As a reporter for the Financial Times (FT) for four years I was in constant close contact with the global elite, and this contact convinced me our world is owned and run by a racket. The racket is comprised of transnational corporations, investment and hedge funds, banks and many other different concentrations of wealth across the globe. While we may not know their names, this racket is who holds real power. They have the backing of the US government, and, if needs be, the might of the US military. If this is the case, why do we know so little about it? This is due, in no small part, to the mainstream media system, of which I was a part. I will try in this chapter to explain how it works.
First of all, the media itself is owned by the racket, so there should be no surprise that it reflects their interests and does not expose it. The media are not just cheerleaders for big business, they are big business. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model’s first, and possibly most important, filter in explaining media behaviour is that the mass media are big businesses controlled by wealthy individuals and have important interlocking interests with other major corporations, banks and governments (Herman and Chomsky, 2002: 14). We are given the illusion of choice from a range of titles, but, in reality, in the United States, five companies own 90 per cent of the media. It is a similar situation around the world. For instance, in Britain just three corporations control 70 per cent of UK newspaper circulation (Media Reform Coalition, 2014), and even after the closure of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch controls 34 per cent on his own (Eaton, 2013).
Second, there’s a strong cultural dynamic in shaping the news to the liking of the racket. Herman and Chomsky noted that the desired output is not achieved primarily through crude editorial intervention but by
The pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centres of power.
(2002: preface)
This starts even before you reach the newsroom. After university I attended the Columbia School of Journalism, the most prestigious journalism school in the world. Thirty-nine per cent of New York Times and 47 per cent of Wall Street Journal employees with journalism Master’s degrees graduated from the university (Wai and Perina, 2018), conveying a distinct advantage to those who can afford the US$105–146,000 per year Columbia itself (2018) estimates it costs to attend. I thought it would be an intellectually vibrant place. During my undergraduate degree at Leeds University in the UK I was exposed to all sorts of ideas from the left and right. But at Columbia, the training ground for the elite corporate media, nobody asks questions of the powerful. Chomsky (2003: 238) claims education is a system of indoctrination, training us to be unthinking, passive and conformist, and at elite universities (like Columbia), you find far more obedience and conformity than in other places.
One example of this is was when Henry Kissinger came to give a speech and hold a discussion with us at the journalism school. People asked him softball questions like “what do you think of China’s human rights policy” and I was sitting there thinking, “this is Henry Kissinger, one of the worst mass-murderers of the twentieth century and nobody is even challenging him!” So I put my hand up and asked how he slept at night, mentioning his role in the overthrow of Allende in Chile and in the mass bombing of South East Asia.
A deathly hush came over my peers. I had crossed a line. The dean of the school got up to stand with Kissinger, literally backing him up and indicating I should shut up. After that, everyone at Columbia considered me a loony and a discredited attention-seeker. One of my professors even told me I had “disgraced myself.” That is the attitude towards power they had. Everything in my time in elite institutions attests to what Herman and Chomsky wrote about the culture and narrow ideology of the media.
At the FT, it quickly became clear that the racket and the media are one and the same, with journalists unconsciously and automatically doing its bidding. By the time you have reached an institution like the FT, you have already internalized what you can and cannot say and the presuppositions of the powerful. For example, we are always the good guys. The West is not like the rest of the world. Even if the United States or United Kingdom make mistakes, it is for a noble cause. Therefore, while we may criticize mistakes, there is no scrutiny of intent. That is the beauty of the system. It is not like working for Pravda in the USSR; you will not be put in jail for what you write or say. You simply will not rise or progress. Anyone providing too much genuine criticism will not be promoted, not have their contract renewed, or not be commissioned to write again. Those that do accept the preconceptions will be promoted. And that is why no one in the media ever even thinks these things; it is simply implicit within what they do. It is not a conscious decision journalists make; nobody thinks “I want to promote war or neoliberal economics to further my career.” But if everyone in the office is thinking it, it is very difficult to go into work every day and be at odds with everyone, you would go crazy. It is certainly not because they are stupid. Far from it: some of the smartest people around work for the FT. It is a form of thought control. You are so embedded in the system that you do not even realize it exists. And you are completely free to say what you like if your bosses like what you say.
I watched young journalists entering the profession and I noticed how they began to change or moderate their opinions as they adapted to what was necessary in these institutions. Winston Churchill once said that if you are not a socialist in your twenties you have no heart; if you are not a conservative in your thirties you have no brain. There is some truth to this in terms of the media. If you are not a conservative by your thirties it means you have not adapted to the conservative media institutions that you have entered. Journalists get less idealistic as they get older. That is how the system works. It roots out ideas that are a danger to it and promotes those that reinforce it. Slowly, we stop expressing opinions that differ from the official line and shed our youthful idealism. Those that do not are generally not rehired. The few that carry on thinking as before quickly become labelled “mavericks,” “controversial” or “ideological.” The mainstream media, and particularly the FT, has a very fixed idea of how the global economy functions and should work and if you do not toe that line you are cast aside. That is how the power structure works. Dissidents or people who think independently and differently to everybody else in the office will not last long.
The “best” journalists are the ones that accept these rules naturally and unconsciously. As Rosa Luxemburg said, “those who do not move do not notice their chains.” If you do not move and start to push boundaries you will never know they exist. I started pushing boundaries. I read Manufacturing Consent before I started my Master’s degree and felt it was a convincing argument. Then I went to Columbia Journalism School and straight on to the FT. At the newspaper I decided to carry on writing as I would previously because I wanted to try out Herman and Chomsky’s ideas. So I continued to put in prepositions like “US-backed” when describing US-backed dictators when the convention is to only write “Russia-backed” or “Iranian-backed” when describing bad characters. What happens when you submit stories describing dictators as “US-backed”? Would editors remove it? And it was explicit: yes they would. And the amazing thing is that no one would ever know because most journalists would never even think to put that in. It is an incredible form of mind control because everybody thinks they are free; the best people to write censored articles are people who do not even realize they are performing self-censorship. And there is a reason for that: people like to think they are independent, fearless journalists that stand up to power, all the bullshit we are taught in journalism school.
I soon realized journalism was a racket. So I began planning to write an exposé. What you read in my (2015) book would never, in any form, get into a newspaper. I learned not to bother to even pitch stories that I knew would never even be considered. After I got rejected time and again pitching various interesting and important articles I just stopped. Was it self-censorship? Totally. But I learned the sorts of stories they wanted.
An example of this was Haiti. My real intention in visiting was to research the latest example of disaster capitalism (see Klein, 2007): how the US government and massive international finance institutions the IMF and World Bank had used the disaster of the 2010 earthquake that killed 300,000 and left millions homeless to force through mass privatization of the island, turning the Caribbean nation into a giant sweatshop for Western businesses to exploit. Haiti was to be the poster child of the free market, created and nurtured by international capitalism. In fact, the racket created a modern-day slave state in the ruins of the country, via a process usually described as “therapy” in the media. Of course, I knew none of this would be published and instead I filed bland reports about poor rates of recovery and a lack of private sector investment in the country (see Kennard, 2011; Kennard and Mander, 2012) aimed at the usual audience of FT readers.
Another factor influencing the media is time and space constraints. Working as a journalist you have to be concise. In the documentary Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky states on camera that:
The beauty of concision – saying a couple sentences between two commercials – the beauty of that is you can only repeat conventional thoughts. Suppose I go on Nightline, for whatever it is, two minutes, and I say “Gaddafi is a terrorist,” “Khomeini is a murderer” etc. I don’t need any evidence, everyone just nods. On the other hand, suppose you’re saying something that isn’t just regurgitating conventional pieties, suppose you say something that’s the least bit unexpected or controversial, people will quite reasonably expect to know what you mean. If you said that you’d better have a reason, better have some evidence. You can’t give evidence if you’re stuck with concision. That’s the genius of this structural constraint.
Concision is powerful. Even if we were inclined to challenge the dominant narratives there is no time to do it. As a journalist, if you are on a deadline you have just minutes to write a story, so you cannot go into an extensive analysis of why some term used by everyone is wrong. Therefore, the dominant narrative is bolstered. But most journalists do not see it as part of their role to challenge power because they have been taught in elite journalism schools to be neutral. They are neutral within a context they do not recognize is there. Neutrality within the corporate media and an unequal society means default support for the US or UK foreign policy position and to corporate power.
When I left the FT I tried to write for other newspapers I believed would be more sympathetic to my political persuasion. But I found out something more disheartening than what I had already experienced: the racket has a complete stranglehold over the media. Liberal and leftist mainstream publications like the Guardian and the New York Times are as compromised and bought off as conservative ones. They are often owned by the same people and are funded through advertisements from the same corporations, rely on the same sources and play by the same rules. These outlets are essential to maintaining the illusion of a fair, balanced, open and obstinate media. They pretend to be fighting the racket and to be on the side of the people, when, in fact, they underpin it. Whether right or left, it is largely the same class of people that inhabit the newsroom. Herman (1982: 149) wrote that journalists are “predominantly white middle class people who tend to share the values of the corporate leadership.” Over half of Britain’s top journalists went to private schools, which account for only 7 per cent of the population and nearly 40 per cent attended Oxford or Cambridge University (Sutton Trust, 2006) while over 20 per cent of New York Times or Wall Street Journal employees went to an Ivy League school, and many more to Columbia (Wai and Perina, 2018). So many Guardian journalists coming from this elite background (38 per cent of Guardian employees attended Oxbridge (Elliott, 2011)) see themselves as liberal lions fighting against the system and the powerful. However, if you ever step to the left of them, you will be attacked. They zealously guard their left flank instructing everyone that theirs is the limit of acceptable discussion and anything more radical is beyond the pale. This is true of the New York Times as well. These journalists reserve their most scorching critiques for leftists, not for conservatives, whom they share largely the same outlook with. As Chomsky (1992) notes, the liberal press already considers itself so extreme in its opposition to power that anything more would be madness. The message is clear: this far and no further.
The Guardian is completely intertwined with the racket; it relies on it for its day-to-day reporting. For example, the “Cities” portion of its website is completely sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which promotes neoliberal globalization around the world and even used to fund explicitly racist Nazi eugenics studies. Its “Global Development” section is sponsored by the controversial Gates Foundation. Meanwhile its “Social Impact” section of its “Sustainable Business Zone” is sponsored by the mining behemoth Anglo-American and its “Sustainable Living” section is paid for by food and consumer goods conglomerate Unilever. In these sections, these massive corporations are given space to publish propaganda about how they embrace corporate social responsibility – a naked attempt to improve their image so they can continue exploiting entire countries for profit.
The Guardian claims this sponsorship has no effect on its content. But my own experiences lead me to believe this is not completely the case. I reported on a town in El Salvador where many of its residents could not afford clean drinking water, despite living on top of a large aquifer (Provost and Kennard, 2014). Meanwhile, large businesses like brewing and bottling giant SABMiller were making huge profits from the water. When we contacted SABMiller, they reacted angrily. Only a few days later, the Guardian carried a news article (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) that was an interview with Karl Lippert, the president of the Latin American division of SABMiller, which responded to some of the issues brought up in our report. The piece was functionally identical to a corporate press release, and there was no interrogation of Lippert’s claims. Why did the Guardian publish this as news? Was it because the newspaper had a “partner zone” sponsored by SABMiller on its website?
The racket’s rules are imposed more forcibly by the Guardian and the New York Times than they are by the Financial Times or by Rupert Murdoch’s publications because they are the definers of what is an acceptable, “respectable” progressive opinion. Their role is about restricting our imagination and getting the public to worship their oppressors and undermining popular political movements that challenge the racket. But at least the Guardian did not formally endorse the coup against democratically elected President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela like the New York Times did.
Two days after the coup, when new leader Pedro Carmona had suspended the constitution, sacked every elected official in the country and declared himself in sole charge of the country, The New York Times (2002) happily noted:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.
Venezuela, a country that challenged the racket openly, has been absolutely brutalized in the press since Chavez’s election, not simply by the flow of negative articles, but also the complete censorship of any positive news, leading to a completely warped perception of the country. Studying how challenges to the racket are reported is perhaps the best way of understanding the capitalist id. A CBS news report in the wake of Chavez’s death in 2013 perfectly encapsulates the inhuman priorities of the racket and its media, and, by extension, our entire political and economic system. The author describes the reaction of the oil market on the news of Chavez’s death and informs us that Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programmes like free health clinics and education drives, but, it continued, without a hint of irony, “Those gains were meagre compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi” (Karita, 2013).
This kind of calculation shows the priorities of the system. Under Chavez, poverty was reduced by half and extreme poverty by three-quarters, while Venezuela was declared illiteracy free in 2005 and undernourishment fell from 15 per cent to a “not statistically significant” number (MacLeod, 2018: 44–7). Yet these benefits for the poor majority that were systematically deprived of their share of the country’s mineral wealth for centuries is unimportant. What is important are the gaudy buildings where the rich can feel important and puffed up. Chavez wasted the money on healthcare and schools when he could have built skyscrapers.
The day after Chavez’s death, Daniel Hannan (2013) wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Chavez, and other Latin American leaders challenging the racket, like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, had stayed in power not because of wealth redistribution or social programmes, but because of their foul-mouthed and vulgar tirades against civil society. Hannan ended by asking if there was any hope for Latin America. His answer was that it lay in Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe who had “achieved a level of popularity the Bolivarians [Chavez, Correa and Morales] could only dream of” because of his “privatization programmes.” Likewise when Uribe left office, the FT (Rathbone, 2010) ran an article calling him “the saviour” of Colombia.
This “saviour” is a president who oversaw killings on an extraordinary scale, using his paramilitaries against the FARC rebels, but also unleashing them on dissidents and the population in general. Under Uribe, Colombia became the most dangerous place in the world to be an activist. More unionists and activists were killed in Colombia than all other countries of the world combined, and his paramilitaries presided over the massacre of thousands of civilians and left millions displaced. The FT concluded that he left a very big pair of shoes to fill. This is only true if your gauge is how many murders you can oversee as president. Hannan since became a Conservative member of the European Parliament, successfully moving from one part of the racket to another.
The portrayal of foreign leaders in the press is directly correlated to how accommodating they are to foreign investors. For instance, Lula da Silva, the reformist social democratic president of Brazil between 2003 and 2011 was treated positively in the Western media, precisely because his rule did not impact negatively on foreign investors. While he did redistribute state resources more equitably than previously, he did not nationalize, expropriate or antagonize big business. However, in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, leaders were voted into office that directly challenged international capitalism and gave power back to their people through nationalizations and the cancellation of exploitative contracts. As a consequence, they were vilified as anti-democratic dictators and terrorists. One Wall Street Journal article entitled “Bolivia’s descent into rogue state status” claimed the country has become “a petri dish in which a culture of organized crime, radical politics and religious fundamentalism festers” (O’Grady, 2013). This distinction between governments was made by former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda (2006) in Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the racket. He claimed Latin America was made up of “good left” governments that are “modern, open-minded and reformist” and “bad left” governments like Correa in Ecuador, Morales in Bolivia and Chavez in Venezuela that are “nationalist, strident and close-minded,” “committing macro-economic folly … driving their countries into the ground.” If you challenge the power and the bottom line of the racket, this is the fate that awaits you in their press.
Reading the press, especially the financial media, is perhaps the best means to understand the sickness of our world because they are more open in their pathology. The day after the Marikana massacre, where 34 striking South African miners were killed, the FT (Wagstyl, 2012) noted that the murders “cast a long shadow.” But this shadow was not the devastating impact on the families of the dead, or the criminal complicity of the company the strikers were protesting against. No, it was that “shares in Lonmin, the platinum mining group at the centre of the dispute, plunged by 10 percent” after the story made worldwide headlines. Even worse for the FT was that, “A tragedy of this scale will have a political, economic and social impact—which seems certain to affect the investment climate.” The financial press does not care about human life, only business profits.
The Economist’s (2015a) article on Angola’s economic problems was similarly revealing of the capitalist id. It noted that the government had announced an end to fuel subsidies, a “generally sensible move” that would “hit the poor especially hard in an already highly unequal society.” If we unpack the sentence we learn that hitting the poor especially hard is generally sensible. And this is true – if you are a rich foreign investor who cares only about profit and not about human life. The state helping its most vulnerable citizens to heat their homes is unimportant.
Sometimes the suffering of the poor is not only sensible, but also necessary. In the same issue of The Economist (2015b), it discussed the “lure” of Egyptian dictator Abdel el-Sisi, whose security forces had killed almost 1,500 people in the last six months of 2013. The magazine instead lauded the Egyptian stock market’s success, claiming:
Sisi has consolidated power and ruthlessly crushed dissent. His firm rule and programme of economic development have also attracted much-needed investment. Freedoms must be sacrificed in the service of progress, the president argues. For now, at least, he may feel vindicated.
Thus, Sisi’s destruction of rights in Egypt is vindicated due to the stock market’s performance. On Sisi, the Wall Street Journal (2013) wrote that, “Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out in the mould of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet” who “took over power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.” The “chaos” and “transition” it references are a US-backed coup against a democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and 17 years of fascist dictatorship that left thousands dead or disappeared along with total economic destruction. But a lot of investors became very wealthy. At least the financial press is honest about profit being the sole motive.
The racket has a tight grip on the mass media, and we will not be free until that grip is broken. But that hold has begun to weaken. We are living through an exciting transition period in the media. It is now easier than ever before to challenge it and all around the world new media ventures free of corporate control are springing up. What is happening now is an irreversible shift of power to the people. For centuries, the elites controlled the means of communication. But with the arrival of the Internet, there are many ways to get around it and to project your voice to the world. The elite are trying to maintain control, but they are failing.
We have seen the rapid rise of political movements all around the world that are challenging the hegemony of the elites. In Spain, Podemos rose to become a major political party in just a few years. In Greece, Syriza grew to take power, despite the strong opposition of the traditional media. However, they are now under enormous pressure from the racket – the European banks and their political mouthpieces. In the United States, Bernie Sanders shot to national prominence with his campaign to become the Democratic nomination for president, all while calling himself a socialist and bitter media hostility towards him. In the UK, the unlikely figure of Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour Party in a huge surge of grassroots energy. Corbyn was written off as “unelectable” and described as a “laughing stock” and later as a threat to national security and a terrorist sympathizer by the media. Despite this, he has galvanized a new generation and may become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. People have ditched the discredited old institutions, old media and old politicians, realizing that the truth does not lie in the “respectable” centre. Soon both old politics and old media will be confined to the dustbin of history.
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