"Hostile newspapers are more to be dreaded than a hundred thousand bayonets." -Napoleon

"Hastiness and superficiality-- these are the psychic diseases of the 20th century and more than anywhere else, this is manifested in the press."--Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The press has long cherished the notion that it is an arbiter of truth, an unbiased corps of crusaders for fact, a champion of god-like objectivity. But its arrogance misleads it. It is often anything but what it claims. In short, it is subject to the same perceptual limitations as all humanity. And often those limitations are amplified by its sense of its own self-importance.

Propaganda, the control of the flow of information, and perceptual engineering were devices the Romans used after their armies had been battered badly in their war with Hannibal. The Roman propagandists and spirit-rousers proclaimed it was a Roman duty to die rather than to yield. Women weren't allowed to go out wearing mourning, though nearly every one of them had lost a relative. Rumor and gossip were forbidden. Silence was decreed in public places. News bearers carrying information into the city were allowed to talk to no one but the officials, the praetors. And no one was allowed to leave the city.

Successful politicians--men who control or transform societies-know that news functions in a social organism to distribute information the way blood stream functions in a biological organism to distribute oxygen. Oxygen enters the body at the lungs, but is needed at the toes. News enters the social system in Moscow or Geneva, but is needed in Keokuk, Iowa. For when the time comes to react, the reaction will depend on the mood of all of the individuals of the social body. Whether it's a mood of anger or passivity, a mood that dictates a celebration, or grim determination to act. That mood can only affect every cell in the social organism simultaneously if all of those cells are bathed in the same information.

By 1578, both the Europeans and the Turks had learned the art of disinformation--putting out false news reports.

William of Orange brought a printing press with him to England to help establish the Glorious Revolution of 1868. And Jefferson made sure that a newspaper editor he could rely on set up shop in Washington before he moved there to take on the presidency.

Napoleon came to power as the printed word was rising like a rocket in importance. 124 new newspapers started during the first three years of the Revolution. French public opinion found a new voice and new leaders in its journalists.

Because annual newspaper subscriptions were a mere 36 cents in France (vs. roughly $30 in England), newspapers attained mass circulation. The papers attacked like harpies. No government could afford to ignore them. Leaders of the Revolution handled obstreperous papers by guillotining their editors.

Napoleon wanted to control not just states, but the flow of information He cut the number of papers from over 70 to less than ten. And he provided unofficial subsidies to a semi-official paper, writing some of its stories himself.

A British official report said that though England was ahead in the development of new weapons, Napoleon "has got the start of us" ... [in] "the use of the press." Nappie's control over the newspaper The Monitor, said the British report, was more powerful than his efforts with "cannon and sword." the French even produced an anti-British paper for the consumption of foreigners. Napoleon censored books, plays, and every form of expression, stamping out anti-government opinion. A bit of that dictatorial spirit still remains in the press of France today.

Abraham Lincoln was a pioneer of press manipulation. When one newspaper regularly disagreed with him, he tried to get its postal privileges revoked. He had the publisher of a New York paper he felt was undermining the war spirit arrested.paper He spent hours huddled with reporters, bombarded their editors with letters, dangled the possibility of exclusives, and offered to make the founder of The New York Herald ambassador to France.

The tradition of the investigative press is all but dead in the U.S. when Howard Fineman of Newsweek was asked how a HUD scandal that mis-spent billions of dollars had managed to unroll for eight years during the Reagan administration without the press catching wind of it, he said that the President had indicated he didn't feel HUD was important, so reporters weren't covering it. In other words, the press was only going to investigate a scandal if someone rubbed their nose in it.

Since it's unlikely any president is likely to hand out press releases pointing to his peccadilloes, it's unlikely the press is going to cover them.

Russell Baker reports that when he was assigned to cover the White House for the Baltimore Sun, he discovered the reporters were kept caged in a small room, got all their news as handouts from the press secretary, and only were allowed access to higher level interviews if they swore informal oaths not to reveal any uncomfortable truths to the public.

Molly Ivins, a veteran and highly respected journalist who's worked for the New York Times, among other papers, wrote in the Houston Journalism Review: "You can find out more about what's going on at the state capitol by spending one night drinking with the capitol press corps then you can in months of reading the papers those reporters write for. The same is true of City Hall reporters, court reporters, police reporters, and education writers -- any of us. In city rooms and in the bars where news people drink you can find out what's going on. You can't find it in the papers." In other words, the press corps tells us far less than they really know. And because they get their news from each other in bars and restaurants rather than from investigation, they often know far less than even Molly Ivins thinks they do.

While millions were being killed in the Soviet Union western journalists participated in the cover up. In the early days of the Russian Revolution, Winston Churchill received photos of atrocities that appalled him. Men, women, and children were being killed indiscriminately. Many of them were dying of appalling torture and mutilation. Churchill became convinced that the Bolsheviks were undertaking one of the most extraordinary atrocities in modern history, pulling off acts of mass murder that dwarfed even the unbelievable bloodletting of the recently ended First World War.

What's more, Churchill was well aware of the fact that in the opinion of the revolution's leader, Lenin, this revolution was not strictly a Russian affair. Lenin planned to export its bloody modus operandie to the rest of the world. Stopping the Bolsheviks became Churchill's first priority. He worked diligently to persuade the newspapers to publish the photos of the mangled bodies left in this "humanitarian" revolution's wake. But no matter how convincingly he argued, no newspaper would accept a single photograph.

As a result, public opinion about the Bolshevik Revolution was relatively indifferent.

This deliberate blindness occurred despite the fact that when the Bolsheviks had initially seized the country by force from a democratically elected parliament, the English had sent troops to overturn the coup. Eventually, however, Churchill was forced to have those troops withdrawn. Churchill's hope was to topple Lenin and his crew, who he was convinced represented only a tiny minority of the Soviet citizenry. Churchill wanted to call for immediate Russian elections, and to replace the usurpers with a democratic government. But thanks to Britain's newspapers, in the minds of the public there were no atrocities. There was no danger, there were no Russians to be saved, and there was no reason to fight. One result: over fifteen million Russians died in the civil war that followed, and tens of millions more were killed in the following decades under Stalin.

Two decades later, when Stalin carried out policies of unparalleled genocide, Walter Durante, Russian correspondent for the New York Times, who was set up in a luxurious Moscow apartment with a good supply of caviar, said nothing about the slaughter. Reporting the truth might have endangered his cozy relationship with the Soviet authorities. Hundreds of other journalists visited the Soviet Union without reporting on the slaughter. Lincoln Steffens, an influential American journalist, said, "I have seen the future and it works."

The journalistic crew tried to give the impression that while the west was decomposing, the Soviet Union was showing the way to a brave new world. Through this act of well-meaning wishful thinking, journalists became accomplices to mass murder.

Journalist were swayed like sheep by the intellectual fashion of the moment. The intellectual superstars of high culture were pro-Soviet, and the press was determined to demonstrate that it, too, was intelligent and "enlightened."

George Bernard Shaw went to the Soviet Union and said it was ushering in a thousand bright tomorrows. He read his own dreams into this land of horror. Critic Edmund Wilson said the death chamber of the Soviet state was "a moral sanctuary where the light never stops shining." Writers who attempted to tell the truth were viciously attacked as enemies of progressive humanitarianism.

One reporter wrote the following:

In the mid-Nineteen Sixties, covering urban unrest for CBS, I perceived that television placed a premium on violence and the threat of violence, I found that I was more likely to get on the CBS Evening News with a black militant talking the language of 'Burn, baby burn!' than with moderates appealing for a Marshall Plan for the ghetto. So, I spent a lot of time interviewing militants like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rapp Brown. In early February 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. came to Washington to announce plans for a 'poor people's march' on Washington in the spring. It was envisaged as a challenge to America's social conscience at a time when the Vietnam. The civil rights community was sharply divided over whether the campaign should be completely peaceful or resort to disruptive action, like unlicensed demonstrations and blocking the bridges into the capitol. Dr. King was having trouble sustaining his policy on non-violence. On February 6, the evening before his planned news conference, the civil rights leader expressed his [spiritual] rally, 'I can't lose hope, because when you lose hope, you die.' Only dimly aware of the pressures on Dr. King, I came to his news conference with a CBS camera crew prepared to do what TV reporters do -- get the most threatening sound bite I could in order to insure a place on the Evening News lineup. I succeeded in eliciting from him phrases on the possibility of 'disruptive protest' directed at the Johnson Administration and Congress. As I waited for my camera crew to pack up, I noticed that Dr. King remained seated behind a table in an almost-empty room, looking depressed. Approaching him, I asked why he seemed so morose. 'Because of you,' he said, 'and because of your colleagues in television. You try to provoke me to threaten violence, and if I don't then you will put on television those who do. By putting them on television, you elect them our leaders. And, if there is violence, will you think of your part in bringing it about?' I was shaken, but not enough to keep me from excerpting the news conference film from the evening news. I never saw Dr. King again.

The press has consistently felt it has a right denied to other arms of the government by the Constitution -- to presume anyone it feels like attacking is guilty until proven innocent and to execute punishment before trial. The press' punishment comes in the form of the destruction of reputations and careers. As Shakespeare said, stealing a man's reputation does him far more damage than stealing his purse.

Press attacks, however, can steal both the reputation and the bank account by making a victim unemployable. Equally offensive, the stress created by false accusations can damage or destroy a victim's health.

From 1968 to 1988, the average length of a sound bite TV news allotted to a presidential candidate fell from 43 seconds to 9.8. Meanwhile, pictures of the candidates with none of his words tripled. This gave the TV producer nearly total power to reshape or distort a candidate's message.

Those who receive the least criticism from the press are usually the biggest butchers. Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Syria's Assad, Yassir Arafat, Fidel Castro--most had their mass murders and forced labor camps swept under the carpet. Some were actually lionized.

King Hussein killed over 2,000 Palestinians on Black Monday--despite the fact that Jordan IS Palestine. In many cases, Hussein's troops went on to mutilate the bodies. No American papers castigated Hussein. He continued to be portrayed as a moderate. Even Pol Pot was defended by the press, who refused to cover the atrocities reported by refugees escaping Cambodia until Russia and North Viet Nam embarked on a campaign to publicize the atrocities.

Professions are not organized solely for the sake of advancing human knowledge, though that's what they pretend. Each profession has its pecking order and its requirements for membership. Though those on the bottom may have the most original ideas, those on the top have the influence. They are the keepers of the orthodoxies. Those on the outside may have ideas more enlightening still, but they are attacked as intellectual vagrants--not because of the quality of their concepts, but because they don't belong. Professional organizations spend a disproportionate amount of their time and money to advance the power and prestige of their members.

The newspaper industry was less than objective from its first years in America. Its famous opposition to the stamp tax in 1765 was based largely on the fact that the act would have raised the costs of newspapers. The press portrayed the tax as a body blow against American liberty. The next blow against liberty they spotted was the Townsend Act, which raised import duties on a variety of goods, including one that hit them in the pocketbook--paper.

American newspapers helped make the American Revolution, among other things, by referring to the thirteen colonies as a single unit lined up against a British enemy.

The Boston Tea Party was organized in the home of a newspaper editor.

In 1919 the New York Times reported the Russian Civil War as one Bolshevik defeat after another. But the Bolsheviks won.

In the Middle East today fundamentalist leaders talk constantly about reviving the worldwide empire of Islam and toppling the west. [A note-these words were written in 1986…fifteen years before 9/11.] To journalists, the idea that this could happen is not believable. So they don't report it. When Hitler told his countrymen they'd rule the world and turn all other races into slaves that, too, sounded preposterous. So the London Times and New York Times didn't report it. It turned out to be one of the most important stories of its age.

In his newspaper column of May 19, 1933, Walter Lippman, an American Jew, wrote an article in praise of Adolph Hitler. Lippman called Hitler "the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people." He then added, "persecuting the Jews serves a purpose. Satisfying Germans' yearning to conquer somebody, it was a kind of lightning-rod which protects Europe."

Journalists in Viet Nam were motivated, not by a search for truth, but by their desire to win the praise of their fellow journalists. The treachery of professionalism is at its worst in journalism. Journalists claim to seek the truth. In reality, they seek popularity among their comrades. This means vigorously avoiding any truths their fellow journalists would scorn.

Each journalist knows certain facts or ideas are forbidden, no matter how true or urgent they may be. Writing about them will get you shunned. On the other hand, certain ideas are popular. The diligent journalist must attempt to seek validation of these concepts everywhere, even if that requires shaping or fabricating the facts. His comrades will not scorn him for falisifying his reporting. They'll praise him for upholding what is just and true.

Larry Pintak, who was a CBS news journalist from 1980 to 1985 in Beirut and other Middle East centers, says the producers back in New York didn't want footage "unless you had pictures of people with guns shooting at each other...Given a choice between a crucial political development and mindless violence, mindless violence won out every time."

The mayor of New Orleans in 1960 begged TV and newspaper reporters to stop their coverage of the city's school integration disorders for three days. Though his request seems odious, its reasoning was not. The journalists, he said, were a major cause of the violence. Explained the mayor, "in many cases these people go to the area to get themselves on television and hurry home to" see the show. The mayor claimed he had seen television cameramen "setting up the scene" and staging mayhem. Not a hard claim to believe.

Sam Donaldson, the television newscaster, was lacing into David Stockman about his book on the "David Brinkley" show. George Will listened to Donaldson's summation of the book's points with astonishment, then leaned over and said "but Sam, I've read the book and that's not what it says." Answered Donaldson, "Well, I don't have CR to read the book. I know what it says!"

Are these the words of a seeker after truth?

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