by Howard Zinn
The press went on playing the role of adjunct to the government, even though the evidence
of a U.S. sponsored invasion began to grow. Time magazine (which later confirmed that it
was a CIA operation) at first talked of Castro's "continued tawdry little melodrama of
invasion." This was right in line with the statement by the U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations James J. Wadsworth, who said the Cuban charge of a planned invasion was "empty,
groundless, false and fraudulent."
The White House asked the magazine New Republic not to print a planned story about the
invasion preparations, and it complied. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later referred to this as "a
patriotic act which left me slightly uncomfortable."75
Four days before the invasion began, Kennedy told a press conference, "There wil not be
under any conditions an intervention in Cuba by the U.S. armed forces." Kennedy knew that
the CIA was using Latin Americans for the invasion. But he also knew that American pilots
were flying some of the planes in the invasion. Four of those pilots were kil ed, but the
circumstances of their deaths were withheld from their families. By the time of that press
conference, the evidence of U.S. complicity in the invasion was clear, yet the press did not
chal enge Kennedy.
When the Times Latin American correspondent Tad Szulc prepared a story that the CIA was
behind the invasion plans, and that the invasion itself was imminent, the big guns of the
Times— publisher Orvil Dryfoos, editor Turner Catledge, and columnist James Reston—got
together to edit Szulc's story to eliminate references to the CIA and to the imminence of the
invasion. Instead of a headline running over four columns, it was given a one-column
headline.
In their 1963 essay on the press and the Bay of Pigs, Victor Bernstein and Jesse Gordon
wrote,
The press had a right to be angry. It had been lied to, again and again, by
President Kennedy, Al en W. Dul es, Dean Rusk, and everyone else … . But it
also had the duty to be ashamed. No law required it to swal ow uncritical y
everything that officialdom said. On the very day the American-planned,
American-equipped expedition was landing at the Bay of Pigs, Secretary Rusk
told a group of newsmen: "The American people are entitled to know whether
we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to
that question is no." Where was the editorial explosion that should have
greeted this egregious lie?
The general manager of the Associated Press, retiring in 1963, said, "When the President of
the United States cal s you in and says this is a matter of vital security, you accept the
injunction."76
172
The slavishness of the major media (with a few heroic exceptions) to the power and the bul ying of government goes a long way toward nul ifying that right declared in the First
Amendment, "the freedom of the press." More instances of government influence on the
media include the fol owing.
1. When CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr managed to get a copy of the House of
Representatives report on the CIA in 1976 (a report suppressed and withheld from the
public), he was investigated by the Justice Department and then fired by CBS.
2. At one time the CIA secretly owned hundreds of media outlets and also used the services
of at least fifty individuals who worked for news organizations in this country and abroad,
including Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, United Press International, CBS News, and various English-language newspapers al over the world.77
3. After Ray Bonner, Central American correspondent for the New York Times, wrote a
series of articles critical of U.S. policy in El Salvador in 1982, he was removed from his
post.78
4. In 1981 a new one-hour series titled Today's FBI began on national television. The
program got official approval and support from Wil iam Webster, the director of the FBI,
who was given veto power over al the scripts.79
5. A CBS television show on the Vietnam War cal ed Tour of Duty was given free use by the
Pentagon of al sorts of military facilities, including helicopters, planes, and personnel. In
return, the Pentagon was al owed to review and veto the scripts. The producer of the show,
Ron Schwary, said, "The outlines are sent to Washington, and if they approve them, they're
written and then the final approval is made through the project officer here."80
6. In the 1980s a number of documentary films were labeled as propaganda by the U.S.
Information Agency (USIA) and denied the certificates that would enable them to be sent
abroad. One of them was about children and drug problems. It had won an Emmy award
and a prize at the American Film Festival but the USIA said it "distorts the real picture of
youth in the U.S." A film on the historical roots of the Nicaraguan revolution was also
refused certification because, the USIA said, it gave "an inaccurate impression of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua today."81
7. President Jimmy Carter tried to discourage the Washington Post from printing a story
about CIA payments to King Hussein of Jordan.82
8. Also in the Carter era, a dispatch in the New York Times related, "The White House made several cal s to officials of CBS News late last week to try to delete a long segment from the
'60 Minutes' news program about American relations with the Shah of Iran and on the
activities of Savak, the deposed Shah's secret police force." (The CIA had helped train the
Savak, which was notorious for its use of torture and general brutality.)83
9. In the spring of 1988 it was disclosed that the FBI was asking librarians to report
suspicious behavior by library users. The American Library Association listed eighteen
libraries that in the last two years were approached by the FBI. For instance, at the
University of Maryland, FBI agents asked for information on the reading habits of people
with foreign-sounding names.84
10. During Reagan's administration, CBS News management kept toning down White House
correspondent Lesley Stahl's coverage of the president. Her scripts were changed a number
of times to make her stories less critical of Reagan.
173
11. A documentary film made by Japanese scientists who rushed to Hiroshima just after the bombing to record the effects of the bombing on the city's residents was confiscated by the
American army and then finished. But the film was not al owed to be shown until 1967. It
was nicknamed in Japan "the film of il usion," because it was not supposed to exist.85
12. When in 1981 the U.S. government leaked documents designed to prove that the
Cubans, with the aid of the Soviet Union, were suddenly sending large amounts of arms to
El Salvador—a claim that turned out to be a great deception—CBS correspondent Diane
Sawyer and others reported it without a critical examination. It was an attempt to portray
the rebel ion in El Salvador as a foreign operation rather than arising from the terrible
conditions in that country. National Wirewatch, a newsletter for editors of wire-service
dispatches, criticized the wire services for "heeding in lock-step fashion" the "party line from Washington on Communist infiltration."86
In general, according to Washington Post writer Mark Hertsgaard, during Reagan's
presidency the press, although claiming objectivity, "was far fro
m political y neutral—largely because of the overwhelming reliance on official sources of information."87 Hertsgaard said
the press and television were "reduced … to virtual accessories of the White House
propaganda apparatus." The role of a critical press was especial y important at that time,
because the supposed opposition party, the Democrats, "were a pathetic excuse for an
opposition party—timid, divided, utterly lacking in passion, principle, and vision."
Al this is not just a recent phenomenon. During World War II, the U.S. government put al
sorts of pressure on the black press to support the war. Attorney General Francis Biddle
pointed to news stories in the black press about racial clashes between white and black
soldiers and said this hurt the war effort; he threatened to close down the black
newspapers.88
The evidence is powerful that the government has tried, often successful y, to manipulate
the press. But, as Noam Chomsky has said, "It is difficult to make a convincing case for
manipulation of the press when the victims proved so eager for the experience."89
In short the First Amendment without information is not of much use. And if the media,
which are the main source of information for most Americans, are distorting or hiding the
truth due to government influence or the influence of the corporations that control them,
then the First Amendment has been effectively nul ified.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that in the United States we have no freedom of
speech, no freedom of the press. There are totalitarian countries al over the world in which
one can say that. In the Soviet Union, before Gorbachev's glasnost policies opened things
up, such a flat statement would have been accurate. Here the situation is too complicated
for that.
Perhaps the difference between totalitarian control of the press and democratic control of
the press can be summed up by the observation of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in
their book Manufacturing Consent: In Guatemala dissident journalists were murdered; in
the United States they were fired or transferred.90
By reading the mainstream press careful y (the inner pages, the lower paragraphs, the
quick one-day mention) it is possible to learn important things. Occasional y, there is a
burst of boldness, as when the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe printed, in defiance of the government, the Pentagon Papers, revealing embarrassing facts
about the Vietnam War. From time to time, honest, courageous pieces of reporting appear
in the big newspapers.
174
A dissident media exists in the United States. Its editors and writers are not jailed. But they are starved for resources, their circulations limited. On the air, there is a glimmer of
independence in cable television, which, of course, has only a smal corner of the viewing
population. There are smal local radio stations (for example, WBAI in New York and Radio
Pacifica on the West Coast) that run programs not heard on national radio.
Public radio and television teeters between constant caution and occasional courage. The
MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, the leading news program of national public television,
concentrates on caution. It loads its programs with establishment spokesmen and cannot
discuss any major issue without bringing in government officials and members of Congress.
It is open to ultraconservatives, but not to radicals. For instance, it has never put on the air
the leading intel ectual critic of American foreign policy, a man who is a world-renowned
scholar, Noam Chomsky. It would be as if, throughout the post-World War II period, Jean-
Paul Sartre had been blacklisted in France and could not be heard by any mass audience.
Courage was shown by Bil Moyers, who interviewed Noam Chomsky in two extraordinary
sessions on public broadcasting.
We mislead ourselves if we think that "public television," because it has no commercial
advertising, is therefore/w. It depends on government funding, and it worries about
corporate donations. Here is an Associated Press dispatch that appeared in the New York
Times under the headline "Public Broadcasting Head Eyes Donors."
Wil iam Lee Hanley Jr., the new chairman of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, wants to make educational radio and television programs such
a good investment for American businesses that they wil readily donate more
money.91
The problem with free speech in the United States is not with the fact of access, but with
the degree of it. There is some access to dissident views, but these are pushed into a
corner. And there is some departure in the mainstream press from government policy, but it
is limited and cautious. Some topics are given big play, others put in the back pages or
ignored altogether. Subtle use of language, emphasis, and tone make a big difference in
how the reading public wil perceive an event.
Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent document this with devastating detail.
They point out how the American press paid much attention to the genocide in Cambodia
(which deserved attention, of course), but ignored the mass kil ings in East Timor, carried
on by Indonesia with U.S. military equipment. They note the very large attention given to
Arab terrorism and the smal attention given to Israeli terrorism. They comment on the
sensational coverage of the break-in of Democratic party headquarters (Watergate) and the
very tiny coverage of the much more extensive series of break-ins by the FBI of the
headquarters of the Socialist Workers party.
There is difference of opinion in the American mainstream press, but it is kept within
bounds, just as there is difference between Republican and Democratic parties, but also
within bounds. It is a puny pluralism that gives us a choice between Democrats and
Republicans, Time and Newsweek, CBS, ABC, and NBC, MacNeil-Lehrer and Wil iam Buckley.
On a very smal scale, I got a taste of American freedom of the press—its positive side and
its limits—back in the mid-1970s. The Boston Globe, in the more open atmosphere created
by Vietnam and Watergate and the increased skepticism of government, invited me and
young Boston radical Eric Mann (he had spent time in prison for trashing the offices of
Harvard's Center for International Affairs) to alternate in writing a weekly column. We were
to be the left counterpart of George Wil and Wil iam Buckley, conservatives whose columns
appeared regularly on the Globe's Op-ed page.
175
And indeed, our columns appeared, uncensored, for more than a year. Probably no big-city newspaper in the country went as far as the Globe in opening its pages to radical views. But then two things happened. A column by Eric Mann critical of Israel was not run. When we
went to the Globe building to protest, the person who regularly received our column
explained to us sadly that the Globe had to think about its Jewish advertisers.
Not long after that, on Memorial Day 1976, I submitted my column as usual. It was not a
traditional Memorial Day statement, celebrating military heroism and past wars, but a
passionate (I would like to think) statement against war. It certainly did not fit in neatly
with the usual Memorial Day pictures of veterans with caps and flags and the tributes to
patriotism. The column didn't get printed. When I inquired, I was told that, in f
act, no
column of mine would appear again. There was a new editor of the op-ed page, who
explained that the page needed less political material and more family columns. Buckley
and Wil , I noted, continued to appear. They seemed to constitute a family.
Lies, Deception, Secrecy
When the government acts in secrecy, free speech is thwarted, and democracy undermined.
With World War II over, the two victorious nations, the United States and the Soviet Union,
immediately became rivals in a race for world power. The cold war was on. In such an
atmosphere, the openness of a democratic society was bound to suffer.
The National Security Council was created in 1947 to consult with the president on foreign
policy. Established with it, presumably to feed it information and advise it, was the Central
Intel igence Agency. National Security Council Report #68, prepared in early 1950 under the direction of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, cal ed for a larger military establishment. It
also said that people had to "distinguish between the necessity for tolerance and the
necessity for just suppression." It worried about the "excess of tolerance degenerating into indulgence of conspiracy."92
The mood of the government became the mood of vigilantism, which might be expressed
this way: We are good. Our enemy is evil. We mustn't tie our hands with the law, the
Constitution, democratic procedures, or the ordinary rules of decency. In 1954 Lieutenant
General James Doolittle, appointed by President Eisenhower to head a commission to advise
him on foreign policy matters, reported back that what was needed was
an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization
more effective, more unique and, if necessary, more ruthless than that
employed by the enemy. No one should be permitted to stand in the way of
the prompt, efficient, and secure accomplishment of this mission … . There
are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do
not apply.93
The commission was just putting into frank language what the United States, like other
imperial powers in the world, had been doing throughout its history, long before there was a
"Communist threat." But there was something different now in the language of the Doolittle Commission—the word covert. It is always a tribute to the citizenry when a government
