The Life and Death of Superman
How manipulation of the media during the Cold War stifled criticism, manufactured consent and laid the groundwork for the modern surveillance state
As a meek, “mild-mannered” reporter for the Daily Planet, the fictional Clark Kent won real fame during the 1950s by ducking into alleys and the occasional phone booth, stripping down to his Superman outfit, and flying valiantly through the air in pursuit of bad guys “faster than a speeding bullet.”
“Look! Up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!” boomed the intro to the popular Superman TV show.
In those days, larger-than-life journalists spoke with a sense of reassuring conviction about the uncertainty of our Cold War conflicted universe. The Superman blurb announcing the fight for “truth, justice, and the American way” signaled to grass roots TV viewers of that era that trusted father figures such as Edward R. Murrow, whose “See It Now” series won American hearts and minds, a place of honor on 29 cent postage stamps, a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, and the praise of President Harry Truman, had their backs.
The Cold War unfolded just as painful memories of the Great Depression and World War II had begun to recede, two cars were in every garage, and voices of charismatic leaders such as John Kennedy resounded with hope and infinite possibility. But the aura of optimism was offset by the threat of nuclear annihilation, the fear mongering of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and President Eisenhower’s warning in his 1961 farewell address about the dangers of the military industrial complex.
Our founding fathers, though wary of the press, acknowledged its vital role in keeping citizens informed as a check on power. Though Truman once described journalists as “prostitutes of the mind,” he valued them as“essential to our way of life” who, to his consternation, became compromised by the Central Intelligence Agency, the intelligence-gathering arm of government that he signed into law in 1947 as a bulwark against communism but later came to regret as “a mistake.” His concerns were amplified by Operation Mockingbird, the agency program that enlisted 400 U.S. journalists from 25 news organizations - including the New York Times and Washington Post - to spy and disseminate propaganda.
At that time, the prospect of a Soviet attack seemed so real that fallout shelters were fashionable and schoolchildren ducked beneath desks during nuclear safety drills. In that environment, self-styled patriots wanted cheerleaders, not watchdogs. CIA overreaching did not stop with Operation Mockingbird. Militant elements within the agency went even farther, orchestrating coups and other covert operations, both foreign and domestic, out of media sight. In his later years, Truman openly lamented that the agency had gone too far. On Dec. 22, 1963, exactly one month after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, he published an Op Ed in the Washington Post titled "Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” Though never specifically tying JFK’s death to the clandestine service (which Kennedy had threatened to break into “a thousand pieces”), the timing and venue of his articles suggested as much. In a letter the following year to Look Magazine, Truman said he never intended for the CIA to engage in “strange activities.” He also backed unsuccessful efforts by New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to transfer oversight of covert operations to the Department of Defense where it would be less vulnerable to hijacking by rogue elements within the agency.
With journalism muzzled, and television saturating only 9% of U.S. homes, the 50s public remained oblivious to secret overseas operations and knew little or nothing about agency-inspired coups that ousted freely elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia (the latter alone resulting in 500,000 to 1 million deaths). It remained equally blind to Operation Chaos, a CIA program inspired by President Nixon that from 1967 to 1974 spied on domestic dissidents who opposed the Vietnam War, among them Daniel Ellsberg, who faced 115 years in prison for leaking the Pentagon Papers exposing U.S. crimes in Southeast Asia before charges against him were dropped in July 1973 because of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering. By the end of that 16-year conflict, with TV ownership up by 93%, and gruesome battlefield images filling living rooms, sentiment changed and ultimately led to U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that took down Nixon as commander-in-chief.
But the media’s image as a principled fighter for justice and honesty in government suffered another smackdown in January 1975 when CIA director William Colby acknowledged during hearings of the Church Committee that the agency used press people to spy and spread propaganda. As a result, the agency terminated its contracts with “accredited” journalists but made no mention of “non accredited” stringers or freelancers. By publicly acknowledging “the family jewels,” Colby infuriated many colleagues, and ultimately ended up floating in the Potomac River.
Journalism’s reputation experienced a brief resurgence in December 1978 when Superman the movie debuted to critical and financial acclaim, garnering box office sales of $300 million as the the second-highest-grossing release of the year, and nominations for three Academy Awards.
But Clark Kent went AWOL again in 1990 after the Pentagon, blaming the press for the U.S. loss in Vietnam, implemented strict rules governing media coverage of the Gulf War. As Western governments beat the drums of war, the media marched in lockstep, rallying the masses against the “Butcher of Baghdad.” Operation “Desert Storm” played out on millions of television screens, turbocharged by sanitized Star Wars imagery, reports of fictional babies being thrown from incubators and accounts about buildups of non existent Iraqi troops. Blinded to the carnage on the ground by “bombs bursting in air,” described three times in 20 seconds by NBC anchor Brian Williams as “beautiful,” U.S. citizens eagerly embraced the narrative that American good guys, determined to make the world safe for democracy, crushed it against huge odds.
The real kryptonite kick to the free press came with the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, billed as a vehicle for broadly expanding avenues of expression that instead enabled just six transnational companies to gobble up 93% of all media outlets, leading increasingly to scripted, echo chamber corporate-controlled messaging and, ultimately, greater bottom line profits.
Unable to compete, the relatively few remaining independent newspapers and magazines cut corners, laid off reporters and bowed increasingly to the whims of government agencies and advertisers. In 1997, when Monsanto warned Fox News affiliate WVTV in Tampa, Florida, not to air a documentary critical of milk tainted with rBGH bovine growth hormone, the station fired the film’s award-winning producers, a lesson to other journalists to toe the line or else suffer the same fate.
The muzzling of the media intensified in the wake of 9/11 with passage of the USA PATRIOT Act and its green-lighting of mass surveillance. By then Superman’s villainous alter ego, Bizarro, had seemingly squeezed out Clark Kent and overshadowed real life reporting icons such as Mike Wallace who, like the “Man of Steel” himself, seemed to fade away along with his investigative scoops, replaced by talking heads, celebrity gossip, and screaming matches between government pundits, cable television military “experts,” and lobbyists who pot-stirred war mongering. Though Operation Mockingbird no longer officially existed, the ramifications of the media makeover suggested that a newer, more streamlined version had replaced the original program. The mainstream’s refusal to report on the plight of Julian Assange with the same vigor that it did on Daniel Ellsberg the generation before was a measure of how compromised the press had become.
To maintain their career trajectories, mainstream reporters set aside J-school principles and went along to get along, virtue signaling in the language of identity politics, deflecting rather than informing, and aiding and abetting divide-and-conquer narratives, Their cherry picked reporting prompted Project Censored to compile an annual list of 25 top stories that got no print or air time while whistleblowers such as Assange and Edward Snowden got targeted for persecution and prosecution for simply reporting the truth about unchecked U.S.surveillance of its own citizens and far-flung, under reported military adventures by its armed forces.
The press not only no longer was a check on government excess, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argued in Manufacturing Consent, its failure to meaningfully inform effectively reduced it to a propaganda machine that staged democracy by getting citizens to fall in line.
The press, the book posited, cannot be a check on power because the very system it is supposed to oversee encourages complicity between governments, corporations, advertisers and big institutions that feed scoops and official accounts and even arrange interviews with “experts” to bolster predetermined story lines. When journalists stray from the consensus narrative, the authors maintained, the flack machine vaults into action, trashing alternative sources, diverting the conversation and, with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda no longer around, blaming Russians and other go-to whipping boys. More recently, flavor-of-the-day scapegoating has centered on naked partisans of the left the and right goaded to trash each other over social issues while ignoring policy matters on which they fundamentally agree. Rather than directing public attention to the root of public discontent, our ruling oligarchy, the reconfigured media fans the fire of divisiveness or else quietly looks the other way while it festers.
One narrative, building on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, was redeployed in the 2020 race, stoking fear that enabled the principal creators of “threats” (namely, the intelligence community, corporations and government) to consolidate their growing stranglehold on power.
Without access to mainstream information channels, dissenters have increasingly gone online, though not without resistance from tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter, which have shut down dissident posters. More obscure critics suspected of being government fronts have piled on, including New York-based Coda Story, which trashed Grayzone, a self-described “independent news website” dedicated to “original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.” Grayzone pushed back, denouncing Coda Story as “a shadowy neoconservative website” that attacks American journalists who challenge official new Cold War propaganda for not disclosing that it is funded by the US government, backed by the European Union, linked to the NATO war alliance, and part of a larger network of regime-change outfits that are bankrolled by Western governments and corporate oligarchs.”
With more choices at its disposal, the public has become increasingly wary of mainstream news reports, with one poll showing that 84% of Americans blame press outlets for the U.S. political divide. According to Gallup, fewer than half of Americans say they trust national newspapers (49%), CNN (48%), Fox News (43%), online news (40%), radio talk shows (38%), television talk shows (33%), and half-hour television entertainment news programs (29%).
The media’s metamorphosis from watchdog to lapdog was one factor that drove Jimmy Carter, widely regarded as the most honest of former presidents, to describe the U.S. as an oligarchy rather than a republic. When Monsanto paid $10 billion in settlement money to thousands of the company’s non Hodgkins Lymphoma victims stemming from exposure to glyphosate, mainstream journalists remained largely in the shadows rather than connecting the dots and alerting the public about possible health problems associated with the consumption of glyphosate-tainted GMO food.
A handful of corporate media stars bucked the trend by hosting outlier, non network shows of their own. “In the Watergate days, my bosses took the heat because I didn’t have to, someone who could say in effect that the buck stops here,” said long-time CBS newsman Dan Rather and former host of the now-defunct Dan Rather Reports, a series that aired "hard-edged field reports” for seven years. “Now, the news stops with making bucks. The spectacle plays out prior to each four-year cycle in a series of so-called political debates, where the one thing that is sure not to happen is genuine debates,” he added. “Questions that the public really cares about seldom if ever seem to get asked, leaving the American public ignorant.”
The corporate media’s obsessive focus on inflammatory identity issues (i.e. abortion, bathroom rights, color, sex, and ethnicity) diverts attention from dollar-driven policy deal-making that benefits special interests at the expense of the public when it occurs out of the public eye. Observed conservative columnist Pat Buchanan: “The country speaks in a tremendous way on Election Day, and then the day after the election that voice falls silent. And all the elected folks go back to Washington. And then the guys who contributed give them a call; and then the lobbyists give them a call; and then the leaders say ‘this is where we’re going to stand on this issue’ and then Washington begins to whisper to them, speak to them, talk to them, and they don’t hear America.”
To make that point, and bring back transparency, consumer advocate Ralph Nader began appearing alongside conscientious, like-minded liberals and conservatives on Washington, D.C. think tank panels. Nader’s 2015 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance To Dismantle the Corporate State, found common ground across the political divide on 25 major policy issues - military budgeting, foreign wars, corporate welfare, the surveillance state, the PATRIOT Act, i.e. - around which progressives and libertarians can coalesce more tenable than either the platforms of Democratic neo liberals or corporate Republicans. He has called on voters across the political divide to ignore distractions, set aside social differences, and focus instead on these and other areas of mutual agreement. While many believe it’s too late to break the corporate/deep state stranglehold, other populist voices eager to change the conversation are aggressively chipping away at it.
Podcasts such as The Young Turks, The Joe Rogan Experience , and the Jimmy Dore Show are increasingly resonating, especially among younger viewers. The Hill’s Rising,” hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, which daily attracts hundreds of thousands of viewers across the political divide, is closing in on the ratings of divide-and-conquer corporate mouthpieces such as MSNBC on the neo-liberal left and neoconservative Fox News.
Ball, the progressive answer to MSNBC’s $30,000-a-day Russia-gate queen Rachel Maddow, agrees more often than not with her socially conservative co-host, Enjeti, especially on matters such as endless war, soft corruption, and degradation of the working class in the name of efficiency. It’s all usually a matter of following the money, they say.
“We’re all getting played by the elites in this country, who designed the system exactly this way to remove the illusion of choice from our lives and screw us all day long economically,” Enjeti said. “Much of what you’re seeing before your eyes is manufactured, cooked up, poll tested, shaped long before it comes out of a politician’s mouth or in a newspaper. This is what ‘normal’ looks like in Washington: A symbiotic relationship between the media and the people they’re supposed to cover. Now, if you think that this doesn’t impact their coverage, then I have a bridge to sell you.”
Echoed Ball: “The cultural war is easy because you don’t have to do anything, you don’t actually have to pass anything, you just have to signal to your team in the right tribal way. Right now, we’re in a spiral where corporations get more powerful and have more influence over our politics, which gives them even more power, and around and around we go. The populist movement, I think is at its best on both the left and the right because it’s all about reversing that cycle so that you have increasing power flowing to the working class and away from corporations. But it’s not a flip-the-switch kind of a thing. It takes a lot of time.”
The media’s skewed reporting on the 2019 ouster of freely elected Bolivian President Evo Morales was a stark reminder of just how far the corporate media has strayed from journalism principles. Bolivian GDP had risen from $8.5 million in 2005, before Morales took office, to $40.9 billion in 2019, prior to his forced departure. Yet Morales came under criticism from the West as a leftist. He described his ouster in November 2019 as a textbook coup d’tat reminiscent of Operation Condor, under which CIA-installed military dictatorships throughout South America permitted U.S. companies to exploit regional resources. The New York Times and the Washington Post and other corporate news outlets kabuki danced around the “flawed”election results that supposedly justified the toppling of Morales. But the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, who reports on global surveillance programs and the persecution of whistleblowers such Assange and Snowden, cited evidence showing that there were no election irregularities that justified removal of the popular Bolivian president, who asserted that the real reason for his ouster was to gain control of the country’s rich lithium reserves. Greenwald’s account was bolstered by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who tweeted that “we will coup whoever we want. Deal with it.” Less than a year after Morales was replaced by an obscure, military-backed political party that enjoyed only 4% support, Tesla shares had surged by more than 600%.
But cutting edge reporting is an exception. The mighty Superman is long gone, duopoly pols continue to enrich themselves at the public trough, government officials remain tone deaf, the corporate media stays compliant, and the wind is still at the back of the surveillance state and its ruling oligarchs. Despite the huge obstacles, independent journalists, ignoring cues from the establishment, continue to inch their way up the mountainsides, confident about reaching a tipping point.
But unless and until that happens, we will continue fast-tracking to the bottom, with Bizarro rather than Clark Kent smiling all the way.
