Authors: Mickey Huff
The case against WikiLeaks exemplifies the US government’s vulnerability to exposure of wrongdoing by brave and hardworking investigative journalists. The corporate media are not those people. Instead, they sided with most government officials and took dubious police reports at face value because doing so was easier than researching the cables’ content and assessing their impact. They tried to lynch Assange instead of assail potential wrongdoings exposed in the WikiLeaks documents. The treatment of WikiLeaks exhibits the media’s dissidence with the concept of investigative journalism. WikiLeaks, which provides actual documentation of government behavior and abuse, has been vilified, while Andrew Breitbart and others who peddle smut and lies are hailed as examples of good journalism by the corporate media.
As
chapter 1
of this volume explained, the US government has been pushing for internet surveillance and censorship. The WikiLeaks issue, when reported on erroneously, or only partially, provides a justification for internet censorship in the name of silencing whistleblowers to protect national security. This ignores the advancements to the democratic process that whistleblowers have historically provided. Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the lies concerning US policy in Vietnam in the 1960s, exemplify this contribution.
In June 2011, as the Pentagon Papers were officially released by the government, Ellsberg explained, “What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya).”
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With the possibilities for free speech available on the internet, it is becoming increasingly harder for the US government to operate in the shadows. This vulnerability has propelled the
Obama administration to prosecute more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. He and those around him can only get away with prosecuting whistleblowers like Assange (as Nixon tried to do with Ellsberg, but failed) if the people are complicit. The media-driven game of shooting the messenger is an underhanded attempt to sway public opinion against Assange while the facts and details of the WikiLeaks cables go largely unprobed. The fact that the so-called news media in the US are more interested in shooting the messenger than in protecting whistleblowers shows clearly that the Fourth Estate is merely a propaganda arm of the state.
“Educator and scholar Adam Bessie made clear just how devoid of thought are claims that schools should be protected from responsible belt-tightening,” writes American Enterprise Institute (AEI) resident education scholar Frederick Hess. Hess was writing in reference to the coauthor of this chapter, specifically a piece he wrote for the
Daily Censored
blog.
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Hess, an intellectual leader in the corporate education reform movement,
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personally attacked Bessie in direct reply to a critique he wrote of a cover story in the
Oakland Tribune
. The story used Hess as an authoritative, non-partisan source, without explaining that AEI is a neoconservative organization that claims, “The government’s authority to tax and regulate represents a growing encroachment on the private sector.”
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Bessie quoted this line in his blog and argued that Hess’s association with AEI should be fully revealed so readers would know his ideological orientation. Bessie wrote, “I am not saying that Hess, nor the AEI should be avoided, but rather the reporter should report to us what their background is—for complete disclosure.”
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In response to a call for transparency, Hess—who received $500,000 in grant money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for AEI’s advocacy
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—dubbed Bessie, a community college English instructor, a “vapid champion of the status quo.”
Hess’s ad hominem attack on Bessie, however, has become the “status quo” of political rhetoric in the last year, particularly in the debates on public education, but also across the policy spectrum in the corporate media. Public workers—teachers, firefighters, police officers, and especially their unions—have been depicted as enemies of prosperity and public welfare, feeding greedily on benefits while the “rest of us” starve. This was illustrated quite literally in a popular cartoon showing a gigantic pig with “UNION” emblazoned across its chest telling a skeletal taxpayer to “tighten his belt.”
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More concerning is that public workers have been cast as villains in the wake of economic collapse, not only by conservative think tanks and political cartoonists, but by the corporate (so-called) mainstream media in a broader sense. Even public supported radio KQED, of San Francisco, ran an op-ed lambasting lazy Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) employees.
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In early August 2010, the
New York Times’s
Ron Lieber accurately predicted, “There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.”
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And sure enough, as a new class of Republicans began their term in January 2011, public workers—and their supposedly excessive benefits—gained considerable coverage. The once vague term “public employee” burst into the public consciousness as a new pejorative, while the fiscal conservative buzzword “austerity” was billed as the only solution to economic woes. The latter term was the number one most searched word on Merriam-Webster online last year.
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In corporate media coverage over the past year, public workers lost the class war that Lieber predicted, and became victims of persistent and systemic factual distortion and villainizing. Out of all public workers, however, teachers and their unions have fared the worst in the last year. They have been subject to relentless mythmaking, largely underwritten or influenced by billionaires such as Bill Gates, that falsely portrays the educational system as irreparably broken, with bad teachers as the primary cause and the free-market as the only viable solution, and ignoring, misrepresenting, maligning, or explicitly censoring alternative perspectives and dissent. So while the worthy topic of public education earned a great deal of coverage in the corporate media, it clearly qualifies as News Abuse because the issue itself is distorted—framed and cast as propaganda for free-market ideologues under a rubric of open debate in a supposed free press.
In 1976, on a failed campaign to the White House, Ronald Reagan coined one of his enduring linguistic legacies: the “Welfare Queen,” a mythical inner-city resident who wastes the public’s hard-earned money on “welfare Cadillacs” and other luxuries she can’t afford and doesn’t deserve. The misleading term suggests the false notion that welfare abuse is rampant, that money spent on social services is going to luxuries rather than necessities. While nearly thirty-five years old, the image of the Welfare Queen remains as strong as ever and Reagan’s battle against her lives on.
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However, now she has traded her Cadillac for a fire engine, a “Cadillac” health care plan, and a pension, as Jonathan Cohn presciently pointed out in “Why Public Employees Are the New Welfare Queens” in the
New Republic
, shortly after Lieber’s
New York Times
article.
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In the same way that Reagan characterized those on welfare as cheating the taxpayers out of their hard-earned money, so have public employees been framed, accused of receiving excessively generous handouts from the public. In several cases where some academics at public institutions fought against these attacks, they were targeted by conservative media activists and the Republican Party.
The mythmaking success of Reagan’s Welfare Queen is critical to understanding how public workers have been portrayed as “public enemies in some way,” as an AP story claimed “some people” saw it.
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The Welfare Queen—a Chicago black woman cheating the social service system—“was a symbol of everything that was supposedly wrong with welfare,” explained University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George Lakoff in an analysis of the term. While this example symbolized the evils of the welfare state, the actual Welfare Queen, whom Reagan claimed “has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards,” did not exist; even though the “media dutifully tried to find her … there never was such a person.” Even though Reagan never explicitly called the Welfare Queen black, he nonetheless invented a powerful stereotype that played the political race/class card, exploiting a fictional denizen of Chicago who “came to stand for a whole category of welfare recipients.” Reagan’s Welfare Queen worked because it fit existing cultural stereotypes—or frames—about
those on welfare. Lakoff further argues that Reagan presented his made-up example as a typical case, and because it received so much press, the Welfare Queen became very real to the public, even if she did not really exist. As a matter of fact, “the majority of welfare recipients are white and few own vehicles of any kind.” This fact didn’t matter, as Reagan’s Welfare Queen furthered the myth that most people on welfare are black and cheating the system.
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Public employees have now become mythologized in the same way Welfare Queens were almost three decades ago. In the last year, “public employee” has become a bad word, a symbol of greed and undeserved excess, one that is responsible for our crumbling budgets, and thus, our own struggling economy. An NPR listener shares in a “Perspectives” segment on San Francisco’s public radio station KQED an anecdote of lazy DMV workers which, like the Welfare Queen, is supposed to be typical of all public workers. “There is only one person serving a long line of customers. As I wait, I watch her coworkers, who should be helping me, eat birthday cake.… It seems in the eyes of public employees, my needs come second—after cake.” Just like the Welfare Queen, this single instance of nameless and anecdotally related bad service becomes a stand-in for how public employees are lazy and disinterested in serving the public, and are receiving benefits they don’t deserve while thumbing their noses at the public in true let-them-eat-cake fashion.
Like the Welfare Queen, the term public employee allows negative stereotypes of public workers to flourish. The perfectly ambiguous term sounds more like a faceless, heartless bureaucrat than a public servant risking her or his life for the common good, as is the case with firefighters or police. The term strips away the humanity and the nobility of a public worker, replacing it with an uninspiring, and certainly unrespectable, blandness. Further, by using the term “employee,” rather than “worker,” or even specific job descriptions like “firefighter,” any associations with work or labor are eliminated; it’s much easier to visualize a lazy employee than a lazy worker or an undeserving firefighter. And thus, with the vague term “public employee,” the NPR “Perspectives” segment is able to use the fallacy of overgeneralization via a couple of DMV workers as a symbol of all government workers, implying that this one instance (which may or
may not be real) symbolizes the work that firefighters, police, and teachers perform across the system. And this is aired on public broadcasting, not only in the corporate media.
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Media coverage also tends to add to the perception that public workers are somehow welfare cases that the rest of the taxpayers support (even though public workers clearly pay taxes). “The media have repeatedly targeted public employees by suggesting that the public dislikes their supposed generous pay and benefits,” though numerous polls demonstrate that the public tends to side with employees, as the liberal group
Media Matters for America
illustrated with a thorough review of corporate media coverage.
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A popular 2011 article in the Associated Press, cited in the
Media Matters
analysis, vividly shows the mischaracterization of public workers. The following passage, in particular, reinforces distorted notions of public workers’ compensation. “At its heart, the issue is this: Some public workers get a sweet deal compared to other workers. And it’s taxpayers who pay for it. That’s set off resentment in a time when economic doldrums have left practically everyone
tightening their belts.
”
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While the reporter uses the phrase “public worker,” he also uses fiscally conservative language nearly identical to the political cartoon mocking unions when he references “belt-tightening.” Further, while the reporter acknowledges that polls show two in five Americans are not on the employees’ side, it is nonetheless the focus of the report, titled “Anger brews over government workers benefits.” The title—and the article itself—all but ignores the two-thirds who are not angry, implying that the anger is far more widespread than it actually is. This is called framing, and this particular form, propagandistic in its nature, is a form of News Abuse.
The aforementioned AP story reinforces this distorting frame by giving disproportionate coverage to studies and scholars that claim public workers are compensated on a greater scale than private sector workers.
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For instance, while the reporter interviewed locals in Wisconsin, he did not refer to an April 2010 study conducted by two University of Wisconsin economics professors, which found that the opposite is in fact true: that state and local workers make less, overall, than those in the private sector. “This recession calls for equal sacrifice, but long-term patterns indicate that the average compensation of state and local employees is not excessive,” the authors conclude.
“Indeed, if the goal is to compensate public and private workforces in a comparable manner, then the data do not call for reductions in average state and local wages and benefits.”
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Additionally, two weeks before the AP story, the Economic Policy Institute released a study that “indicates that state and local government employees in Wisconsin are not overpaid.”
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Neither of these studies was mentioned by AP, nor any study that contradicts the majority of the interview subjects who state, as undisputed fact, that public worker benefits are excessively generous in comparison to private sector worker benefits.