otherwise

We see what we’re told is there, not what is. A 1989 survey showed
that drug use and crime were on a par in the US and Canada. But
Americans ranked drugs as their number-one problem and crime as
their third. Canadians saw drugs as insignificant and ranked crime a
lowly twentieth on the list of their dilemmas. The facts were the
same, but the perceptions were different. Why? Because the headlines
in the two countries were different.
Molly Ivins, a highly respected journalist who’s worked for the New
York Times, among other papers, wrote in the
Houston Journalism Review: “You can find
out more about what’s going on at the state
capitol by spending one night drinking with
the capitol press corps than you can in
months of reading the papers those reporters
write for. The same is true of City Hall reporters, court reporters,
police reporters, education writers, any of us. In city rooms and in
the bars where newspeople drink you can find out what’s going on.
You can’t find it in the papers.” 2
Then there are the many cases in which the press manufactures or
manipulates the news. According to the New York Times Book
Review, Oliver North “describes being in the office of the Reagan
aide, Pat Buchanan, working on an announcement of the capture of
the Achille Lauro terrorist, when Niles Latham, an editor at the New
York Post, called to ask Mr. Buchanan to make the President say,
‘You can run, but you can’t hide,’ so the paper could use it as the
front page headline. Mr. Buchanan obligingly wrote the line into the
President’s remarks.” 3
From 1968 to 1988, the average length of a TV news sound bite
allotted to a presidential candidate fell from 43 seconds to 9.8.
Meanwhile, pictures of the candidates with none of his words
tripled. This gave the TV producer nearly total power to reshape or
distort a candidate’s message.
A 1990 survey showed that an astonishing number of congressmen
and other elected officials believed that the pyramids may have been
built by aliens. Even worse, one of the groups that came out with the
highest levels of general ignorance were newspaper editors. Over 50
percent of these media leaders felt that dinosaurs and humans had
inhabited the earth at the same time. (Humans, in fact, didn’t show
up until some 65 million years after the dinosaurs had abandoned
their bones and departed from the scene.) The bottom line: The men
and women spooning facts into the brains of most Americans have
apparently gotten their scientific education from the Flintstones.
The men and women spooning facts
into the brains of most Americans have
apparently gotten their scientific education
from the Flintstones.
Writes Molly Ivins: “One of the most depressing aspects of reporters
as a group is that they tend to be fairly ignorant themselves. There is
no excuse for it, and there is a complete cure for it. Read, read, read.” 4
Further muddling the information we receive from overseas is the
fact, reported by historian and former New York Times journalist
Robert Darnton, that “few foreign correspondents speak the language
of the country they cover.” 5 So-called foreign reporters simply
regurgitate preconceptions. English correspondents write of “the
England of Dickens” and those in France portray “the France of
Victor Hugo, with some Maurice Chevalier thrown in.” What justifies
this? Says Darnton: “Newspaper stories must fit a culture’s preconceptions
of news.”
Anyone who’s been interviewed by the press knows that his socalled
quotes will be wild distortions of his original statements, yet
writers refuse to check the accuracy of their notes with the source.
Why? Says one former investigative reporter: “We don’t like to be
confronted with our own mistakes.” What’s more, we “are tired of the
story and don’t want to do more work.” 6
Writers respond to the world with a kind of herd instinct. They see
which direction the animals on either side of them are rushing, and
don’t bother to notice the real world through which the pack is
m o v i n g . Yet they pretend to report on the real world. What’s worse,
they often fool their readers into believing that this is true.
“You can find out more about
what’s going on at the state capitol
by spending one night drinking with
the capitol press corps than you can in months of reading
the papers those reporters write for.”
You are Being Lied To
36