Recently Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008 and prolific journalist/author, mourned “the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms,” the Himalayan glaciers. In an LA Times opinion piece surveying what no longer works in the U.S., Schell cited areas like the environment, education, and transportation, and found American hopelessness, especially compared to contemporary China.
Schell’s “studying of melting glaciers” was likely related to a much-hyped warning from the World Wildlife Fund, which was revealed to be a sham, based on an anecdotal report. But Schell’s warnings, along with his list of American failings, suggest a general ideological bias.
A recent challenge has been identifying the bias of the mainstream media. Oddly enough, exposing ideological bias has long been a favored project in communication studies, usually practiced by leftists. One method, much used by recent multicultural leftists, has held that consciousness and meaning are contingent social constructs. Following such post-modernists as Lyotard, these folks regard discourse as a composite of linguistic, social, and cultural formulations. One need only examine these to reveal the consciousness or mentality of an author or work.
Orville Hickok Schell III would seem to be a dream subject for this approach. Schell was born in 1940 in New York City into money and privilege. Father Orville, Jr., went to Yale and Harvard Law, was a prominent Wall Street lawyer, headed the New York City Bar Association, was chair of the New York City Ballet, chaired leftist human rights group Americas Watch, and co-founded Helsinki Watch (forerunner to Human Rights Watch). In the ’60’s he organized the lawyers’ peace march on Washington. The Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School is named for him.
Orville III went to elite Episcopal Pomfret School in Connecticut, then Harvard, dropping out after three years to study Chinese at Stanford, then back to Harvard, graduating in 1964. Schell went on to UC Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies, getting his MA in 1967 and doing doctoral work. In 1969 Schell co-founded Pacific News Service, an “alternative” news wire service which started New American Media in 1996 as a “collective” of news outlets for “marginalized” ethnic minorities, with major foundation support.
Schell made his academic name as a China scholar. In The China Reader:Vol.III of 1967, Schell and co-author Franz Schurmann considered Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” of 1958 a “magnificent madness” in which “though mass starvation was avoided, hunger swept the land. Factory after factory closed down, just as in the Great Depression of the United States.” According to c’s 2005 calculations, “close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the Great Leap Forward and the famine,” hardly magnificent or equivalent to Thirties America.
Then in 1974 after the equally disastrous events of the Cultural Revolution, Schell went to China on a tour (“arranged” by William Hinton, an American Marxist who spent much time in China) traveling, working in a factory, and then on a collective farm. Schell reported his experiences in In the People’s Republic in 1977. In a testament to the romance of Western Maoists, Schell found little to alarm him in the total state control and in the silence of the people (“for some unexplained reason the interpreters have been eating separately from us here in Yenan”), which Schell usually attributed to national character or culture, as “the Chinese often remain reticent to challenge authority,” rather than the totalitarian state and human fear he inadvertently revealed. Schell assured us that the model collective farm’s earthen grain vats were “filled to the brim with corn, millet and wheat” at a time when Mao’s nuclear program was commandeering vast food resources, resulting, according to Jung Chang, in “less calorie intake than it had been under the Nationalists in 1930.” Mao died just as Schell finished this book, and Jung Chang estimates that during Mao’s rule, “Well over 70 million people had perished – in peacetime.”
Schell’s work on Mao’s China is reminiscent of the positive reports from Stalin’s Soviet Union by Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, NY Times Moscow bureau chief 1922-36, who in 1933 denied a similar government-created famine in the Ukraine while conveying Stalinist propaganda to the West. Recently, Schell has recognized his failure to see what was happening in China, “a sensation akin to returning to a Chinese painting in which a mist-shrouded landscape has miraculously cleared to reveal what was obscured beyond.” It is a fatuous excuse, hiding his misrepresentations behind a purported foreign aesthetic, similar to Duranty’s excuse that Stalin’s Russia was “Asiatic” and thus required a cruel despotism.
Besides Himalayan glaciers, Schell has long been interested in environmental matters. In the early 70’s he moved to Bolinas, then a reclusive coastal village and artist colony in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. In the 1976 The Town That Fought to Save Itself Schell recorded a naturalist, “back to the land” experiment, the founding of Paradise Valley, a “multi-family farm” much like a hippy commune on 48 acres bought by the New Land Fund, a gift from “two wealthy people.” Schell advocated a low growth, no development, primitive agrarian lifestyle emphasizing composting toilets, along with the promotion of a counterculture “community,” suggesting an interplay between William Hinton’s description of Maoist revolution as “agrarian reform” and some of Schell’s views.
In 1978 Schell, a critic of factory farming, joined rancher Bill Niman to form “Niman-Schell Meats.” In 1996 with revenues at $5 million, Schell left to become Dean at Berkeley, Bill Niman took on new partners and venture funding, largely from CalPERS. By 2000 Niman Ranch had revenues of $20 million, had become an elite brand, featured by upscale restaurants, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s. By 2007 it had become a national operation of over 500 ranches with revenues of $75 million.
Both Bolinas and Niman Ranch can stand as emblems of American environmentalist culture. Bolinas had long been a rustic yet exclusive enclave – Schell compared it to Martha’s Vineyard. For Schell, like many counterculture refugees from Sixties Berkeley who spread out around northern California, Bolinas became a place to play out communal, liberationist, agrarian fantasies. Like much of northern California, it was such a valuable a piece of real estate that it forgave any folly and was destined to become what one observer described to Schell as “a ghetto for rich young professionals, weekenders, and dope dealers in expensive cars.” Niman Ranch represents another emblem, the “health food” wing of environmentalism as a fussy fixation that grew into an elite market segment. Both Bolinas and Niman Ranch became luxury brands. What hippy norodniks imagined as a peasant commune was destined to more closely resemble Marie Antoinette’s rustic model hamlet at Versailles, complete with faux shepherdesses, royal milkmaids, and pampered livestock.
Schell has also been active in television, as a producer for PBS’s WGBH- Boston (1984), NBC Nightly News (1987), CBS’s 60 Minutes, Peter Jennings’ specials at ABC, and Frontline (1994). Schell won Peabody and Dupont Awards for 60 Minutes‘ Made in China (1992) and a Peabody as producer of Frontline‘s The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1997), the latter an epic three hour documentary on the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre of June 1989, directed by Carma Hinton, daughter of William Hinton, and her husband Richard Gordon. The show generated dispute on all sides, with the Chinese government warning in totalitarian fashion: “it will mislead the audience and hurt the feelings of 1.2 billion Chinese people.”
But pro-demonstration voices, such as student leader Chai Ling, the “goddess of democracy,” were also critical the show, made by “pro-Communist” Hinton for “commercial gain.” Even on the left, critic Ian Baruma in the NY Review of Books regarded the film as “partisan,” in that it “does promote a cause… of moderation and reform… personified by Zhao Ziyang” and “judges the radicals, and Chai Ling in particular, harshly… through deft editing and a vaguely historicist approach.”
In a subsequent exchange with the producers, Baruma raised, alongside the harsh treatment of the protesters, the central issue, the show’s reflexive granting of legitimacy to the Chinese government: “Just as there are ‘moderates’ in occupation governments, there are reformers and moderates in the Chinese government. The point is they are not elected.”
As dean at Berkeley J-School Schell presided over hiring socialist Barbara Ehrenreich, pro-Sandinista Mark Danner, LA Times/New Republic/Tikkun editor Steve Wasserman, Frontline writer/producer Stephen Talbot, The Nation‘s Tom Engelhardt, anti-capitalist foodie Michael Pollan, and others from the political and counterculture left.
Schell is currently Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations for the Asia Society in New York. All told, Orville Schell represents a consistent mentality and a good case for an elite, leftist-environmentalist ideological bias in journalism.
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