Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon

Author:Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon [Lee , Martin A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 081840521X
Publisher: LGLA
Published: 2013-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

PUFFING THE PEACEFUL ATOM

The same biases in press coverage of nuclear weapons plants have applied in press treatment of “the peaceful atom.” Nuclear power has been vigorously promoted by many news media, which have made clear their hopes for revival of the industry in the U.S. during the last decade of this century. The New York Times, for instance, has been crazy about the Shoreham nuclear plant built on Long Island. In July 1986, Village Voice writer Jack Newfield reported that by his count the Times had editorialized in favor of the Shoreham plant 22 different times during the previous 40 months. He called it “the Times’s love affair with the nuclear power industry.”

The Times was not interested in merely raising the dead. It wanted the country’s nuclear power business to be revived well beyond the hundred-odd reactors accounting for just under 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Its editorial barrage grew more frequent and furious throughout the decade. As the Shoreham plant’s chances of opening faded, the Times took to heaping scorn on anyone who opposed the nuke.

In May 1988, the Times had yet another nuclear conniption fit, denouncing politicians who’d proposed scrapping Shoreham: “That folly could threaten the nation’s security, not just Long Island’s, by further eroding public confidence in nuclear power.” In mid-February 1989, the paper lashed one of its favorite whipping boys on the subject, New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo—who “could have educated people about Shoreham, and quieted their distorted fears.” A few weeks later, the Times was back at the nuclear pulpit, damning a familiar demon: “Governor Cuomo’s festoon of fine arguments against Shoreham is spun around a falsity. The plant is not unsafe…” For good measure, the editorial blasted people for selfish unwillingness to share their island with a nuclear plant that could turn their neighborhoods into radioactive wastelands: “Long Islanders have themselves to blame, too. They made it impossible for any politician to tell them the truth. They refused to accept assurances on Shoreham…”

But along with the bombast, the Times offered a suggestion. Why not beat some nuclear plowshares into swords? After all, it reasoned, “Instead of acquiescing in the wasteful destruction of a $5.5 billion reactor, the Government could at least consider converting it to making tritium for nuclear weapons.” If Shoreham could be retrofitted to make material for thermonuclear bombs, all would not be lost. (So much for the “peaceful atom.”)

The Times’ affection for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons was anything but coincidental. From the beginning, the military and commercial aspects of the split atom have been closely linked, depending on the same matrix of technologies and federal subsidies—along with media hype to deflect opposition. And while in theory a newspaper’s editorial position is separate from what appears in the news pages, the realities are often different. In the case of the New York Times, the torch it was carrying for Shoreham cast a long shadow in the newsroom.

In 1982, Times reporter Frances Cerra wrote in a news article that

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