Mining for the Truth

There is, perhaps, no greater source of propaganda than the television. The garbage that passes for news in this country is appalling, but the propaganda seeps into everything. It's crucial that we become familiar with the ways in which the media attempts to manipulate us. Chomsky calls it "manufacturing consent."

Last night I attempted to watch a program on the History channel called "Engineering Disasters." One segment dealt with a coal mine in China. Let me start by giving you a really brief synopsis of how the story went. Conditions in Chinese coal mines are horrible. The workers are poorly paid and provided almost no safety measures or compensation when injured or killed on the job. The audience is informed that the Chinese have not even begun to reach the safety standards we implemented in the 1970s! As the story unfolds we are briefly informed that coal mining in the United States was pretty rough a hundred years ago, but today we have state of the art technology helping to make every coal mine as safe as can be.

The lesson: the United States of America is good; China is bad. We are all very fortunate to live and work in the United States.

The problem: conveniently, not a word was said about the valiant struggle of unionized workers to fight for better and more humane working conditions in American coal mines. Remember, this is the History channel! The best we can get is "Things were bad but they got better because this is America."

Again and again the Chinese government was disparaged for not reaching to the heights of American compassion for its workforce. In one piece the narrator informs us that the Chinese simply made a cold, calculated cost/benefit analysis and decided the cost of protecting workers would be too expensive. Those damn Chinese are mean!

What the narrator doesn't tell us is that American capitalists did the same thing in this country a hundred years ago. And it wasn't magic or "American goodness" or our bold and compassionate government that changed it. In fact, our government did and does everything in its power to fight the labor movement. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the Ludlow Massacre in which 66 men, women, and children were killed by the National Guard and militia men for daring to ask for a better deal.

There is no magic process for bringing about justice in this world. When we marvel at the advances the coal miners have made in regards to occupational safety and compensation we must be reminded of the hard work and dedication of working men and women to educate themselves, organize themselves, and agitate for a better deal. Those men, women, and children who died at Ludlow died so that maybe the next coal miner wouldn't have to die to make a living. They died so that maybe the next coal miner might make a livable wage. They died to get a better deal for the rest of us.

But unions suck so what does it matter, right? Regardless of how you feel about unions, this is a story about how subtle our propaganda system really is in this country. Pick your social movement, any social movement: Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Gay Rights, the environmental movement, solidarity struggles, peace movements, etc. The real struggles that go on are hidden from view. The Civil Rights movement, for example, is distilled down to: Rosa Parks stood up on a bus one day and the rest of America said, "Damn, I think we might be racist; Let's give those black folks a better deal!" The subtle message is always: Things just naturally improve in America; if there is an injustice we will naturally work to fix it.

There's a lot to take in here. I wish more people appeciated the amazing legacy of our labor movement. But it's even more important we all realize the ways in which the media attempts to manipulate and mislead us. Perhaps it's the "Terrorist Expert" confidently telling us that the CIA didn't know anything about Osama Bin Laden until 1995 (LIE!). But you can bet that it will be something. We are bombarded on a daily basis with misleading information and a multitude of red herring stories meant to distract us.

There are those who will say, "You can't include everything in a story." The segment was only so long. We can't expect them to include every little detail, right? There's only so much time in a day.

The problem is that this was a fundamental aspect of the story. The audience has no way of understanding the story as it's told. They are not given enough information. They are told that American coal miners have it better than Chinese coal miners. But why? The audience is never given that crucial piece of the puzzle. It's simply deception through omission. Thus, though it is never directly articulated it is implied that the betterment of the American coal miner came about directly through the actions of our benevolent government. For instance they went into very specific detail regarding the safety devices American coal miners use and the government agency that makes sure that their working environment is safe, but never is there any mention of why a government agency had to be created or how these work conditions gradually got safer.

We don't need to agree all the time. But we cannot even begin to have civilized and meaningful dialogue in this country until eliminate the propaganda and democratize our media outlets, helping to ensure an educated workforce.

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