Amid globally visible Western hypocrisy on Palestine and Ukraine, a new book provides us with a clear outline of how the mainstream corporate media plays an important role in shaping opinions in the service of US imperialism. In doing so, the book updates and validates the seminal work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent. The Canary caught up with author Devan Hawkins to discuss his new book Worthy and Unworthy.
And in our first article on the book, we look at how uneven coverage of protests in China and India pushed him to explore even more cases of blatant media bias.
Worthy and Unworthy: behind the research
Hawkins said his experiences growing up made him “skeptical of the media”. In particular, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 taught him about “how the media can manipulate people’s opinions, intentionally or not”. And more recently, he decided to “delve more deeply into these topics”, especially as US foreign policy has “reoriented itself” to the perception of China as “the new official enemy”.
The spark for the book was an article he was preparing on the differing coverage between the Hong Kong and Kashmir protests of 2019. As these “almost lined up with each other perfectly”, he began to analyse them systematically.
By “applying Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s idea around worthy and unworthy victims”, he would evaluate whether Hong Kong got more attention because the ‘bad guy’ of the story was New Cold War target China, while the bad guy in Kashmir was India – a “Major Defense Partner” of the US.
Hawkins focused on looking at coverage from the New York Times, as a paper of record. In particular, he searched for all relevant articles there, counted them, and then determined the “quality of the coverage”.
The expectation was that “not only would the coverage be greater in the case of the events that are happening in your official state enemies of the country, but also that it would be more negative”.
By applying Chomsky and Herman’s approach, Hawkins essentially validated it, showing that it’s still relevant today. In fact, he said:
If anything, it’s even more relevant now because of the cutbacks that are happening for a lot of outlets, right? In the past, smaller media outlets might have had foreign coverage, where now it’s really the New York Times and those big papers. So that’s the only source for a lot of these stories that are happening in these other countries.
How the media is still ‘Manufacturing Consent’ for conflict
Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent looked at how capitalist mainstream media organisations work in the interests of powerful elites. And they argued that these media outlets split victims of violence or injustice into two groups – ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’.
If a victim is fighting a country that powerful interests oppose, their cause is worthy (think Ukraine and Russia). But if a victim is fighting a country that’s an ally of powerful interests, their cause is unworthy (think Palestine and Israel).
The idea is that mainstream media coverage will show significant sympathy for ‘worthy’ victims, treating them as worthy of support, but will downplay or even justify the suffering of ‘unworthy’ victims. Even if their situations are essentially the same, the theory says, the coverage will be different.
The double standards of the US empire and its allies have long been clear. But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza overlapping in the last year, the hypocrisy is as nakedly obvious as perhaps ever before. And the mainstream media has loyally followed suit, to differing extents.
Hawkins started out with a scientific, analytical comparison of the Hong Kong and Kashmir protests. But he ended up compiling a number of important comparisons from different parts of the world. And these help to prove that the mainstream media’s distinction between worthy and unworthy causes is still going strong.
In fact, if anything, Chomsky and Herman’s theory is as poignantly relevant today as it ever has been.
Case Study One: a ’worthy’ protest against China and an ‘unworthy’ protest against India
Talking about legitimate concerns for citizens in Hong Kong, now part of China under the “one country, two systems” principle, Hawkins takes us back to the protests of 2019 over the Extradition Bill. These events were big news in the West, but he boils it down to the fact that:
sometimes criminals would commit crimes, especially financial crimes in mainland China, and then flee to Hong Kong, and then there’d be a situation where it would be impossible for them to be extradited for it.
And while Western media covered the protests, they rarely highlighted that there was “a certain element of the population that was in favor of the Extradition Bill”.
Over in Kashmir, meanwhile, Hawkins explains:
the article of the Constitution was revoked, and that was an article of the Constitution that had existed… for well over half a century that gave the special status to Kashmir
Comparing this to the events in Hong Kong:
Basically, democratic elections completely ended in Kashmir during that time, and then there was a much more violent response. There were more deaths that occurred in terms of the protests and the state response to it. There were actually no deaths that were documented in the case of the Hong Kong protests where there were… maybe close to a dozen that occurred in Kashmir during those time periods.
So both in terms of the the nature of what was done, which I would say would be more drastic in the case of Kashmir than in Hong Kong… and then also the state response, it seemed more drastic, and therefore you would think it would get at the very least as much coverage as the Hong Kong protests.
But as I show in the book that was very much not the case… And then also in terms of the nature of the coverage overall, I would say that the coverage was critical in the case of the Kashmir revocation, but not to the same extent… and not to the same volume as was the case with Hong Kong.
Why was the coverage different?
Hawkins insists that he doesn’t really go into the reasons for the the difference in coverage. However, he does point out that:
It’s easier to report on the stories when they’re negative about China, because we’re… primed to see China as the enemy, and not have those same necessary feelings about India.
He also says protesters in Hong Kong seemed “more media savvy”:
They were doing a good job of doing things that would generally get the attention of the US media.
On this point, he mentions that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which journalist and author Matt Kennard has called “an overt CIA”, had previously “supported what are called ‘democratic movements’ in Hong Kong”. He believes it would be great to have more research about how such training “can be helpful for teaching protesters how to appeal to Western audiences”.
The Canary will be releasing more articles on the comparisons Hawkins made in his book in the coming days.
Featured image supplied
