Mass (media) hypnosis

Op-ed

by Hans Durrer

It doesn't cease to baffle me that whenever I turn on the news it does not seem to matter at all which channel I choose — they all seem to agree on what is relevant in this world.

We all love freedom, we are told — and often by politicians who are forced to live a tightly regulated life with no freedom at all. Fact is however that we abhor freedom, that we prefer to have none of it.

Isn't freedom supposed to create variety? So how come it creates so much uniformity? 'Cause we're afraid of freedom — for what humans, above all, want is security, says Dostoyevsky's Great Inquisitor.

Moreover, we human beings want to belong. Which is why the American media stood by its government when it decided to invade Iraq.

Meanwhile, the New York Times — its opinion-page, however, opposed the invasion — regrets publicly that it agreed with the Bush administration "that Saddam Hussein was concealing a large weapons program that could pose a threat to the United States or its allies" — which, as we all know by now, could hardly have been more wrong — and it also regrets that it "didn't do more to challenge the president's assumptions."

So how come it didn't? "At the time, we believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding large quantities of chemical and biological weapons because we assumed that he would have behaved differently if he wasn't. If there were no weapons, we thought, Iraq would surely have cooperated fully with weapons inspectors to avoid the pain of years under an international embargo and, in the end, a war that it was certain to loose. That was a reasonable theory, one almost universally accepted in Washington and widely credited by diplomats all around the world. But it was only a theory."

The mass media do not only serve, they also represent, and are part of, the masses — and these masses are characterised by group thinking. Contrary to what editors usually claim, they are not after the exclusive story that nobody else has, they are after the story that their rival paper has. As James Fenton in "The Fall of Saigon" reported: "In those initial days it was possible to travel outside the city, since no formal orders had been given. Indeed it was possible to do most things you fancied. But once the restrictions were published restricting us to Saigon, life became very dull indeed. The novelty of the street scenes had worn off, and most journalists left at the first opportunity. I, however, had been asked by the Washington Post to maintain its presence in Vietnam until a replacement could be brought in. I allowed the journalists' plane to leave without me, then cabled Washington stating my terms, which were based on the fact that I was the only stringer left working for an American paper. The Post, on receipt of my terms, sacked me. I had thought I had an exclusive story. What I learned was: never get yourself into an exclusive position. If the New York Times had had a man in Saigon, the Post would have taken my terms. Because there were no rivals, and precious few Americans, I had what amounted to an exclusive non-story."

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/EDITORIAL/oped0707.shtml

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1123