The Problem
How can it be that someone like Peter
Mulhern can pen the following words:
"The biases of the elite media are too well documented to make good
column fodder. Most journalists have a tribal attachment to the Democrat
Party that transcends even ideology" ( http://nj.npri.org/nj99/11/media.htm
),
while (as at 18 May 2002) the page http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html
(on a Media Studies site) treats media bias as if only right-wing media
bias existed ? Surely they live in different worlds ?
The media and education systems (the Media-University Complex) in
Western countries have the ideological cohesiveness and mass coverage
to create "reality", and then to go out and "discover" it, to research
it, and to report it. They create reality by seeking out left-wing,
Feminist, and ethnic etc. extremists and giving them the same, or more,
coverage as/than mainstream organizations, and refusing to give first-person
coverage (fair interviews) to right-wing extremists, Pro-Life activists,
and Men's/Fathers' groups, etc.. Over time, this moves the criterion
of "mainstream" inexorably to the left.
Meanwhile, the real reality is simmering away below the surface of
reported events. On the rare occasions when it attempts to burst out
into public consciousness (e.g. when the Right are doing well in the
polls), the media do their best to sweep it back under the carpet by
means of scare-mongering, libel, and selective reporting. It is really
only talk-back radio and the Internet that give people the freedom to
bypass Left-Wing media censorship and propaganda.
The media are frequently attacked by "Right-Wing" critics -- not for
the bias of the owners of the media (which is relatively minor in scale),
but for the bias of the media workers (journalists, in particular).
For example, in 2002 media coverage of French Right-Wing politician
Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Dutch political assassinee, Forteyn, most
journalists were blatantly and openly one-sided, as if the media were
a left-wing political party (which, in practice, they are). The media
see right-wing extremism as the problem, whereas in fact left-wing media
bias forces moderate Right-Wingers into extremism, because the media
prevents them from having equal access to the public.
Right-Wing populists are bound to be critical of media bias, because
they attract most of it - names such as Rush Limbaugh and Richard Nixon,
in the USA, and Robert Muldoon and Winston Peters, in New Zealand, spring
to my mind immediately. The website http://www.mrc.org
is solely given over to the publicizing of Left-Wing media bias. The
webpage http://nj.npri.org/nj99/11/media.htm,
referring to an event involving Lyndon Johnson that was "news" to me,
states:
"Nothing Richard Nixon was ever accused of in connection with Watergate
posed as great a threat to the integrity of the American political
process as the crime Lyndon Johnson committed in James Reston's presence.
But Johnson was a Democrat. He could rely on Reston to ignore his
crime. He could also rely on Newsweek to continue ignoring it 35 years
later."
Though the Fathers' Movement is, at long last, starting to get a little
bit of media coverage, any activist in the broader Men's Movement can
testify to anti-male, Feminist bias in the media. See http://members.tripod.com/peterzohrab/marclepi.html
, for example.
Media Power
People often say things like "Knowledge is Power" or "Information
is Power," but they seldom seem to realize this applies to politics
as well as to everything else. The Media - particularly before the advent
of the Internet - controlled information. This seems to have gone to
their heads, in many cases. Some media people have acquired star status,
which is an indication of their power over people's minds. They are
not aware of their own bias.
The news media are very powerful, as Goebbels knew. He was aware of
the need to conceal the "art" of the media professional from the audience
by using historical analogies rather than making blatant political propaganda.
Similarly, the modern western media propagandizes by choosing what to
cover and what questions to ask, rather than by being blatantly biased
in the presentation of what it does cover - usually, at any rate. The
problem for politically incorrect causes such as Men's Rights has been
how to get covered at all.
Let us take the example of the Jews and the state of Israel. The Jews
are labeled victims in their role as a minority in western countries
- and so they get very little negative press from journalists who fear
being branded anti-Semitic. Indeed, they have so much power they are
often able to suppress the dissemination of information on the Nazi
Genocide of the Jews that they disagree with. The Armenians have no
comparable power to suppress Turkish Revisionism that denies the Turkish
Genocide of the Armenians, for example.
But Jews in Israel are seen as "oppressors" of the Palestinians, and
so they get some bad press in the West for that role. I was sympathetic
towards former Likud Party Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu of Israel,
when he complained about anti-Israeli media bias. It's not so much that
I agree with his policies - it's just that Israeli Right-Wingers, like
Masculists, come up so often against the wall of simple-minded media
bias that they feel there's almost no point in fighting it head-on.
It has taken the events of September 11th 2001 to modify this media
bias to any extent - now Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel are
categorized as "terrorism", and linked to the World Trade Center atrocity.
Another case in point is Bosnia, where the western media has been
biased against the Serbs. Martin Bell was a famous BBC television reporter
who argued within the BBC against their official policy of neutrality.
He eventually left the BBC and went into politics. I heard him in an
interview referring to the Bosnian Serbs as the "bad guys." His intonation
made it clear he meant to have scare-quotes around the phrase, but it
is also clear that that was how the western media - and hence the western
world - actually saw the Bosnian Serbs.
In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs and the Croats had virtually the
same spoken language (called "Serbo-Croat"), but the Serbs wrote in
the Cyrillic alphabet (like the Russians and the Bulgarians) while the
Croats used the Roman alphabet. Whether this was cause or effect (or
both), I am not sure, but it is clear the Serbs had closer relationships
to Eastern Europe, and the Croats (to the extent the Cold War allowed)
had closer relationships to Western Europe. This made it almost inevitable
that the western media would have an anti-Serb bias - which was exacerbated
by the fact that these media people were mostly based in Sarajevo, in
anti-Serb territory.
I am not excusing Serb atrocities. But the agenda of the Serbs appeared
to be to be independent from the Croats and Muslims. The United Nations
and the media, dominated by western interests, decided on a contrary
agenda of forcing the three parties to live together in one country
(Bosnia). Faced with the world community's hostile agenda, it is not
surprising how some Bosnian Serbs may have acted like cornered animals.
The Sociology Problem
There is a standard, Left-Wing bias that prevails in Universities,
but I will not discuss that topic here - except with reference to the
field of Sociology. See my book, "Sex, Lies & Feminism" ( http://members.tripod.com/peterzohrab/contents.html
) for further details.
The problem of Left-Wing media bias is best understood as pertaining
to the field of the Sociology of the Media. However, Sociology is itself
known to be a Left-Wing bastion - so much so that I once received an
email from a man, asking me about Men's Rights, and apologizing for
the fact that he was a Sociology student and therefore likely to be
hostile to Men's Rights !
For example, a quick search of the World Wide Web for "Sociology of
the Media" (or something similar) yielded the following top results:
- The City University, London, which showed no sign of any interest
in the sociology of media personnel in their extensive course-offering;
- The "Equality Studies Centre" of University College Dublin, which
has a course on "Sociology of the Media and Equality", taught by a
woman, amidst a raft of other optional courses, which are virtually
all taught by women, and include "gender", "sexualities", and "women"
- but not "men", needless to say;
- The personal page of a female lecturer at the University of New
Brunswick, who has so far taught "Sociology of the Media" along with
"Introduction to Women's Studies";
- Hope College, which gave no detailed information;
- New School University, which has a course "Fundamentals of Sociology
of Media", which refers to the media as being "a constitutive element
in the power structure of capitalist societies", but shows no sign
of investigating the role of the employees of media entities;
- A University of Essex gateway to resources about the Sociology
of the Media;
- The University of New Brunswick, which does not give much information
about the content of courses;
- The University of Limerick, which has a course on "Sociology of
the Media", which includes "media representation of women" (but probably
not "media representation of men") as one of its topics.
None of these show evidence of any interest in researching the role
of the workers in the media industry or men, as such. Their focus seems
usually to be on the owners of the media, as capitalists (i.e. from
a Leftist perspective), on the effects of the media on Society, and/or
on Feminist perspectives on the media.
Conclusion
Far from being mere observers and reporters, the media are powerful
and active players in the political process. One example is the well-known
Feminist author, Susan Faludi. According to Laura Taflinger,
"Faludi thinks a journalist's job is to create social change by
educating people and taking the time to investigate things. A journalist
needs to be passionate about a cause, she says." ( http://www.dnai.com/~ljtaflin/FEMJOUR/faludi.html
)
Since they control the actual perception of political reality of billions
of people, the media have to choose between tidying up their act and
becoming increasingly a target of political violence.
