WHY WE FIGHT
"Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return."
Fredrick Remington, writing his employer William Randolph Hearst from Havana in 1897
"Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
William Randolph Hearst's response to Remington regarding what became known as the Spanish-American War.'
(Source: Citizen Hearst, W.A. Swanberg, 1963)
The
famous exchange above indicates the unprecedented power a media owner
has. In this case, a few extremely wealthy individuals, notably Hearst
and Joseph Pulitzer, were able to manipulate the government into the
Spanish-American War by inflaming public opinion with propaganda and
yellow journalism.
For
a short time in the early part of the twentieth century, there was a
great diversity of opinions present in the media: "muckraking," as its
detractors called investigative reporting, was at its zenith. Ida
Tarbell had won international fame with her brilliant exposé of the
Standard Oil Company, serialized in McClure's magazine before becoming a
book. Upton Sinclair exposed the hideous practices of the meat
packaging industry through The jungle, a work which was serialized in
the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, a year before being published
as a book. But as World War I broke out, criticizing the establishment
became taboo, and the U.S. Post Office refused to deliver Appeal to
Reason and other similar publications. Advertisers pressured the media
to lighten up. And fairly quickly, muckracking disappeared from the
scene, never to return to the same degree. From time to time,
journalists like George Seldes, I.F. Stone, and more recently Robert
Parry, would self-publish when they realized they could not tell the
truth boldly and fully in other people's publications. But these small
circulation newsletters and journals could never compete with media
giants such as CBS or the New York Times.
The
Establishment in this country knew early on how important it was to
control the press. Just as the representative form of government was set
up to prevent direct democracy, or rather, "mob rule," so too did the
press have to be protected from what Walter Lippmann called "the
defective organization of public opinion." Truth could be a powerful
weapon, one the elites were loath to share with masses. But keeping the
truth out of the press presented a quandary. The elites themselves
needed to know what the truth was. How could the elites get the
information and still manage to keep it hidden from the rest of the
world? As Lippmann (who served in an intelligence unit designed to aid
the U.S. negotiating team in Paris as WW1 ended) argued, in his essay
Public Opinion,
"representative
government cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of
election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making
the unseen facts [of the new world] intelligible to those who have to
make the decisions."'
In a 1937 work, Harold Lasswell, one of the fathers of modern communication theory, made a similar and more explicit suggestion:
"Propaganda
must be coordinated with information and espionage services which can
supply material to the propagandists and report progress of propaganda
work."
