Do We Want to Know?
MILLER, ARTHUR S.
BOOKS Do We Want to Know? UNTENDED GATES: THE MISMANAGED PRESS by Norman E. Isaacs Columbia University Press. 258 pp. $20. INVENTING REALITY: THE POLITICS OF THE MASS MEDIA by Michael...
...Freedom of the press," as A. J. Liebling said in a famous remark, "belongs to the man who owns one...
...Coming from widely divergent viewpoints, Norman Isaacs, the quintessential journalistic establishmentarian, and Michael Parenti, from the American political Left and author of Democracy for the Few, provide a partial answer...
...But the Far-Right zealots have achieved their underlying purpose: The media, generally, are a major factor in wedding the people to the ideology of America's governing class...
...they must also sometimes admit realities...
...These giants have three basic functions: to make profits, to help sell consumer goods, and to train people for loyalty to the American system of corporate capitalism...
...Neither Untended Gates nor Inventing Reality will change the media, but both are essential to a fuller understanding of what we read and see daily...
...His book, after belaboring such practices as the widespread use of anonymous "sources," merely ends on a hortatory note: Isaacs thinks the media should be accurate, balanced, fair, compassionate, ethical, complete, and Accountable (oddly, he capitalizes this word...
...In 1984, Orwell portrayed a propaganda system that depended on violent coercion, as in totalitarian regimes...
...INVENTING REALITY: THE POLITICS OF THE MASS MEDIA by Michael Parenti St...
...Although Parenti does not say so, this is what annoys the Far-Right zealots—such as Reed Irvine, Richard Vi-guerie, and Jerry Falwell—who belabor the press for being too "liberal...
...Neither asks what may be the deeper question: Do the American people, speaking generally, want to be informed...
...Isaacs tells us that the mass media are badly managed...
...We have been gulled into mass intellectual somnolence...
...Strongly denying that Americans have a free and independent press, Parenti documents his stinging indictment with numerous examples of suppression or conscious slanting of "news...
...Inventing Reality is a slashing criticism of a macrocosmic nature of the derelictions of the media...
...They dislike the fact that although the media try "to invert reality...
...Establishment-oriented preacher...
...In the Age of Information, no one can be fully informed by the mass media...
...That is a harsh indictment, for which he has no remedy...
...Why, then, are so many people badly informed...
...The pity is that neither Isaacs nor Parenti explores the fundamental question of whether Americans want to be fully informed or, indeed, whether they can know all that should be known about immensely complicated public policy problems...
...16.95...
...As a consequence, the bland presentation in Untended Gates will have an impact similar to that of a sermon by some Arthur S. Miller, professor emeritus of constitutional law at George Washington University, is working on a book on the need for major constitutional revision...
...But he does not offer any useful suggestions to get there from here...
...His fundamental fear, stated more than once, is a strange addition to a volume delineating mismanagement of the press—a constitutional convention that he thinks would repeal the First Amendment's protection of press freedom...
...But as Thoreau intimated, there is no groundswell among the people to have it otherwise...
...The further meaning, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is that we live in a post-Orwellian world...
...Some editors and publishers do beat against the barriers of "benign" coercion...
...The former is a microcosmic account of the media, extolled as a provocative exposition of what goes on in American newsrooms...
...He acknowledges that the media are not (quite) a kept, "absolutely compliant," instrumentality...
...Heads will nod in quiet assent (perhaps), and the press managers will continue to do what they have been doing...
...Virtually, the community have come together and agreed what things should be uttered, have agreed on a platform and to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a thousand dares utter anything else...
...Isaacs concedes the dominance of the profit motive: "Profits, big profits, are the motive, not public-service journalism...
...This is the true problem of our "mismanaged press" as well as of "the politics of the mass media...
...The meaning of this for the First Amendment is obvious...
...This is the essential lesson that Isaacs and Parenti bring...
...Thoreau knew as long ago as 1858 that the press voluntarily limits the range and type of permitted expression: "There is no need of a law to check the license of the press...
...He did not foresee the "benign" control of the radically different, equally powerful system of indoctrination and propaganda that does not rest on coercion and that flourishes in nations called democratic...
...Parenti weighs in to assert that they are the chosen instruments of corporate capitalism with the mission of protecting that system...
...It is law enough, and more than enough to itself...
...Untended Gates and Inventing Reality should be read together...
...That was not quite correct: A few, a very few, do dare to swim against the tide...
...Martin's Press...
...by Arthur S. Miller This, we are often told, is the Age of Information...
...they come almost entirely from the alternative press or the impoverished magazines of opinion...
...He believes the media shape the people's perception of reality not by telling them what to think (although of course they do that) but by setting the agenda of public discourse—determining what people will think about...
...Parenti's main thesis is that "the press does many things and serves many functions, but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power...
...Save for tiny magazines of opinion-such as The Progressive, The Nation, and The Texas Observer—Liebling's "man" more likely is a corporate giant, hierarchically organized and bureaucratically managed...
...Americans are being ill served by them—their minds corrupted, their views controlled, their desires canalized into "acceptable" channels...
Vol. 50 • April 1986 • No. 4
