One of the most striking aspects of life in Third World countries is information starvation. Because they’ve learned not to trust their state-controlled media, people in authoritarian backwaters carefully debrief newcomers. What’s going on abroad? What’s going on here? Did you get any foreign newspapers or magazines through customs?
News is a component of infrastructure every bit as important as roads and telephones. Businesspeople need to know if a border with a neighboring country is open so they can decide whether or not to send out a truck. Citizens need to know their government’s international standing—are those falling bombs their leader’s fault? Hunger for news hurts a country almost as much as hunger for food.
The First Amendment enshrines freedom of the press in the U.S. Constitution, but a variety of forces conspire to prevent totally free access to information. Residents of most cities rely on one large daily newspaper, usually part of a media conglomerate that itself owns the biggest local radio and television stations. Directors of that corporation and the editors who work for them are frequently loathe to offend influential government officials and business tycoons, for if they get cut off—excluded from access to press releases, interviews, leaks, etc.—their ability to collect news is impeded. One might argue that such “news” is little more than worthless propaganda, but fear of causing offense often inhibits the media’s natural role as a watchdog of democracy.
Our government very rarely censors the media. It doesn’t have to.
A new, subtle form of self-censorship has recently become commonplace. A news story is covered in full, minus a crucial fact that changes the entire tenor of the piece. That missing bit of information is invariably something that would make someone important look bad.
The American media has, for example, devoted extensive coverage to political unrest in Venezuela, where mobs loyal to President Hugo Chávez have clashed with striking employees of the state oil company. The crisis sparked an attempted coup d’état in April 2002. To busy Americans, this looks like a simple story of a right-wing Latin American dictator crushing poor workers. That’s because three key facts are regularly omitted from the story. First, the oil company strike was called by its wealthy managers, not its workers. Second, Chávez was democratically elected. Third, the coup plotters were backed by the Bush administration. “We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don’t like this guy,” said a U.S. Defense Department official quoted in The Guardian, an English paper that has become an important post-September 11 resource for Americans in search of objective reporting. The bully, it turns out, is us—not Chávez, who is standing up for his nation’s poor.
Similarly, the North Korean crisis looks like a simple case of crafty Commies welching on their agreement not to develop nukes in exchange for economic aid. Repeatedly left out of the thousands of words spilled daily on this topic are the contents of the 1994 North Korea-U.S. Agreed Framework, in which President Clinton promised to develop full diplomatic relations with Kim Jung Il’s regime, and North Korean warnings dating to 1999 that they would resume nuclear research unless the United States kept up its end of the bargain.
North Korea is violating the agreement. But the United States broke it years earlier.
The closest thing to a “smoking gun” found by U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq is 12 warheads found at an ammo dump south of Baghdad. Americans know that the White House considers this discovery a “material breach” that justifies war. Few are aware that, as reported January 17 in the U.K. Telegraph, the canisters were empty, and are probably American-made shells sold to Iraq by the Reagan administration. Not much of a “smoking gun.”
Scratch the surface and you find this sort of thing all over the “news.” Democratic complaints that the Bush tax cuts only benefit the “richest 1 percent” of Americans are duly reported, but leave out a definition of the term. Did you know that you have to earn more than $330,000 a year to be in the top 1 percent? Nineteen percent of Americans don’t. They told Time that they think they’re in that top 1 percent.
Perhaps you’ve read that American soldiers are fighting off guerrillas loyal to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in eastern Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, the Associated Press says, is “believed by Afghan and U.S. authorities to be allied with Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants.” That may be true. But Hekmatyar was always a sworn enemy of the Taliban—until the CIA tried to kill him last May, with a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone plane.
One missing detail. Changes the story a little, doesn’t it?