"Journalism Under Fire" or control ?
1983 Article
The bourgeois writers always "study" a question through isolating it from the social, economic and political structure of that given society. The "studies" usually start with reducing a macro level question to a micro level, and end up at the individual level, in other words at the "human error". "Corruption, deceit and knavery, when they occur from time to time, are seen to be the result of human weakness. The institutions themselves are beyond reproach! " (H. Schiller, Mind managers) They blame nature and/or individuals for the problems.
The production relations constitute the economic-politic structure of society. "The class which has the means of production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production" (Marx, Engels, 1845). The ruling class exercises an active hegemony over all society through the State. "The coercive function of the state is assured by the apparatuses of repression; such as the army, the police, the courts, the prisons and the administration, and of indoctrination; such as, education, family, political-cultural institutions and the means of communications. Thus, the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. And these ideas, recalling Marx's statement, are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas, hence of the relationships which makes the class ruling, therefore the ideas of its dominance. This is why the study of means of communication cannot be isolated from the concept of the state. Since the ruling class has control over material and mental production, the function of the means of communication is to serve the interests of the ruling class. This applies to all existing economic-political systems, from the Soviet Russia to social-capitalist China, from Socialist Albania to fascist-oligarchic countries. (Of course, if we do not count the fact that in the one it serves the interests of a minority; justification and perpetuation of the social inequalities, in the other it serves the interests of majority; the elimination of social inequality)
It does not matter what label the capitalist put on the existing production relations; it does not matter how they describe the function of the means of communications; it doesn't matter how they justify the interrelation between the government and the corporations and the media, the essence of the state and the function of the means of communications do not change.
Even if we leave aside the concept of the state, the ownership of the means of communications plays the decisive role in their functioning. "The ownership and control of the mass media, like all other forms of property are available to those with capital" (Schiller .H) Together with the monopolization of the means of communication the function of the media is monopolized by the ownership, for the ownership, which is based on profit, manipulation, persuasion and indoctrination. A production relations in the media business, not different than those of the capitalist production relations was made up. An absolute control was settled with personally selected top editors and staffers. The news workers of the capitalist press become subject to constant pressure from a number of sources; the publishers, the executive editors, local authorities, business corporations, political organizations, the industrial-military complex and so on so forth. In other category belong the police, courts, FBI, CIA, etc. Finally " there is a pressure exerted by the "canons" of journalism evolved by the owners of the mass media and rooted in tradition, ethical norms and standards passed from generation to generation of journalists and drummed in at the universities and refresher courses." (Monopoly Press, Vitalis Peterusenko)
With the new division of labor, such a control was made possible in which all reports filed by field correspondents were completely rewritten by staffers at the home office. So the chance that the news will fail to reflect corporate (or "national") interests was assured. The reporters, journalists became the employees and the corporations became employers. What happened to a worker when he/she contradicted the interests of the bosses , happened to the news workers. In other words, the means of communications cannot run against the interests of their owners. To argue otherwise shouls be explained in two ways; first it is a self-deception - if the argumentator does not belong the ruling class; second, it is a fraud - the argumentator either belongs to the ruling class or subservient to it.
The bourgeois writers, such as Gaye Tuchman, accord news workers a much more active role in shaping the news. They argue that the news workers are a group with more power than most to " create, impose and reproduce social meanings - to construct social reality. David Halberstam, (The Power That Be) however, shows us otherwise. The men (he calls media barons) who founded TIME, CBS News, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, guided their corporate growth, shaped them editorially and reported for them. Henry Luce, the founder of TIME magazine, once said; "From the first page to the last...whatever comes out has to reflect my view, and that is the way it is " (Halberstam D, pp 91)
So , we can easily say that the writer of "Journalism Under Fire" is either one of the ruling class or its servile spokesman. Like the rest of bourgeois ideologues, his essay, from the very beginning proves that its aim is to distort the facts, distract the attention, and as always happens to shift the burden of the dirt of capitalism in general, of capitalist journalism in particular on to the backs of the individuals - the news workers. This is another striking example of how the ruling class and its mouthpieces justify their rotten systems by reducing the wrong goings to the individual level.
He says that "the public respect for journalism has fallen dramatically, and is threatening one of the foundation of the country's democratic system. But, like the others, he covers up the real cause which is the corporations that turned the media in to the means of profit and the "democratic system" into a "democracy" exercised by and for themselves. He comes out with the results of some polls carried on by NBC, ABC, and some newspapers, in order to reinforce his accusation of the news workers as the cause. However, poll itself is another weapon in the hands of the capitalists to hoax and manipulate the masses.
"The opinion polls correspond to specific interests, usually the political interests. The opinion poll is, at the present time, an instrument of political action, its most important function is perhaps to impose the illusion that a public opinion exists, and that is simply the sum of a number of individual opinions." (Pierre Bourdieu, 1972)
"The poll, though a scientifically shaped instrument, cannot be a neutral construct. By its very nature, it is concerned with human habits, intentions, and its formulation and utilization are inseparable from ongoing ongoing social relationships..it is intended to assist policy-making and decision making at the very governmental, political and economic levels...The empirical data is not only meaningless but dangerous. Rather than revealing, it conceals the actual parameters of the conditions that are supposedly being explored" . (H. Schiller, The Mind Managers)
Following his (The TIME Author) accusations of being the journalists unpatriotic, hostile to government of their country, and of their being ignorant to national security, he complains about the "freedom of Press".
Lets see what actually "freedom of Press" means:
"Freedom of Press" belong to the interests of the catalogue of bourgeois liberal principles. It is the freedom of property. It is functional to the interests of owners of the means of production. The liberal means of communications only transmit messages which take into account the protection of those interests. The bourgeois itself is in fact unable to apply it in its full sense and reverts to official censorship when its interests are threatened. " (Armand Mattelard, 1971)
The monopolies integrated with the business seek to extend direct influence over the rank and file of the mass media they strive to bribe and corrupt.
"Freedom of the press in capitalist countries is in fact freedom of the rich to bribe and buy the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with the venomous lies of the bourgeois press ( Lenin C.W Vol 28)
Lately scores of cases have come to light of reporters, columnists and editors receiving payments for publishing items about companies and their owners. They get gifts, free fare for themselves and their families, free recreation in the exotic places, and sometimes free call-girls.
" It is freedom for the capitalists to buy up hundreds of newspapers and this way fabricate the so called public opinion " (Lenin CW Vol 30)
"Under capitalism, a newspaper is a capitalist enterprise, a medium of information..a means of enrichment and instrument for duping and cheating the masses of working people." (Lenin CW Vol 32)
Briefly, being a member or a servile of the ruling class, the TIME author tries to create the impression that the interests of the nation are the interests of the corporations and vice versa. So, whoever rises against the corporations is denounced as rising against the "state", the "national interests".
For the question of the "invasion of private life", the situation is similar. Government and private surveillance, telephone tapping, electronic eavesdropping, violation of mail, spying - these and other forms and methods of invading privacy are widely protested.
The government administration service keeps files which contain not only biographic data, but also gossip, rumors and characterizations of about eight million persons. The Pentagon has a similar file for 14 million American. And the FBI has files on 158 million citizens, sophisticated computers are used to keep the files up-to-date are for retrieval of information.
It is not computers, of course, or the news-workers, but the social system that uses such a marvel of technology to humiliate, degrade and abuse its citizens.
Consequently, the ruling class which has the control over the mental and material production is naturally worried by the press, radio and television's loss of credibility. Besides the ideological. moral and ethical consequences of such massive loss of credibility in the eyes of mass reader might strike at their pockets. Because the profit considerations are often more weighty than any others, they started to criticize some aspects of the administration and its policies. But without touching the heart of its policy, naturally through blaming the individuals rather than the "system" and its institutions.
They had to find a guilty party for the wrong doing, and that has been the individuals; the news workers.
Erdogan A
1983
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