On January 20 the fairy king of fairyland was recrowned. He was elected on a platform suspended in mid-air by the power of imagination. He is the leader of a band of men who walk through ghostly realms unvisited by reality. And he remains the most powerful person on Earth.
How did this happen? How did a fantasy president from a world of make-believe come to govern a country whose power was built on hard-headed materialism?
To find out, take a look at two squalid stories that have been concluded recently.
The first involves the broadcaster CBS. In September its 60 Minutes programme ran an investigation into how George W Bush avoided the Vietnam draft.
It produced memos that appeared to show his squadron commander in the Texas National Guard had been persuaded to ”sugarcoat” his service record. The allegations were refuted: Republicans were able to point to evidence suggesting the memos had been faked. Last week the producer was sacked and three executives were forced to resign.
The incident couldn’t have been more helpful to Bush. Though there is no question that he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam, the collapse of CBS’s story suggested that all the allegations made about his war record were false, and the issue dropped out of the news.
CBS was denounced by the right-wing pundits, with the result that between then and the election, hardly any broadcaster dared to criticise Bush. Mary Mapes, the producer whom CBS fired, was the network’s most effective investigative journalist: she was the person who helped bring the Abu Ghraib photos to public attention. If the memos were faked, the forger was either a moron or a very smart operator.
It’s true, of course, that CBS should have taken more care. But I think it is safe to assume that if the network had instead broadcast unsustainable allegations about John Kerry, none of its executives would have been sacked. How many people have lost their jobs, at CBS or elsewhere, for misreporting the Jessica Lynch affair?
Or for claiming that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons programme in 2003? Or that he had a hand in 9/11? The answer is none. You can say what you like in the United States media, as long as it helps a Republican president. But slip up once and you will be torn to shreds.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. In 1998 CNN made a programme that claimed that, during the Vietnam War, US Special Forces dropped sarin gas on defectors who had fled to Laos. In this case, there was plenty of evidence. But after four weeks of furious denunciations, the network’s owner, Ted Turner, publicly apologised.
CNN had erred, he said, by broadcasting the allegations when ”we didn’t have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt”. As the website wsws.org has pointed out, it’s hard to think of an investigative story that could have been proved at the time by journalists ”beyond a reasonable doubt”. But Turner did what was demanded of him, with the result that, in media fairyland, the atrocity is now deemed not to have happened.
The other story broke three days before the CBS people were sacked. A US newspaper discovered that Armstrong Williams, a TV presenter who had a slot on a syndicated show called America’s Black Forum, had secretly signed a contract with the US Education Department. The contract required him ”to regularly comment” on Bush’s education Bill and to ensure that ”Secretary [of Education Rod] Paige and other department officials shall have the option of appearing from time to time as studio guests”.
It’s hard to see why the administration bothered to pay him. Williams has described as his ”mentors” Lee Atwater — who, under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, brought a new viciousness to Republican campaigning — and the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. His broadcasting career has been dedicated to promoting extreme Republican causes.
What makes this story interesting is that the show he worked on was founded by black activists Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, to ”allow black reporters to hold politicians and activists of all persuasions accountable to black people”. They sold their shares in 1980, and the programme was later bought by the Uniworld Group. With Williams’s help, the new owners have reversed its politics, and turned it into a recruitment vehicle for the Republican Party.
These stories are illustrations of the ways in which the US media are disciplined by corporate America. In the first case the other corporate broadcasters joined forces to punish a dissenter in their ranks. In the second case a corporation captured what was once a dissenting programme and turned it into another means of engineering conformity.
The role of the media corporations in the US is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won’t hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not.
So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable that helps the Republicans, and a reality that hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further from reality.
Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become president must learn to live in fairyland. — Â