At the end of May, Miro Cernetig of the Globe and Mail'’s China bureau was writing about the tenth anniversary of the slaughter of students and others at Tiananmen Square. He bemoaned the fact that the young people of China today do not believe that the Chinese army killed hundreds – perhaps thousands – of protesters at Tiananmen. "Censorship and propaganda are working their revisionist magic" in China today, he commented, matter-of-factly.

Western media accept it as given that the people of so-called "communist" or "socialist" countries, from Cuba to China, are effectively brainwashed by state propaganda. What they refuse to see is that censorship and propaganda are more prevalent and more effective in so-called western democracies. As Noam Chomsky has observed, propaganda is less effective where there is overt coercion, than it is where hegemony rules. In other words, in order to be effectively manipulated, we have to believe we are not being manipulated at all.

It's not surprising that the news media will be the last to be cognisant of their own role in purveying "one-dimensional thought," as Herbert Marcuse termed it more than 35 years ago. The relentless concentration of media ownership within the hands of smaller numbers of ever-wealthier elites has exacerbated the problem. Mainstream, corporate media today, in the hands of Conrad Black and those of his ilk, religiously promote free market, neoliberal values and policies.

Even a cursory reading of the news over the past decade reveals that ownership values are reflected in news content, whether on free trade, the deficit and debt, social program cuts, the attack on labour, and now tax breaks.

The latest example of the news media rallying to the corporate clarion happened in the Ontario provincial election of June 3. The incumbent Tory government of premier Mike Harris was returned, thanks in no small part to a cooperative media and an undemocratic (first past the post) electoral system which rewards a party with a minority electoral vote – in this case 45% – with a majority (58%) of the seats.

Leaving aside the need, at a minimum, for a system of proportional representation, examination of the news media coverage of the election reveals a textbook example of the phenomenon of news media as corporate clarion. A study of more than 500 articles in Conrad Black's National Post, Ken Thomson's Globe and Mail and even the Toronto Star found all of the papers to be biased and severely lacking. We'll just summarize some observations by making six points.

1. To begin with, the newspapers all narrowly focussed on trivia and "horserace journalism" such as polling, while largely ignoring substantive issues such as policies. The newspapers had their own polls conducted, and used these as fodder for endless speculation about who was ahead, and by how much. The polls were also a boost to the status quo, for despite the closeness of the election (45% Tories, to 40% for the Liberals, and 13% for the NDP) from the beginning of the campaign the newspapers predicted another Tory majority, based on the polls. Said the Toronto Star: "At the end of the election's first week, a tightly wrapped Premier Mike Harris and his team have the look of winners."("Tories surge to big lead in first poll,"– Toronto Star, May 8).

2. After embarrassing confrontations with protesters in the first two days of the campaign, premier Harris withdrew into a bubble of carefully orchestrated events, stage-managed before the Tory party faithful. Perhaps because their own access wasn't jeopardized, the papers didn't object to Harris's peek-a-boo campaign. Indeed, instead of calling Harris to account, the newspapers interpreted the premier's cocooning as evidence of his successful tactics in dealing with protesters, and praised him for this.

3. The Globe and Mail and the National Post in particular, went to extreme ends to promote the Tories. The Post, for example, hired a "body language expert" to inform readers that Harris came across best in the leaders' debate because "the whites of his eyes" mean "clarity of vision" and he frequently raised his eyebrows which is a positive gesture that "people really like." Meanwhile, Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty was "too excited" and too animated in the debate, while the NDP's Howard Hampton bottled up his anger over government policies, according to the body language expert.

4. Initially, using their own polls which put the NDP a distant third at 9 percent in popular opinion (they wound up with 13 percent) the press dismissed the party's chances of getting anywhere, and saddled leader Howard Hampton with a hopeless uphill battle. ("Hampton treads a long, lonely campaign trail," Toronto Star, May 8). Later, when Hampton was judged to have won the leaders' debate, he was portrayed as rescuing his party from oblivion and robbing votes away from the Liberals, and hence helping the Tories to win.

The National Post, in particular, stepped up its criticism of Hampton after the debate, and ran a suspect poll result on its web site on a daily basis, which suggested premier Harris won the debate. The Post ran an election "debate" in column format, between Harris supporter David Frum and Liberal party supporter John Duffy. For the Post, which is notorious neocon Conrad Black's main vehicle, the NDP was completely out of the picture, right from the start.

5. In the first week of the campaign the Harris Tories committed a gross error with their practice of luring teens out of high school classes with T-shirts and pizza, to campaign and demonstrate for Harris. But this became a one-day wonder in the press. Harris pulled the bus and apologized, and there was reference to a police investigation, but the press let the matter drop. Here's how National Post columnist David Frum dismissed the scandal on May 15: "Giving kids pizza to cheer for a candidate? What enormity will the Tories be guilty of next? Balloons and streamers? Brass bands? Free babysitting at party rallies?"

But when the NDP's Howard Hampton picked up on a press gallery joke and made a relatively harmless comparison between Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty and Norman Bates of Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, the press was all over him for beating up on the mentally impaired, and he was forced to apologize. And when Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty quite reasonably linked Harris's cuts to social programs and education, to the school shootings in Taber Alta, the press jumped all over him, forcing an apology.

6. All in all, what the press left out was just as important as what was reported on. Some of the scandals and controversies which were largely ignored by the press included: municipal amalgamations, Harris' possible role in giving instructions to the OPP in the shooting of Dudley George at Ipperwash, the use of closure to pass the omnibus Bill 26; passing Bill 22, which denies basic human rights to workfare recipients; UN criticism for the increasing legions of homeless and poor; controversies involving political interference at the Trillium Foundation and Ontario Place; Tory Speaker of the Legislature Al McLean's resignation over a sex scandal; Leslie Noble and two other prominent Tories receipt of about $450,000 in fees from Ontario Hydro for consulting work that produced just 12 pages of records; the "Lands For Life" scandal that saw millions of hectares of public land given away cheap to the forestry industry; Tory spending of about $100 million in taxpayers' money in blatant political ads during the run up to the election; the Dionne Quints scandal; Ontario air pollution.

Some of these issues were given one-time coverage by some of the press, but the overwhelming tendency was to ignore the PC government's record, and focus narrowly on the 28 day campaign. The general position taken by the press was typified by National Post columnist David Frum, writing on May 15:

"If today's topic is ethics in government, here's the bottom line, undisputed by [Liberal John Duffy]: The Harris government that has gone for four years without a breath of scandal. This government ranks among the cleanest - I would say it is the very cleanest - in Ontario's history."

To read the press during the election, one would think so. Thus, by what they focussed on and what they ignored, the news media were a tremendous help in getting Mike Harris re-elected.

James Winter (winter@uwindsor.ca), Ph.D., is a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Windsor, where Jeremy Gillies (email.jer@home.com) is a graduate student.