Date: Tue, 11 Dec 90 17:27:11 CST        From: ACTIV-L%UMCVMB.BITNET
Subject: book review: Unreliable Sources
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/** udc.media: 260.0 **/
** Topic: INSIGHT FEATURES December 1990 in News Media
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Unreliable Sources
By Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon
Lyle Stuart, 1990, 419 Pages

By Ivan Handler
Insight Features

   Unreliable Sources by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon opens up a
new front in the war for progressive change--the battle for "info-
democracy."

   The conflict is rooted in the fact that the mass media is owned
and operated, both as profit centers and as instruments of power,
almost exclusively by the largest multinational corporations.  This
gives rise to a situation where viewpoints not in keeping with the
media's keepers are censored into oblivion or distorted into
submission.

   The battle for info-democracy is thus a campaign to increase the
number of points of view that are reported and given credibility
through the mass media.  It is not a contest to replace one
ideological filter with another.

   With this book, Lee and Solomon have provided a field guide for
activists engaged in this effort.  Since both authors are members
of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the progressive media
watchdog group, they are in a good position to instruct others.

   The book's first section deals with the most general issues: the
media industry as a whole, media as a business, the role of
advertisers, the role of sex, buzzwords and target markets. It then
goes on  to point out the conflicts of interest between media
institutions and the corporations that own them.

   FAIR is most known for its study of Nightline, where it
documented the overly conservative, white and male composition of
Ted Koppel's guest list.  Highlights from this study are presented
in the book as a case-in-point.

   One of the best sections is called "Media Con Games: How to See
Through Them."  It documents all the different ways bias enters the
news--misleading headlines, loaded language, politically charged
labels, unattributed assertions, the "Kissinger-Haig disease," and
the manifold abuses of the pronoun "we."  This chapter alone
justifies the price of the book for any media warriors.
   The bulk of the text is devoted to the media's reporting of the
biggest stories of social concern in the last decade.  "The main
problem," state Lee and Solomon, "is not the proliferation of
explicit falsehoods (though plenty of that goes on); it has more
to do with what gets left out of the news when the field of
possibilities is circumscribed by vested interests."  The New York
Times practice of watching out for the interests of its wealthy
board of directors is a leitmotif.

   Other topics highlighted are the Watergate, Contragate and
"Quaylegate" scandals.  If you didn't hear much about the latter,
it's about how the press suppressed a report from a drug dealer
that he sold the Vice President marijuana 15 to 20 times.

   The big media is notorious for smoothing over class and national
conflict.  The New York Times, the book points out, chalks up the
widening gap between rich and poor during Reagan's reign as "the
actions of free markets and free people."  Time magazine describes
developers as "democratically inspired" when they remove the poor
from selected neighborhoods to make way for the urban gentry.
About the only time the media was pro-working-class was in its
treatment of Soviet miners, even though the same news shows all but
ignored the struggle of U.S. miners.

   The book concludes with an interview with FAIR spokesman Jeff
Cohen.  It spells out what FAIR has learned about confronting the
press and how to make progress toward a less censored future.
Cohen explains how to do research and conduct meetings with
editors, pointing out that reporters are often well aware of the
bias problem and sympathetic to FAIR's goals.

   This book could have been written in a way that would make us
all feel even more powerless and the future seem even more bleak.
But it's a tribute to the authors that I finished it feeling even
more charged up and ready to move.  It's an essential tool for
fighting corporate domination of the media.

   Ivan Handler is a computer specialist and media activist working
with Networking For Democracy in Chicago.
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