It would be seriously disingenuous if we ignored the role of the news media and publishers in establishing or reproducing ideological positions, or the policies of vested interests – under guises of ‘truth,’ of ‘objectivity,’ or ‘letting the facts speak for themselves’.
Propaganda works in the most fascinating and mysterious ways, out in the open as “advocacy” or “official stories” parsed with those damnedest presentations of “single-story narratives” as a claim to the “truth”.
This type of propaganda is much more insidiously planted, as it were, when presented as objectivity or neutrality. Reportage, or what passes for analyses, and what we refer to as “framing”, is close to what Caryl Rivers (a contemporary and close collaborator of the late great historian Howard Zinn) described several years ago as part of the “Slick Spins and Fractured Facts: How Cultural Myths Distort the News”.
One way of understanding all of the above is to accept that all news media have an editorial position and newsrooms are populated by people with passions, prejudices and preferences, all of whom are expected to cohere with institutional guidelines – the ones that are codified and those that are culturally embedded.
This is hardly a newsworthy statement. The point I guess is that it would be seriously disingenuous if we ignored the role of the news media and publishers in establishing or reproducing ideological positions, or the policies of vested interests – under guises of “truth,” of “objectivity,” or “letting the facts speak for themselves”.
That last one gets my goat every time. We select facts and arrange them to tell particular stories. It may be a bit silly, but I have yet to hear of a fact that fell from the sky, knocked someone on the head, and proclaimed eternal validity or exclusivity. This should become clear later in this essay.
One quite revelatory example of how publishing houses (and their editorial staff) stayed in business was during the early Nazi era when Jewish owners of the Ullstein Publishing House sought to stay in business (without any Nazis actually looking over their shoulders), by simply following the (unwritten) script.
This was recounted in one of the two volumes of the autobiography of Arthur Koestler; The Invisible Writing or Arrow the Blue. As I write this, I am sitting, quite literally, in a wooden house on stilts in a Bornean forest kampung, and quite unable to provide references to Koestler’s recollections, but doveryai, no proveryai (trust, but verify).
Nonetheless, the Ullsteins were accused of “paving the way for Nazi ascendancy” through their compliance and complicity as “important cultural producers” (see the research paper, The “Ullstein Spirit”: The Ullstein Publishing House, the End of the Weimar Republic and the Making of Cold War German Identity, 1925–77, by Jochen Hung of Utrecht University in Holland).
For things to change everything must stay the same…
Fear of change, self-belief and solidarity frames international journalism
We are in an era of quite troubling transition, with all the morbidities that come therewith. The biggest “non-change” – I can’t think of a better word (metathesiophobia is such a mouthful when you’re writing in the media) – is the way that the US in particular, and the West in general, remains the reference point for reportage and analysis in what passes for international journalism.
I should hastily add that “international journalism” is a bit of an oxymoron; there are simply journalists within countries like the US, or Britain, or South Africa, who write about international things.
Only in South Africa, maybe also in Singapore, Taipei and the Philippines, have I witnessed cohorts of journalists who actually take their cues from Washington… the Philippines, as it goes, talks “non-alignment” and “peace” and expects everyone to fall for it.
But the US is continuing its military installations in the Southeast Asian archipelago as part of its intimidation of China. That latter part is barely reported on. China has a single foreign military base in the world (in Ethiopia), while the US has about 750 in about 80 countries. Someone made light of the “fact” that Iran had the nerve to place its country within a circle of American military bases.
A big deal was made of “international journalism” after the horrific attacks on New York City and Washington DC on 11 September 2001. I would add, also, that some folk for whom I have always had a lot of respect began to write about “international journalism after 9/11”. So I may be a bit wrong.
It’s just that “international journalists” like Christiana Amanpour hardly step beyond what is expected from Foggy Bottom, most notably at the time when she was married to James Rubin, who served as US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
The same would apply to “journalists” like Fareed Zakaria, who was mentored by Samuel Huntington, who gave us the intellectually lazy “clash of civilisations” nonsense…
We know, now, that the BBC, which most of us grew up listening to religiously (and which at least partly inspired me to become a journalist, with the late Don Mattera giving me the final push), has had Raffi Berg probably responsible for spinning the pro-Israeli/anti-Palestinian narrative at the corporation (see here, and he, Berg, was identified as a CIA and Mossad collaborator. I prefer not to write about that conflict because I need to put food on the table…).
Anyway, the daily international news, from the legacy media to online news media, is almost always about US and European positions on Russia, China, Iran. It’s laughable and sometimes depressing.
Forget politics for the moment. You may write about the magnificence of “Route 66” or the beauty of autumn in Vermont, and that’s perfectly acceptable. What is not acceptable is to write about the destruction of Iraq or Libya, or the tens of wars and invasions that the US has been part of over the past seven decades. They dropped more bombs on Laos than any of us can count, for goodness’ sake.
“The American bombings left Laos the most heavily bombed nation, per capita, in human history,” according to The Legacies of War project.
Such cruelty and injustice are ignored, especially if “the official story” is fed by the embassy in Pretoria. There is rarely a mention of the suspension of habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay, or the wilful Nato bombing of the former Yugoslavia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMvQS-vIjGE
You have to write about “US reports” about Iran’s nuclear programme, when the US actually dropped nuclear bombs on innocent people – in a show of might to the old Soviet Union.
It’s like telling a mass killer that she is, now, allowed to carry heavy weapons and walk about the world doing as she wishes. Of course, the darling of the liberal establishment, John Mearsheimer, makes all the right noises to put himself on the right side of history, when he has trained legions of young students that “realism” is, well, just the way things are, and we have to accept it.
Now write about, say, what is (probably) the oldest mosque in the world in Huaisheng, Guangzhou, and all the US/EU tropes about the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese are laid at your door. Is it not funny that the US always talks about “Communist China,” but nobody talks about “Capitalist America”? (There is a rapidly growing literature about the decline of the West, and about Western liberalism that is not written by lefties; start by reading the Financial Times’ correspondent, Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism).
Try to discuss the epochal opening up of China by Deng Xiaoping, and the conversation is redirected to Mao Tse Tung or Chinese warlordism. American-fed journalism always raises Taiwan, when the Chinese themselves (from its highest echelons) do not want to go to war against “its family” on the Austronesian island colonised by Chinese nationalists in the 1940s.
It’s okay to discuss Ronald Reagan’s “neoliberal revolution” as necessarily a good thing, but the conversation about the internment of Japanese in World War 2, or mass incarceration of black men in America, means you “hate America”.
Or, as a US diplomat, whom I will name – Larry Schwartz – told me in the early 1990s that my questions about the Tompkins Square Park riot of 1988 when “homeless people, squatters and drug addicts” (that was “the official story”), was “the type of things that the Soviets liked to talk about,” he said. I was not a Soviet lapdog!
Most recently, and on another level, one of the most beautiful cities in the world is in Iran. Consider this, it’s perfectly acceptable to write about the wonders of New York’s Times Square, Central Park, or the Grand Canyon, or Big Sur, but write about Isfahan – arguably the most beautiful city in the world – and all the misdeeds of the Ayatollahs are laid at your door.
Try to explain the brilliance of St Petersburg’s architecture, and all the cruelty and injustice of Joseph Stalin is placed on your back. Explain how Russia has gone from the horrors of the Boris Yeltsin years (reeling from the collapse of the former Soviet Union), and the destruction of the 1998 financial crisis, to a payment system that, as a result of hyperinflation – all with the help of American advisers – has become a “virtual economy”, according to the American liberal establishment.
A most conservative record explains that Russia’s economy is “outperforming”. Notwithstanding American-led sanctions, the International Monetary Fund’s “World Economic Outlook” (of October 2024) expects “the Russian economy to grow by 3.6 percent this year, up from the 3.2 percent expansion stated in the preceding edition published in April and also comfortably ahead of the United States (2.8 percent), Germany (0.0 percent), France (1.1 percent) and the United Kingdom (1.1 percent)”.
The propaganda model of journalism (more correctly, donor-funded or philanthropy journalism) will necessarily deflect from all that. The single-story narrative is crafted between Washington and Brussels. Russia, Iran, China – bad, US/EU – good.
Let’s go back to Iran. “International journalists” readily report US intelligence sources (accepted as truth for some reason) telling us that Iran funds Hamas or Hezbollah (which may well be true), but you cannot write that US companies are making millions from feeding the war machines.
You also cannot write about the perversity of a US lawmaker (or a French one) wearing a lapel badge of a foreign country, but condemn anyone/everyone who dares to wear the lapel badge or display the flag or symbols of America’s latest enemy … like women in the French legislatures who have been asked to remove their hijabs. Again, I don’t care for flags or symbols of national pride, I care about intellectual honesty and integrity in journalism.
Also, Iran says it does not intend to have nuclear warheads, but we are not meant to believe that. The US, which does have nuclear warheads, and which has used them, tells us a different story – and we have to believe them. (For the record I oppose all nuclear arms, and I am not a fundamentalist of any stripe).
Read this, and this, and you may get a sense of how propaganda is shaped around the belief that Iran needs to be attacked, or bombed, as the New York Times opined almost a decade ago, and how the US is always the good guy in the piece – never mind the increased military presence around Iran (and elsewhere in the Middle East).
Some of our intellectuals will sink into catastrophism if Iran, China or Russia builds military bases or sends aircraft squadrons to the US borders with Mexico or Canada.
Recently, a seriously romanticised and almost hagiographic piece was written about the departure of former US Ambassador to South Africa Ruben Brigety. It was up to then Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga (say what you wish about Motshekga, she is a Cabinet minister) to formally bid farewell to the former Chinese Ambassador, to Ambassador Chen Xiaodong and his wife, Madame Zhang Bin on 5 March last year. You would have to look really hard, across the media, to hear about the Chinese Ambassador to South Africa, Wu Peng.
In the meantime, Anthony Blinken and Ursula von der Leyen hog the news of the world as paragons of virtue, but the ambassadors of Russia, China and Iran (America’s enemies) barely get a word in. At least not in the South African media.
Disclaimer: Having spent more than three decades under the spell of and in education and working in “the West”, today most of my time (of learning and listening) is spent on and in the East. My budget has so far taken me to refugee camps on the Myanmar-Thailand border where the policies of a certain Buddhist fundamentalist have persecuted minorities, and around the Nusantara. I may end up in China at some point, but I have bills to pay at home…
Finally, the silence of journalists (about the killing of tens of journalists in Palestine) has been defining. We were a generation that fought against media repression, censorship and bannings, but the same people who fought against all of that in the 1980s are quiet now that America’s allies are killing journalists.
The victors may write history, but some of us will win the war against memory and wilful forgetting.
If any lessons can be taken from all of the above, it would be that searches for the truth, for intellectual integrity and honesty, cannot be attenuated by the caprices of fashion or by journalists who have either not read a book recently, or rely on the knowledge they acquired as political journalists representing the white media during the apartheid era. DM