Mill’s Nightmare
Free Speech and the Media


In 2007, the stakes of preserving democracy in the United States may be at their highest since the founding of the country, and media is at the helm of this ship. Yet, the country is divided and confused. This is not by accident.

The mainstream media is driven by the specific goal of profit, thereby both instilling fear into its audience to behave in a certain manner— agreement with the officials of the society— and to numb minds to societal needs by focusing on the individual. Receiving this type of media does not require work. The receiver is bombarded by it. The work to be done is for the consumer to pay very careful attention to these messages in terms of who sent them, their political, social, and cultural effects, and what has been left out of these messages. Professor Sut Jhally (2005) has stated that “The most important thing about the message system is not what is in it but what is absent and that is the ultimate form of power.”(Jhally, 2005)

John Stuart Mill appealed to his audience, in his book of essays On Liberty (1869), to protect democratic freedom against tyranny accomplished through censorship. He claimed that the government has no right to use coercive power, and that this power is more injurious to the society when public opinion goes along with it. Mill realized that if the citizens are in agreement with the concept of being controlled, their minds must have been tainted in someway. He also stated that every single voice has the right to be heard.

Mill was correct that democracy would be forever under siege, and that those in power would endlessly seek to silence dissenting voices. Seven years following Mill’s publication of On Liberty, Karl Marx (1876) published The Capital, an insightful glimpse into the future world of industrial capitalism.Yet Mill had no way of foreseeing the impending economic changes from an agricultural society to an industrial nation, nor did he take into account the effect that these changes would have on free speech. Although the right to speak freely remains protected in our Constitution, it cannot rightly be termed “free speech”. Speech, via media, is not free. It costs. It is a hybrid form of fascist control when the media is dominated by corporations. In his article Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse, Sut Jhally (1997) stated:

“Indeed, commercial interests intent on maximizing the consumption of the immense collection of commodities have colonized more and more of the spaces of our culture. For instance, almost the entire media system (television and print) has been developed as a delivery system for marketers its prime function is to produce audiences for sale to advertisers. Both the advertisements it carries, as well as the editorial matter that acts as a support for it, celebrate the consumer society.” (Sut Jhally, 1997, ¶6 )

As the Industrial Revolution began to take hold in the United Stated, Mother Jones, an Irish immigrant, worked in vehement opposition to the lack of enforcement of newly established child labor laws. In 1903, she encouraged a strike of textile workers in Kensington, Pennsylvania. Of the 75,000 workers, 10,000 or more were children under ten years of age. These children were working long hours in dangerous factories where injuries, some life threatening, were a daily occurrence and included the loss of limbs. Jones questioned the press as to why they were not publicizing the fate of these children. According to Judith Pinkerton Josephson (1997) in her biography of Mother Jones, the newsmen simply stated, “They couldn't because the mill owners had stock in the papers.” (Pinkerton Josephson, 1997, p. 84)

This corporate media institution, born out of the Industrial Revolution, is driven by a profit motive; its purpose is to sell products and ideology that will justify the colonization of minds and territories to exploit the labor force and to lay claim to the natural resources, thereby committing atrocities against humanity, cultures, and the natural environment. The justification is a free market and a global economy that will improve the quality of life for those residing in underdeveloped countries, as well as ensuring an availability of inexpensive commodities for those residing in the West. The competing value of free speech, in this sense, is a draw between political ideologies that foster democratic, humanitarian, environmental, and social values and those that prioritize economic gain for an already wealthy few.

Jhally’s point of view was not new to opinions concerning a free society and media. In the late 1920’s, the decade that introduced the advertising industry, Edward Bernays coined the phrase “Corporate Journalism” and described this new found media as “an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.” (Pilger, 2007, ¶1). In order to profit, this new corporate journalism needed to attract advertisers to fund production and sales, and therefore developed its own need to sell an image. The irony defies the ideology and ethics of journalistic free speech, where the purpose is to inform, while the sole purpose of this new corporate journalism is to sell. To do so, the image chosen by this new capitalist venture needed to appear respectable to the establishment. As a result, the image of a democratic perspective was constructed— an image that Robert McChesney, one of the leading scholars on media and ethics, has called “entirely bogus.” (Pilger, 2007, ¶1)

Under this new corporate journalism, the news as well as opinions were dominated by “official” sources, specifically government and financial interests. (Pilger, 2007, ¶1). To exemplify this point is the journalistic role of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Judith Miller, writing for one of the most respected newspapers in the world, The New York Times. Because of the respectability of both the paper and Ms. Miller, her work was vital in promoting the United States invasion of Iraq.

Prior to the invasion, Miller wrote many articles, including her front-page article under the headline “Secret Sites; Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms” which told a story of knowledge of sites that were creating biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. (Rich, 2006, p. 40) These articles all confirmed Saddam’s arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction, backing up her journalism with seemingly reliable sources, and instilling fear in the minds of the worldwide readers of The New York Times. After the invasion of Iraq, it came to light that Miller’s primary source of information was a practitioner of fraud, Ahmed Chalabi, who was on his own political and economic mission, aligned with the Bush administration, to overthrow Saddam’s government.

Not only did Miller’s articles assist in “selling the war”, dissenting views were rejected from mainstream media. According to Mills (1869), a clear failure in the ethics of free speech occurs when a contradictory opinion is suppressed, the reason being that this contradictory opinion may be the truth, and if it is being censored, the truth of that message is being denied. The power structure “assumes that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.” (Mill, 1869, ¶ 2)

In February of 2003, then Secretary of State Collin Powell went before the United Nations, using Miller’s self-serving source, Chalabi, as a voice of the absolute truth. This is not surprising, based on Mill’s analysis of the denial of dissenting voices. Later that year, Chalabi was exposed and accused in the London based newspaper, The Telegraph, “of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington.” He said, “Information about Saddam Hussein's weapons, even if discredited, had achieved the aim of persuading America to topple the dictator.” (Fairweather and La Guardia, 2004, ¶ 1)

The selling of the invasion of Iraq was an administrative propaganda ploy in which the mainstream, or corporate media, played a primary role while dissenting voices were silenced. FAIR (2003), or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, researched and presented statistics concluding that while the majority of U.S. citizens were hoping for their government to honor the United Nations Resolution and follow diplomacy, they were being bombarded by media messages that were banging the war drums. (FAIR, 2003) It is also essential to note that the images and voices of those promoting war were “officials”, and the manner in which the mainstream media presented the voices of anti-war activism was via biased images of nameless people on the streets, implying ignorance on the part of the messengers.

In addition to the absence of dissenting voices in mainstream media, other absences exist. These include the reporting of actions that change the power structure. Often fear, a charm of a seller for media, is used as a diversion tactic, as the threat of terrorism has been used against U.S. citizens post 9-11. If the public’s attention is diverted, the passing and signing of laws that give the powers that be further power encounter little to no opposition. An example of such a law that presently exempts the United States from Habeas Corpus and terms set forth in The Geneva Conventions is The Military Commissions Act, signed into law in October, 2006. According to this act, extraordinary rendition is an acceptable practice. On the same notorious day that this act was signed into law, President Bush also signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act. This act allows the President to declare public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. (Morales, 2006, ¶2) This act grants the government permission to declare and enforce marital law, stripping U.S. citizens of all of their freedoms. It is a true attack on the freedoms granted U.S. citizens based on their Constitutional rights, as it is all encompassing, and immensely threatening to democratic freedom in that it is widely interpretive.

According to Project Censored (2007), several other top stories that grant further and sometimes unlimited power to the present United States Government include AFRICOM, a revised and upwardly aggressive form of Former President Carter’s CENTCOM, founded in his ideology that “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” (Hunt, 2007, ¶ 3). This mission to colonize the oil regions of the globe is now in full throttle, and as Africa is the home of this essential resource, oil, the U.S. is putting the moves via a military presence on the continent. (Hunt, 2007, ¶ 3). This is occurring in “silence”, unbeknownst to the majority of U.S. citizens and bereft of their consent.

In her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism , Naomi Klein (2007) stated that, “the administration quickly moved (post 9-11) to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through a radical vision of hollow government, in which everything from waging wars to reconstructing from those wars to disaster response became an entirely for-profit venture.” (Klein, 2007, ¶ 15)

According to Thomas Jefferson (1816), “No man can be both ignorant and free.” To be a free thinker in our consumer culture dominated by corporate media messages, it is essential that citizens seek out information, and ask the right questions regarding the information: “How are messages constructed? How messages are made sense of by audiences? What social, political and cultural effects do messages have? and “What has been left out of media messages?” (Jhally, 2007)

Linguistic scholar, Noam Chomsky (2007), is among other scholars in his reasoning that the risks for a citizen of a democratic society to be mentally controlled compared to a person living in a totalitarian society are higher by the nature of each. In a totalitarian society, it is clear that the message is that of the state, while in a democratic society, the boundaries are unclear. “This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty.” (Chomsky, 2007, ¶8 )

The internet offers hope in the challenging struggle to make and keep information available to all. Independent media is a media based on conscience, humanitarian voices, and strife towards truth via the subjective voices of many. If Mill were alive today, he would probably be a regular on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, he would most likely be a blogger, yet he most certainly would be monitoring the Federal Communications Commission like a hawk to assure freedom of speech and the protection of a healthy democracy. Although Mill could not have anticipated that the messages of corporations would dominate speech in the United States, he would surely recognize the biggest culprits, media conglomerates, such as News Corporation, Viacom, CBS, Disney, Time Warner, and General Electric, and the need to support Network Neutrality, which will keep the internet free of corporate control.




References

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Morales, Frank (2006, October, 26). Bush moves towards marshall law.
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