnesota—specifically, my neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis—has a huge population of Somalian immigrants, the largest population of Somalians in the U.S. That’s the context in which the local newspaper, the Star Tribune, printed the following sentence on April 14th, 2009:

“The pirate crisis . . . showed Somalia for what it is: A textbook definition of a ‘failed state,’ whose lawlessness explains . . . why so many have eagerly chosen Minnesota over Mogadishu...”

The U.S. media was filled with similar references during and immediately after the hostage-taking, including references to a “war on piracy” and “anarchy on the high seas” and more. While one cannot condone the behavior of these so-called pirates, one can’t help but notice the deafening silence in regard to what one analyst calls “the other piracy” which has remained almost unmentioned in the tsunami of coverage in the U.S. media of this “riveting” story.

That other piracy is “the massive illegal foreign fishing piracy that has been poaching and destroying the Somali marine resources for the last 18 years following the collapse of the Somali regime in 1991.” That’s Kenyan journalist Mohamed Abshir Waldo speaking, referring to what is known as Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. Waldo adds that “Another major problem closely connected with the IUUs and illegal fishing is industrial, toxic and nuclear waste dumping in both off-shore and on-shore areas of Somalia.”

The twin problems of IUU fishing and the dumping of toxic waste have caused untold suffering to unknown numbers of virtually defenseless Somalian fishermen and coastal residents. The Voice of America published a story in 2005 on “reports from northern Somalia of illnesses consistent with radiation sickness, including respiratory infections, mouth ulcers, abdominal hemorrhages and unusual skin diseases.” The Agence France Presse news service reported at that time that “Somalia's government in exile [has] demanded an urgent probe” into these reports. None of this was deemed newsworthy by the U.S. media.

According to Waldo, “The countries engaged [in the illegal practices] include practically all of southern Europe, France, Spain, Greece, UK.”, and more. None of these European states are ever referred to in the West as “failed states,” despite their past and current practice of exploiting and stealing from weaker nations around the world. Nor is that bleak term applied to the U.S., despite its “failure” exemplified by a long history of military aggression against sovereign states around the globe, from Iraq to Nicaragua to Vietnam. Not to mention the U.S.’s poisoning of the world economy, and its being the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide, and its having 50 million people uninsured, and so forth.

Distorting the Pirate Story in Predictable Ways

Throughout the coverage of the pirate attack on the U.S.-flagged ship, the corporate media tended to report the crimes of the so-called “pirates” in vivid detail, engaging in fear-mongering—referring to “high-seas terror” and “failed states”—while ignoring the pattern of crimes from which the piracy was born. By doing so journalists as a group were doing exactly what the Father of Public Relations, Ed Bernays, said the mass media must do in order “to meet market demands.” And that is to “reflect, emphasize, and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies.” The “tendencies” upon which much (not all) of the reporting on the Somali pirate story relied include:

1. A tendency to racism, in which poor, largely dark-skinned people are identified as “pirates” and “terrorists” while more-affluent, largely “white” people are assumed to be nothing but innocent victims, if they are characterized by race at all, which they are typically not. (The crew of the U.S. ship was not entirely “white,” by the way, but that doesn’t change the racialized understanding of perpetrator and victim to which I here refer.)

2. A tendency to Eurocentrism, in which the victim/perpetrator dynamic is invariably viewed from the vantage point of the European West, where there are no “failed states”, but only tearful reunions and heroic feats of military “precision killing” (that’s the actual phrase used in an April 13th, 2009 NY Times report headlined “Obama Signals More Active Response to Piracy.”)

3. A corollary of the previous tendency is the tendency of people in the more powerful nations to focus on threats to people like themselves. That is, threats to the powerful. To use a crude analogy, when a human is bitten by an insect it is nearly certain that action will be taken to address the threat. In contrast, when a human steps on a less-powerful insect the death will rarely be noticed by humans, much less addressed with action. In the current example, the “piracy” that threatens European shipping moves our President to say that “we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes.” He doesn’t say, and needn’t say, that he is referring to one “piracy” only: that of the less-powerful people in the story. His silence helps perpetuate the invisibility of the piracy of the powerful.

4. A tendency to simplify and individualize human behavior. In this way of thinking, the explanation for “piracy” is that some people are simply evil. This is in contrast to a systems way of thinking which, while it may also condemn the behavior, would attempt to understand the behavior by considering context, history, and the possibility that the perpetrators may have some complex and comprehensible motivations for their criminal behavior. A good example of how this might apply to our understanding of pirates comes from the work of Marcus Rediker (see sources for further reading elsewhere in this issue.)

The key to understanding the news coverage that we have seen on the Somali Pirate story is to remember that the driving force behind the modern market-based news organization is the need to reach the largest number of the consumers that are desired by advertisers. The fear of alienating those consumers has an insidious effect on the ideas and opinions that are distributed, both consciously and unconsciously, as part of the news “product.” The desires and intentions of individual journalists are of little importance in this dynamic, since the bottom line is this: The news corporations that best “meet market demands” by best “reflecting, emphasizing, and even exaggerating broad popular tendencies” will be the ones that survive in the marketplace. The organizations that consistently rock the ideological boat will not thrive, and will likely not survive.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s an unavoidable consequence of the profit orientation of the modern media industry.

Jeff Nygaard is a writer and activist in Minneapolis, Minnesota who publishes a free email newsletter called Nygaard Notes, found at www.nygaardnotes.org

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