A Summer of 'Damage Control'

Is the mainstream media taking a more adversarial stance to US foreign policy objectives? At first glance, this might seem to be the case, given all of the discussion in the media, especially this past summer, on events involving US human rights violations in detention facilities -- Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc. Commenting on the exposure of outsourcing torture, Columbia Journalism Review's Deputy Executive Editor proclaims that "Thanks to the news media of the world, the American people are finding out, a little more each day." In a narrow sense, this is true; however, it is important to look at how these exposures are being framed in elite commentary.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, after atrocious events become too obvious to ignore, the media shifts into "damage control" mode. In this mode, " "public attention is diverted to overzealous patriots or to the personality defects of leaders who have strayed from our noble commitments, but not to the institutional factors that determine the persistent and substantive content of these commitments." This is in keeping with the "societal purpose" of the mainstream media, as Herman and Chomsky argue in Manufacturing Consent, which is to "inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state." Moreover, notes Chomsky,

"A threat to dominant ideology arises only when... [US foreign policy] is analyzed in terms of its specific social and economic components and is related to the actual structure of power and control over institutions in American society. One who raises these further questions must be excluded from polite discourse, as a 'radical' or 'Marxist' or 'economic determinist' or 'conspiracy theorist,' not a sober commentator on serious issues...But the principle that the United States may exercise force to guarantee a certain global order that will be 'open' to the penetration and control of transnational corporations- that is beyond the bounds of polite discourse"(Towards a New Cold War [New York: The New Press, 2003], pp. 146-147).