The bloodthirsty maniac in the White House has just won even more ground in the US midterm elections. Michael Moore, author of Stupid White Men, attempted to explain this terrible state of affairs on Channel Four News, but missed a wide-open goal. The businesslike Republican lady he was in discussion with (looking a little like Annette Benning’s brink-of-a-nervous-breakdown housewife in American Beauty) accused Mr Moore of not crediting the American people with any intelligence whatsoever. Moore’s answer indicated that it was sad but true: the American people are idiots.
I personally know only a handful of American people, and they have generally struck me as being idiots. Some of them are relatives of mine. However I refuse to generalise and fall into the elitist trap left wide open for Michael Moore. A better answer might have been “No! The American people, and people in the world at large, are not idiots! They merely have the wool pulled over their eyes by the media.”
“So you’re saying that people are easily fooled? Surely that equates with idiocy?”
“No, you can’t catch me in that trap, evil Republican lady! The people are hard to fool, but the media is very powerful!”

The view that the mass media is engaged in some kind of sinister mind-control is as old as mass media itself, but the classic expounder of the theory is the MIT linguistics lecturer, commie troublemaker and Woody Allen look alike, Noam Chomsky. He argued in ‘Manufacturing Consent’ (with Edward S. Herman) that the media serves the powers that be, namely the state and big business, preserving the status quo by both indoctrinating the public with beliefs consistent with the prevailing system and by diverting people from issues that are ‘off limits’. It does this not as a matter of policy, but through filters that have occurred naturally in the development of the media. The main filters are the fact that the mass media is owned by big business and thus naturally preserves its ideals, the fact that the media must court advertising revenues to survive and therefore must be nice to big businesses, and the fact that writing comfortable news stories based on press releases from business and the state is much cheaper and easier than actually finding stuff out for yourself.

The implications of this are that people are not presented with alternative ideologies but are persuaded to unquestioningly accept the society we have been led to. The only view available is the one that tells us to be good consumers, to spend all we have and more on Playstations and fashionable gear, to vaguely covet an exciting, glamorous lifestyle whilst in reality living our lives vicariously through a TV screen, and to channel the dissatisfaction we feel into hatred towards people who are simplistically portrayed as Satan figures.

This picture is somewhat exaggerated, and the media cannot be blamed for everything that is inadequate about our lives. The media is obsessed with lifestyle and trivia to the extent that its readers are. In this respect at least, the truism that “we get the media we deserve” is fair. The fact that misdemeanours and gross abuses perpetrated by companies, large and small, are often brushed aside due to self-censorship can be illustrated hundreds of times over. But does this really mean that the media are forcing Americans to vote Republican?

War is the issue of the moment. It would be untrue to say that the media in the UK, in the rest of Europe or in America are completely behind the war in Iraq, or the ridiculous ‘war on terrorism’ in general. But there are important issues here that are given far too little coverage. For instance that the US armed and financed Iraq’s war against Iran and continued to provide support to Iraq throughout the 1980s, that Saddam actually asked the US’s permission before invading Kuwait in 1991 and that in a Middle East full of despicably totalitarian regimes Iraq is being punished for not following the US’s line on the Israel/Palestine issue. There is a complex history of Western intervention at work, whereby America (and previously Europe), with the UK as a staunch ally, has been arming its own future enemies against its past ones for half a century.

Apart from journalistic laziness, there are a few reasons why the mass media would ignore these important issues. They are complicated and not remotely sexy (sex is the key – all stories must be sexy). They have been ignored for years, and it would be confusing and awkward to suddenly address them, and give them the serious debate they deserve, at this late stage. There is also some evidence of the mass media not ignoring these issues, such as Gore Vidal’s extensive article in The Observer (‘The Enemy Within’, Sunday 27th October, available semi-legally on the Internet. Try it, kids!) which claimed outrageously and totally convincingly that the US knowingly and willingly allowed the September 11th attacks to occur. Articles such as these are rare exceptions to Chomsky’s theories. But immensely serious allegations, like implicating the US government for an attack on its own people are simply impossible to investigate and prove given the resistance that the US state machine would undoubtedly put up. To do so would take time and resources that newspapers do not have.

All the information contained in Gore Vidal’s article and much more has been readily available on the Internet since long before the article was written, provided you know where to look. The Internet is extremely hard to repress; sites can endlessly mirror themselves and information can be copied to various different sources. Most websites do not rely on advertising revenues or have reason to censor themselves. The Internet is the ultimate democratic medium, but it is hardly a mass medium. It is easy to ignore news stories that surface on the net, and easier still not to trust them, and to think “any crackpot could have written that”. Most ‘radical’ news sites are put together by volunteers with even less resources than cash-strapped newspapers. Although these sites enable an information-hungry few to find out what otherwise goes unreported, the mass media remain the only channels for getting an issue noticed.

All this may not in practice make Americans or anyone else vote for war, but it keeps important discussions out of the public domain. Regardless of whether Gore Vidal’s allegations are correct, it allows the possibility of unimaginable wrongdoing to go under-discussed and un-investigated. For a newspaper to publish an article alleging that the President of the USA is a mass murderer in its review section, with a small tag line on the front page declaring ‘Here’s a new view of 9/11’ or something equally trite, is inadequate beyond words, and almost as bad as not publishing it at all. Despite the fact that this was published, and despite the availability of alternative views on the Internet, the mass media is drastically failing its audience.