The CIA and the Media / Fighting the ‘Cold Cannonfodder War’ / Telling the Truth About Lies

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN
Rolling Stone

After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below, available at Carl Bernstein.

In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.

The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:

Pentagon Prepares for Economic Warfare | US Army War College: Constant Conflict: Information & Culture Warfare

"We are out of money." Barack Obama May 23, 2009: Obama openly says what anyone with common sense has known for quite some time: the US is broke, and will not be able to honor its financial and fiduciary obligations.

“Quantitative Easing” it is called. As a refresher for readers with real lives and better things to do, QE is how central banks describe what is essentially an act of counterfeiting. They buy bonds with money created – electronically – specifically for that purpose. Abracadabra – “money” comes into being.

We thought the Bubble Epoch was the peak in claptrap and illusions. But we were only in the foothills. The feds now pretend to bail out the economy by giving money to companies that pretend to be concerned, run by people who pretend to know what they are doing. And when they run short of money, they create more of it, pretend it is real…and pretend they can tell it what to do.
~ Germany launches Gold-To-Go ATM's | Ladies & Gentlemen: the US Is Insolvent: “We are out of money.” Obama May 23, 09 | Avalanche of Claptrap Illusions ~

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Pentagon preps for economic warfare

Politico | EAMON JAVERS; 4/9/09 4:18 AM EDT

The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.

The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.

“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.

But instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies.

Their efforts were carefully observed and recorded by uniformed military officers and members of the U.S. intelligence community.

In the end, there was sobering news for the United States – the savviest economic warrior proved to be China, a growing economic power that strengthened its position the most over the course of the war-game.

The United States remained the world’s largest economy but significantly degraded its standing in a series of financial skirmishes with Russia, participants said.

The war game demonstrated that in post-Sept. 11 world, the Pentagon is thinking about a wide range of threats to America’s position in the world, including some that could come far from the battlefield.

And it’s hardly science fiction. China recently shook the value of the dollar in global currency markets merely by questioning whether the recession put China’s $1 trillion in U.S. government bond holdings at risk – forcing President Barack Obama to issue a hasty defense of the dollar.

“This was an example of the changing nature of conflict,” said Paul Bracken, a professor and expert in private equity at the Yale School of Management who attended the sessions. “The purpose of the game is not really to predict the future, but to discover the issues you need to be thinking about.”

Several participants said the event had been in the planning stages well before the stock market crash of September, but the real-world market calamity was on the minds of many in the room. “It loomed large over what everybody was doing,” said Bracken.

“Why would the military care about global capital flows at all?” asked another person who was there. “Because as the global financial crisis plays out, there could be real world consequences, including failed states. We’ve already seen riots in the United Kingdom and the Balkans.”

The Office of the Secretary of Defense hosted the two-day event March 17 and 18 at the Warfare Analysis Laboratory in Laurel, MD. That facility, run by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, typically hosts military officials planning intricate combat scenarios.

A spokesperson for the Applied Physics Laboratory confirmed the event, and said it was the first purely economic war game the facility has hosted. All three participants said they had been told it was the first time the Pentagon hosted a purely economic war game. A Pentagon spokesman would say only that he was not aware of the exercise.

The event was unclassified but has not been made public before. It is regarded as so sensitive that several people who participated declined to discuss the details with POLITICO. Said Steven Halliwell, managing director of a hedge fund called River Capital Management, “I’m not prepared to talk about this. I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you.”

Officials at UBS also declined to comment.

Participants described the event as a series of simulated global calamities, including the collapse of North Korea, Russian manipulation of natural gas prices, and increasing tension between China and Taiwan. “They wanted to see who makes loans to help out, what does each team do to get the other countries involved, and who decides to simply let the North Koreans collapse,” said a participant.

There were five teams: The United States, Russia, China, East Asia and “all others.” They were overseen by a “White Cell” group that functioned as referees, who decided the impact of the moves made by each team as they struggled for economic dominance.

At the end of the two days, the Chinese team emerged as the victors of the overall game – largely because the Russian and American teams had made so many moves against each other that they damaged their own standing to the benefit of the Chinese.

Bracken says he left the event with two important insights – first, that the United States needs an integrated approach to managing financial and what the Pentagon calls “kinetic” – or shooting – wars. For example he says, the U.S. Navy is involved in blockading Iran, and the U.S. is also conducting economic war against Iran in the form of sanctions. But he argues there isn’t enough coordination between the two efforts.

And second, Bracken says, the event left him questioning one prevailing assumption about economic warfare, that the Chinese would never dump dollars on the global market to attack the US economy because it would harm their own holdings at the same time. Bracken said the Chinese have a middle option between dumping and holding US dollars – they could sell dollars in increments, ratcheting up economic uncertainty in the United States without wiping out their own savings. “There’s a graduated spectrum of options here,” Bracken said.

For those who hadn’t been to a Pentagon event before, the sheer technological capacity of the Warfare Analysis Laboratory was impressive. “It was surprisingly realistic,” said a participant.

Still, the event conjures images of the ultimate Hollywood take on computer strategizing: the 1983 film “War Games” in which a young computer hacker nearly triggers a nuclear apocalypse.

The film and the reality had one similarity: The characters in the movie used a computer called WOPR, or War Operation Plan Response. The computer system used by the real life war-gamers? It was called WALRUS, or Warfare Analysis Laboratory Registration and User Website.

Source: Politico.com

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Constant Conflict

Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14. | Ralph Peters

The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are either empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the world's inhabitants are prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape.

We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now, history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the challenge lies in managing information. Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority.

For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is "nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited." The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the motor and signifier of change. Those humans, in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.

We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright--and it is also very dark. More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics. There will be more democracy--that deft liberal form of imperialism--and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.

In the past, information empowerment was largely a matter of insider and outsider, as elementary as the division of society into the literate and illiterate. While superior information--often embodied in military technology--killed throughout history, its effects tended to be politically decisive but not personally intrusive (once the raping and pillaging were done). Technology was more apt to batter down the city gates than to change the nature of the city. The rise of the modern West broke the pattern. Whether speaking of the dispossessions and dislocations caused in Europe through the introduction of machine-driven production or elsewhere by the great age of European imperialism, an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever further into Braudel's "structures of everyday life." Historically, ignorance was bliss. Today, ignorance is no longer possible, only error.

The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable, uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures unable to master it. The radical fundamentalists--the bomber in Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral terrorist on the right or the dictatorial multiculturalist on the left--are all brothers and sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and alienated by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or ambitions. They ache to return to a golden age that never existed, or to create a paradise of their own restrictive design. They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.

Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.

It is a truism that throughout much of the 20th century the income gap between top and bottom narrowed, whether we speak of individuals, countries, or in some cases continents. Further, individuals or countries could "make it" on sheer muscle power and the will to apply it. You could work harder than your neighbor and win in the marketplace. There was a rough justice in it, and it offered near-ecumenical hope. That model is dead. Today, there is a growing excess of muscle power in an age of labor-saving machines and methods. In our own country, we have seen blue-collar unions move from center stage to near-irrelevance. The trend will not reverse. At the same time, expectations have increased dramatically. There is a global sense of promises broken, of lies told. Individuals on much of the planet believe they have played by the rules laid down for them (in the breech, they often have not), only to find that some indefinite power has changed those rules overnight. The American who graduated from high school in the 1960s expected a good job that would allow his family security and reasonably increasing prosperity. For many such Americans, the world has collapsed, even as the media tease them with images of an ever-richer, brighter, fun world from which they are excluded. These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer about them, but only about the privileged. Some seek the solace of explicit religion. Most remain law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Some do not.

The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives. In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and satellite dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming down Baywatch, sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of serious consideration as factors influencing world affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one's own impoverished group or country or region. Adding to the cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square the perceived moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he has been told to value, with America's enduring punitive power. How could a nation whose women are "all harlots" stage Desert Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must be a demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and oppression in which his own secular, disappointing elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner's desire may be to attack the "Great Satan America," but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture "doesn't work." The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.

It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

We are building an information-based military to do that killing. There will still be plenty of muscle power required, but much of our military art will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he knows about himself, manipulating data for effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar advantages to our opponents. This will involve a good bit of technology, but the relevant systems will not be the budget vampires, such as manned bombers and attack submarines, that we continue to buy through inertia, emotional attachment, and the lobbying power of the defense industry. Our most important technologies will be those that support soldiers and Marines on the ground, that facilitate command decisions, and that enable us to kill accurately and survive amid clutter (such as multidimensional urban battlefields). The only imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet will be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and turn the boats into low-income housing. There will be no justification for billion-dollar bombers at all.

For a generation, and probably much longer, we will face no military peer competitor. Our enemies will challenge us by other means. The violent actors we encounter often will be small, hostile parties possessed of unexpected, incisive capabilities or simply of a stunning will to violence (or both). Renegade elites, not foreign fleets, should worry us. The urbanization of the global landscape is a greater threat to our operations than any extant or foreseeable military system. We will not deal with wars of Realpolitik, but with conflicts spawned of collective emotions, sub-state interests, and systemic collapse. Hatred, jealousy, and greed--emotions rather than strategy--will set the terms of the struggles.

We will survive and win any conflict short of a cataclysmic use of weapons of mass destruction. But the constant conflicts in which we selectively intervene will be as miserable as any other form of warfare for the soldiers and Marines engaged. The bayonet will still be relevant; however, informational superiority incisively employed should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to defeat some--but never all--of our enemies outside of bayonet range. Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy's heart.

Pilots and skippers, as well as defense executives, demand threat models that portray country X or Y as overtaking the military capability of the United States in 10 to 20 years. Forget it. Our military power is culturally based. They cannot rival us without becoming us. Wise competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on our terms; rather, they will seek to shift the playing field away from military confrontations or turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms of assault on our national integrity. Only the foolish will fight fair.

The threat models stitched together from dead parts to convince Congress that the Russians are only taking a deep breath or that the Chinese are only a few miles off the coast of California uniformly assume that while foreign powers make all the right decisions, analyze every trend correctly, and continue to achieve higher and higher economic growth rates, the United States will take a nap. On the contrary. Beyond the Beltway, the United States is wide awake and leading a second "industrial" revolution that will make the original industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only the United States has the synthetic ability, the supportive laws, and the cultural agility to remain at the cutting edge of wealth creation.

Not long ago, the Russians were going to overtake us. Then it was oil-wealthy Arabs, then the Japanese. One prize-winning economist even calculated that fuddy-duddy Europe would dominate the next century (a sure prescription for boredom, were it true). Now the Chinese are our nemesis. No doubt our industrial-strength Cassandras will soon find a reason to fear the Galapagos. In the meantime, the average American can look forward to a longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free membership in the most triumphant culture in history. For the majority of our citizens, our vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the greatest engine of positive change in history.

Freedom works.

In the military sphere, it will be impossible to rival or even approach the capabilities of our information-based force because it is so profoundly an outgrowth of our culture. Our information-based Army will employ many marvelous tools, but the core of the force will still be the soldier, not the machine, and our soldiers will have skills other cultures will be unable to replicate. Intelligence analysts, fleeing human complexity, like to project enemy capabilities based upon the systems a potential opponent might acquire. But buying or building stuff is not enough. It didn't work for Saddam Hussein, and it won't work for Beijing.

The complex human-machine interface developing in the US military will be impossible to duplicate abroad because no other state will be able to come from behind to equal the informational dexterity of our officers and soldiers. For all the complaints--in many respects justified--about our public school systems, the holistic and synergistic nature of education in our society and culture is imparting to tomorrow's soldiers and Marines a second-nature grasp of technology and the ability to sort and assimilate vast amounts of competitive data that no other population will achieve. The informational dexterity of our average middle-class kid is terrifying to anyone born before 1970. Our computer kids function at a level foreign elites barely manage, and this has as much to do with television commercials, CD-ROMs, and grotesque video games as it does with the classroom. We are outgrowing our 19th-century model education system as surely as we have outgrown the manned bomber. In the meantime, our children are undergoing a process of Darwinian selection in coping with the information deluge that is drowning many of their parents. These kids are going to make mean techno-warriors. We just have to make sure they can do push-ups, too.

There is a useful German expression, "Die Lage war immer so ernst," that translates very freely as "The sky has always been falling." Despite our relish of fears and complaints, we live in the most powerful, robust culture on earth. Its discontinuities and contradictions are often its strengths. We are incapable of five-year plans, and it is a saving grace. Our fluidity, in consumption, technology, and on the battlefield, is a strength our nearest competitors cannot approach. We move very fast. At our military best, we become Nathan Bedford Forrest riding a microchip. But when we insist on buying into extended procurement contracts for unaffordable, neo-traditional weapon systems, we squander our brilliant flexibility. Today, we are locking-in already obsolescent defense purchases that will not begin to rise to the human capabilities of tomorrow's service members. In 2015 and beyond, we will be receiving systems into our inventory that will be no more relevant than Sherman tanks and prop-driven bombers would be today. We are not providing for tomorrow's military, we are paralyzing it. We will have the most humanly agile force on earth, and we are doing our best to shut it inside a technological straight-jacket.

There is no "big threat" out there. There's none on the horizon, either. Instead of preparing for the Battle of Midway, we need to focus on the constant conflicts of richly varying description that will challenge us--and kill us--at home and abroad. There are plenty of threats, but the beloved dinosaurs are dead.

We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think them, too. But our military must not embark upon the 21st century clinging to 20th-century models. Our national appetite for information and our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures, information-controlling societies, and rejectionist states. The skills necessary to this newest information age can be acquired only beginning in childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating. If we insist on a "proven" approach to military affairs, we will be throwing away our greatest national advantage.

We need to make sure our information-based military is based on the right information.

Facing this environment of constant conflict amid information proliferation, the military response has been to coin a new catchphrase--information warfare--and then duck. Although there has been plenty of chatter about information warfare, most of it has been as helpful and incisive as a discussion of sex among junior high school boys; everybody wants to pose, but nobody has a clue. We have hemorrhaged defense dollars to contractors perfectly willing to tell us what we already knew. Studies study other studies. For now, we have decided that information warfare is a matter of technology, which is akin to believing that your stereo system is more important to music than the musicians.

Fear not. We are already masters of information warfare, and we shall get around to defining it eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it comes to our technology (and all technology is military technology) the Russians can't produce it, the Arabs can't afford it, and no one can steal it fast enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman, China, is achieving remarkable growth rates because the Chinese belatedly entered the industrial revolution with a billion-plus population. Without a culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of free information in a society, China will peak well below our level of achievement.

Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities--usually with marginal, if any, success--and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don't have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further increasing our relative strength.

It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real or potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing more to soften them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into the sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the stuff in the movies. If the Trojans "saw" Athena guiding the Greeks in battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey's tanks. Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way.

Within our formal military, we have been moving into information warfare for decades. Our attitude toward data acquisition and, especially, data dissemination within the force has broken with global military tradition, in which empowering information was reserved for the upper echelons. While our military is vertically responsible, as it must be, it is informationally democratic. Our ability to decentralize information and appropriate decisionmaking authority is a revolutionary breakthrough (the over-praised pre-1945 Germans decentralized some tactical decisionmaking, but only within carefully regulated guidelines--and they could not enable the process with sufficient information dissemination).

No military establishment has ever placed such trust in lieutenants, sergeants, and privates, nor are our touted future competitors likely to do so. In fact, there has been an even greater diffusion of power within our military (in the Army and Marines) than most of us realize. Pragmatic behavior daily subverts antiquated structures, such as divisions and traditional staffs. We keep the old names, but the behaviors are changing. What, other than its flag, does the division of 1997 have in common with the division of World War II? Even as traditionalists resist the reformation of the force, the "anarchy" of lieutenants is shaping the Army of tomorrow. Battalion commanders do not understand what their lieutenants are up to, and generals would not be able to sleep at night if they knew what the battalion commanders know. While we argue about change, the Army is changing itself. The Marines are doing a brilliant job of reinventing themselves while retaining their essence, and their achievement should be a welcome challenge to the Army. The Air Force and Navy remain rigidly hierarchical.

Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are either empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the world's inhabitants are prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape. The current chest-thumping of some Asian leaders about the degeneracy, weakness, and vulnerability of American culture is reminiscent of nothing so much as of the ranting of Japanese militarists on the eve of the Pacific War. I do not suggest that any of those Asian leaders intend to attack us, only that they are wrong. Liberty always looks like weakness to those who fear it.

In the wake of the Soviet collapse, some commentators declared that freedom had won and history was at an end. But freedom will always find enemies. The problem with freedom is that it's just too damned free for tyrants, whether they be dictators, racial or religious supremacists, or abusive husbands. Freedom challenges existing orders, exposes bigotry, opens opportunity, and demands personal responsibility. What could be more threatening to traditional cultures? The advent of this new information age has opened a fresh chapter in the human struggle for, and with, freedom. It will be a bloody chapter, with plenty of computer-smashing and head-bashing. The number one priority of non-Western governments in the coming decades will be to find acceptable terms for the flow of information within their societies. They will uniformly err on the side of conservatism--informational corruption--and will cripple their competitiveness in doing so. Their failure is programmed.

The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline.

Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has published widely on military and international concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon Books. This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.

Source: U.S. Army War College: Parameters

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries

“We prevailed over those societies because of our passion for openness, for trusting our citizens more than we empower our leaders. We celebrate our openness. In fact, it is unnecessary secrecy that is timid and cowardly. Openness is courageous. Be courageous. Be as open as you responsibly can,” Ms. Mazer urged.
~ Dir. National Intelligence Insp. Gen. on Secrecy ~

“The major reason, I think, has to do with cultures of secrecy.” Secrets, however, are also political currency. Secrets are power. The obstruction appears to be a mix of disinterest, incompetence, but above all officialdom's enduring love of secrecy for its own sake. Concealment is the trademark of secret policemen. Not democracy.
~ The secret files that still haunt SA ~

______________________________________________________________

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries

New York Times

Published: March 28, 2009

TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.

The newly reported spying operation is by far the largest to come to light in terms of countries affected.

This is also believed to be the first time researchers have been able to expose the workings of a computer system used in an intrusion of this magnitude.

Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

The Toronto researchers said they had notified international law enforcement agencies of the spying operation, which in their view exposed basic shortcomings in the legal structure of cyberspace. The F.B.I. declined to comment on the operation.

Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

The Toronto researchers, who allowed a reporter for The New York Times to review the spies’ digital tracks, are publishing their findings in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication associated with the Munk Center.

At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans, are releasing an independent report. They do fault China, and they warned that other hackers could adopt the tactics used in the malware operation.

“What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course,” the Cambridge researchers, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson, wrote in their report, “The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.”

In any case, it was suspicions of Chinese interference that led to the discovery of the spy operation. Last summer, the office of the Dalai Lama invited two specialists to India to audit computers used by the Dalai Lama’s organization. The specialists, Greg Walton, the editor of Information Warfare Monitor, and Mr. Nagaraja, a network security expert, found that the computers had indeed been infected and that intruders had stolen files from personal computers serving several Tibetan exile groups.

Back in Toronto, Mr. Walton shared data with colleagues at the Munk Center’s computer lab.

One of them was Nart Villeneuve, 34, a graduate student and self-taught “white hat” hacker with dazzling technical skills. Last year, Mr. Villeneuve linked the Chinese version of the Skype communications service to a Chinese government operation that was systematically eavesdropping on users’ instant-messaging sessions.

Early this month, Mr. Villeneuve noticed an odd string of 22 characters embedded in files created by the malicious software and searched for it with Google. It led him to a group of computers on Hainan Island, off China, and to a Web site that would prove to be critically important.

In a puzzling security lapse, the Web page that Mr. Villeneuve found was not protected by a password, while much of the rest of the system uses encryption.

Mr. Villeneuve and his colleagues figured out how the operation worked by commanding it to infect a system in their computer lab in Toronto. On March 12, the spies took their own bait. Mr. Villeneuve watched a brief series of commands flicker on his computer screen as someone — presumably in China — rummaged through the files. Finding nothing of interest, the intruder soon disappeared.

Through trial and error, the researchers learned to use the system’s Chinese-language “dashboard” — a control panel reachable with a standard Web browser — by which one could manipulate the more than 1,200 computers worldwide that had by then been infected.

Infection happens two ways. In one method, a user’s clicking on a document attached to an e-mail message lets the system covertly install software deep in the target operating system. Alternatively, a user clicks on a Web link in an e-mail message and is taken directly to a “poisoned” Web site.

The researchers said they avoided breaking any laws during three weeks of monitoring and extensively experimenting with the system’s unprotected software control panel. They provided, among other information, a log of compromised computers dating to May 22, 2007.

They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California.

Beyond that, said Rafal A. Rohozinski, one of the investigators, “attribution is difficult because there is no agreed upon international legal framework for being able to pursue investigations down to their logical conclusion, which is highly local.”

Source: New York Times

How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection, Univ. of SW Louisiana

“... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures...... it is of the utmost urgency that governments now recognize the facts and implications of population growth, determine the ultimate population sizes that make sense for their countries and start vigorous programs at once to achieve their desired goals.”

“... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources -- in this rough order of importance -- all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities.”

“...there is general agreement that up to the point when cost per acceptor rises rapidly, family planning expenditures are generally considered the best investment a country can make in its own future.”
~ National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth ~

The Inflection Is Near?

By Thomas L. Friedman

Published: March 7, 2009

Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can’t resist quoting from it. Consider this faux article from June 2005 about America’s addiction to Chinese exports:

FENGHUA, China — Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of [garbage] Americans will buy. Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ‘salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these.’ ... One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless [garbage]? I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year — more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world’s fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit.

“Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets,” argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”

One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment — when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once — “The Great Disruption.”

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

Gilding says he’s actually an optimist. So am I. People are already using this economic slowdown to retool and reorient economies. Germany, Britain, China and the U.S. have all used stimulus bills to make huge new investments in clean power. South Korea’s new national paradigm for development is called: “Low carbon, green growth.” Who knew? People are realizing we need more than incremental changes — and we’re seeing the first stirrings of growth in smarter, more efficient, more responsible ways.

In the meantime, says Gilding, take notes: “When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.”

Source: New York Times

How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection

by T. Michael Maher, University of Southwestern Louisiana

This article is from Population and Environment, Volume 18, Number 4, March 1977

Recent surveys show that Americans are less concerned about population than they were 25 years ago, and they are not connecting environmental degradation to population growth. News coverage is a significant variable affecting public opinion, and how reporters frame a problem frequently signals what is causing the problem: Using a random sample of 150 stories about urban sprawl, endangered species and water shortages, Part I of this study shows that only about one story in 10 framed population growth as a source of the problem. Further, only one story in the entire sample mentioned population stability among the realm of possible solutions. Part II presents the results of interviews with 25 journalists whose stories on local environmental problems omitted the causal role of population growth. It shows that journalists are aware of the controversial nature of the population issue, and prefer to avoid it if possible. Most interviewees said that a national phenomenon like population growth was beyond the scope of what they could write as local reporters.

INTRODUCTION

In 1992 the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society issued a joint statement urging world leaders to brake population growth before it is too late (Royal Society, 1992). That same year, 1,600 scientists (including 99 Nobel laureates) issued a statement warning all humanity that it must soon stabilize population and halt environmental destruction (Detjen, 1992). That same year, a Gallup poll showed that Americans were less concerned about population than they had been 20 years before (Newport & Saad, 1992). That same year, world leaders ignored population growth at the largest environmental summit in history, the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro.

Why are the American public and political leaders so indifferent about this issue that so concerns the world's leading scientists and environmentalists? Not because Americans are anti-environment: another recent Gallup Poll (Hueber, 1991), showed that 78% of Americans considered themselves environmentalists and 71 % favored strong environmental protection, even at the expense of economic growth. How can Americans express strong concern about the environment, yet a diminishing concern about population growth, which many environmental experts consider the ultimate environmental problem?

It seems likely that Americans are not connecting population growth to environmental problems. In addition to the above-cited Gallup poll, a series of nationwide focus groups conducted for the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative confirmed this. The study sought to determine attitudes on population among 10 different voting groups, among them Catholic An- mainstream Protestants, Jewish groups, and environmentalists.

The focus group summary report noted, "The issue of population is not invisible but most often it is a weak blip on the radar screens for most of the voting groups—with the exception of the committed environmentalists and internationalists" (Pew, 1993, p. 22).

Focus groups are ideal for getting beneath the surface of public opinion, for finding out why people think what they think. And most tellingly, when the Pew-sponsored focus groups were evaluated on whether respondents could connect population growth with environmental degradation, environmentalists and some of the internationalists and Jewish men's groups could make the connection, "but overall most of the others do not make many direct, unaided connections between population and environment," the 1993 Pew report stated (p. 26, italics in the original report).

But why is the American public not making the connection? This paper explores the possibility that news stories, from which Americans may infer causality of environmental problems, may keep them from making the connection between population growth and the problems it causes.

Population researchers Paul and Anne Ehrlich opened their book, The Population Explosion, with a chapter titled, "Why Isn't Everyone as Scared as We Are?" They acknowledged, "The average person, even the average scientist, seldom makes the connection between [disparate environmental problems] and the population problem, and thus remains unworried" (1990, p. 21). But while they noted that the evening news almost never connects population growth to environmental problems, the Ehrlichs chiefly blamed social taboos fostered by the Catholic Church and Ha colossal failure of education" (p. 32) for public indifference about population. Howell (1992) also minimized the role of the media in influencing public aptitude about science and the environment, and pointed instead to education:

The obvious starting point for the individual is the public schools.... Education proceeds into undergraduate programs, which can play more than one major role in enhancing scientific literacy (p. 1 60)

The Ehrlichs and Howell seem to assume that education is the chief factor driving public opinion about environmental causality. But in Tradeoffs: Imperatives of Choice in a High-Tech World, Wenk (1986) offered a more media-centric view of how the public learns: "Whatever literacy in science and technology the general public has reached is not from formal education. Rather, it is from the mass media. That responsibility of the press has been almost completely ignored" (p. 162).

This study will examine press responsibility for the public's indifference to population growth by exploring two questions:

• To what extent do press reports about population-driven environmental problems link those problems to population growth?
  
• What reasons do reporters give for ignoring population growth in stories about environmental problems?

Before discussing method and findings, however, we must first review the theoretical basis for the media's role in molding public opinion.

AGENDA-SETTING AND MEDIA FRAMING THEORY

Wenk's point that the media are prime movers of public opinion aligns well with recent mass communication scholarship. Scholarly estimation of the power of the media has fluctuated widely during the twentieth century. In the early decades, the mass media seemed to wield great power, as evidenced by the success of the Creel Committee in selling billions in war bonds during World War I, and by the nationwide panic Orson Welles created in his 1938 Halloween hoax broadcast of invasion from Mars. But scholarly estimation of media influence plummeted when The People's Choice study showed media stories had little influence on a panel of voters and Harrison (1992) argued that environmental impact results from three primary determinants: population, consumption level (sometimes expressed as economic level or affluence) and technology (or resources). This is usually expressed as a formula I = PAT; that is, environmental impact is the product of population, affluence and technology factors. Bailey (1990) reported additional models, POET and PISTOL, which add social organization, information and standard of living to the basic I = PAT model.

With specific reference to habitat loss, Sears (1956), Jackson (1981), Myers (1991), Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1990), Harrison (1992) and many others have shown that population growth pushes people into relatively pristine, natural environments. Endangered species problems are frequently the flip side of this coin: when people convert wildlife habitat to their own habitat, they bulldoze trees, introduce chemicals, channelize streams, build dams, alter the water table, and disrupt habitat in numerous other ways.

While it is well known that environmental experts connect environmental degradation to population growth, it is less well known that land developers are equally straightforward in implicating population growth as a causal agent for turning wildlife habitat and farmland into subdivisions. The how-to manuals for real estate development are very explicit about the critical role of population growth:

The two primary determinants of the need for home and commercial construction are population growth and the demolition and retirement of existing facilities.... Growth in population creates a need not only for housing but also for supporting real estate facilities such as shopping centers, service stations, medical clinics, schools, office buildings, and so on (Goodkin, 1974, p. 14).

The main idea to keep in mind as you search for rewarding corporate realty investments is that in general, land prices are the resultants of population. As more people come on a given section of land, whether to build homes, to work in stores, office buildings, factories, financial institutions, or supermarkets, they create a demand for living space, land and structures. This demand, except during a recession, seems likely to expand indefinitely (Cobleigh, 1971, p. 10).

Demand for real estate at the national level is influenced by national population growth and demographic change, coupled with expanding employment opportunities and rising per capita incomes (McMahan, 1976, p. 76).

Naturally, they frame the results with different language: what land developers might call conversion of raw land to happy communities is often the same phenomenon that environmentalists would call loss of critical wildlife habitat. But both environmentalists and developers agree that population growth is a chief force driving the process of land conversion. Land conversion, in turn, is frequently associated with species decline and urban sprawl, two issues whose news coverage this study examines. A third issue studied in this research, water shortages, is also exacerbated by population growth, according to Postel (1993), Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1990), the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (1972), Homer-Dixon, Boutwell and Rathjens (1993), Orians and Skumanich (1995) and many other writers.

We should acknowledge that the cornucopian economists (for example, Simon, 1981; 1990; Bailey, 1993) dispute the notion that population growth has produced any adverse environmental effects. However, their arguments have had much greater predictive power with regard to the short-term price and availability of nonrenewable resources. The cornucopians have failed to explain away the continuing net loss of wildlife habitat, and the growing incidence of water shortages and declining water quality. In general, there is good consensus among the experts that population growth is a significant variable that affects land and water use. But do media reports reflect this?

This is a two-part study. Part I uses content analysis to determine the extent to which reporters include the causal role of population growth in framing stories about the environment. Part II is a follow-up to Part I. It employs depth interviews to discover why reporters ignore the connection between population growth and environmental problems. Since Part I provides the premise for Part Il, its methods and results will be discussed separately.

PART l: HOW REPORTERS FRAME ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

To measure media framing of environmental stories, Part I uses a randomized sample of 50 articles each for three common population-influ- environmental problems: endangered species, urban sprawl, and water shortages. Articles were downloaded from Lexis-Nexis, the world's largest database of full-text news stories. At the time of the study the Nexis library included 170 newspapers, 330 magazines, as well as wire services. Within Nexis, the CURRENT file limited the search to stories dated 1991 or later. Using the connector "w/2" (e.g., "endangered w/2 species") produced only stories in which the search terms appeared within two words of each other.

The search produced 1,349 water shortage stories, 1,942 urban sprawl stories, and 6,001 endangered species stories. These were sampled by using a random number table. Selected stories were limited to newspaper, magazine and wire service stories from U.S. and Canadian sources. To be considered for coding, the story had to describe a population-driven environmental conflict. (It is now common for various grievance groups to call themselves an endangered species. Such stories were discarded.)

All stories were coded for whether or not population growth was mentioned as a cause of the problem described in the story. A second coder read 30% of the stories from each of the three issues as a reliability check. Coder reliability was 100% because coding news stories for the presence or absence of a reference to population growth is much more reliable than coding stories into abstract, overlapping content categories.

Results

Of the 150-article sample, 16 (less than 11%) mentioned population growth as a cause of the environmental problem described in the story. Population growth appeared in eight urban sprawl stories, seven water shortage stories, and one story on endangered species. Results are presented in Tables 1, 2, and 3.

Tables 1, 2, and 3 also list solutions mentioned in each story. These solutions are numerically summarized in Table 4. As noted earlier, many experts agree that environmental impact is a product of three primary determinants: population, affluence and technology. If these factors serve as causes, addressing them could serve as solutions. Table 4 analyzes how solutions are framed within the sample of stories.

Tables 1-3 show that population growth is mentioned as a cause in only 10.7% of environmental-problem stories. But population is even more unpopular as an environmental solution: Table 4 shows that from a sample of 150, only one story mentions that a stable population might be a possible solution to environmental problems.

Table 4 suggests that reducing consumption is the favored remedy in stories about endangered species and urban sprawl; but for water shortage problems, technological remedies are higher on the media agenda. In other words, most endangered-species preservation measures entail forbidding consumption of some rare creature's habitat (e.g., ancient forests or springs or desert lands). Likewise, many urban sprawl stories present zoning—legal measures to limit consumption of land—as the chief measure to constrain development of a city perimeter. Such a solution simply dumps the population problem on some other community. But water shortage stories present technological fixes (e.g., new dams, new wells, new pipelines, desalination of sea water) 56% more frequently than reducing consumption.

Discussion

Although many scientific groups, environmental scientists and even land development experts agree that population growth is a basic cause of environmental change, media framing diverges widely from expert framing. Just over 10% of a Lexis-Nexis sample of environmental news stories links human population growth to the environmental problems it affects. Even more significantly, only one story in a sample of 150 presents the view that limiting population growth might be a solution to environmental problems. From the standpoint of Americans' environmental future, the most damaging stories might be those that mention population growth as a cause of the problem, while ignoring population stability as a solution. Such stories effectively tell the reader: population growth affects environmental degradation, but population stability is too outlandish even to be mentioned as a policy option.

Ignoring that a stable population might be a longterm solution to environmental problems, news stories instead direct the public's attention to palliative solutions: build new dams to supply water. zone to prevent urban sprawl, set aside land for endangered species.

Given reporters' penchant for proclaiming to "tell both sides," to render all the news that's fit to print, to answer who? what? where? when? and why?, this leads naturally to the question: Why do reporters avoid the population issue so steadfastly?

PART Il: WHY JOURNALISTS AVOID MENTIONING POPULATION

As we have seen, both land development economists and environmental experts acknowledge population growth as a key source of environmental change. But journalists frame environmental causality differently.

Why? Communication theory offers several possibilities. First is the hegemony-theory interpretation: reporters omit any implication that population growth might produce negative effects, in order to purvey the ideology of elites who make money from population growth. As Molotch and Lester (1974) put it, media content can be viewed as reflecting "the practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others" (p. 120). Since real estate, construction and banking interests directly support the media through advertising purchases, this interpretation seems plausible. A number of media critics (e.g., Gandy, 1982; Altschull, 1984; Bennett, 1988) have suggested that media messages reflect the values of powerful political and commercial interests. Burd (1972), Kaniss (1991) and others have pointed out that newspapers have traditionally promoted population growth in their cities through civic boosterism. Molotch (1976) even suggested that cities can best be understood as entities competing for population growth, with the city newspaper as chief cheerleader.

Certainly most reporters would be incensed at the suggestion that they shade their reporting to placate commercial interests. But Breed's classic study of social control in the newsroom (1955) showed that news managers' values are transmissible to journalists through a variety of pressures: salaries, story assignments, layout treatment, editing, and a variety of other strategies that effectively shape news stories in ways acceptable to management.

Another possible explanation for why journalists omit population growth from their story frame is simple ignorance of other explanations. Journalists who cover environmental issues may not be aware of any other possible ways to frame these stories, thus they derive their framing from other journalists. Journalists frequently read each other's work and take cues for coverage from other reporters, particularly from the elite media (Reese & Danielian, 1989). Perhaps the pervasive predictability of the story frames examined in Part I is another example of intermedia influence. On the other hand, it seems difficult to believe that journalists could be ignorant of the role population growth plays in environmental issues, because media coverage frequently ties population growth to housing starts and business expansion. Furthermore, "Why" is one of the five "W's" taught in every Journalism 101 course. A public affairs reporting textbook, Interpreting Public Issues (Griffin, Molen, Schoenfeld, & Scotton, 1991), admonishes journalists: "A common journalistic mistake is simply to cover events—real or staged—and ignore underlying issues" (p. 320). The book identified population trends as one of the "big trouble spots," and listed world population as the first of its "forefront issues in the '90s" (p. 320). Hence, we cannot say that reporting basic causality is beyond the role that journalists ascribe for themselves. Indeed a panel at the 1994 Society of Environmental Journalists discussed "Covering Population as a Local Story" (Wheeler, 1994). But ignorance remains a possible reason, for not all reporters have training in environmental issues.

A third possible explanation comes from the "spiral of silence" theory by German scholar Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1984):

The fear of isolation seems to be the force that sets the spiral of silence in motion. To run with the pack is a relatively happy state of affairs; but if you can't, because you won't share publicly in what seems to be a universally acclaimed conviction, you can at least remain silent, as a second choice, so that others can put up with you (p. 6).

According to Noelle-Neumann, "the media influence the individual perception of what can be said or done without danger of isolation" (p. 156). Media coverage legitimates a given perspective. Lack of media coverage—omitting a perspective consistently from media stories—makes the expression of that perspective socially dangerous. Noelle-Neumann also suggested that the media serve an articulation function: "The media provide people with the words and phrases they can use to defend a point of view. If people find no current, frequently repeated expressions for their point of view, they lapse into silence; they become effectively mute" (p. 1 73).

This description fits the national sample of news stories discussed in Part I of this study. These stories often show a double layer of causal myopia. Not only did the journalists not tell readers that population growth was causing the problem, the people in the stories themselves—the sources quoted by the journalists—seemed unaware that their predicament was exacerbated by expanding population. Both the reporters and their subjects seemed to be spiraling in silence. But why would reporters so consistently avoid mentioning population as a causal factor of environmental degradation? After all, journalists are not engaged in some misanthropic conspiracy to dupe the public. But Americans are extremely sensitive to issues involving reproduction, as the continuing furor over abortion demonstrates. Perhaps journalists consider population growth a taboo topic. Journalists' sources, taking their cues from media silence about population, steer clear of the issue themselves.

In How Do Journalists Think?, Stocking and Gross (1989) offer a cognitive psychology model that suggests that journalists construct hypotheses in pursuing news stories, but that reporters tend to indulge in a host of causal attribution errors. Among these are the tendency to oversimplify, to prefer anecdotal information over more valid statistical information, and the "fundamental attribution error"—the "tendency to weigh personal causal variables more than situational variables" (p. 47). Since population growth is a situational force, this model suggests why journalists might attribute urban sprawl to developers rather than to population growth.

The shallowness of media coverage has attracted scholarly comment as early as Lippmann (1922), who pointed out that journalists must deal in stereotypes because of deadline pressures and readers' preference for simplicity. Many other scholars have commented on the shallow, episodic nature of the news. "The news we are given is not fit for a democracy; it is superficial, narrow, stereotypical, propaganda-laden, of little explanatory value, and not geared for critical debate or citizen action," Bennett (1988, p.9) wrote. Linsky (1988) noted, "The event-orientation of news is a particular problem, for it steers coverage away from ideas and context and does nothing to encourage the drawing of connections between stories" (p. 216).

Entman (1989) identified three production biases common to media stories: 1. simplification—audiences prefer the simple to the complex; 2. personalization—individuals cause events rather than institutional, historical or other abstract forces; 3. symbolization—audiences want dramatic action, intriguing personality, and stirring slogans, and the media provide them. Bennett (1988) offered a similar list of weaknesses in media content: emphasis on people rather than process, and on crisis rather than continuity; isolation of stories from each other, and official assurances of normalcy.

In sum, many existing theories can explain the consistent tendency by journalists to avoid mentioning population growth as a source of the problems they cover. Without further evidence, we really cannot tell. Graber has called for more study on the etiology of content: "Why are particular events selected from the large number of events that might be publicized and why are events cast into particular story frames that supply the interpretive background by which the story is judged?" (1989, p. 146). That is the point of Part I of this study: to find out why journalists neglect the causal role of population growth in framing their articles.

Method

The author conducted telephone depth interviews with 25 journalists at their work site to determine why they had omitted the causal role of population growth from recent stories they had written. These interviews included several questions asked of all respondents, but also asked the interviewees in an open-ended fashion to comment on the role of journalism in providing information about causality in environmental stories.

The journalists interviewed represented a purposive sample: writers from U.S. newspapers who had done articles accessible in Lexis-Nexis using the same keyword searches used in Part I of this study (endangered w/2 species, water w/2 shortage, urban w/2 sprawl). All interviewees had written the stories under discussion within the preceding six weeks, and all interviewees had omitted population growth from the story frame.

A purposive sample was chosen for several reasons:

• It was necessary to call journalists who had written recently about environmental problems. Journalists are unlikely to be willing or able to discuss details of stories they wrote 18 months ago. Even the current-news library within Lexis-Nexis contains articles so many months old that their details would have been long forgotten by the journalists who produced them.
  
• The researcher sought a geographic diversity of reporters. Because California (population 31 million) produces so many stories about environmental degradation, and because California newspapers are well-represented in Lexis-Nexis, a randomized sample would likely have yielded a preponderance of California reporters. A purposive geographic selection of journalists produced a more diverse set of perspectives, since the interviewed reporters should represent different educational backgrounds, social circles and within-state political perspectives. A summary of the geographic origin of the interviewed journalists is provided in Figure 1.
  
• This study does not seek to generalize from the sample to the overall population of reporters, as a probability-sample survey would. It seeks psychological depth rather than sociological breadth, by seeking patterns to reporters' comments about the nature of their work.

As Wimmer and Dominick (1983) suggest in their book on research methods, depth interviews frequently use small purposive samples and a nonstandardized interview format. Hence they lack generalizability. But this chapter seeks to glean information about sensitive subjects—possibly, journalistic taboos—and for that purpose depth interviews are ideal.

Interview Format

In opening the discussion, the researcher identified himself and stated the study was about how journalists depict causality in environmental stories. The researcher assured the journalists that they would not be identified in any report resulting from the study. After mentioning that he had obtained their stories and bylines through a Lexis-Nexis scan, the researcher recounted a few details of each writer's story to establish common ground with the respondent. The researcher then asked an open-ended question: "What would you say was the cause of [the problem discussed in your story]?" If this answer produced no mention of population, the researcher asked a second open-ended question: "Can you think of any other causes? Perhaps at a deeper level of causation?"

If two open-ended questions produced nothing about the causal role of population growth, the researcher volunteered it by saying: "Many environmental writers say that population growth is one of the ultimate causes of environmental problems like [the problem discussed in the story]. Do you think that's true in your story?" If the journalist agreed that population growth was indeed a causal factor (but had not volunteered such information unaided), this offered two possible interpretations: either the journalist was not well attuned to the environmental effects of population growth, or the journalist felt the subject was too controversial to broach (a spiral of silence effect). Further questioning sought to clarify how the writer stood on the issue. If the writer showed familiarity with the population issue, this was taken as evidence of a viral of silence effect. If the journalist seemed unaware of a connection between population growth and environmental problems, this was interpreted as lack of knowledge.

If the respondent implicated population growth in either open-ended question, or in agreement with the researcher's suggestion, the researcher then asked: "Would it have been out of place to have mentioned this in your story?"

The researcher then sought to determine why the reporter had omitted population growth in framing the story. The researcher also sought the respondent's views on the population-environment connection, and the role of journalism in informing the public of causality in reporting environmental problems. One other standard question for each interview was: "If you had interviewed a source for the story in question, and that source had implicated population growth as a source of the problem, would you have used that quote?"

Results

The interviews produced little support for the "ignorance hypothesis"—the possibility that journalists are unaware of the causal role of population growth in precipitating local environmental problems. In response to an open-ended question, eight of the 25 volunteered that population growth was a source of the problems they wrote about. Eleven more agreed that population was a likely cause, when the researcher offered the idea. These 11 had the benefit of aided recall, but only two of them seemed to be unfamiliar with the population-environment connection.

Six interviewees discounted that population was a major factor in the problem they had described in their stories—and they were possibly correct, within their immediate environmental context and time frame. Areas with stable or even declining populations can still experience pressure on land and water resources through increased consumption; for example, a large cohort of baby boomers might attain affluence sufficient to build new homes on larger lots or buy second homes.

Generally, though, the surveyed reporters seemed aware of the role that population growth played in precipitating environmental problems.

The interviews gave little evidence of any "hegemony theory" effect. That is, reporters made no mention of being influenced by real estate advertisers or other powerful interests. But this is to be expected, since hegemony theory postulates that reporters" obeisance to the dominant ideology is unconscious and unexamined. A study of this nature, which relies on self-reportage of motives, would be unlikely to reveal hegemonic effects.

The interviews show some evidence for the "spiral of silence" explanation: many interviewed reporters felt that population is a hot issue, better left unmentioned. Several reporters volunteered this in conversation. One recalled the controversy that ensued when the Philadelphia Enquirer advocated Norplant as a solution for local teen pregnancy, which created charges of racism by area black people. Another reporter admitted of population, "It's such an incendiary issue. If you say, 'It all comes down to too many people,' you'll have everybody from Operation Rescue to the Catholic Church calling you." Another said, "We as journalists are nervous to discuss population." Another admitted, "Most of us [reporters] wait until somebody says it." In other words, the reporter felt he could not broach the issue in an interview without recriminations. This last statement implies that a spiral of silence is at work. Many journalists interviewed for this study felt the population issue was too controversial for them to bring up in an interview. The media are commonly acknowledged to serve as legitimizers for what can be said safely (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Gans, 1979; Noelle-Neumann, 1984). But these interviews suggest that reporters themselves are affected by possible negative repercussions from pressure groups. Thus a spiral of silence about population growth may be maintained by determined pronatalists, immigration advocates, and intimidated journalists.

Further evidence of a spiral of silence is the fact that several reporters who did not volunteer population growth as a cause of local problems in response to open-ended questions subsequently admitted deep concern about population. After the researcher broke the silence and mentioned that some environmental writers feel population growth drives environmental problems, many interviewees who had not volunteered such a perspective in an open-ended format voiced similar feelings. One woman reporter mentioned that she had chosen not to have children in part from environmental concerns—yet she did not mention population as an environmental variable when asked an open-ended question. Two other journalists who avoided mentioning population in response to open-ended questions later said they address population every few months in stories. Both were quite familiar with details of the issue. But they did not initially volunteer that familiarity to the interviewer.

Finally, of course, none of the interviewees had mentioned population in the stories they wrote. Such a discrepancy indicates that reporters are not putting all they know about causality into their story frame. As Noelle-Neumann put it, it is easier to remain silent and run with the pack. But the taboo nature of population growth was not the chief reason journalists mentioned for avoiding the issue in their reportage. Instead, most said population was simply beyond the bounds of their story.

The Narrative Imperative and Causal Dissociation

The reason journalists most consistently mentioned for avoiding the population issue was not anticipated in the researcher's initial series of questions. That is, when asked to comment on why they had omitted population growth from their story, most interviewed journalists said that population growth simply did not fit within the event frame that served as their news peg.

Many writers (Bennett, 1988; Entman, 1989; Hart, 1987; Gans, 1979) have commented on journalists' preference for the dramatic over the explanatory, the personal over the situational. Many others have commented on the need for journalism to compress complex reality into narrative form (Darnton, 1975; Paletz, Reichert, & McIntyre, 1971). In her study of the sociology of newswork, Tuchman (1978) focused on organizational forces as prime mover of the news product, but she admitted that story forms have considerable power to shape the news:

Attributing to news narratives the power to raise certain questions and to ignore others may seem to digress from this book's argument. Rather than demonstrate that news is a product of specific ways of organizing newswork, it suggests that the formal characteristics of the product of newswork guide inquiry. The power of forms cannot be dismissed (p. 104).

McCartney (1987) even applied a centuries-old typology of fictional conflict situations to journalistic stories, and discovered that many classic conflict forms could be discovered in modern journalistic stories.

McCombs, Einsiedel, and Weaver (1991) suggested that news is shaped by journalists' training, by bureaucracies of news organizations, and also by "the traditions of journalism as a genre of mass communication" (p. 26). They added that structural biases "arise from the very nature of journalistic reporting and writing. The narrative styles of journalism shape the configuration of facts reported in the news" (p. 30). They added, "To a considerable degree, what each reporter sees is framed by the genre in which he or she writes" (p. 34).

This narrative imperative of news pushes an invisible, slow, impersonal social force like population growth out of the story frame. If they ascribe blame for, say, urban sprawl, journalists tend to blame visible, personal causes—e.g., land developers—without ever questioning the social and economic forces that make it profitable for land developers to replace forest with suburb. If they ascribe blame for water shortages, journalists tend to blame Mother Nature: when will the drought end?

The working principles of storytelling create causal myopia in news stories. Daily events reporting must have a news peg, an event that gives the writer premise for writing the story. In terms of space and time, the story must be framed fairly tightly around the event. Reporters cannot "go global" with a local story, for their space is limited in column inches to tell the story. Many of the interviewed reporters commented on this limitation when discussing their role as local journalists. Each of the following comments is from a different journalist:

• "When you come to something like population growth, it's difficult for a community to say, 'We want to take on population growth.' It was staying close to the event. If it were a big feature on what [my area] is going through, then it would make sense to discuss population."
  
• "My story was more of a historical piece [on how a small community had changed]. For that approach [a discussion of population growth] wouldn't have worked."
  
• "Often daily journalism doesn't include the broad context; you find that in the op-ed pages. Journalists are self-conscious about appearing intellectual; they don't want to appear self-indulgent."
  
• "It's difficult to think you're going to have a forum as a local reporter to talk about a global issue like population."
  
• "The press tends to be crisis-oriented and has a hard time getting a handle on issues that are big."
  
• "I don't think globally when I write a story; I think, 'what do the people in this town want to know about?'"
  
• "It's not journalists who are the problem [for omitting causality]. It's the editors. They don't want us to challenge the reader with unpopular ideas."
  
• "It is the role of journalists to include population growth as a source of problems. But on a daily story, you can practically never do that. On a daily story, it's almost impossible. If I were to try, my editor would probably want me to spend more time defining terms, and we don't have space for that."
  
• "Population doesn't ring a bell with me in the realm of causality. Maybe on the global picture, but in terms of a developer putting in a golf course, no."
  
• "I've got 20 inches to explain why a garter snake is endangered. There's no room for population growth in the story. Sometimes I write about population in general terms."
  
• "Population is beyond this story as far as I have learned. We sometimes address the population issue on its own terms."
  
• "The global perspective is not out of line, it's just not what got me into this story. This was more about politics than the environment."
  
• "[Mentioning population] probably requires a look at the bigger picture, a more national scope. As [newspaper] space becomes constricted overnight and editors were looking for places to cut, [population] would be the first thing to go."
  
• "The immediate problem was the drought. They [local officials] were just waiting to see what happened. Population didn't play into that story. We cover fires, basically. You come back later on—about once every six months—and say, here's the trend. But you've got so many other topics."
  
• "Population as a topic is not a taboo; we have done stories on population in the past. It is a matter of stopping to think about it when you write a story. This [story in question] was written in about an hour on a laptop in my kitchen about 10 p. m., and it's not one of my best efforts."
  
• "I don't know that you can get [population] into the story. There are space limitations and the conventions of journalism are such that you have to keep your paragraphs germane to one another. If you're talking about wildlife habitat and then all of a sudden you're talking about world population growth, you've gotta explain to an editor how you got there and use a lot of paragraphs to do that."
  
• "Maybe Americans have a reluctance to talk about [population]. I don't know when, if ever, they'll be ready. Maybe the next generation will actually bring up population as a topic for discussion."

The implications are clear from these quotes. Local journalism cannot easily connect community events to slow, impersonal national or global causes. Even those interviewed journalists who were very savvy on environmental issues, who were very aware of the effects of population growth, admitted that including it in event-driven stories is frequently impossible. Space limitations are always a concern, and editors do not tolerate journalists' straying too far from the story line.

Although depth interviews lack generalizability, they are indeed useful in exploring sensitive issues of journalists' motivation and intention. Naturally, self-reporting cannot capture all of journalists' reasons for why they frame stories in a given manner. People cannot verbalize every motive for what they do. But the interviewed journalists showed considerable consensus in suggesting that population growth is too broad to fit in a story framed tightly around a local environmental problem. Most respondents were acutely aware of the boundaries separating local and national reporting, and what this means for the work they do. Taking a national perspective on a controversy over a local land development would be seen as egotistical, intellectual, and beyond the journalist's job description.

However, despite the forces constraining journalists from mentioning population growth, environmentalists may have an opportunity to affect causal framing of environmental problems. When asked whether they would use a quote connecting environmental problems to population growth, if their sources offered such a perspective, 16 journalists interviewed for this study indicated they would. Five said they would probably not include such a perspective, and four were unsure, allowing that their framing would depend on the context of the story.

The symptoms of overpopulation colliding with finite or scarce resources (i.e. ecological overshoot resource wars) include: energy depletion, food shortages, species extinction, politically correct fascism, Immigration and emigration, terrorism, starvation, poverty, disease, crime, economic & political instability, pain and misery... Population Policy Common Sense

This means that environmentalists have the opportunity to break the media's silence about population and help connect population growth to the problems it causes, if they will take the initiative to raise the subject with journalists who cover local environmental issues. Environmentalists should understand that most reporters do not consider it their role to broach the population issue. As one interviewed journalist admitted of the population connection, "Most of us [reporters] wait until somebody says it." Another reporter said, "If someone were intelligent enough to mention population, I would mention it [in the story]." Yet another comment was, "Unless the journalist runs across the right expert who says, 'It's population,' the tendency is not to put it in [the story], unless you've been assigned to write a major series." However, as one interviewed reporter commented, "No one ever mentions population growth as a source of the problem." Another said, "No one has talked about limiting demand [for housing]. Officials in these small towns are pretty shortsighted."

DISCUSSION

The symptoms of overpopulation colliding with finite or scarce resources (i.e. ecological overshoot resource wars) include: energy depletion, food shortages, species extinction, politically correct fascism, Immigration and emigration, terrorism, starvation, poverty, disease, crime, economic & political instability, pain and misery... Population Policy Common Sense

In thousands of communities across America, population growth is wreaking changes: a mobile home park displaces an orchard, a farmer loses his water rights to a city hundreds of miles away, an endangered reptile's last known habitat is threatened by a subdivision. These and countless other population-influenced disruptions reduce wildlife habitat, rural solitude, water availability, and many other environmental qualities. But this study shows that only one news story in 10 connects these events to domestic population growth.

This study suggests that the working principles of journalistic storytelling create a vast causal dissociation when the news media report population-driven environmental problems. Local media can cover local environmental degradation, but cannot connect these problems to population growth because, in part, reporters and their sources feel that population growth can only be addressed at the national level. National media can address the population issue, but national reporters cannot peg a story on population to local events that, from a national perspective, seem trivial. Why would Newsweek readers in Iowa or Oregon want to know about population-driven water rationing in a suburb of San Diego, or a protested land development north of Atlanta? And on the other hand, why would a borough of Boston want to address national population growth as an issue? From a systems theory perspective, the information feedback loop that connects the microcosm to the macrocosm is broken in the news we get.

A spiral of silence also seems to affect journalists' framing of population-driven environmental problems. Most journalists interviewed in this study knew population growth affects the environment they cover, but they were reluctant to mention population either in their stories or in the interviews that formed the basis for this chapter. Reporters know the controversial nature of population growth, and would rather avoid the issue than mention it—even in questioning sources for their stories.

This study suggests that, from an agenda-setting perspective, the narrative imperative of newswriting keeps issues like population off the agenda. Frequency of mention by the media is the chief means by which an issue asserts itself into the public consciousness (McCombs & Shaw, 1977). But even though population growth causes or exacerbates uncountably frequent events that lower the quality of most Americans' lives, reporters do not mention this. They cannot connect event to ultimate cause in daily events reporting, and this effectively keeps the cause off the agenda and out of public consciousness. If, as one interviewed reporter suggested, reporters "cover fires" for six months, then write a single "trend story" that connects the events to causes, this pattern likely keeps population low on the agenda, because an isolated trend story is unlikely to have much effect on public consciousness.

McCombs and Shaw (1977) note that the media serve a useful function by setting the agenda:

Both by deliberate winnowing and by inadvertent agenda-setting the mass media help society achieve consensus on which concerns and interests should be translated into public issues and opinion (pp. 151 -152).

But the agenda-setting process seems useful only if we consider what the media do place on the agenda. This study shows that agenda-setting may have a dark side, when we consider what the media do not cover. To generalize from this study, it seems likely the media have a blind spot regarding the basic layers of multilayered causality. The deep causes that drive daily events remain off the agenda. Certainly this is the case with population growth, but such causal dissociation may keep many other deep-seated causes of social problems off the agenda.

Although scholars have not satisfactorily tied the media agenda and public opinion to the policy agenda (Borquez, 1993), many scholars have agreed that the media are very important for determining what does not get on the policy agenda. Spitzer (1993) noted: "The scope of the conflict determines the outcome . . . more than any other single force in national politics, the media control the scope of politics." In a similar vein Kingdon (1973) said: "In addition to noting how important the media are in bringing subjects, facts, and interpretations to congressmen, it is also important to mention that the media also play some part in determining which pieces of information will not be brought to congressmen." Indeed, recent U.S. policy on population is pronatalist (Abernathy, 1993). And although in 1996 Congress took measures to reduce illegal immigration, it did so primarily for economic and social reasons, rather than out of concern for the environment. That same Congress dramatically reduced U.S. funding for worldwide family planning programs.

Many environmentalists are frustrated by the low salience Americans give the population issue. Deploring the "primitive stage" of U.S. public opinion on population, Grant (1992, p. 231) characterizes U.S. political discourse as "the kingdom of the deaf" (p. 239). Part t of this study shows that the American public is not deaf; but in the news they read, Americans simply have little to hear that explains the environmental costs of population growth. Well-known population researcher Paul Ehrlich has written that a "conspiracy of silence" keeps humanity from taking action on population (1989). Part II of this study shows that journalists are engaged in no conspiracy; they are simply keeping within the storytelling bounds of their craft, framing their coverage of environmental issues narrowly with regard to space and time. Interviewed journalists feel that a limited newshole keeps them from connecting local environmental problems to global causes like population growth and immigration into the United States. They also know that reproductive matters are a hot button with some readers, and steer clear of the issue if they can.

But population must become more salient if future generations are to enjoy the quality of life we now know. A number of scholars conversant with sustainable levels of agricultural and energy output recently estimated an optimum population for the United States (Pimentel & Pimentel, 1992; Constanza, 1992; Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1992; Werbos, 1992). The highest estimates were below current population levels; several low estimates were for a U.S. population of less than 100 million. Meanwhile the population of the United States is 265 million and is growing about 1 % a year.

Walter Lippmann (1922) distinguished news from truth: "The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act" (p. 226). This study shows how and why we are letting signalized events, rather than truth, set the agenda for our demographic and environmental future.

REFERENCES (See Word Version)

Source: DieOff [Download: Media's Population Agenda & 'War on Terror' Outcome: HOW & WHY Journalists Avoid Population-Environment Connection, by T. Michael Maher; Univ. of SW Louisiania (Word: 153 KB)]