Comment by thrden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrden | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In 1933 The United States recognized the Soviet Union, however Walter Duranty wrote his work defending Stalin in 1931. Further, it has been argued that his work and the New York Time's work played an important part in the United State's formal recognition of the Soviet Union [1]

Additionally, the United States had joined a military Intervention in the Russian Revolution against the Bolsheviks (we sent almost 11,000 troops). As such relations between the two countries could not reasonably be considered friendly before recognition. [2]

Finally, The United States had gone through the First red scare just 10 years prior to the articles being written. As such it's unlikely that the U.S. Populace had an overwhelmingly positive view of the country. [3]

Whereas the two had a strong trade relation as you pointed out, the countries were very adversarial and as such I believe it is incorrect to imagine that the NYT's strings were pulled to show the USSR in a positive light.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Reporting_the_1...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare

The recognition was just a side note, my main point is that by 1930, the big American businesses were investing heavily in the USSR, therefore the idea that the media was suppressing stories that might jeopardize those deals is completely consistent with Manufacturing Consent. Especially if the US populace was already hostile to the USSR in the first place - they would want to diffuse that, not provoke a reaction.

In any case, the model described by Chomsky applies mostly to post-WW2 media, as the newspapers and radio channels really began to grow and concentrate, fueled by the flourishing advertising industry. Whether the NYT in 1930 fit the model is not very relevant.

The factors needed to gauge cause-and-effect between media coverage and nation-level politics are so diffuse and broad that I feel it would be impossible to distinguish a world in which the tail wags the dog versus vice versa. Publishing stories favorable to the USSR is not a binary or discrete action. Neither is giving them the Pulitzer award. NYT's positive/whitewashing coverage of USSR could have been a result of the NYT reporters and editors being sympathetic towards Communists. And the government and business eagerness to have a relationship was made possible from Soviet sympathies being normalized.

Why do Chomsky and his fellow believers point to such massive hard-to-prove examples like the Vietnam War to argue systemic and planned bias between media, business, and government? Why not more everyday examples, such as news outlets' ubiquitous coverage of violent crime. As someone who's worked to procure crime data from local jurisdictions to publish for the newspaper, I can tell you that bureaucrats and businessfolks most definitely do not like publicizing this information, or emphasizing crime events, because it's bad for business, particularly real estate.

News organizations most likely have killed stories/beats for not wanting to anger real estate developers, especially developers who happen to rub elbows with the publishers and top editors. Yet if this is a systematic issue, why is the media at a local level so incompetent when it comes to managing the happiness of the local business community when it comes to crime and corruption stories? Many reporters at top-tier institutions like NYT started at local/regional outlets. Do they all have a come-to-Jesus talk with the publisher as part of joining the elite, nationally powerful outlets?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com