A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 1: The Media

The intellectual effort needed to understand my work is not very formidable.

It takes a comprehensive perspective to understand what is happening in our world and what humanity’s options are. Bucky Fuller developed a curriculum to achieve comprehensive thought. He was the professional grandfather that I never knew I had, as I groped toward a comprehensive perspective on my own.

Fuller’s comprehensivist teachings are filled with jargon, somewhat understandably, but I generally avoid jargon in my work. Because it had a different genesis in ways (although our business efforts were wiped out for being too dangerous to vested interests, and other similarities), my work is a little different from Fuller’s. My work is designed to be easily understood by nearly anybody who is willing to put in just a little honest effort. In coming posts, I am going to give examples of that from my work.

I am going to start with a subject that all of my readers are familiar with: the media. As Ed Herman’s biographer, I had to read about all of his work that I could, and Ed generally stayed in his lane on the media. His primary question was a simple one: is the American mainstream media an unbiased seeker of the truth? The media portrays itself that way, and academics also support the idea. Then Ed performed scientific analyses, with the unbiased media as the null hypothesis, which in academia means the assertion that is being tested. In Ed’s first collaboration with Noam Chomsky, they developed the bloodbath framework that Ed used for the rest of his life. According to that framework, slaughters perpetrated by the USA and its allies (“constructive” and “benign” bloodbaths) would be celebrated, justified, or ignored in the mainstream media, while slaughters committed by enemy regimes (“nefarious” bloodbaths) would be not only denounced, but they would be lied about, and there was a subcategory of nefarious bloodbath called “mythical,” which either never happened or was a minor event that was greatly exaggerated in the media’s reporting.

It is easy to determine which regimes are allies or enemies of the USA, and all that Ed did was compare slaughters, based on the best independent data, to the media’s reporting on them. Ed invented other ideas, such as worthy and unworthy victims. Worthy victims are the victims of enemy regimes, while unworthy victims are victims of us or our allies. Ed would just total up the media’s coverage, and the results were stark. In his most famous comparison, in Manufacturing Consent, he compared the murders of church workers in allied and enemy regimes, and found that the media reported on worthy victims more than 100 times as often as the unworthy victims. Ed also pursued qualitative aspects of the murders. For worthy victims, they were often portrayed in saintly terms, while unworthy victims, if even mentioned, were often portrayed as deserving of their fate, even when they were American nuns.

A generation after Manufacturing Consent, Ed coauthored a book on the politicization of the term genocide. It was a variation of his worthy-and-unworthy-victim analysis. In that instance, he found that murders of people by enemy regimes were called “genocide” more than 25,000 times as often as murders committed by allied regimes. When testing null hypotheses, the results are statistically analyzed and there are confidence intervals that state that the results could have been arrived at by chance. Five percent and one percent confidence intervals are standard in academia. Data that falls in the 5% confidence interval means that there was a 5% chance that the null hypothesis was valid in light of the data, if the process was valid. A 1% confidence interval is more conservative. Ed did not use confidence intervals in his media-analysis work, but just stated how skewed the data was, such as a more than 100-fold discrepancy in coverage for those church worker deaths, and a 25,000-fold discrepancy in describing those mass slaughters as genocides. But if Ed had used confidence intervals, they would have been far smaller than 1%, and in the case of the use of “genocide,” it was likely on the order of 0.00001% or even smaller, which means that the idea that the media impartially used the term “genocide” in its reporting had virtually no support. That is called rejecting the null hypothesis. In the social sciences, I have never seen a statistic as extreme as what Ed and his coauthor adduced for the media’s use of “genocide.”

Why is the media’s reporting so unreliable? That was what Ed and Noam’s Propaganda Model was all about, and it was primarily Ed’s invention. The Propaganda Model is essentially a conflict-of-interest model. The primary upshot of the Propaganda Model is that the media’s stated goal of pursuing the truth was undermined by vested interests, primarily American elites. The Propaganda Model specifically identified the media’s owners, advertisers, and media sources as influences (“filters”) that undermined media impartiality. Two other filters in the Propaganda Model were attacks on journalists and media organizations that strayed from elite narratives, and the final filter was the overriding ideological milieu that generally demonized official enemies. It was identified as anticommunism when Manufacturing Consent was published, but after the fall of the Soviet Union it became “terrorists” and other official enemies.

Ed’s work was a very straightforward scientific test of the null hypothesis about media impartiality, but to this day, none of Ed’s and Noam’s critics have ever provided a credible critique of those results. Instead, they directed a barrage of lies at Ed and Noam, generally personal attacks, and other misdirections. Ed’s Wikipedia bio remains libelous to this day, and Wikipedia refuses to even present the bloodbath framework, as that would expose the ideological nature of Ed’s bio. Ed’s libelous Wikipedia bio is an inadvertent confirmation of the Propaganda Model.

My journey and studies taught me that in order to understand any controversial issue such as media impartiality, or how Western medicine works, and the many subjects that I have studied, conflicts of interest is the place to start. If there are conflicts of interest, then the pursuit of the truth or the public’s interest will almost never be served. That is the salient observation to keep in mind during this short course on comprehensive thought. Nearly all of my work is easily understood if people can lay aside their conflicts of interest, but few people have proven willing and capable of doing it, which was my journey’s primary lesson.