Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media. - book reviews

Unreliable Sources: A Gaide to Detecting Bias in News Media, by Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon. New York: Lyle Smart, 1990.419 pp. $19.95. (paperhack edition, with new introduction on the Gulf War and the media, 1991. $14.95.)

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon have written a very useful "Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media," the subtitle of their book with the apt main title Unreliable Sources. The authors are associated with the organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and its publication EXTRA!, and the book complements FAIR's work by providing a detailed account of the many manifestations and sources of bias, a "how to influence the media" postscript-interview with FAIR founder and executive director Jeff Cohen, along with appendix listings of supplementary readings, alternative media, organizations that critique the media, and the names and addresses of mainstream media institutions.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I is an introduction to bias, featuring an account of how the mainstream media places importance on commercial considerations and profits, and a chapter on media sources and the bias that flows from media/source linkages and mutual dependency. Part II ("The Media Elite") has substantial chapters on the corporate structure and control of the media and the extent to which the media's news serves corporate and government interests. Part III ("Domestic Routines") has three good chapters on economic issues, covering among other things: class conflict (or rather, its denial), taxes and social security, keeping labor in its place, health and pollution, and prejudice. Part IV ("International Intrigues") has chapters on U.S.-Soviet relations, terrorism and narcotics, and human rights and foreign policy. A brief concluding chapter is entitled "Toward an Uncensored Future."

Unreliable Sources was designed to be widely read. It has no footnotes and is written in a breezy and popular style with many short case studies and other illustrative material. It avoids formal theoretical discussion, although a model (or models) of how the media work and the forces that constrain media behavior could be readily inferred from the text. The text is of high quality: clear, sometimes eloquent, and with a vast array of telling illustrations of forms of bias. These are often hammered home with compelling demonstrations of the dichotomous treatment in language, tone, and selective attention of similar cases with different political implications. At times the illustrations pile up to a point of surfeit and temporary reader exhaustion. This reflects the fact that the universe of media bias is immense indeed.

This writer has only a few criticisms of this valuable book. While castigating the New York Times for firing Sidney Schanberg for his muckraking coverage of New York City, Lee and Solomon mention Schanberg's "in depth dispatches from many Asian nations" and "his reporting from Cambodia [that] won him the Pulitzer prize." But the Pulitzer prize is as unreliable an index of quality as the Nobel prizes for Peace (Kissinger, Begin), or Economics (Friedman, Stigler, Hayek, ad nauseam), are in their respective fields. Furthermore, in an examination of forty-five of Schanberg's dispatches from Phnom Penh, Noam Chomsky and I showed in Manufacturing Consent that there were only three "in which victims of U.S. bombing are granted a few phrases to describe what is happening in Cambodia." There was not a single column that sought to explore the effects of the countryside bombing, and "the Americans are explicitly exonerated, apart from the error of bombing the wrong village" (pp. 276--278). This was typical mainstream reporting with the kind of bias that Lee and Solomon do not admire.

The authors also accept too readily the view that media attention has been a function of the relevance of a story to East-West conflict. They quote Michael Posner, claiming that "Countries that loom large in East/West regional conflicts get a lot more press than countries that aren't perceived in the same geopolitical terms." And in speaking of Indonesia, they write that its scant newsworthiness was partly a result of the fact that the country, "a U.S. ally, is not a focal point of East/West conflict." This overlooks the fact that East/West conflict is often contrived in order to justify aggression or to provide system-supportive propaganda. Guatemala in 19531954 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, to name just two examples, were such "focal points" only because U.S. administrations declared them so, in order to rationalize assaults on tiny powers whose independence and alternative social models the U.S. leadership refused to accept. That the fraudulent claims that these were "East/West conflicts" have been supported by erstwhile "left" analysts (i.e., Fred Halliday in From Kabul to Managua) does not make them any less fraudulent. Indonesia's holocaust of 1965-1969 was based on an alleged Communist Party attempted coup and was followed by the massacre of the Party leadership and cadres, plus hundreds of thousands of other people. This slaughter of Communists could have been interpreted as a "focal point" of East/West conflict, but was not because a 1ow-keyed treatment was appropriate for a "constructive" bloodbath; phony indignation at the supposed Red attempt at a coup did not serve government policy. Pol Pot's killings in Cambodia, by contrast, elicited a great deal of indignant attention.

Unreliable Sources can also be criticized at the level of policy prescriptions. The book shows that the media's failings are deeply rooted in structural relationships. In the last few pages the authors ponder the "formidable task of reinvigorating the First Amendment and promoting glasnost in this country when the mass media are controlled by a handful of corporate titans." They speak also of the need to "reclaim the air waves as a public trust." But their policy recommendations, including Jeff Cohen's in the postscript ("A Call to Media Action") do not call for structural change or seek to encourage new media or to reclaim the air waves through a change in control. Their penultimate sentence is that "This stifling power imbalance won't change unless a broad-based democracy movement emerges in the United States on a scale comparable to recent upheavals in China or Eastern Europe." But such upheavals start from little acorns, like underground media, samizdats, and grassroots organizations that strike at power and create genuine alternatives. It is regrettable that Lee and Solomon give so little attention and encouragement to the possibilities of democratic structural change, stressing instead ways of getting existing media organizations to perform better.

Edward S. Herman teaches media analysis at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, with the Dictionary of Doublespeak, and cartoons by Mat Wuerker. (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

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