Free Press

In his film, Jesus of Montreal, Denys Arcand draws a wonderful comparison between the past function of the Catholic church, and the current role of our press and media. The press and media today play a part much like the church in medieval Europe. They are at least as pervasive, influential and perverse as the church once was. They provide an ongoing interpretation of reality, making sense of its day-to-day senselessness, from an ostensibly disinterested and morally superior standpoint, just as the church used to. They explain to people why things are as they are, why it’s best they stay that way, and how much worse everything could get if all that changed. In these ways, press and media accustom people to accept and adjust, to make the best of the overall pattern and seek satisfactions within themselves – fitness, cooking and self-actualization where once were prayer, meditation and flagellation – rather than by trying to alter the world around them.

Reading the Press

AGINCOURT COLLEGIATE INSTITUTE

The Oldest Secondary School in Scarborough

Dear Mr. Salutin,

I heard your brief [radio] exchange with Mr. Stevens [Managing Editor] of The Globe and Mail the other day. I was intrigued with your comments about their coverage of Reagan and the Iranian arms issue. As a teacher of politics and history, I would appreciate your views on how a serious sixteen-to eighteen-year-old student should approach news sources to develop a thoughtful, critical awareness of the same. I hope you can find time to reply.

Sincerely,

Ken Smith

Head, Department of History and Social Science

Dear Mr. Smith,

I start to despair when I think of an ordinary, serious person in this society – one of your students, for instance, or a working person – trying to make sense of world events on the basis of the daily papers and news broadcasts. The problem, in my opinion, is not lack of information. We get a flood of information in this society – not everything that’s out there, but enough to understand most of what’s going on – if you can piece it all together. The trouble is that the information comes at us in an almost impenetrable way, it’s like having sand flung in your face. The truly significant, the true but trivial, the contradictory, the distorted and contorted – along with the carefully told lies – are all reported and repeated as “news.”

Try to make sense, for instance, of the Iran/Contra Arms Scandal. There’s been a ton of news, but when you really look – it doesn’t make sense! At the centre of the story, for instance, is the notion that the United States broke faith with its own high principles by dealing with a terrorist government. Yet we know, from the press itself, that the United States backs governments all over the world which terrorize their own and other populations. Numerous military governments in South and Central America – and the previous government of Iran – have all received abundant support from the US, including training in torture and equipment meant for suppression of civilian populations. Over 100,000 people have been murdered by US-trained and supplied forces in El Salvador and Guatemala in the past decade! In the area of state-backed state terrorism, the US probably leads the league. In addition to backing terror by other states, the American government engages in terror itself, mining Nicaragua’s harbours and refusing to appear before the World Court; sponsoring assassinations (Castro) and coups (Guatemala, Iran, Chile); and maintaining Nicaraguan contras who specialize in burning crops, attacking civilian transport, and murdering foreign aid workers. The press has reported all this, sometimes more and sometimes less. Yet the same press continues to announce that the Reagan government has a policy against dealing with terrorist states, which policy it has only now betrayed. What is a reader to think?

The same holds true for practically any story you can think of: a mass of information, and at the centre, a set of contradictions and/or a vacuum of understanding. This applies to the so-called analysis by columnists, as well as the news pages. My heart goes out to any reader who yearns for understanding, not just information, and must rely on mainstream sources. One might very rationally despair and revert to soap operas, crossword puzzles or woodworking. Or grow completely cynical and apathetic. Or blame oneself for being stupid. These are reactions even among some journalists, who continue to report the world in terms they themselves have long since given up comprehending.

So what about your serious students? What are they to do? Alternate sources, like The Nation or In These Times from the US, or The New Statesman from the UK – even This Magazine in Canada – would certainly help, but that’s impractical for most people. They’ve enough to do making a living, getting a degree, dealing with family and friends – and just keeping up with the headlines plus a bit.

The main thing, I suppose, is – Beware. Of what? Of the assumptions that are sold almost every time we buy a paper or turn on The National. There are assumptions in our daily feeding of the news, but they are embedded so deeply that it’s very difficult to ferret them out and name them. We all grew up with these assumptions; we are taught them almost the way we learn the grammar of our native language so that they feel “natural,” we don’t notice them and we don’t question them, they seem inborn. Getting hold of them is like trying to pull out one of your own teeth. Let me list five such assumptions that I have managed to extract with great difficulty.

1) People in positions of power and privilege in our society are there, more or less, because of merit; therefore, they deserve respect. This assumption underlies a huge amount of reporting. Yet there is no evidence for it. People with wealth and power may well be there because they have lied or cheated or killed or bought their positions. History – modern and ancient – is full of examples. Yet the news rarely considers such alternate possibilities. One never hears Ronald Reagan described as a war criminal, or Finance Minister Michael Wilson an economic terrorist, or the head of any major corporation a gonnif. All these ascriptions are tenable. The facts are there to justify them. The terms make sense, they are applied to other people as a matter of course. Yet they do not appear in polite journalistic discourse about the high and mighty – it would be like farting in public. It’s simply not done – except in the most exceptional circumstances: an impeachment, a prison term, when such people are, as it were, stripped of their “natural” right to respect. Even Reagan, to revert, is treated in the current debacle as though he has fallen from grace – yet he’s been a liar and a baby-killer all along.

2) We live in what is, more or less, a real democracy. This would be of great use in supporting the first assumption, in the case of political leaders, if the first assumption were ever seriously challenged. Yet again, there is not much evidence for it. Look at all our elected leaders across the country – in the legislatures and councils, or any federal-provincial conference. The vast majority are middle-class, middle-aged, white business or professional men. They are a tiny minority of the population, yet they head all federal and provincial governments and nearly all political parties. Their narrow obsessions become public policy: slashing deficits, for example, by cutting social programs. All polls show that only businessmen favour this practice – but it remains a policy centerpiece. As for the democratic process itself, political participation consists, for most citizens, of the chance to cast a vote every few years between fairly identical candidates; a chance many simply ignore. There are some primitive components of democracy in our political system, but we are far from the full job.

3) The economic system under which we live is, more or less, a natural force, like gravity or the weather. The evidence for this assumption is also limited. More than half the world’s population, for instance, lives under alternate economic systems. But never mind comparisons; look at how our own economic reality is reported. The Globe and Mail this November ran a series on the current ways of the wealthy – with a glance at the poor – in Toronto. It was full of information on the excesses and indulgences of the Recently Even Richer among us; it read like softcore economic pornography. Yet it might have been a horticultural report: these plants over here are luxuriant and thriving but those there are scraggly and wilting. If there was any implied judgment it belonged in Lifestyles: Rich is In, Poor is Out. They are two separate, preordained realities. No sense that there might be a connection between the two: that the New Excess of the rich is the spoils of a war waged for the last six years on the rest of the population. Yet the evidence is available for this argument: the drop in real income of working people, the replacement of skilled jobs with menial service positions, the mad splurge of the wealthy on mergers and acquisitions as they shut down factories, the loss of services like the mail while real estate balloons irrationally, the visible disappearance of middle-income groups as we grow to resemble a Third World society of affluent and impoverished extremes – and almost all reported regularly in the Globe itself! Yet these “facts” don’t get dynamically connected – they all just . . . are. This is a good example of the irrelevance of mere fact. That there are rich and poor people is still a mere fact, though more suggestive. That there are rich people because there are poor people stimulates thought, outrage and even action – because if there is a cause other than the state of nature, then the situation could be other than it is.

4) The population of Canada is approximately eighty-five people. This is about the number you would get if you totaled those whose views and interests are recounted with any verve in the press, and I find it the real bloodsucker in the crew of assumptions foisted on us. It reflects the rather healthy elitism which, it seems to me, has become the chief trait of the current period. To the extent that the existence of those other than the elite is acknowledged at all, it is clearly suggested as a corollary – that some people and their opinions count far more than others.

5) There are no hidden assumptions contained in the general run of journalism, just a report of “the facts.” This could as readily be assumption number one, and the preamble to all others. It is difficult to place because it is both the beginning and end of the whole scam: we must assume there are no assumptions in order to buy everything that is assumed in whatever follows; and we are unlikely to acknowledge the attempt to hide assumptions until we have noticed they exist. Assumptions are not nearly as persuasive when one takes note – as in mathematics – that they are being assumed.

It seems to me if your students watch for these assumptions – and search for others – they’ll have something to do besides scratch their heads as they read the dailies or watch the newscasts. They’ll also be able to separate some of the information presented from the malpractice worked on it by hidden agendas; and start to interpret that information in ways that make some real sense to them.

Let me speculate, finally, on how journalism would look without the hidden assumptions I’ve been describing. This is more difficult than it sounds. Those assumptions are embedded in our way of thinking, and they tend to insinuate themselves in almost everything written in a journalistic context – regardless even of the writer’s intent. Take again the Iranian Arms Scandal. If the story is written in a straightforward, familiar manner, it will be assumed as a matter of course that leaders possess merit, that we live in a real democracy and so forth; that therefore the Reagan case is an aberration, an exception – and the whole thing ends up reinforcing the standard peddled version instead of challenging it! We’re having some experience with this problem in our current efforts at This Magazine to introduce more reportorial and investigative articles. We’re finding, I think, that simply telling a different story from the mainstream – but in the mainstream way – is not quite enough.

If you want to be read differently, it seems to me you have to somehow signal to the reader that you are not assuming what is usually taken for granted. You must clearly disengage what you are doing from the accepted framework of what is usually done. You can challenge those assumptions directly, by quoting and exposing – as Noam Chomsky or Alexander Cockburn do. You can include an explicit analysis of the facts you’re presenting, along with your own assumptions – instead of allowing the framework to slip in by default. Tone is also important. You can indicate a certain skepticism about accepted wisdom – often with just a phrase or a verbal shrug that puts the reader on notice that you want to be taken differently. Even the insertion of a little phrase like “I think,” placed before a statement, undermines the anonymous authority of conventional journalism. Or so it seems to me.

This has become rather vague and theoretical, so let me conclude with an example – of what I think is the most subversive thing I have ever written in the mainstream. I had a weekly column once, for a TV magazine with a huge circulation. One week I wrote about the morning news show, Canada AM, and especially about the coffee mugs they use and present to their thousands of guests. All over the world, people begin their day with those mugs. I said in a country like ours, with so few national symbols – a leaf, a beaver – it’s no small thing to have created an icon in the form of a coffee mug. And I concluded, “I wonder if Yasser Arafat still has his.” It seems to me that through media presentation Yasser Arafat has become a compendium of all the most odious and unacceptable moral and political traits. Though I haven’t the time to argue it here, I’d say this is a bum rap. Yet to most Canadians he remains the monster of the Western media; his monstrousness taken for granted and assumed. That image is harder to hold, though, when you picture him taking his Canada AM mug down from the kitchen cupboard. The assumptions totter, or maybe just shudder. A while later I was fired from that job, ostensibly because I criticized The Cosby Show, but I actually believe it was because of Yasser Arafat and the coffee mug.

Regards to you and good luck to your students.

Yours,

Rick Salutin

February 1987