Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, & Culture: Why pay attention to the New York Times? Organization, Normalization, Ideology

Edward Herman does his usual incisive work in decoding the New York Times.

"The biases of the New York Times surface in one or another fashion on a daily basis, but while sometimes awfully crude, these manifestations of bias are often sufficiently subtle and self-assured, with facts galore thrown in, that it is easy to get fooled by them. Analyzing them is still a useful enterprise to keep us alert to the paper’s ideological premises and numerous crimes of omission, selectivity, gullible acceptance of convenient disinformation, and pursuit of a discernible political agenda in many spheres that it covers."
From Fog Watch - The New York Times Versus The Civil Society: Protests, tribunals, labor, and militarization and wars - By Edward S. Herman Z Magazine -

But here is my basic question. Why? We need information but why look at the New York Times at all? Why worry about it?

1) Because it has so much influence over the governing elite? Is this true anymore? Perhaps it guides the governing elite.

2) Perhaps by reading the NYT and the WSJ critically we gain insight into the ruling class and its aims? Is this true? In that case if we can use those insights as an organizing tool then we are doing ourselves a service.

3) Because we don't have counter-hegemonic media of our own that establishes a grand world view for radical change and will set to crumbling the world view of the New York Times? This goes back to to point one and the overwhelming influence the times have on governing elites. That influence is bound to seep through to those who oppose the Rulers and Bosses, unless we counter the distortions and ideological spin and outright lies.

4) But in the end the reason we have to spend so much time decoding the New York Times and other media of ruling class ideological "information", is because we are too weak to establish our own media for organizing and information.

So in short: Why pay attention to the New York Times? Because of the failure of the left to organize.

Famously, in Lenin's What is to be done? he argued that a regular paper of a working class party is an organizing tool. Bolshevik party organization, was bound to be dictatorial as Rosa Luxembourg realized early on, but the fact is that Lenin, before he took power had deep insight in how to organize. It is part of the tragedy of Bolshevism and the atrocity of Stalinism that these organizational insights have been lost. The fact is that as the left stands today in the Western capitalist republics, there is no network of radical media that is also used as an organizing tool. There are small networks of radical media and they are very loosely connected to organizing networks. But unless the organizing networks and the media networks are organically related we will never be able to make the first step toward constructing a counter-hegemonic world view.

The South End Press collective and the people at Z Magazine have been trying to build such integrated networks for years but unfortunately the network is too small and too loosely connected to other cooperative organizations and to unions. It is not there fault. People such as Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent seem to me to be near heroic in their commitment to a vision of radical democracy. But over and over again I keep on coming back to the same point in my mind - we on the left must not be organizing correctly if we are not organizing better than say the right wing Christers.

The Process of "Normalization": A suggestion for using Herman's & Chomsky's model to study legal institutions:

Edward Herman continues:

One very important feature of an establishment institution is that it gives heavy weight to official and corporate news and opinion and little attention to facts and opinions put forward by those disagreeing with the official/corporate view. Government and corporate officials are “primary definers” of the news, and experts affiliated with, funded by, and/or supporting them function to institutionalize those views. In a perverse process, the links of these experts to official and corporate sources give them a preferred position in the media despite the built-in conflict-of-interest, unrecognized by establishment institutions. (PBS has repeatedly turned down labor-funded programs on grounds of conflict-of-interest, but doesn’t do the same for corporate-funded programs, as PBS officials have internalized the establishment’s normalization of conflicts-of-interest involving the dominant institutions of society.) Those in opposition, even if representing very large numbers, even a majority of the population, have difficulty gaining access. Another way of expressing this is to say that the media, as part of the establishment, align themselves with other constituents of the establishment, and are very often at odds with and give little voice to the civil society.

First a criticism. It is true that we can put this problem in terms of a conflict between "State" and "Civil Society." There is a long tradition of the radical Enlightenment for doing so. It is part of our tradition and we should claim it. (On this matter I would suggest two books Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 by Jonathan I. Israel and A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688 by Ellen Meiksins Wood & Neal Wood.) But this can be done only if we define the business entity that we call "the Corporation" as a state entity. In fact such corporate entities are very much like states, and act as little sovereignties with their own laws and arbitrary punishments. (This is a fact that right wing libertarians will never comprehend.) Even so the conflict is not simply between "state" and "civil society" but between those who own and manage society - its property, its productive resources and its capital - and those who don't . (Notice I am stating this conflict from a tradition that follows Marx but does not accept his terms as "scientific.")

The reason I begin with this criticism, a criticism that Herman would amend in his own way, is that when we try to understand the "normalization" of business interests we must understand that they are normalized as if they were the interests of society as a whole, i.e. civil society. Thus the national interest is the interest of "business" (meaning big corporate profiteering) as a whole. A person such as Herman who speaks in defense of Civil Society, cannot even be heard by the editors of the New York Times because as far as those editors are concerned, they are civil society and so is the totalization of interests that surround General Electric, Disney, CBS, Microsoft, et. al. As long as the worker of a corporation is considered to be a part of that corporation, or a small business owner is considered to be a part of business interests, then they are a part of civil society. But the immigrant who tries to form a union is not part of civil society and therefore does not deserve a voice equal to the New York Times. The same is true of the woman who gets fired from a corporation because she wishes to take care of her child before she arrives at work.

How such terms as "conflict-of-interest" are internalized and normalized is in fact the crucial question both here and when studying the ideological normalization of similar terms in legal institutions. The processes are not the same but they are similar. I would suggest that one could write a study of legal institutions and their ideological filtering systems similar to Edward S. Herman's and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media. One might call it Manufacturing Legitmacy: The Political & Social Economy of Legal Institutions. The problem is that there are too many aspects of legal institutions that we would like to account for - not only courts and judges, but Law Schools, law firms, police departments, private "security" forces, administrative agencies, corporate imposed "non-state" rules and regulations (both for workers and consumers), private and negotiated law such as emegers from contracts, etc. etc. Each institution should be studied discretely of course but I propose that an entry problem is distinguishing 'non-state' law from state law and showing how all of this integrates into the current political and social economy.

On the ideological level the problem is the same. How do we describe the normalization of an ideological view, accurately and in detail, in a way that can lead to understanding and not further obscurity?

Jerry Monaco
New York City
2 December 2005