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Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
ABC
Narrows the Field: Did Kucinich's Criticism of Koppel Influence Decision?
Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting, 12/11/03
NEW
YORK - December 11 - A day after ABC's Ted Koppel moderated a debate
between the Democratic presidential contenders, the network decided
to withdraw three off-air producers from the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich,
Carol Moseley Braun and Rev. Al Sharpton.
ABC's
decision was attributed to the fact that these candidates are perceived
to have a slim chance of winning the Democratic nomination. An ABC
spokesperson explained (Boston Globe, 12/11/03) that "as we prepare
for Iowa and New Hampshire, we are putting more resources toward covering
those events." Appearing on CNBC with Kucinich (12/10/03), Time
reporter Jay Carney suggested that the decision could be due to the
fact that "all of the media organizations have limited resources.
It's actually, I think, pretty impressive that they had somebody on
your campaign day by day by day."
Somehow
it's hard to believe that the "limited resources" of the
Disney corporation (2003 revenues: $27 billion) explains ABC's call.
ABC's decision does seem to mirror the opinions of Koppel, who seemed
frustrated that these candidates were included in the debate at all.
According to the New York Times (12/7/03), Koppel "said he would
have preferred a slugfest among the six leading candidates."
Koppel was quoted: "You can't have a debate among nine people....
There is no such thing. It's called a food fight."
"How
did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun get into
this thing?" Koppel was quoted in the Washington Post (12/10/03).
"Nobody seems to know. Some candidates who are perceived as serious
are gasping for air, and what little oxygen there is on the stage
will be taken up by one-third of the people who do not have a snowball's
chance in hell of winning the nomination."
Koppel's
dismissive attitude towards those three candidates carried over into
the debate itself, as evidenced by this question:
"This
is a question to Ambassador Braun, Rev. Sharpton, Congressman Kucinich.
You don't have any money, at least not much. Rev. Sharpton has almost
none. You don't have very much, Ambassador Braun. The question is,
will there come a point when polls, money and then ultimately the
actual votes that will take place here, in places like New Hampshire,
the caucuses in Iowa, will there come a point when we can expect one
or more of the three of you to drop out? Or are you in this as sort
of a vanity candidacy?"
Kucinich's
response to that question generated perhaps the most media coverage
his campaign has received so far:
"Ted,
you know, we started at the beginning of this evening talking about
an endorsement. Well, I want the American people to see where the
media takes politics in this country. To start with endorsements,
to start talking about endorsements. Now we're talking about polls.
And then we're talking about money. Well, you know, when you do that,
you don't have to talk about what's important to the American people.
"Ted,
I'm the only one up here that actually, on the stage, that actually
voted against the Patriot Act. And voted against the war. The only
one on this stage. I'm also one of the few candidates up here who's
talking about taking our healthcare system from this for-profit system
to a not-for-profit, single-payer, universal health care for all.
I'm also the only one who has talked about getting out of NAFTA and
the WTO and going back to bilateral trade conditioned on workers rights,
human rights and the environment. Now, I may be inconvenient for some
of those in the media, but I'm, you know, sorry about that."
One
has to wonder whether Kucinich's rebuke of Koppel, and his criticism
of the priorities of the media, had something to do with ABC's decision
to limit coverage of these candidates. No matter what the rationale,
this does raise a concern that ABC is making an early call on the
election of 2004-- weeks before any votes have been cast.
For
the record, before ABC's decision to cut back coverage, Kucinich,
Sharpton and Moseley Braun had been mentioned a combined total of
ten times this year on ABC's World News Tonight, according to a search
of the Nexis database. Only one of those mentions referred to the
candidate's position on a policy.
ACTION:
Contact ABC and ask them why they have decided to limit their coverage
of Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun. Encourage ABC to let voters,
not pundits, decide who they want to select as a presidential nominee.
CONTACT:
ABC News
World
News Tonight
Phone:
212-456-4040
mailto:PeterJennings@abcnews.com
Nightline
202-222-7000
mailto:nightline@abcnews.com
As
always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously
if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org
with your correspondence.
Censored! Neocons' Plans For
Global Domination Top The Annual List Of Stories Ignored Or Downplayed
By The Mainstream Media.
By Camille T. Taiara
S.F. Bay Guardian, September 10, 2003
If there's one influence that has shaped worldwide politics over the
past year, it's the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited
the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to solidify its military and economic
control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and
the environment. But President George W. Bush hasn't simply been responding
to world events. The agenda his administration has followed fits perfectly
with a clearly defined plan that's been in place for more than a decade.
The neoconservative blueprint for U.S. military domination is hardly
a secret. A group called the Project for a New American Century -
a think tank founded by hawks who now hold prominent jobs in the White
House - released a version of it three years ago. The document is
shocking in its candor: it asserts that the United States should be
moving unilaterally to assert military control around the globe and
that all that's necessary to jump-start the effort is a "new Pearl
Harbor." Yet none of the major news media in this country have reported
on this document or on the fact that Bush is so closely following
its script. That's the biggest "censored" story in the nation last
year, according to Sonoma State University's Project Censored, a 27-year-old
program dedicated to shining some light on the shortcomings of the
major news media. Researchers at Sonoma State meticulously combed
through news reports from 2002 and the first quarter of 2003 to find
stories that didn't get the media attention they deserved. This year's
big stories include the attack on civil liberties at home, Donald
Rumsfeld's plan to provoke terrorists, and treaty-busting by the United
States. In many cases, these stories got little or no play - or else
were presented piecemeal, without any attempt to put the information
in context. "The stories this year reflect a clear danger to democracy
and governmental transparency in the U.S. - and the corporate media's
failure to alert the public to these important issues," Project Censored
director Peter Phillips told the Bay Guardian. "The magnitude of total
global domination has to be the most important story we've uncovered
in a quarter century." What follows is the Bay Guardian's rundown
of Project Censored's top 10 censored or underreported stories for
last year: 1. The Neoconservative Plan For Global Dominance "Terror:
A question of when, not if" read the front-page headline of the Sept.
7, 2002, San Francisco Chronicle. Americans, the article argued, will
just have to get used to the fact that we're now engaged in a "perpetual
war." Later that day Bush went on TV to ask the nation for another
$87 billion for the fight against terrorism. But the concept of perpetual
war, and the military strategy that comes with it - of unilateralism,
preemptive strikes, and a "forward presence" in key regions throughout
the globe - is nothing new. The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon simply provided the perfect rationale to implement
existing plans. Back in the early 1990s, hawks in Bush Sr.'s administration
- notably, then-<\d>Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, with the help
of General Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz (at the time, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff chair and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, respectively)
- drew up a plan that was virtually identical to the National Security
Strategy unveiled in September 2002. Their blueprint - first spelled
out in a 1992 classified internal policy statement titled "Defense
Planning Guidance" (later repeated in Cheney's "Defense Strategy for
the 1990s," formally released in January 1993) - called for the United
States to assert its military superiority to prevent the emergence
of a new superpower rival. It called for the United States to diversify
its military presence throughout the world, offered a policy of preemption,
argued for the expansion of the U.S. nuclear program while discouraging
those of other countries, and foresaw the need for the United States
to act alone, if need be, to protect its interests and those of its
allies. Sound familiar? Yet the neocons knew they faced a hard sell
as Bill Clinton took office. "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy,
Forces, and Resources," a report released by the Project for the New
American Century in 2000, stated that the United States needed a catastrophe
- "a new Pearl Harbor," as the authors called it - to jump-start the
neocons' blueprint for all-encompassing military and economic world
dominance. (PNAC was founded by none other than Cheney, Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and other former Reagan and Bush administration
hawks.) Then came the attacks of Sept. 11 - just nine months after
the Bush administration took office. The events of that day provided
the perfect excuse for Cheney and company to finally see their plans
to fruition. Top on their list of targets was Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Within 24 hours of the planes hitting the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon - and without so much as an inkling of evidence as to who
had carried out the attacks - Attorney General John Ashcroft was already
calling for war on Iraq, according to a report by Bob Woodward in
the Washington Post. Indeed, the neocons have had the Persian Gulf
in their crosshairs for 30 years now. After the oil crisis of 1976
and the Gulf states' nationalization of their petroleum industries
in the years that preceded it, the United States began building up
forces in the region - primarily in Saudi Arabia - and strengthening
relationships with regional dictatorships. The reasons seem simple:
the region holds two-thirds of the world's oil. "Control over the
Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China,"
Hampshire College professor and Resource Wars author Michael Klare
told Mother Jones. "It's having our hand on the spigot." David Armstrong,
Harper's Magazine, October 2002; Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones, March
2003; John Pilger, www<\d>.pilger<\d>.carlton<\d>.com, Dec. 12, 2002.
2. Homeland security threatens civil liberties The year 2002 ought
to be remembered as the year when Big Brother came of age. As the
Pentagon waged unending war abroad in the name of battling terrorism,
the Bush administration pursued a parallel, wholesale war on dissent
at home, fusing foreign intelligence operations with domestic security.
Agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation were granted
sweeping powers to spy on U.S. citizens. Civil liberties took the
greatest hit in the last 30 years as the feds consistently slashed
away at our basic constitutional rights - including the right to privacy,
to any semblance of a fair trial in cases broadly defined as terrorism-related,
and to the freedoms of speech, association, and assembly. The Bush
administration undertook all this and much more by means of the USA
PATRIOT Act, executive orders, and the newly created Department of
Homeland Security. On Oct. 1, 2002, the government established the
Northern Command - a branch of the U.S. armed forces empowered to
coordinate military "assistance" to domestic law enforcement agencies.
That was just the latest in a push to allow the federal government
to use the U.S. military against its own citizens in the event of
mass civil unrest. (That trend wasn't without precedent: an anonymous
Justice Department official reportedly told the Seattle Weekly, in
late December 1999, that the feds had deployed an elite U.S. Army
strike force by the name of the Delta Force, to infiltrate the now-infamous
anti-<\d>World Trade Organization demonstrations in that city weeks
earlier.) Yet media coverage of such measures was piecemeal at best
- and failed to shed light on the sordid details and ominous repercussions
that accompanied them. But it gets worse: The administration is pushing
the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, dubbed Patriot Act
II. Now that there's opposition, the administration is trying to sneak
major provisions through as riders in other congressional bills. "The
second Patriot Act is a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar
and Adolf Hitler gave themselves," Alex Jones wrote on www.rense.com.
Frank Morales, Global Outlook, Winter 2003; Alex Jones, www<\d>.rense<\d>.com,
Feb. 11, 2003, and Global Outlook, Vol. 4; Charles Lewis and Adam
Mayle, Center for Public Integrity, Feb. 7, 2003. 3. U.S. illegally
removes pages from Iraq U.N. report Bush administration insiders often
take extreme measures to protect their own - including those who supplied
Hussein's regime with weapons of mass destruction and training on
how to use them. Even as Bush urged military action against Iraq for
the country's failure to divulge details of its alleged chemical,
biological, and nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government covertly removed
8,000 of the 11,800 pages of the weapons declaration the Iraqi government
had submitted to the United Nations Security Council and the International
Atomic Energy Agency. But the Iraqis released copies of the full report
to key media outlets in Europe. It turns out that the missing pages
may have contained damning details on 24 U.S.-based corporations,
various federal departments and nuclear weapons labs, and several
high-ranking members of the Reagan and Bush administrations that,
from 1983 until 1990, helped supply Hussein with botulinum toxins,
anthrax, gas gangrene bacteria, the makings for nuclear weapons, and
associated instruction. Among those implicated: Eastman Kodak, Dupont,
Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel, the U.S. Department of Energy
and Department of Agriculture, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories,
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield. Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice,
Jan. 1, 2003, and The Humanist, March/April 2003. 4. Rumsfeld's plan
to provoke terrorists Buried deep in one of its Sunday issues late
last October, the Los Angeles Times published a story by military
analyst William Arkin about a slew of secret armies the Pentagon had
been creating around the world. One such force caught the eye of Moscow
Times columnist and regular CounterPunch contributor Chris Floyd,
who picked up on the tip and ran with it. "According to a classified
document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new
organization - the 'Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (dubbed
the 'Pee-Twos')' - will carry out secret missions designed to 'stimulate
reactions' among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing
violent acts which would then expose them to 'counterattack' by U.S.
forces," Floyd wrote. In short, the alleged document seemed to show
that the Pentagon was gearing up to actively instigate terrorist acts,
despite the risk to innocent civilians. "The Pee-Twos will thus come
in handy whenever the Regime hankers to add a little oil-laden real
estate or a new military base to the Empire's burgeoning portfolio,"
Floyd continued. "Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir 'em
with a stick, and presto: instant 'justification' for whatever level
of intervention/conquest/rapine you might desire." Or, he proffers,
just make them up after the fact. Chris Floyd, CounterPunch, Nov.
1, 2002. 5. The effort to make unions disappear What better way to
make those pesky unions disappear than by branding them a threat to
national security? That's precisely what the neocons in the White
House and on Capitol Hill have been doing - in a blatant move to break
some of the country's most powerful labor syndicates. And, so far,
they've gotten away with it. Bush - certainly not known as a stalwart
of workers' rights - invoked his war on terrorism rhetoric in early
October 2002 to force striking International Longshore and Warehouse
Union dock workers in Oakland back on the job, thereby undermining
the future of the ILWU's West Coast labor agreement. "Some $300 billion
worth of cargo - equivalent to 30 percent of U.S. gross domestic product
- passes through ILWU members' hands each year," Lee Sustar wrote
in Z Magazine. (The ILWU is also renowned as one of the nation's most
progressive unions - having shut down ports up and down the Pacific
Coast in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal and, later, the anti-WTO
protesters in Seattle during the '90s.) Then, when the Bush administration
created the Department of Homeland Security, its secretary Tom Ridge
invoked similar reasoning to argue that the department's employees
be exempted from civil service regulations governing pay scales, hiring
and promotion practices, bans on discrimination, whistle-blower protections,
and - last but not least - collective bargaining rights. The formation
of the DHS accounted for the largest restructuring of U.S. government
since 1947 and brought together more than 100 executive agencies under
one roof - equaling a total of 180,000 workers. Immigrant workers
also took a big hit. The federalization of airport screeners caused
thousands of noncitizens to lose their jobs. Others were swept up
by Immigration and Naturalization Service raids targeting not only
baggage screeners but also other airport workers, including food servers.
Lee Sustar, Z Magazine, Sept. 20, 2002; David Bacon, War Times, October-November
2002; Anne-Marie Cusac, The Progressive, February 2003; Robert L.
Borosage, The American Prospect, March 2003. 6. Closing access to
information technology All the stories that make up this year's Project
Censored winners were gleaned from alternative and international media
sources. Likewise, progressives quickly learned to seek out sources
like CommonDreams.org, truthout.org, and the U.K. Independent's Web
site for the real news on the latest war on Iraq. The Internet has
functioned as the single most important medium for accessing these
kinds of information. But if the big communications companies get
their way, the Web could be compromised as a democratic source of
alternative news and perspectives. Soon what we get from the Web could
be a carbon copy of what we already get from corporate TV, cable,
radio, and newspapers. For several years now, businesses that provide
access to the Web - cable, telephone, and (more recently) satellite
companies - have been working to cash in on their control over distribution.
Unlike the companies controlling telephone lines (which by law must
grant access to any company that wants to use them), the Federal Communications
Commission opted, in spring 2002, to grant cable companies full control
over who could use their cable networks - and under what terms. Cable
companies can now manage the speed at which different sites pop up,
block out any content they choose, and even deny sites and ISPs access
to their lines altogether. Of course, telephone companies have since
been lobbying for the same exclusive rights over DSL. The telephone
and cable lines are controlled by monopolies in most U.S. cities and
towns. (Comcast, now the world's largest cable company, exerts sole
control over cable lines serving almost one third of U.S. households
- including San Francisco.) Without any open-access laws to preserve
competition, those monopolies are sure to hike up their rates, making
it more difficult for small businesses and nonprofits to stay online.
The thousands of ISPs currently available could dwindle to just two
or three for any given region, as broadband distributors like AOL
Time Warner favor their own companies' ISPs over others. Customers
might be forced to pay more for a wider variety of sites, and companies
could block whatever sites they chose to. Of course, the largest media
conglomerates have already been merging with the companies that provide
Internet access to the vast majority of U.S. households and that stand
to gain handsomely from such a deal. So is it any wonder they've blacked
out the story? Arthur Stamoulis, Dollars and Sense, September 2002.
7. Treaty busting by the United States Even as the Bush administration
publicly demanded that terrorists be brought to justice and that Iraq,
Iran, North Korea, and others dismantle their (in Iraq's case, alleged)
nuclear weapons programs, it consistently worked to undermine hard-fought
international agreements - including numerous treaties and the international
court system - meant to do just that. Bush has resuscitated the Reagan-era
missile defense program, pursued the development of a "Robust Nuclear
Earth Penetrator" bomb and other small-size nuclear weapons for use
in its military campaigns abroad, declared its intent to create bio-warfare-agent
facilities at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos labs, adopted
a policy of preemptive military strikes, waged an illegal war against
Iraq, and actually voted to authorize a U.S. military attack on the
International Criminal Court in the Hague should the ICC dare try
any American for war crimes. In fact, the United States has now "either
blatantly violated or gradually subverted" at least nine multilateral
treaties on which it is a signatory, Project Censored found. These
include the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons
Commission, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Treaty Banning
Antipersonnel Mines, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the U.N.
Convention on Climate Change, and the Rome Statute of the ICC. All
these action have been taken in the name of national security. Yet,
"this unprecedented rejection of and rapid retreat from global treaties
... will render these treaties and conventions invalid without the
support and participation of the world's foremost superpower," wrote
Project Censored's authors. Marylia Kelly and Nicole Deller, Connections,
June 2002; John B. Anderson, The Nation, April 2002; Eamon Martin,
Ashville Global Report, June 20-<\d>26, 2002; John Valleau, Global
Outlook, Summer 2002. 8. U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted
uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects
Former Sergeant First Class Carol Picou will never be the same after
serving in the first Gulf War. On the front lines with a mobile medical
unit, "I noticed that all the bodies that were on the highways and
the tanks and all the armament that was damaged was burnt," the veteran
nurse told Hustler magazine last spring. "It was actually literally
black, and I thought the Iraqi people were black-skinned. It amazed
me that they were burnt that bad - that we would have used some type
of armament that would actually melt these people into their vehicles."
Picou began experiencing serious health effects almost immediately.
Back in the United States, her muscles were deteriorating. She permanently
lost control of her bowels. She suffered from 104-degree fevers, and
her skin would break open and bleed. Rather than take care of Picou,
who had served in the armed forces since 1978, the Army medically
discharged her against her wishes in 1995. "More than 9,600 of the
relatively young Operation Desert Storm veterans have died since serving
in Iraq, a statistical anomaly," wrote Dan Kapelovitz, the reporter
who interviewed Picou. Of those still living, more than a third -
upward of 236,000 - have filed Gulf War Syndrome-<\d>related claims
with the Veteran's Administration. Research overwhelmingly suggests
these ailments and deaths were caused by depleted uranium, a metal
the military uses in much of its hardware that is so dense it can
pierce through steel-armored tanks. But this radioactive material
has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, according to renowned scientist
Helen Caldicott. In Iraq incidences of cancer, childhood leukemia,
and rare mutations in newborns have skyrocketed. A study conducted
by the U.S. Army in 1990, at least six months before the first Gulf
War, shows the U.S. government knew what the effects would be. Nonetheless,
the Americans and Brits dropped anywhere between 300 to 800 tons of
the stuff on Iraq over the four-day assault. They've done nothing
to clean up the radioactive mess left behind. "In effect, George Bush
Sr. used weapons of mass destruction on his own people," Kapelovitz
continued. But it didn't end there. The United States has since used
depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and again
during its most recent assault on Iraq - a fact that was reported
in the European media but not widely in the United States. Dan Kaplevitz,
Hustler, June 2003; Reese Erlich, Children of War, March 2003. 9.
In Afghanistan: poverty, women's rights, and civil disruption worse
than ever Rather than allow the international community to supply
sufficient security forces to safeguard Afghan citizens from brutal
warlords - and thereby create the foundation necessary for democracy
and reconstruction - the United States has instead financed and armed
regional warlords in its effort to root out the last remaining al-Qaeda
forces. As a result, by October 2002 - a year after the United States
embarked on its campaign to "liberate" that war-torn Central Asian
country - private armies were estimated to be 700,000 strong. (The
International Security Assistance Force, in contrast, consists of
a scant 5,000 troops - only enough to provide meager protection for
Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.) The practice has, in effect, strengthened
the nation's endemic system of military feudalism. The heroin trade
has skyrocketed. Life expectancy is a mere 46 years - with more than
one in four children not making it to their fifth birthday. Only 10
percent of those who survive have access to an education. In many
regions the constraints placed on women's basic liberties have reverted
to those imposed by the Taliban. Per capita average yearly income
is only $280. And the basic infrastructure needed to reintroduce law
and order - like a working justice system, banking institutions, a
national army - remains a pipe dream. In short, thanks to American
policies, Afghanis are more forsaken than ever. Yet, as far as the
mainstream U.S. media are concerned, Afghanis' worst fear has come
true: Afghanistan has once again dropped off the corporate media's
radar - and, with it, that of the American public. Ahmed Rashid, The
Nation, Oct. 14, 2002; Pranjal Tiwari, Left Turn, February/March 2003;
Jan Goodwin, The Nation, April 29, 2002; Scott Carrier, with a photo
essay by Chien-Min Chung, Mother Jones, July/August 2002. 10. Africa
faces new threat of colonialism Many Americans are now at least marginally
aware of recent neoliberal economic programs such as the Free Trade
Area of the Americas and Plan Colombia. But how many have heard of
the New Partnership for Africa's Development - a plan being forwarded
by the world's most powerful industrialized nations? NEPAD was launched
at the G8 meeting in June 2002 - presumably to help combat poverty
in Africa by encouraging outside investment. Curiously enough, the
architects of the program didn't bother to consult with representatives
of a single African nation while drawing up their plan. Critics fear
the program is just another bid by more powerful nations to exploit
the continent's last remaining natural resources - at the expense
of Africans themselves. First-world meddling has already wrought havoc
on Africa. During the cold war, the United States alone injected $1.5
billion worth of weaponry and training into the continent - now the
most war-torn in the world. From 1991 to 1995 the United States increased
its military contributions to 50 of Africa's 53 nations. Millions
have died from war, displacement, disease, and starvation as a result.
Meanwhile, structural adjustment programs force-fed to African nations
by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and G8 in the name
of development have only resulted in the continent's foreign debt
rising by a whopping 500 percent over the past 20 years. More of the
same isn't likely to help.
www.projectcensored.org's
25 top censored stories of 2002-2003
What's Wrong with the News?
www.fair.org
Independent, aggressive and critical media are essential to an informed
democracy. But mainstream media are increasingly cozy with the economic
and political powers they should be watchdogging. Mergers in the news
industry have accelerated, further limiting the spectrum of viewpoints
that have access to mass media. With U.S. media outlets overwhelmingly
owned by for-profit conglomerates and supported by corporate advertisers,
independent journalism is compromised.
Ultimately, FAIR believes that structural reform is
needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent
public broadcasting, and promote strong, non-profit alternative sources
of information.
Check out these links for more of FAIR's analysis of
the media business:
What
Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?
From a talk at Z Media
Institute June 1997
By Noam Chomsky
Part of the reason why I write
about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual
culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media.
It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You
can compare yesterday’s version to today’s version. There
is a lot of evidence about what’s played up and what isn’t
and the way things are structured.
My impression is the media aren’t
very different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual
opinion—there are some extra constraints—but it’s
not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up
and back quite easily among them.
You look at the media, or at
any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about
its internal institutional structure. You want to know something
about their setting in the broader society. How do they relate to
other systems of power and authority? If you’re lucky, there
is an internal record from leading people in the information system
which tells you what they are up to (it is sort of a doctrinal system).
That doesn’t mean the public relations handouts but what they
say to each other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot
of interesting documentation.
Those are three major sources
of information about the nature of the media. You want to study
them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule
or something. You take a look at the structure and then make some
hypothesis based on the structure as to what the media product is
likely to look like. Then you investigate the media product and
see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in
media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully
just what the media product is and whether it conforms to obvious
assumptions about the nature and structure of the media.
Well, what do you find? First
of all, you find that there are different media which do different
things, like the entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so on,
or even most of the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming
majority of them). They are directing the mass audience.
There is another sector of the
media, the elite media, sometimes called the agenda-setting media
because they are the ones with the big resources, they set the framework
in which everyone else operates. The New York Times and CBS,
that kind of thing. Their audience is mostly privileged people.
The people who read the New York Times—people who are
wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the political class—they
are actually involved in the political system in an ongoing fashion.
They are basically managers of one sort or another. They can be
political managers, business managers (like corporate executives
or that sort of thing), doctoral managers (like university professors),
or other journalists who are involved in organizing the way people
think and look at things.
The elite media set a framework
within which others operate. If you are watching the Associated
Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the mid-afternoon
it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that
says "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times
is going to have the following stories on the front page."
The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a newspaper in
Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out
what the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway,
this tells you what the news is. These are the stories for the quarter
page that you are going to devote to something other than local
affairs or diverting your audience. These are the stories that you
put there because that’s what the New York Times tells
us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are
an editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of have to do that, because
you don’t have much else in the way of resources. If you get
off line, if you’re producing stories that the big press doesn’t
like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon. In fact, what just
happened at San Jose Mercury News is a dramatic example of
this. So there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive
you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break the
mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works pretty
well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious
power structures.
The real mass media are basically
trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t
bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested
in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about
professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their
problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t
serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We"
take care of that.
What are the elite media, the
agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for
example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations.
Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned
by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse,
and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of
the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations
are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above. If you
don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media
are just part of that system.
What about their institutional
setting? Well, that’s more or less the same. What they interact
with and relate to is other major power centers—the government,
other corporations, or the universities. Because the media are a
doctrinal system they interact closely with the universities. Say
you are a reporter writing a story on Southeast Asia or Africa,
or something like that. You’re supposed to go over to the big
university and find an expert who will tell you what to write, or
else go to one of the foundations, like Brookings Institute or American
Enterprise Institute and they will give you the words to say. These
outside institutions are very similar to the media.
The universities, for example,
are not independent institutions. There may be independent people
scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well.
And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of
Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic.
It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources
of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants,
and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate
power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what
the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don’t
adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize
it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it,
and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be
weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way
up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people
who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you
who have been through college know that the educational system is
very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you
don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a
filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they
aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes
of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions
like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges,
for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through
a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners;
how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the
right thoughts, and so on.
If you’ve read George Orwell’s
Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was
a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big
hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal
Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later.
Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal
Farm was about "Literary Censorship in England" and
what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet
Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not
all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck, but
the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent
ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.
He talks a little, only two
sentences, about the institutional structure. He asks, why does
this happen? Well, one, because the press is owned by wealthy people
who only want certain things to reach the public. The other thing
he says is that when you go through the elite education system,
when you go through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that
there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are
certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization
role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that,
you’re usually out. Those two sentences more or less tell the
story.
When you critique the media
and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is
writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, "nobody
ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business
about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never
under any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point
is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated
that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going
say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk,
or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never
would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything
they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the
more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization
system.
Okay, you look at the structure
of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well,
it’s pretty obvious. Take the New York Times. It’s
a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They
don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy
to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money
when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The
product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing
the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society.
You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course,
advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television
or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations
sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media,
it’s big businesses.
Well, what do you expect to
happen? What would you predict about the nature of the media product,
given that set of circumstances? What would be the null hypothesis,
the kind of conjecture that you’d make assuming nothing further.
The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears,
what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the
interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power
systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would
be kind of a miracle.
Okay, then comes the hard work.
You ask, does it work the way you predict? Well, you can judge for
yourselves. There’s lots of material on this obvious hypothesis,
which has been subjected to the hardest tests anybody can think
of, and still stands up remarkably well. You virtually never find
anything in the social sciences that so strongly supports any conclusion,
which is not a big surprise, because it would be miraculous if it
didn’t hold up given the way the forces are operating.
The next thing you discover
is that this whole topic is completely taboo. If you go to the Kennedy
School of Government or Stanford, or somewhere, and you study journalism
and communications or academic political science, and so on, these
questions are not likely to appear. That is, the hypothesis that
anyone would come across without even knowing anything that is not
allowed to be expressed, and the evidence bearing on it cannot be
discussed. Well, you predict that too. If you look at the institutional
structure, you would say, yeah, sure, that’s got to happen
because why should these guys want to be exposed? Why should they
allow critical analysis of what they are up to take place? The answer
is, there is no reason why they should allow that and, in fact,
they don’t. Again, it is not purposeful censorship. It is just
that you don’t make it to those positions. That includes the
left (what is called the left), as well as the right. Unless you
have been adequately socialized and trained so that there are some
thoughts you just don’t have, because if you did have them,
you wouldn’t be there. So you have a second order of prediction
which is that the first order of prediction is not allowed into
the discussion.
The last thing to look at is
the doctrinal framework in which this proceeds. Do people at high
levels in the information system, including the media and advertising
and academic political science and so on, do these people have a
picture of what ought to happen when they are writing for each other
(not when they are making graduation speeches)? When you make a
commencement speech, it is pretty words and stuff. But when they
are writing for one another, what do people say about it?
There are basically three currents
to look at. One is the public relations industry, you know, the
main business propaganda industry. So what are the leaders of the
PR industry saying? Second place to look is at what are called public
intellectuals, big thinkers, people who write the "op eds"
and that sort of thing. What do they say? The people who write impressive
books about the nature of democracy and that sort of business. The
third thing you look at is the academic stream, particularly that
part of political science which is concerned with communications
and information and that stuff which has been a branch of political
science for the last 70 or 80 years.
So, look at those three things
and see what they say, and look at the leading figures who have
written about this. They all say (I’m partly quoting), the
general population is "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders."
We have to keep them out of the public arena because they are too
stupid and if they get involved they will just make trouble. Their
job is to be "spectators," not "participants."
They are allowed to vote every
once in a while, pick out one of us smart guys. But then they are
supposed to go home and do something else like watch football or
whatever it may be. But the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"
have to be observers not participants. The participants are what
are called the "responsible men" and, of course, the writer
is always one of them. You never ask the question, why am I a "responsible
man" and somebody else is in jail? The answer is pretty obvious.
It’s because you are obedient and subordinate to power and
that other person may be independent, and so on. But you don’t
ask, of course. So there are the smart guys who are supposed to
run the show and the rest of them are supposed to be out, and we
should not succumb to (I’m quoting from an academic article)
"democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their
own interest." They are not. They are terrible judges of their
own interests so we have do it for them for their own benefit.
Actually, it is very similar
to Leninism. We do things for you and we are doing it in the interest
of everyone, and so on. I suspect that’s part of the reason
why it’s been so easy historically for people to shift up and
back from being, sort of enthusiastic Stalinists to being big supporters
of U.S. power. People switch very quickly from one position to the
other, and my suspicion is that it’s because basically it is
the same position. You’re not making much of a switch. You’re
just making a different estimate of where power lies. One point
you think it’s here, another point you think it’s there.
You take the same position.
@PAR SUB = How did all this
evolve? It has an interesting history. A lot of it comes out of
the first World War, which is a big turning point. It changed the
position of the United States in the world considerably. In the
18th century the U.S. was already the richest place in the world.
The quality of life, health, and longevity was not achieved by the
upper classes in Britain until the early 20th century, let alone
anybody else in the world. The U.S. was extraordinarily wealthy,
with huge advantages, and, by the end of the 19th century, it had
by far the biggest economy in the world. But it was not a big player
on the world scene. U.S. power extended to the Caribbean Islands,
parts of the Pacific, but not much farther.
During the first World War,
the relations changed. And they changed more dramatically during
the second World War. After the second World War the U.S. more or
less took over the world. But after first World War there was already
a change and the U.S. shifted from being a debtor to a creditor
nation. It wasn’t huge, like Britain, but it became a substantial
actor in the world for the first time. That was one change, but
there were other changes.
The first World War was the
first time there was highly organized state propaganda. The British
had a Ministry of Information, and they really needed it because
they had to get the U.S. into the war or else they were in bad trouble.
The Ministry of Information was mainly geared to sending propaganda,
including huge fabrications about "Hun" atrocities, and
so on. They were targeting American intellectuals on the reasonable
assumption that these are the people who are most gullible and most
likely to believe propaganda. They are also the ones that disseminate
it through their own system. So it was mostly geared to American
intellectuals and it worked very well. The British Ministry of Information
documents (a lot have been released) show their goal was, as they
put it, to control the thought of the entire world, a minor goal,
but mainly the U.S. They didn’t care much what people thought
in India. This Ministry of Information was extremely successful
in deluding hot shot American intellectuals into accepting British
propaganda fabrications. They were very proud of that. Properly
so, it saved their lives. They would have lost the first World War
otherwise.
In the U.S., there was a counterpart.
Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. The
U.S. was a very pacifist country. It has always been. People don’t
want to go fight foreign wars. The country was very much opposed
to the first World War and Wilson was, in fact, elected on an anti-war
position. "Peace without victory" was the slogan. But
he was intending to go to war. So the question was, how do you get
the pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so
they want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda.
So they set up the first and really only major state propaganda
agency in U.S. history. The Committee on Public Information it was
called (nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel Commission.
The guy who ran it was named Creel. The task of this commission
was to propagandize the population into a jingoist hysteria. It
worked incredibly well. Within a few months there was a raving war
hysteria and the U.S. was able to go to war.
A lot of people were impressed
by these achievements. One person impressed, and this had some implications
for the future, was Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf, he concludes,
with some justification, that Germany lost the first World War because
it lost the propaganda battle. They could not begin to compete with
British and American propaganda which absolutely overwhelmed them.
He pledges that next time around they’ll have their own propaganda
system, which they did during the second World War. More important
for us, the American business community was also very impressed
with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The
country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people
were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming
wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants
were coming in, and so on.
So what do you do? It’s
going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously,
you have to control what people think. There had been public relation
specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There
was a guy hired to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and
that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which
is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first
World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission.
In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel
Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called
Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally,
did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during
the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected
with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the
term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So
he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts
off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War.
The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission
that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment
the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies."
These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to
be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that
the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we
have these new techniques.
This is the main manual of the
public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an
authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public
relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the
democratic government of Guatemala.
His major coup, the one that
really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women
to smoke. Women didn’t smoke in those days and he ran huge
campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models
and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that
kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading
figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.
Another member of the Creel
Commission was Walter Lippmann, the most respected figure in American
journalism for about half a century (I mean serious American journalism,
serious think pieces). He also wrote what are called progressive
essays on democracy, regarded as progressive back in the 1920s.
He was, again, applying the lessons of the work on propaganda very
explicitly. He says there is a new art in democracy called manufacture
of consent. That is his phrase. Edward Herman and I borrowed it
for our book, but it comes from Lippmann. So, he says, there is
this new art in the method of democracy, "manufacture of consent."
By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally
a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant
because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices
and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always
do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate.
So we’ll have a real democracy. It will work properly. That’s
applying the lessons of the propaganda agency.
Academic social science and
political science comes out of the same thing. The founder of what’s
called communications and academic political science is Harold Glasswell.
His main achievement was a book, a study of propaganda. He says,
very frankly, the things I was quoting before—those things
about not succumbing to democratic dogmatism, that comes from academic
political science (Lasswell and others). Again, drawing the lessons
from the war time experience, political parties drew the same lessons,
especially the conservative party in England. Their early documents,
just being released, show they also recognized the achievements
of the British Ministry of Information. They recognized that the
country was getting more democratized and it wouldn’t be a
private men’s club. So the conclusion was, as they put it,
politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms
of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World
War towards controlling people’s thoughts.
That’s the doctrinal side
and it coincides with the institutional structure. It strengthens
the predictions about the way the thing should work. And the predictions
are well confirmed. But these conclusions, also, are not allowed
to be discussed. This is all now part of mainstream literature but
it is only for people on the inside. When you go to college, you
don’t read the classics about how to control peoples minds.
Just like you don’t read
what James Madison said during the constitutional convention about
how the main goal of the new system has to be "to protect the
minority of the opulent against the majority," and has to be
designed so that it achieves that end. This is the founding of the
constitutional system, so nobody studies it. You can’t even
find it in the academic scholarship unless you really look hard.
That is roughly the picture,
as I see it, of the way the system is institutionally, the doctrines
that lie behind it, the way it comes out. There is another part
directed to the "ignorant meddlesome" outsiders.
That is mainly using diversion of one kind or another. From that,
I think, you can predict what you would expect to find.
What's Wrong With This Picture?
by MARK CRISPIN MILLER
[from the January 7, 2002 issue]
For all their economic clout and cultural sway, the
ten great multinationals profiled in our latest chart--AOL Time Warner,
Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony,
Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media--rule the cosmos only at the
moment. The media cartel that keeps us fully entertained and permanently
half-informed is always growing here and shriveling there, with certain
of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart or get digested
whole. But while the players tend to come and go--always with a few
exceptions--the overall Leviathan itself keeps getting bigger, louder,
brighter, forever taking up more time and space, in every street,
in countless homes, in every other head.
The rise of the cartel has been a long time coming
(and it still has some way to go). It represents the grand convergence
of the previously disparate US culture industries--many of them vertically
monopolized already--into one global superindustry providing most
of our imaginary "content." The movie business had been largely dominated
by the major studios in Hollywood; TV, like radio before it, by the
triune axis of the networks headquartered in New York; magazines,
primarily by Henry Luce (with many independent others on the scene);
and music, from the 1960s, mostly by the major record labels. Now
all those separate fields are one, the whole terrain divided up among
the giants--which, in league with Barnes & Noble, Borders and
the big distributors, also control the book business. (Even with its
leading houses, book publishing was once a cottage industry at both
the editorial and retail levels.) For all the democratic promise of
the Internet, moreover, much of cyberspace has now been occupied,
its erstwhile wildernesses swiftly paved and lighted over by the same
colossi. The only industry not yet absorbed into this new world order
is the newsprint sector of the Fourth Estate--a business that was
heavily shadowed to begin with by the likes of Hearst and other, regional
grandees, flush with the ill-gotten gains of oil, mining and utilities--and
such absorption is, as we shall see, about to happen.
Thus what we have today is not a problem wholly new
in kind but rather the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process
whereby that old problem has become considerably larger--and that
great quantitative change, with just a few huge players now co-directing
all the nation's media, has brought about enormous qualitative changes.
For one thing, the cartel's rise has made extremely rare the sort
of marvelous exception that has always popped up, unexpectedly, to
startle and revivify the culture--the genuine independents among record
labels, radio stations, movie theaters, newspapers, book publishers
and so on. Those that don't fail nowadays are so remarkable that they
inspire not emulation but amazement. Otherwise, the monoculture, endlessly
and noisily triumphant, offers, by and large, a lot of nothing, whether
packaged as "the news" or "entertainment."
Of all the cartel's dangerous consequences for American
society and culture, the worst is its corrosive influence on journalism.
Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom et al., the news is, with a few
exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that the cartel
also vends nonstop. This is also nothing new--consider the newsreels
of yesteryear--but the gigantic scale and thoroughness of the corporate
concentration has made a world of difference, and so has made this
world a very different place.
Let us start to grasp the situation by comparing this
new centerfold with our first outline of the National Entertainment
State, published in the spring of 1996. Back then, the national TV
news appeared to be a tidy tetrarchy: two network news divisions owned
by large appliance makers/weapons manufacturers (CBS by Westinghouse,
NBC by General Electric), and the other two bought lately by the nation's
top purveyors of Big Fun (ABC by Disney, CNN by Time Warner). Cable
was still relatively immature, so that, of its many enterprises, only
CNN competed with the broadcast networks' short-staffed newsrooms;
and its buccaneering founder, Ted Turner, still seemed to call the
shots from his new aerie at Time Warner headquarters.
Today the telejournalistic firmament includes the meteoric
Fox News Channel, as well as twenty-six television stations owned
outright by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which holds majority
ownership in a further seven). Although ultimately thwarted in his
bid to buy DirecTV and thereby dominate the US satellite television
market, Murdoch wields a pervasive influence on the news--and not
just in New York, where he has two TV stations, a major daily (the
faltering New York Post) and the Fox News Channel, whose
inexhaustible platoons of shouting heads attracts a fierce plurality
of cable-viewers. Meanwhile, Time Warner has now merged with AOL--so
as to own the cyberworks through which to market its floodtide of
movies, ball games, TV shows, rock videos, cartoons, standup routines
and (not least) bits from CNN, CNN Headline News, CNNfn (devised to
counter GE's CNBC) and CNN/Sports Illustrated (a would-be rival to
Disney's ESPN franchise). While busily cloning CNN, the parent company
has also taken quiet steps to make it more like Fox, with Walter Isaacson,
the new head honcho, even visiting the Capitol to seek advice from
certain rightist pols on how, presumably, to make the network even
shallower and more obnoxious. (He also courted Rush Himself.) All
this has occurred since the abrupt defenestration of Ted Turner, who
now belatedly laments the overconcentration of the cable business:
"It's sad we're losing so much diversity of thought," he confesses,
sounding vaguely like a writer for this magazine.
Whereas five years ago the clueless Westinghouse owned
CBS, today the network is a property of the voracious Viacom--matchless
cable occupier (UPN, MTV, MTV2, VH1, Nickelodeon, the Movie Channel,
TNN, CMT, BET, 50 percent of Comedy Central, etc.), radio colossus
(its Infinity Broadcasting--home to Howard Stern and Don Imus--owns
184 stations), movie titan (Paramount Pictures), copious publisher
(Simon & Schuster, Free Press, Scribner), a big deal on the web
and one of the largest US outdoor advertising firms. Under Viacom,
CBS News has been obliged to help sell Viacom's product--in 2000,
for example, devoting epic stretches of The Early Show to what
lately happened on Survivor (CBS). Of course, such synergistic
bilge is commonplace, as is the tendency to dummy up on any topic
that the parent company (or any of its advertisers) might want stifled.
These journalistic sins have been as frequent under "longtime" owners
Disney and GE as under Viacom and Fox [see Janine Jaquet, "The Sins
of Synergy," page 20]. They may also abound beneath Vivendi, whose
recent purchase of the film and TV units of USA Networks and new stake
in the satellite TV giant EchoStar--moves too recent for inclusion
in our chart--could soon mean lots of oblique self-promotion on USAM
News, in L'Express and L'Expansion, and through
whatever other news-machines the parent buys.
Such is the telejournalistic landscape at the moment--and
soon it will mutate again, if Bush's FCC delivers for its giant clients.
On September 13, when the minds of the American people were on something
else, the commission's GOP majority voted to "review" the last few
rules preventing perfect oligopoly. They thus prepared the ground
for allowing a single outfit to own both a daily paper and a TV station
in the same market--an advantage that was outlawed in 1975. (Even
then, pre-existing cases of such ownership were grandfathered in,
and any would-be owner could get that rule waived.) That furtive FCC
"review" also portended the elimination of the cap on the percentage
of US households that a single owner might reach through its TV stations.
Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the limit
had been 35 percent. Although that most indulgent bill was dictated
by the media giants themselves, its restrictions are too heavy for
this FCC, whose chairman, Michael Powell, has called regulation per
se "the oppressor."
And so, unless there's some effective opposition, the
several-headed vendor that now sells us nearly all our movies, TV,
radio, magazines, books, music and web services will soon be selling
us our daily papers, too--for the major dailies have, collectively,
been lobbying energetically for that big waiver, which stands to make
their owners even richer (an expectation that has no doubt had a sweetening
effect on coverage of the Bush Administration). Thus the largest US
newspaper conglomerates--the New York Times, the Washington Post,
Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Co.--will soon be formal partners
with, say, GE, Murdoch, Disney and/or AT&T; and then the lesser
nationwide chains (and the last few independents) will be ingested,
too, going the way of most US radio stations. America's cities could
turn into informational "company towns," with one behemoth owning
all the local print organs--daily paper(s), alternative weekly, city
magazine--as well as the TV and radio stations, the multiplexes and
the cable system. (Recently a federal appeals court told the FCC to
drop its rule preventing any one company from serving more than 30
percent of US cable subscribers; and in December, the Supreme Court
refused to hear the case.) While such a setup may make economic sense,
as anticompetitive arrangements tend to do, it has no place in a democracy,
where the people have to know more than their masters want to tell
them.
That imperative demands reaffirmation at this risky
moment, when much of what the media cartel purveys to us is propaganda,
commercial or political, while no one in authority makes mention of
"the public interest"--except to laugh it off. "I have no idea," Powell
cheerily replied at his first press conference as chairman, when asked
for his own definition of that crucial concept. "It's an empty vessel
in which people pour in whatever their preconceived views or biases
are." Such blithe obtuseness has marked all his public musings on
the subject. In a speech before the American Bar Association in April
1998, Powell offered an ironic little riff about how thoroughly he
doesn't get it: "The night after I was sworn in [as a commissioner],
I waited for a visit from the angel of the public interest. I waited
all night, but she did not come." On the other hand, Powell has never
sounded glib about his sacred obligation to the corporate interest.
Of his decision to move forward with the FCC vote just two days after
9/11, Powell spoke as if that sneaky move had been a gesture in the
spirit of Patrick Henry: "The flame of the American ideal may flicker,
but it will never be extinguished. We will do our small part and press
on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely."
Certainly the FCC has never been a democratic force,
whichever party has been dominant. Bill Clinton championed the disastrous
Telecom Act of 1996 and otherwise did almost nothing to impede the
drift toward oligopoly. (As Newsweek reported in 2000, Al Gore
was Rupert Murdoch's personal choice for President. The mogul apparently
sensed that Gore would happily play ball with him, and also thought--correctly--that
the Democrat would win.)
What is unique to Michael Powell, however, is the showy
superciliousness with which he treats his civic obligation to address
the needs of people other than the very rich. That spirit has shone
forth many times--as when the chairman genially compared the "digital
divide" between the information haves and have-nots to a "Mercedes
divide" between the lucky few who can afford great cars and those
(like him) who can't. In the intensity of his pro-business bias, Powell
recalls Mark Fowler, head of Reagan's FCC, who famously denied his
social obligations by asserting that TV is merely "an appliance,"
"a toaster with pictures." And yet such Reaganite bons mots,
fraught with the anti-Communist fanaticism of the late cold war, evinced
a deadly earnestness that's less apparent in General Powell's son.
He is a blithe, postmodern sort of ideologue, attuned to the complacent
smirk of Bush the Younger--and, of course, just perfect for the cool
and snickering culture of TV.
Although such flippancies are hard to take, they're
also easy to refute, for there is no rationale for such an attitude.
Take "the public interest"--an ideal that really isn't hard to understand.
A media system that enlightens us, that tells us everything we need
to know pertaining to our lives and liberty and happiness, would be
a system dedicated to the public interest. Such a system would not
be controlled by a cartel of giant corporations, because those entities
are ultimately hostile to the welfare of the people. Whereas we need
to know the truth about such corporations, they often have an interest
in suppressing it (as do their advertisers). And while it takes much
time and money to find out the truth, the parent companies prefer
to cut the necessary costs of journalism, much preferring the sort
of lurid fare that can drive endless hours of agitated jabbering.
(Prior to 9/11, it was Monica, then Survivor and Chandra Levy,
whereas, since the fatal day, we have had mostly anthrax, plus much
heroic footage from the Pentagon.) The cartel's favored audience,
moreover, is that stratum of the population most desirable to advertisers--which
has meant the media's complete abandonment of working people and the
poor. And while the press must help protect us against those who would
abuse the powers of government, the oligopoly is far too cozy with
the White House and the Pentagon, whose faults, and crimes, it is
unwilling to expose. The media's big bosses want big favors from the
state, while the reporters are afraid to risk annoying their best
sources. Because of such politeness (and, of course, the current panic
in the air), the US coverage of this government is just a bit more
edifying than the local newscasts in Riyadh.
Against the daily combination of those corporate tendencies--conflict
of interest, endless cutbacks, endless trivial pursuits, class bias,
deference to the king and all his men--the public interest doesn't
stand a chance. Despite the stubborn fiction of their "liberal" prejudice,
the corporate media have helped deliver a stupendous one-two punch
to this democracy. (That double whammy followed their uncritical participation
in the long, irrelevant jihad against those moderate Republicans,
the Clintons.) Last year, they helped subvert the presidential race,
first by prematurely calling it for Bush, regardless of the vote--a
move begun by Fox, then seconded by NBC, at the personal insistence
of Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric. Since the coup, the corporate
media have hidden or misrepresented the true story of the theft of
that election.
And having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media
continue to betray American democracy. Media devoted to the public
interest would investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI,
the FAA and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for
our protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't bothered
to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should the media
report on all the current threats to our security--including
those far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently, conducting
bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned (just like John
Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not play down, this government's
attack on civil liberties--the mass detentions, secret evidence, increased
surveillance, suspension of attorney-client privilege, the encouragements
to spy, the warnings not to disagree, the censored images, sequestered
public papers, unexpected visits from the Secret Service and so on.
And so should the media not parrot what the Pentagon says about the
current war, because such prettified accounts make us complacent and
preserve us in our fatal ignorance of what people really think of
us--and why--beyond our borders. And there's much more--about the
stunning exploitation of the tragedy, especially by the Republicans;
about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden families; about
the ongoing shenanigans in Florida--that the media would let the people
know, if they were not (like Michael Powell) indifferent to the public
interest.
In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear
to work against the public interest--and for their parent
companies, their advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation
is completely un-American. It is the purpose of the press to help
us run the state, and not the other way around. As citizens of a democracy,
we have the right and obligation to be well aware of what is happening,
both in "the homeland" and the wider world. Without such knowledge
we cannot be both secure and free. We therefore must take steps to
liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our
own.
UNDERREPORTING PEACE MOVEMENT
Wanda Freeman Un-covering the peace movement Gray Lady drops ball
If street marches are the tip of the public-opinion iceberg, then
the worldwide movement against going to war with Iraq is big enough
to sink a fleet of Titanics. Yet a flip through the major American
newspapers and a trip around the television dial tells a different
story < one that must make the hundreds of thousands (and possibly
millions) of anti-war marchers out there feel pretty lonely. The Washington
Post and the Gray Lady herself, The New York Times, are among many
U.S. media giants that have been out of step on the anti-war beat
lately. And frankly, the repeated oversights are looking a bit suspicious.
First there was the Sept. 28 rally in London, which the British press
covered extensively. The London Independent reported estimates of
150,000 to 350,000 protesters and declared the rally ³one of the biggest
peace demonstrations seen in a generation.² The London Times cited
an organizer¹s estimate of 400,000 protesters. The Guardian said the
rally, waged cooperatively by the Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim
Association of Britain, focused on the slogans ³Don¹t attack Iraq²
and ³Freedom for Palestine.² And the Observer described ³an undeniable
unity of purpose² among a crowd ranging from keffiyah-wearing Muslim
activists to pram-pushing Hampstead ladies. Given the fact that Britain
is alone in backing the Bush administration on attacking Iraq, a protest
of such magnitude in London would seem worthy of coverage by the leaders
of the American press. But the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy
In Reporting, which combed through The New York Times and the Post,
found hardly a word about the anti-war rally. The London rally that
did catch the papers¹ attention was about a proposed ban on fox hunting.
That¹s right. While both papers made only passing mention of the anti-war
protest, which they yawningly said was attended by ³thousands,² ³tens
of thousands² and ³150,000,² they really got excited about that fox-hunting
march the week before. The Post, says FAIR, ran a 1,331-word story
on the front page of its Style section, while the Times ran a Reuters
piece on page A4 and followed up with an op-ed about class politics
associated with the hunt. Then there was last Saturday¹s anti-war
rally in Washington, D.C., which had a turnout of at least 100,000
and was described as possibly the biggest anti-war protest in the
nation¹s capital since Vietnam. Oh, you didn¹t hear about that one
either? Well, no wonder. Despite FAIR¹s ³Action Alert² resulting in
hundreds of activists¹ queries to The New York Times and the Post
about their news judgment vis-à-vis the London rally, the papers once
again missed the anti-war boat. Editor & Publisher reported this week
that The New York Times¹ Johnny-come-lately story < in Wednesday¹s
issue, at the top of page A17, with a five-column headline and a ³huge²
photo < had ³Omake-up article¹ written all over it.² Indeed, after
publishing a brief Sunday piece on page A8 incorrectly claiming a
smaller-than-expected turnout at the nation¹s capital, the Times had
a great deal to make up for. E&P says the follow-up described a ³two-mile
wall² of marchers outside the White House; it also ³mentioned other
demonstrations last week, and those planned for the future around
the country, quoted several antiwar activists and described numerous
other anti-war efforts, including referendums and online petitions.²
Sadly, The New York Times is not alone in dropping the ball. Author-activist
David Helvarg, who claims 30 years of experience at estimating crowds,
says in TomPaine.com that the turnout at the Washington rally reached
100,000 by 3 p.m. Yet National Public Radio reported only 10,000 protesters,
which was the size of the crowd during its first hour assembling at
the Vietnam Memorial. Both The New York Times and the Post, he says,
continued their days-old ³top-of-the-fold² placement of the sniper
arrest story instead of giving the anti-war rally its due. The daily
press, networks and cable ³newsmouths² buried the protest story, Helvarg
says, and local stations in Washington led their newscasts with ³snipers,
a carjacking and the upcoming Marine Corps Marathon.² Such persistent
under-coverage of the anti-war movement is dismaying, to say the least.
It creates the demoralizing impression that anti-war sentiments are
marginal when they might be anything but. Worse, it gives rise to
questions about the integrity of the American press. But just because
a pillar of journalism like The New York Times misses the scoop in
its own back yard doesn¹t mean citizens can¹t access an accurate picture
of the anti-war movement at all. Helvarg admits that Saturday¹s protests
got ³major play² on the West Coast. Local papers including the Northwest
Arkansas Times and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette have reported on
protests as well. And then there¹s a thoroughly modern grassroots
network < online. On the Web, says Stephen O¹Leary, a contributing
scholar with the Online Journalism Review, ³there¹s plenty of evidence
of a global grassroots sentiment opposing the war. In fact the Internet¹s
crucial role in public debates has never been more evident.² O¹Leary
goes on to survey numerous relevant Web sites and links that serve
not only activists but also ³interested citizens seeking alternative
perspectives.² His lengthy list includes the Institute for Policy
Studies, a ³multi-issue progressive think tank²; an interview with
propaganda expert Nancy Snow; and links provided on Philip M. Taylor¹s
Institute of Communications Studies site at Leeds University in the
United Kingdom. If the East Coast press makes some anti-war citizens
feel lonely, O¹Leary¹s list in OJR offers reassurance < and plenty
of company. Online and west of the Hudson River, grassroots networkers
are giving the Gray Lady a taste of her own medicine. Wanda Freeman
is features editor at the Northwest Arkansas Times. Her column appears
on Fridays.
PROJECT CENSORED
The Project Censored Annual Top 25 Countdown/Award Ceremony/Book Release
Celebration was filmed at Sonoma State University on September 28,
2002 and will be broadcast on Dish Network Free Speech TV October
18th - Eastern Standard Time - at 6:00, 10:00, 14:00, 16:00, 22:00;
or Pacific Standard Time- 3:00, 7:00, 11:00am, 1:00 and 7:00pm. Political
analyst/author Michael Parenti and cartoonist Dan Perkins, aka Tom
Tomorrow, creator of This Modern World, keynoted Project Censored's
annual release. Davey D of KPFA Hardknock Radio was the master of
ceremonies. Authors and representatives such as Jerry Mander and Brian
Willson spoke to the top 10 issues which include the FCC sale of public
airwaves; Global privatization of social services; and US involvement
in Colombia, Macedonia, and the Congo. Among others represented and
honored were Greg Palast, Jeremy Rifkin, Maude Barlow, Michel Chossudovsky,
and Jim Hightower. Tune in for coverage of this provocatively informative
evening. For more program information go to the TV Schedule at http://www.freespeech.org
-- Project Censored Sonoma State University 1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928 707-664-2500 Tax deductable donations accepted.
http://www.projectcensored.org/contacts/donor.htm Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored Sonoma State University 1801
East Cotati Ave. Rohnert Park, CA 94928 707-664-2588 http://www.projectcensored.org/
MEDIA CONCENTRATION
MEDIA CONCENTRATION MoveOn Bulletin Wednesday, November 6, 2002 Editor:
Susan Thompson, susan.thompson@moveon.org Editorial Assistant: Leah
Appet, leah@moveon.org Subscribe online at: http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin
CONTENTS: Introduction "Freedom to be Heard" by Normon Solomon One
Link Who Owns the Media? A Decline in Media Quality Deregulation Speeds
Concentration Media Reform Reader Mail: INTRODUCTION Such as it is,
the press has become the greatest power within the Western World,
more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One
would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn FREEDOM TO BE HEARD By Norman Solomon
MoveOn strives to "help create a culture of civic engagement." Such
goals are crucial. But the big obstacles include the major news media
of the United States. These days, in theory, just about everyone in
the country has freedom to speak. But freedom to be heard is another
matter. Varied sources of information and genuine diversity of viewpoints
should reach the public on an ongoing basis. But they don’t. The planned
war on Iraq is a case in point. All kinds of claims take hold in U.S.
mass media while rarely undergoing direct challenge. Newsrooms and
studios, filled with hot-air balloons, are apt to harmonize with the
pronouncements of official Washington as long as sharp pins don’t
get through the door. The huge gap between freedom of speech and freedom
to be heard also helps to explain how fervent belief in Uncle Sam’s
intended benevolence remains so widespread among Americans. Laid on
thick by the dominant voices of mass communication, the latest conventional
wisdom swiftly hardens and calcifies. Along with heavy doses of Pentagon
Correctness, the mainstream media are saturated with corporate sensibilities.
The effects are so routine that we usually don’t give them a second
thought. At networks owned by multibillion-dollar conglomerates like
General Electric, Viacom and Disney, the news divisions solemnly report
every uptick or downturn of the markets. In contrast, when was the
last time you heard Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather or Peter Jennings report
the latest rates of on-the-job injuries or the average wait times
at hospital emergency rooms? While many viewers assume that coverage
reflects the considered judgment of journalistic pros, those journalists
are enmeshed in a media industry dominated by corporate institutions
with enough financial sway to redefine the meaning of functional professionalism.
In theory, noncommercial TV and radio outlets are insulated from the
inordinate power of money. But across the country, each year, "public
broadcasting" relies on hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations
that are pleased to provide underwriting to burnish their images among
upscale viewers and listeners. Whatever other benefits accrue, those
firms buy some valuable PR with their de facto commercials, known
euphemistically in the trade as "enhanced underwriter credits." Along
with the politically appointed board of the nonprofit Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, corporate donors exert hefty influence on
programs by "underwriting" -- and, in some cases, literally making
possible -- specific shows. Private money is a big determinant of
what’s on "public" broadcasting. Without corporate funding for specific
programs, many current shows would not exist. Public television airs
the "Nightly Business Report," but viewers can search in vain for
a regular show devoted to assessing the fortunes of working people.
At PBS, no less than at avowedly commercial networks, the operative
assumption seems to be that wealth creates all labor, not the other
way around. Back in the 1770s, Adam Smith articulated a more progressive
outlook, writing: "It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor,
that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased." Years
ago, National Public Radio initiated "NPR business updates" to supplement
newscasts many times each day on stations nationwide. Listeners will
be disappointed if they wait for an "NPR labor update." Various public
radio stations feature the daily national program "Marketplace" and
the weekly "Sound Money" show, but there is no comparable broadcast
such as "Workplace" or "Sound Labor." At the same time, big money
tilts reporting and punditry. On major networks, we rarely hear a
strong voice speaking against the outsized power of large corporations.
Overall, the main problems with media are profoundly structural. The
airwaves are supposed to belong to the public, but they’ve been hijacked
by huge companies. With the government assisting the monopolization
process, all the major forms of media -- such as broadcasting, cable,
newspapers, magazines, books, movies, the music industry and, increasingly,
the Web -- are now dominated by the interests of capital, devoted
to maximizing private profit. Some investors benefit; the public gets
shafted. Any successful movement for basic progressive change will
need to push big money off the windpipe of the First Amendment. For
democratic discourse to thrive, freedom to speak must be accompanied
by freedom to be heard. Norman Solomon’s weekly syndicated column
-- posted and archived at www.fair.org/media-beat -- focuses on media
and politics. He is executive director of the Institute for Public
Accuracy (http://www.accuracy.org). ONE LINK This is a wide-ranging
and valuable invective against the current state of the mainstream
US media. Some issues that are highlighted include the decline of
foreign news bureaus, the focus of news programs on entertainment
issues such as movie profits, and the outright subservience of the
media to the interests of corporations and the US government. Several
organizations that are working to explain and fight media concentration
are also specifically mentioned. http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen0425.html/
WHO OWNS THE MEDIA? Media concentration, also known as media convergence
or media consolidation, basically comes down to the fact that fewer
and fewer companies own the media. Mediachannel.org has created a
comprehensive chart of exactly who owns what. http://www.mediachannel.org/ownership/chart.shtml
Colombia Journalism Review provides a clickable list of the major
media companies and their holdings. This web guide demonstrates the
exceedingly far reach of these companies. http://www.cjr.org/owners/
This is a clickable chart of the ten largest media companies in the
world, current as of Dec. 20, 2001 (it is important to note that media
concentration is not only an American problem). It includes US companies
such as the Walt Disney Company and AOL Time Warner, as well as international
giants Bertelsmann and Vivendi Universal. http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html
A graph of media ownership shows the number of corporations in control
of US media plunging from 50 in 1983 to only six now. It is followed
by a really useful list of links, which includes the major media reform
advocacy groups. http://www.corporations.org/media/ As FAIR explains,
"Almost all media that reach a large audience in the United States
are owned by for-profit corporations--institutions that by law are
obligated to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other
considerations. The goal of maximizing profits is often in conflict
with the practice of responsible journalism." This brief introduction
to corporate ownership of the media is followed by a number of links
to resources on the topic, including Normon Solomon's columns. http://www.fair.org/media-woes/corporate.html
EXAMPLES OF A DECLINE IN MEDIA QUALITY Michael Massing of the Columbia
Journalism Review evaluates the press coverage immediately after the
events of Sept. 11, 2001. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=massing
Print and broadcast media in the US have severely cut back foreign
news coverage, leading to a poorly educated American public. This
may be one of the reasons that Americans were so shocked by the events
of Sept. 11--they have little to no knowledge of politics, ideology,
and religion in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, coverage of crime,
violence, sex and scandals has greatly increased. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0927-03.htm
FAIR answers the question "What's Wrong With the News?" with a clickable
list of very short introductions to the following issues: - corporate
ownership - advertiser influence - official agendas - telecommunications
policy - the narrow range of debate - the PR industry - pressure groups
- censorship - sensationalism http://www.fair.org/media-woes/media-woes.html
DEREGULATION SPEEDS CONCENTRATION This is an excellent and brief summary
of the new push for deregulation of the media industry by the FCC.
Generally, a source like this might be expected to take a sympathetic
view toward any efforts to deregulate, but this article is surprisingly
skeptical. It is particularly useful in briefly critiquing the almost
utopian hopes of web advocates. Websites may be relatively cheap,
but good (or at least flashy) content costs money, and the big media
companies have used this fact to insert themselves as the dominant
presence on the web. http://www.moveon.org/r?11 This article discusses
the FCC's move towards deregulation in more detail. Deregulation is
based on the perspective that the media is a product only, a "toaster
with pictures." There seems to be little or no recognition of any
need for policies that maintain a diversity of opinion, thus serving
the interests of the public as citizens; rather, the public is regarded
only as a group of consumers. The results of this deregulation will
most likely be an even more acute concentration of the media into
the hands of a few big corporations. However, there is still time
to fight it, and the article includes information on writing to the
FCC. http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/mediaownership FCC Chairman
Michael Powell is currently the driving force behind the continuing
trend of media concentration. Nor does he seem very concerned about
the creation of media monopolies. According to Powell, "Monopoly is
not illegal by itself in the United States. People tend to forget
this. There is something healthy about letting innovators try to capture
markets." And what about diversity? Well, Powell believes that "[d]iversity
and all that stuff is very important, but it's hard to get a consensus
on what it is, other than that the goals are worthy." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/mergers.html
MEDIA REFORM This excellent article makes the case for media reform
and gives some examples of what must be done to institute such reform.
According to the author: "For democrats, this concentration of media
power and attendant commercialization of public discourse are a disaster.
An informed, participating citizenry depends on media that play a
public service function. As James Madison once put it, 'A popular
government without popular information, or the means of acquiring
it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.' But
these democratic functions lie beyond the reach of the current American
media system. If we are serious about democracy, then, we need to
work aggressively for reform." So what kind of reform is needed? Some
suggestions from the article: - reduce the current degree of media
concentration - create special incentives for nonprofits - maintain
and enforce broadcast regulation - make public broadcasting public
- enforce antitrust laws http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR23.3/mcchesney.html
This excellent article outlines a "12-Step Program for Media Democracy."
http://www.moveon.org/r?12 Granny D, an activist, gives some practical
suggestions for media activism in this earthy speech, in which she
says that alternative media sources "are like the secret short wave
transmissions that an occupied people can turn to for the truth and
for hope." She also critiques the current state of journalism very
effectively. According to Granny, "The news is not something that
comes into a city like a parade and can be reported by simple observation
and description. Oh, traffic wrecks, house fires, bankruptcies and
murders are lovely distractions and can fill some pages. But such
items, compared to the more highly evolved stories of real journalism,
are like the stooped-over half-man, half-ape precursors on the evolution
scale. A self-governing people require the more highly evolved arts
of journalism."
Playing Dumb? Dan Rather's Curiously
Clueless Take on Why Americans Don't Vote
by Paul Street; November 06, 2002
Let's start with two elementary precepts relating to
the proper role of the media in a democratic society. First, key media
personalities in such a society should never lie to the people, whose
capacity for making intelligent and informed policy and voting choices
is damaged by dishonest, deceitful or disingenuous reportage and commentary.
Second, such personalities should be reasonably well informed about
the subjects upon which they report and comment.
These precepts are especially relevant where media ownership
and control structures and other social and political factors are
such that the public tends to rely on a few sources of information.
Such is the case in the United States, where less than 9 corporations
own more than fifty percent of all media (including both print and
electronic) and people suffer the longest working and commuting times
in the industrialized world.
Consider, then, the small but revealing case of long-time
CBS news chief and anchorman Dan Rather and the lady who called him
on Larry King Live two nights ago. Rather, it should be noted, has
long been sold by CBS as the model of modern broadcast integrity -
the anchor you can "trust." He is the official corporate stepson of
television news icon Walter Cronkite, who was once voted "the most
trusted man in America."
What, the caller wanted to know, is the reason for rampant
voter apathy in the US? Is it getting worse? What, she asked Rather,
can we do about it?
These are good questions, especially in light of yesterday's
mid-term Congressional elections, in which just 39 percent of voting-age
citizens participated. Less than half the American electorate bothers
to cast ballots even in the quadrennial presidential elections. This
incredibly weak voter interest enhances the disproportionate political
influence exercised by highly organized pressure groups representing
special interests. Consistent with yesterday's results, it enhances
the already exaggerated influence of rich and middle-class people,
who are far more likely to vote than the mass of poor and ordinary
working folks.
Too bad the highly awarded anchorman's answers weren't
up to speed. After accurately reporting that low turnout has become
more pronounced over time, Rather threw up his hands in befuddlement.
He claimed that he simply couldn't come up with any good explanations
or solutions beyond suggesting the holdings of elections on weekends
(thereby eliminating the conflict between working and commuting and
voting) and a uniform coast-to-coast closing time at the polls (thereby
increasing turnout in the Pacific time zone). He concluded that "it
will take some very dramatic changes" to increase American voter turnout.
But, as Rather certainly knows, the causes of American
voter apathy simply aren't mysterious. They include first and foremost
the widely understood disproportionate influence exercised by concentrated
private wealth and power on the candidate selection and policy processes
in America, "the best democracy that money can buy." This is driven
partly by harsh economic inequality in the US, where the top 1 percent
that owns more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth and makes more
than 80 percent of campaign contributions above $200 possesses vastly
greater capacity to fund candidates and demand certain sorts of policies
(of the type that tend to defend and even exacerbate that inequality)
than the rest of the population.
It is also driven by the extraordinarily high costs
of American campaigns, which in turn are driven largely by the corporate
media in whose employ Rather so profitably serves. Hugely expensive
media advertisements are American candidates' leading expenditure
and the US is unique among industrial states in its refusal to offer
free or publicly financed media time to candidates.
It is no accident that the candidate who wins what campaign
reformers call "the wealth primary" - the race for private dollars
to pay for expensive media buys - tends to win American elections
in the great preponderance of cases.
This media- and money-addicted perversion of democracy
is deeply enabled by the Supreme Court's notorious plutocratic ruling
that (in essence) "money equals speech." In the Buckley v. Valeo (1976)
decision, the high court determined that campaign expenditure limits
violate candidates' free speech rights, ignoring the basic fact (understood
in other industrial democratic states with higher voter turnout) that
vast private wealth invested in the political process tends to drown
out the positive free speech rights (including the right to actually
be heard) of candidates and parties that do not have access to vast
private fortunes.
The second key factor is the distinctive winner-take-all
character of the American electoral process, which makes it next to
impossible for new, small, and alternative parties to challenge the
two wealthy wings (Democrats on "the left" and Republicans on the
right) of the American Chamber of Commerce Party. When a third party
could hypothetically garner, say 30 percent of the vote in every single
Congressional race and yet receive absolutely zero representation
in Congress, it is hard to muster much energy to challenge the parties
that dominate the nation's leading representative body (ditto for
the fifty state legislatures). The Supreme Court's crassly authoritarian
outlawing of fusion (whereby upstart parties not yet ready to field
their own winnable candidates could put their own party label next
to a mainstream candidate's name on ballots) and the refusal of state
and federal government to enact instant runoff election procedures
(whereby a mandated follow-up majority choice election of the top
two candidates in every race where no candidate polls a pure majority
would permit third parties to escape the "spoiler" label and would
compel the leading two candidates to recognize third/fourth party
issues to attain office) further discourage efforts to work outside
the two/one party regime.
Without such work, it is difficult, given the emptiness
of the prevailing system's commitment to substantive democracy, to
recruit and activate citizens to engage the political process.
Also worth noting, it is considerably more difficult
to vote in the US than in other democratic nations. Unlike their counterparts
in most such states, for example, Americans are not automatically
registered to vote at their home address by the local government.
Beyond the government's revealing failure to designate
election days holidays, one of the most relevant barriers (it swung
the 2000 presidential race in Florida) relates to criminal justice
policy. Currently 46 states prohibit prison inmates from voting while
serving a felony sentence, 32 states deny the vote to felons on parole
and 29 states disenfranchise felony probationers. Ten American states
deny voting rights for life to ex-felons.
This is a matter of no small democratic concern in a
nation that leads the world in mass incarceration and where an estimated
one in five adult males, including one in three black males, is an
ex-felon. As a result of felony disenfranchisement, 13 percent of
all Black men in the US have lost their electoral rights - "a bitter
aftermath," notes British sociologist David Ladipo, "to the expansion
of voting rights secured, at such cost, by the freedom marches of
the fifties and sixties."
Thanks to these and a host of related factors including
the at-once Orwellian and Huxlean content of corporate media, which
leaves the nation's consumer-citizens shockingly ignorant of candidates'
policy positions, American political contests are ideologically bland,
boring, petty, trivial, personality-centered and negative. They tend
towards a neutered privilege-friendly consensus that discourages passionate
popular involvement on the part of the non-privileged majority. Among
a large number and percentage of Americans, the basic sentiment is
that politics are both irritating and irrelevant to their lives. Citizens
(or ex-citizens) increasingly believe, with no small justice, that
there is no significant difference between the parties. For many,
especially those without a lot of money, "one person, one vote" is
an American myth and making the trip to the voting booth on any day
of the week is a waste of their scarce time.
Meaningful campaign finance reform including publicly
financed elections and free media time for candidates and the introduction
of proportionate representation and other measures enabling third
and fourth parties (instant run-off, fusion, etc.) are the surest
paths to the increase of voter interest and turnout in America. Media
reform, including media de-concentration and the empowerment of alternative
non-corporate media, would also go far to reinvigorate democracy and
therefore voter interest. So would the reduction of America's unmatched
long working and commuting hours, which would free up more time for
citizens to become intelligently and substantively engaged in the
political process. These are the sorts of things that would immediately
merit mention from anyone who was seriously concerned with increasing
voter turnout in the US.
These are explanations and solutions, however, that
Dan and his fellow multi-millionaires would rather not broadcast to
the masses of the "world's greatest democracy." All things considered,
it is likely that he and his upper-class comrades are content with
the low turnout and media-fed inertia and ignorance (willful at elite
levels) that scar American politics. For the popular apathy that Rather
and other wealthy Americans claim to abhor leaves them in greater
command of policy than would be the case if more of us cared to vote.
The fact that paid political advertising feeds the overflowing coffers
of the corporate media that pays his inflated salary only deepens
the logic behind his public befuddlement on how we might reduce widespread
voter apathy in the self-declared homeland and headquarters of democracy.
Paul Street is an urban social policy researcher, freelance
writer and regular ZNet Commentator based in Chicago, Illinois. His
essays, articles, and opinion-editorials have appeared in Z Magazine,
In These Times, Monthly Review, The Journal of Social History, Dissent,
The Equal Opportunity Journal and the Chicago Tribune. He can be reached
at pstreet@cul-chicago.org.
Showdown at the FCC
By Jeffrey Chester and Don Hazen,
AlterNet
May 1, 2003
The Bush Administration will soon hand the nation's
biggest media conglomerates a new give-away that will concentrate
media ownership in fewer hands. On June 2, the Federal Communications
Commission, run by Michael Powell (son of Colin), plans to end long-standing
federal checks and balances on corporate media power.
Companies behind the measure include the powerhouses
of corporate media power: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp/Fox., General
Electric/NBC, Viacom/CBS, Disney/ABC, Tribune Corp and Clear Channel.
Once the rules are swept away, expect to see more mergers and buy-outs
of radio and TV stations, major papers and even TV networks. It will
then soon be possible for a single conglomerate to control most of
a community's major media outlets, including cable systems and broadband
Internet service providers. There will be fewer owners nationally
of all major media outlets of communications.
Right-wing powerhouses are also likely to grew more
powerful soon, unless opposed. Rupert Murdoch's Fox is planning to
take over the country's most power satellite service, Direct TV. He
will be able to not only control access to millions of households,
he will use it as a "Death Star" to further expand his broadcast and
cable TV empires. Meanwhile, liberals – let alone progressives
– have no ownership influence over any major media outlet.
This is all happening despite the fact that growing
numbers of the public are willing to stand up and express their unhappiness
with the way media conglomerates are using the public airwaves. As
Neil Hickey describes in one of the following articles, "The Gathering
Storm Over Media Ownership," in hearings across the country there
has been a huge outpouring of public concern and anxiety about the
direction of the media system.
Not surprisingly, the media conglomerates thirst for
more control as they seek to end media ownership limits. What all
this means for our nation hasn't been covered by the media. There
has been no TV network news coverage on the impending media give-away.
Nor have the major dailies explained to readers what their lobbyists
are doing and how such changes will affect journalism, politics and
the public's First Amendment rights to a system fostering diversity
of viewpoints and expression.
A rare exception was a recent column in the New York
Times by conservative pundit William Safire arguing that the media
system is hiding the real story because it is unwilling to "expose
the broadcast lobby's pressure on Congress and the courts to allow
station owners to gobble up more stations and cross-own local newspapers,
thereby to determine what information residents of a local market
receive."
The proposed FCC rule changes will further weaken the
ability of mainstream journalism to serve as a critical public safeguard.
Soon, reporters at newspapers will have to pay attention to whether
they get TV ratings, once their papers become part of larger TV empires
concerned about promoting advertising and "brandwashing." More importantly,
the country will have even fewer gatekeepers over the news and popular
culture that informs much of public consciousness. You can read more
about this problem from media mogul Barry Diller, who made many revealing
statements to Bill Moyers on a recent edition of his program NOW,
on PBS.
As recent TV coverage of the Iraq war illustrates, US
media companies aren't interested in providing a serious range of
analysis and debate. "Embedded" reporters present information from
a point of view shared with U.S. soldiers. News outlets hire retired
military generals to dish up the prominent "expert" point of view.
Journalists regurgitate communiqués disseminated by the Pentagon.
Corporate TV stations avoid feeding viewers information and images
they "don't like" such as coverage of civilian casualties and protests.
The network that 36 percent of people watch for their primary war
coverage (Fox News, according to a recent Gallup poll), is a deliberately
conservative mouthpiece. Furthermore, for the media companies to be
heavily lobbying the Bush administration for give-aways that will
net them billions of dollars – while they are providing mostly
uncritical coverage of the war – gets to the crux of our media
problem. Danny Schechter of the Media Channel provides more details
of this media conglomerate war cheerleading collusion in "War Coverage
Rewrites History."
The FCC's Powell is also promoting massive consolidation
in cable TV and with online communications for this summer. Soon just
two massive cable companies – Comcast and AOL Time Warner –
may be legally permitted to own almost all of the nation's cable TV
systems. And Powell has already removed critical safeguards that will
enable cable and telephone giants to dominate high-speed Internet
access – which has alarmed the ACLU (and even other monopolists
like Microsoft and Disney).
Some key members of Congress may be undergoing some
reality therapy as citizens are forcing them to confront the stark
ramifications of the media deregulation they have enabled. One overwhelming
result of their actions, for example, is the Clear Channel Communications
buying spree (the company now owns more than 1200 radio stations),
which has run roughshod over the nation's commercial radio system,
turning it into a wasteland of conformity and commercialism. In contrast,
back in 1996, the combined total of the number of stations owned by
the two largest radio chains was a mere 115. Eric Boehlert, as part
of a powerful and detailed series on Salon.com on media concentration,
explains how the Clear Channel situation may be producing a backlash.
A less known but also disturbing trend is represented
by another conservative company, Sinclair Broadcast Group, which,
as Paul Schmelzer writes in "The Death of Local News," is pioneering
the frightening model of local news from a central sources thousands
of miles away from the market. Meanwhile, perhaps unrelated to media
concentration, but clearly connected to the war, female voices have
just about disappeared from the media as documented by Caryl Rivers
from Women's ENews.
Despite all the bad news, Andrew Schwartzman of the
Media Access Project offers: "These decisions in June are hardly the
end of it. There is a real effort to keep the FCC in check going forward.
Cable ownership rules are up for review this summer. There will be
a spate of mergers after the rules change, and organizing may be able
to beat some of them back, and pushes for legislation to gain back
some of what has been lost."
But in the big picture, unfortunately, elected officials
have been silent about what will be the most significant changes in
media diversity rules since the Reagan era. It's time to send Congress
a message that they should speak up now and defend the right to free
speech, competition and ownership diversity in the digital age. To
make your voice heard go to MediaReform.net,
a comprehensive website that makes it easy for you to register your
protest about the FCC's media deregulation policies.
Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.org.
Jeffrey Chester is the director of the Center
for Digital Democracy.
The Gathering Storm
over Media Ownership
By Neal Hickey, Columbia
Journalism Review
April 15, 2003
Editor's Note: Bringing the story up to date: The
Federal Communications Commission whacked a hornet's nest with a stick
on September 23, 2002, when it announced that it would take a hard
look at all of its controversial rules on media ownership. On that
day, Michael Powell, the commission's chairman, invited comments from
the public about who can own what and how much in the media business.
Instantly, the hornets began to swarm.
By the deadline for submissions, February 3, oceans
of legal briefs had poured in from unions, trade associations, consumer
activists, think tanks, academicians; the Newspaper Association of
America, National Association of Broadcasters, Newspaper Guild, National
Organization for Women, Sony, American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists, National PTA, American Psychological Association, National
Association of Hispanic Journalists, United Church of Christ, and
roughly 13,000 other groups and individuals.
All of them pointed out, in differing ways, that
the FCC was embarking on nothing less than the most massive reexamination
of media ownership rules in the agency's history, and that the outcome
could have the most profound effects on how Americans get their news
and information. Many of them argued that loosening the rules would
cause a far greater concentration of media power in the hands of fewer
and fewer huge companies – even more concentration than already
exists – and the withering away of competition and diversity
of viewpoints. Powell said that he and his fellow commissioners would
review all the comments and evidence and hand down the new rules in
late spring. And so the battle was joined, growing louder through
the fall and winter.
While the FCC chief wanted to hold only two public
hearings in New York City and Richmond, Va., on the rule change, Democratic
commissioners, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Kopps, organized additional
meetings in Duke University, Seattle, Wash., San Francisco, and Los
Angeles to ensure greater public involvement. Over the past few months,
the opposition to the proposed rule changes has steadily gathered
momentum, binding together a broad and diverse group of allies. The
last round of public hearings in San Francisco and Los Angeles on
Apr. 26 and 27, attracted a large number of both ordinary citizens
and activists speaking out passionately against media consolidation.
Thus far, there is little indication that Powell
has changed his mind. Over the same weekend, he told Newspaper Association
of America convention that the FCC plans to remove the cross-ownership
ban which prevents newspapers form owning radio and TV stations in
the same area. But with the FCC decision a mere month away, the fight
over the future of U.S. media is growing ever more urgent with each
passing day.
And the lines have been drawn. It is a strange battle,
in a way, pitting journalists against their bosses, breaking up old
alliances, and gathering momentum as the day of reckoning approaches.
In mid-January, Senator John McCain, the new chairman
of the Senate Commerce Committee, grilled all five FCC commissioners
about the "monumental decisions" they were about to make that "will
shape the future of communications forever." A Democratic senator,
Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, called for more voices in the nation's
media, but not from "one ventriloquist." A passionate, daylong seminar
was held at Columbia's law school ("the most important meeting taking
place anywhere in America today," Commissioner Michael Copps told
the symposiasts). In late February, the FCC held a hearing of its
own in Richmond, Virginia, followed by two others (at the University
of Washington and Duke) organized by Copps personally. Copps, a Democratic
appointee, complained that the policy review was moving too fast,
and that the issues should be ventilated far more publicly before
any decisions were made. Powell sternly disagreed, saying that "you
don't need a nineteenth century whistle-stop tour to hear from America."
Powell has regularly pointed out that reviewing the
rules is no pet project of his own, but was mandated by the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 (signed by President Clinton), requiring him to reexamine
FCC regulations every two years and get rid of the dead wood. Also,
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ordered the FCC
to justify several of the rules or junk them.
Still, Powell's own view ("validate or eliminate" has
been his cry) is that much ownership regulation no longer makes sense
because it dates from the era when channels of information were scarce.
Now, cable, the Internet, and direct-broadcast satellites are commonplace.
His legal adviser, Susan Eid, puts it this way: "The chairman has
long since advocated that, if you're going to do an honest evaluation
of the rules, you have to look at the marketplace as it exists today,
not how it looked thirty or forty years ago when we had black-and-white
TV, no remote control, and three choices of TV programs." The presumption
is on repeal of the rules, she says, unless hard evidence proves they
serve the public interest. Powell has been at pains to reassure his
critics that he plans no scorched-earth policy that would lay waste
all regulation. But defenders of the public interest – Consumers
Union, Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Digital Democracy,
and many others – fear that the FCC, with its GOP majority (three
Republicans, two Democrats), will predictably facilitate Big Media's
yen for the "efficiencies," the "synergies," and bottom-line values
that come with gigantism. They fear those values will prevail at the
expense of what's best for people who want to know what's going on
in the world. Those advocates were not reassured in October when the
FCC released twelve new elaborate studies of the media marketplace
that, in total, suggested that media consolidation isn't such a bad
idea. The consumerists countered that the studies were tainted and
tilted, and that they telegraphed the commission's hidden intentions
to favor Big Media at the expense of the public when the time comes
to change the rules.
'Awful Things Will Happen'
One of the most contentious of the FCC regulations forbids
a single company to own a newspaper and a television station in the
same community. The Newspaper Association of America, whose member
papers account for almost 90 percent of U.S. daily circulation, is
ferociously campaigning to exterminate that rule. The twenty-seven-year-old
ban is so archaic that it should end "without further comment or analysis,"
says the NAA's brief, because a mountain of evidence proves that cross-ownerships
improve the quality and quantity of news and public affairs reporting
without posing any real threat to competition and viewpoint diversity.
John Sturm, president of the NAA, recalls that the cross-ownership
rule was born in a different world a quarter century ago, and that
"whatever it was designed to prevent or remedy is irrelevant now."
He points to forty communities in the United States that have cross-ownerships
(which existed before the rule, or got special waivers). No harm,
he insists, has come to the public in those markets. "Our opponents'
arguments are all theoretical – no data, just words. 'Awful
things will happen,' they warned. Well guess what? Nothing awful has
happened. What more evidence do we need? Case closed."
That doesn't satisfy Linda Foley, president of the 35,000-member
Newspaper Guild, who fires from the opposite battlement: More cross-ownerships
means jobs will be lost, and news consumers will receive a more homogenized
diet of news and opinion. "The biggest impact is that we would have
fewer and fewer people on the local level deciding what the news agenda
is." The NAA-Guild difference of opinion dramatizes an unbridgeable
chasm: The owners of newspapers generally want the ban lifted and
the journalists who work for those papers generally don't. Reporters,
columnists, and editorial writers – predictably – tend
to think it's an unwise career move to publicly oppose their bosses'
position on the matter, which may be why journalists have mostly failed
to inform Americans about what's at stake here.
A few do speak out. At Knight Ridder's Philadelphia
Inquirer, Henry Holcomb, a business writer, told CJR he worries about
a corporate mentality that may try to "squeeze as many dollars as
possible" out of a newspaper/TV combination and "blur all of the distinctive
ways we try to stimulate and inform the public." Would TV people who
acquired a newspaper be respectful of what they don't know about newspapering,
he wonders? Will they understand the subtleties of print culture?
One voice in the wilderness among newspaper proprietors
is Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times, whose family has
controlled the paper for generations. "Our opposition to cross-ownership
runs against our own business interests," he says. Repeal of the rule
would substantially increase the value of the Times. "It would eliminate
a competitor and give us more control over the marketplace. If that's
all we cared about, we'd be for it."
But he's sure that these clusters don't produce good
journalism. "The Blethen family could benefit financially from repeal
of cross-ownership," he says, "but I guarantee you that the citizens
of Seattle would not benefit from it." Large newspaper chains and
TV station groups covet these combinations out of self-interest, not
the public interest, he says, because owning lots of media in one
market lets you control advertising rates. "It's the public company
mentality, that you have to keep getting bigger as the only way to
drive earnings, stock prices, and the ceo's stock options." Editors
of chain-owned newspapers are mostly silent about cross-ownership,
Blethen says. "We're creating a whole generation of publishers and
editors who don't have the independence to speak out on these issues
on behalf of the public."
New Sources Of News?
As long ago as 1978, the Supreme Court in FCC v National
Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, wrote: "It is unrealistic
to expect true diversity from a commonly owned station-newspaper combination.
The divergence of their viewpoints cannot be expected to be the same
as if they were antagonistically run." Defenders of the rule offer
evidence that newspapers and television stations are by far the most
popular sources of news and thus ought not be melded into one voice.
But backers of deregulation are fond of pointing out that the Internet,
cable, and direct broadcast satellites offer an array of choices that
didn't exist a few decades ago, so no great damage is done by losing
a journalistic voice or two in a community. Hold on, says the opposition:
Virtually all of the major Internet sites that people use for news
are owned by Big Media; the editorial content is indistinguishable
from what those broadcasters and newspapers put out. Moreover, they
point out, most Internet users go to the Web for national and international
news, not local. And besides that, the Internet is not a mass medium,
no matter what you may have heard: Little more than half of U.S. households
have Internet connections, and among minorities and poor people, the
figure is a lot lower.
On the cable side, concentration is already apparent:
Two owners, Comcast and AOL Time Warner, serve 40 percent of cable
households. All of the cable news networks – CNN, CNN Headline
News, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, CNNfn – are owned by three conglomerates:
AOL Time Warner, GE, and News Corporation. Direct broadcast satellites?
Two companies control virtually the entire industry, and recently,
one of them (EchoStar) tried unsuccessfully to buy the other (DirecTV).
Thus, most sources of news are tapped from the same old barrels.
'More Voices, Not Fewer'
Are TV networks too big for their boots? TV stations
think so. The 1996 Telecom Act lets media companies like Viacom, GE,
Disney, and News Corp. – which own, respectively, CBS, NBC,
ABC, and Fox – accumulate stations to their hearts' content,
as long they reach no more than 35 percent of U.S. households. The
networks have lobbied furiously to own more stations because many
of those local outlets have huge profit margins of 40 percent or more
(networks make far less), and because owning them would give the networks
more power than they already have over what gets on the air nationally.
To bolster their push to lift the ownership caps, networks claim that
their owned-and-operated stations produce better local newscasts than
independent stations do. No they don't, insist the indies. At the
moment, CBS owns twenty-one stations; ABC, ten; NBC, thirteen; and
Fox, thirty-three. Most other commercial stations have affiliate contracts
with a network, but are owned by companies like A.H. Belo, Hearst-Argyle,
Cox, and Post-Newsweek. Station groups like those think the TV networks
already have too much influence, and believe that letting them gobble
up more TV stations will give them a stranglehold on programming –
news, public affairs, and entertainment.
The dispute has driven a wedge between the National
Association of Broadcasters (whose board of directors is dominated
by independent station owners) and the big TV networks, causing CBS,
NBC, and Fox to quit the NAB in a huff. Dennis Wharton, an NAB vice-president,
says: "We think the thirty-five-percent cap has been good for localism."
An influential group called the Network Affiliated Stations Alliance,
which represents 600 stations, agrees. Its chairman, Alan Frank, the
president of Post-Newsweek's station group, tells CJR: "We feel it's
important for democracy that we have more voices, not fewer. Further
consolidation is not good for the country. Our system of broadcasting
is set up very clearly as being locally based. That's its strength."
The affiliated stations argue that independent stations
are far more able than network-owned stations to preempt the network's
prime-time programs when a major news story of local importance breaks.
Still, networks often use sanctions built into affiliate contracts
to muscle stations into running the network's menu of entertainment
shows instead of local news coverage.
In September 2002, CBS strong-armed a Florida affiliate
into airing the season premiere of 48 Hours instead of an important
gubernatorial debate. NBC, during the 2000 political campaign, pressured
its affiliates to run a baseball playoff game instead of a presidential
debate. (Some refused.) ABC's affiliate in Dallas, home of American
Airlines, had to fight the network for a few minutes of airtime during
Monday Night Football halftime to present local news updates on the
November 12, 2001, crash of an American Airlines jet. But the simple
truth is that stations rarely preempt the network for local coverage
lest they enrage viewers devoted to Survivor, The Bachelorette, and
Joe Millionaire.
As with most of the ownership rules, the underlying
debate is less about principle than about whose financial ox would
be gored if the 35 percent cap were eliminated or eased. Affiliates
(but not network-owned stations), collectively, haul in tens of millions
of dollars every year for renting their airtime to the networks. That
so-called "compensation" is found money for the affiliates and goes
straight to the bottom line. They don't want to lose it. Networks,
on the other hand, say they can't afford to pay it any longer and
have made it no secret that they want to stop. Thus, the more stations
a network can own outright, the more it can improve its revenue stream,
eliminate compensation, and obviate those pesky preemptions that undermine
audience ratings and advertising income. Hostile guns from many quarters
are bearing on the 35 percent rule; however, the smart money is betting
that the FCC will hedge its bet and raise the limit to 40 percent
or 50 percent rather than discard it altogether.
'How Dare You?'
Among the other ownership rules, public advocates are
especially averse to the notion of one company owning two television
stations in the same community (so-called duopolies) and to letting
any of the Big Four TV networks – CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox –
buy out one of the others.
In 1999, the FCC relaxed its rules to allow common ownership
of two TV stations in the same market as long as one of them isn't
among the community's four leading stations, and eight others remain.
About seventy-five such duopolies exist. For journalists, that often
means combining news staffs and resources, reducing the richness of
a community's news diet. In Los Angeles, for example, CBS's two stations
share a news director, and so do Fox's. In New York, Fox's two stations
will soon be under one roof. (Since 1995, the number of entities owning
commercial TV stations has dropped 40 percent.)
The NAB argues that the FCC ought to okay these media
marriages because some small TV stations are losing money, and if
they go out of business, the community will lose one newsroom covering
the local scene. In a new tack, the NAB recently upped the ante and
began campaigning for triopolies in areas where stations are on shaky
financial ground. (Viacom's president, Mel Karmazin, told a media
conference in December: "How dare they say you can have only two stations
in a market?")
At the national level, far more conspicuous consequences
for news would result if, let us say, CBS took over NBC. (Viacom,
CBS's parent, once expressed such an interest.) That can't happen
now, but if the rule is altered, two news divisions inevitably would
become one, giving viewers less choice in hearing about wars, elections,
national policy, and the Washington ballyhoo. (Meanwhile, Dan Rather
and Tom Brokaw would suffer the indignity of sharing the anchor chores.)
In April 2002, NBC acquired Telemundo, the Spanish-language
network, and promptly merged the two networks' newsrooms in Miami.
The assumption, says Herta Suarez, AFTRA's national director of special
projects, is that NBC will do the same in cities such as Los Angeles
and Chicago, where both networks have news operations. "This will
reduce opportunities for journalists to work," she says, "and also
what the public will learn." (Suarez also laments that NBC pays Latino
staffers less than Anglos for the same work.) Juan Gonzalez, president
of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, says that the
goal of giving Americans a diversity of opinions and analyses "has
been virtually forgotten."
A 'Tragic Mistake?'
At the Columbia law school forum in January, chairman
Powell confessed he is no fan of Congress's mandate that he review
media ownership rules every two years. It's "regrettable and destabilizing"
he said, to go through this torturous process so often. He added:
"There will be rules when this is done [but] there won't be a rule
that lets one person own everything."
That reductio ad absurdum was marginally reassuring
to his opponents, but they hoped he would remain tightly focused on
the crucial underlying principle, that the whole point of devising
public policy is to do what's best for the people, not to guarantee
corporations their desired "efficiencies" and "synergies," which is
none of the FCC's business.
As USC's filing to the commission put it, the agency's
mandate to regulate is driven by the First Amendment rights of the
public, not the media owners. Safeguarding those rights has "been
understood to permit restricting the media industry's natural desire
to concentrate ownership in order to achieve economies of scale."
Sandra Ortiz, author of the USC brief and executive director of the
university's communications law center, says that the once-revered
concept of local media ownership has become "so rare as to be almost
quaint."
The Newspaper Guild's comments to the commission are
equally unambiguous: "Media owners claim that relaxation of ownership
rules will allow them to realize 'synergies.' [But] the commission's
charge is to protect and enhance media diversity, competition, and
local identity – not efficiency." AFTRA points out that media
conglomerates, in hot pursuit of higher profits, customarily put heavy
pressure on their newspapers and broadcast stations to cut costs,
with negative consequences on the journalism. Once upon a time, says
the union, broadcast stations competed for audience by doing the best
possible local news. But media companies that dominate a market have
little incentive to spend money on enterprisers and investigations.
Depriving people of that "is to enter onto a slippery slope that will
leave the public wondering whose 'truth' is being told."
Allowing further media concentration would be a "tragic
mistake," says the veteran editor Gene Roberts, now a journalism professor
at the University of Maryland. "Communities deserve to be looked at
with different eyes. Even with the best integrity and most solid news
principles in the world, what looks like a story to one person may
not to another." Easing the rules, says Roberts, is "just going to
make an already bad situation even worse. There's very little news
competition in most parts of the country, and we're about to have
even less."
That's how it looks now, anyway. Five unelected appointees,
whom most Americans have never heard of, will make those decisions
in the next few months. If they get it right this time, the hornets
won't swarm quite so furiously two years from now when the rules come
up for review all over again.
Neil Hickey is CJR's editor at large.
WHY WORRY ABOUT WHO OWNS THE MEDIA?
MoveOn Bulletin Op-Ed
by Eli Pariser
It's like something out of a nightmare, but it really
happened: At 1:30 on a cold January night, a train containing hundreds
of thousands of gallons of toxic ammonia derails in Minot, North Dakota.
Town officials try to sound the emergency alert system, but it isn't
working. Desperate to warn townspeople about the poisonous white cloud
bearing down on them, the officials call their local radio stations.
But no one answers any of the phones for an hour and a half. According
to the New York Times, three hundred people are hospitalized, some
are partially blinded, and pets and livestock are killed.
Where were Minot's DJs on January 18th, 2002? Where
was the late night station crew? As it turns out, six of the seven
local radio stations had recently been purchased by Clear Channel
Communications, a radio giant with over 1,200 stations nationwide.
Economies of scale dictated that most of the local staff be cut: Minot
stations ran more or less on auto pilot, the programming largely dictated
from further up the Clear Channel food chain. No one answered the
phone because hardly anyone worked at the stations any more; the songs
played in Minot were the same as those played on Clear Channel stations
across the Midwest.
Companies like Clear Channel argue that economies of
scale allow them to cut costs while continuing to provide quality
programming. But they do so at the expense of local coverage. It's
not just about emergency warnings: media mergers are decreasing coverage
of local political races, local small businesses, and local events.
There are only a third as many owners of newspapers and TV stations
as there were in the 1970s (about 600 now; over 1,500 then). It's
harder and harder for Americans to find out what's going on in their
own back yards.
On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
is considering relaxing or getting rid of rules to allow much more
media concentration. While the actual rule changes are under wraps,
they could allow enormous changes in the American media environment.
For example, one company could be allowed to own ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Almost certainly, media companies will be allowed to own newspapers
and TV stations in the same town. We could be entering a new era of
media megaliths.
Do you want one or two big companies acting as gatekeepers
and controlling your access to news and entertainment? Most of us
don't. And the airwaves explicitly belong to us -- the American people.
We allow media companies to use them in exchange for their assurance
that they're serving the public interest, and it's the FCC's job to
make sure that's so. For the future of American journalism, and for
the preservation of a diverse and local media, we have the hold the
FCC to its mission. Otherwise, Minot's nightmare may become our national
reality.
------------------------------
Interested in taking on the FCC and other media-related
concerns? Join the MoveOn Media Corps, a group of over 29,000 committed
Americans working for a fair and balanced media. You can sign up now
at:
http://www.moveon.org/mediacorps/
F.C.C.
Votes to Relax Rules Limiting Media Ownership
The Associated Press
Monday 02 June 2003
Federal regulators relaxed decades-old rules
restricting media ownership
Monday, permitting companies to buy more television stations and own
a
newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same city.
The Republican-controlled Federal Communications
Commission voted 3-2 --
along party lines -- to adopt a series of changes favored by media
companies.
These companies argued that existing ownership
rules were outmoded on a media landscape that has been substantially
altered by cable TV, satellite broadcasts and the Internet.
Critics say the eased restrictions would
likely lead to a wave of mergers landing a few giant media companies
in control of even more of what the public sees, hears and reads.
The decision was a victory for FCC Chairman
Michael Powell, who has faced growing criticism from diverse interests
opposed to his move toward deregulation.
"Our actions will advance our goals of diversity
and localism," Powell said. He said the old restrictions were too
outdated to survive legal challenges and the FCC "wrote rules to match
the times."
The FCC said a single company can now own
TV stations that reach 45 percent of U.S. households instead of 35
percent. The major networks wanted the cap eliminated, while smaller
broadcasters said a higher cap would allow the networks to gobble
up stations and take away local control of programming.
The FCC largely ended a ban on joint ownership
of a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same city. The provision
lifts all "cross-ownership" restrictions in markets with nine or more
TV stations. Smaller markets would face some limits and cross-ownership
would be banned in markets with three or fewer TV stations.
The agency also eased rules governing local
TV ownership so one company can own two television stations in more
markets and three stations in the largest cities such as New York
and Los Angeles.
"The more you dig into this order the worse
things get," said Michael Copps, one of the commission's Democrats.
He said the changes empowers "a new media elite" to control news and
entertainment.
Fellow Democrat Jonathan Adelstein said
the changes are "likely to damage the media landscape for decades
to come."
The rule changes are expected to face court
challenges from media companies wanting more deregulation and consumer
groups seeking stricter restrictions.
The FCC also changed how local radio markets
are defined to correct a problem that has allowed companies to exceed
ownership limits in some areas.
The government adopted the ownership rules
between 1941 and 1975 to encourage competition and prevent monopoly
control of the media.
A 1996 law requires the FCC to study ownership
rules every two years and repeal or modify regulations determined
to be no longer in the public interest. Many previous proposed changes
were unfinished or were sent back to the FCC after court challenges.
As the vote approached, opposition intensified.
Critics bought television and newspaper ads, wrote letters and e-mails,
and demonstrated outside television stations owned by major media
companies.
Some ads took on Rupert Murdoch, whose News
Corp. owns Fox News Channel, 20th Century Fox TV and film studios,
the New York Post and other media properties. Murdoch told a Senate
committee last month he has no plan for a media buying spree after
the changes, other than his proposed acquisition of DirecTV, the nation's
largest satellite television provider.
The critics of eased rules include consumer
advocates, civil rights and religious groups, small broadcasters,
writers, musicians, academicians and the National Rifle Association.
They say most people still get news mainly from television and newspapers,
and combining the two is dangerous because those entities will not
monitor each other and provide differing opinions.
Large newspaper companies such as Tribune
Co. and Gannett Inc. wanted the "cross-ownership" ban lifted.
"Newspaper-owed television stations program
more and better news and public affairs than any other stations,"
said John Sturm, president of the Newspaper Association of America.
News Corp. and Viacom Inc., which owns CBS
and UPN, stand to benefit from a higher national TV ownership cap
because mergers have left them above the 35 percent level. Those companies,
along with NBC, persuaded an appeals court last year to reject that
cap and send it back to the FCC for revision.
Lawmakers have split mainly along party
lines. Democrats demand more public scrutiny of the changes while
Republicans support Powell. Some lawmakers critical of the FCC have
proposed legislation to counter relaxed regulations.
Eight Steps To Free Media
by Huck Gutman
Published on Wednesday, June 18, 2003 by the Rutland
Herald (Vermont)
On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission decided,
by a partisan 3-2 vote, to “deregulate” the media. Gone are restrictions
preventing newspapers from owning television stations; limits on the
number of television stations a corporation may own, and nationwide
viewers it may reach, have been relaxed.
The FCC acted despite holding only one public hearing,
although the chairman and staff did have 71 private meetings with
communications industry officials. Three quarters of a million private
citizens deluged the FCC with letters and e-mail, demanding that the
public interest be served. Many were especially outraged by the revelation
that FCC officials had taken 2,500 trips sponsored by the broadcast
industry, a $2.7 million purchase of favor and influence.
The battle to assure that media serve the public interest
is not lost. What commissioners can cavalierly take away, Congress
can restore. The airwaves are regulated; every radio and television
broadcaster enjoys monopoly ownership of frequency it uses. In return
for their concession to use the public airwaves and the public space
through which cable is strung, broadcasters should be required to
serve our democracy’s need for an open and vigorous media.
Here are eight steps Congress can take to create a free,
diverse and locally responsive media.
1. Repeal the recent FCC rulings. To eliminate concentration
of ownership and encourage a diversity of viewpoints, include a provision
that no person or entity which owns one form of media can receive
a license to broadcast in another medium no cross-ownership of newspapers,
television, radio, cable.
2. Limit ownership of broadcast stations to three for
television, five for radio, with no overlap of broadcast areas. The
example of Clear Channel, which in the wake of previous deregulation
bought up over 1,200 radio stations, is precisely what is to be avoided.
3. Reinstate the fairness doctrine. Persons with opposing
points of view should be afforded free air time to respond to political
statements. And extend the fairness doctrine to require some balance
in political talk shows: if there are three conservative hosts on
a station, there must be at least one liberal one, and vice versa.
4. Support local news. Television and radio stations
should be required to produce and air local news as a condition of
using the public airwaves.
5. Reinstate the public service requirement. Each station
provide substantial evidence of service as a requirement of license
renewal.
6. Give free air time to political candidates. Each
station and cable network should be obliged to provide substantial
broadcast time to candidates for federal office, for the top three
positions in each state, and for top local officials. This will not
only encourage democracy, it will be a substantial step toward campaign
finance reform.
7. Make local stations mandatory in all reception packages.
Satellite and cable television providers should include local television
stations including local public access television in their basic package.
Enact the same requirement for the emerging satellite radio companies.
8. Maintain Internet access and diversity. Companies
providing telecommunications services should be required to carry
Internet traffic at low cost, as is current practice. The Internet
must not in the future be controlled by companies wealthy enough to
pay to disseminate particular news and views.
Huck Gutman is professor of English at the University
of Vermont.
Copyright © 2003 Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier
Times Argus
ACTIVISM UPDATE: Savage Fired by MSNBC
July 7, 2003
Michael Savage's MSNBC show, The Savage Nation, was cancelled today
because of homophobic remarks made by the host on the July 5 edition
of the show, according to an Associated Press (AP) report. Those comments--labeling
a caller "a sodomite" and telling him to "get AIDS and die"-- were
the subject of a FAIR action alert earlier today. MSNBC spokesperson
Jeremy Gaines told AP, "His comments were extremely inappropriate
and the decision was an easy one." Over the past five months, FAIR
activists have written more than 2,000 individual letters to MSNBC
expressing their concerns about Savage's record of bigotry and hate,
and criticizing the network for hiring a host who routinely traffics
in slurs while firing host Phil Donahue over his anti-war views. Savage
can still be heard on some 300 radio stations across the country.
Note: In a campaign that was contriversial Over 2000 Voice4change
readers sent e-mails to Kraft foods urging them to stop supporting
Savage, which they did. For the rest of the story: http://www.voice4change.org/stories/showstory.asp?file=030709~fair.asp
Working the Corporate Media
By Andy Mager
It is accepted wisdom among progressives that the mainstream
media provides neither accurate news nor the necessary context to
understand current events. We rail against the increasing conglomeration
of media outlets in the hands of a few massive multinational corporations.
Unfortunately, many people let this truth convince them that there
is little value in trying to work with the media as part of our social
change efforts. I believe that this approach is short-sighted and
counterproductive.
The Peace Council has shown over the past eight months
that through hard work and persistence, we can receive more and often
better mainstream media coverage of our work. It is easy to complain
that the media is corrupt and biased in favor of corporate power.
It is more difficult to develop relationships with editors and reporters
so that information about our concerns and efforts reaches many thousands
of people who might otherwise believe that “everyone supports
the president.”
Many journalists in the media want to provide accurate information
but are constrained by their lack of knowledge, fear of making waves
and a profit-driven industry. By working with them, we can help them
to advocate for good coverage of the crises facing our nation and
what groups like the Peace Council are doing to offer alternatives.
Putting resources into our work with the mainstream
media doesn’t mean we should stop organizing advocacy campaigns,
educational programs, demonstrations and nonviolent direct actions.
Instead it is a valuable complement to those other components of our
work. When our demonstration gets coverage on local television, radio
or newspaper, the word spreads well beyond our usual circles. Over
the past several months, several of our demonstrations received advance
publicity. Not surprisingly, the turnout for those demonstrations
was beyond our expectations.
We must simultaneously continue to develop and support
alternative media, so that sources of in-depth information with a
progressive orientation will continue to expand.
To learn more about working with the media and media
activism, contact FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), a progressive
media activist group, (212) 633-6700 or www.fair.org. For a current
Central New York media contact list, see <www.peacecouncil.net/cnymedia.htm>.
The following suggestions come from over two decades
of my experience working with the media.
Don’t assume they’re against us—Yes,
we face an increasing problem of media ownership and control being
in fewer and fewer hands. This does affect what is reported and how
it is reported. However, there are many journalists who believe in
getting a fair and accurate story. Give them a chance.
Do your homework!—Know who to contact and when you need
to contact them to get your story covered. Know your issues and be
prepared to provide clear, non-rhetorical soundbites. Remember that
you are not talking to other activists, but to the general public.
Be diplomatically assertive—Know the issues and perspectives
which your group wants to present and be sure those points are made—regardless
of what questions are asked. Don’t evade a question, but don’t
let reporters run the interview or determine your agenda.
Be persistent—Your issue probably won’t be at the
top of a journalist’s agenda, so you need to be willing to contact
the media more than once and follow-up with them. Follow-up phone
calls on news releases are essential.
Make it easy for them—When writing press releases, making
calls or at events, be succinct and to the point. Include quotes in
news releases, being sure that you provide good contact information,
and have background materials on hand. Remember that they have many
stories to cover and are under increasing time pressure.
Be thoughtful – Choose your words carefully when talking
with the media. Anything you say—no matter how casual or offhanded—may
be quoted.
Make it interesting for them—While we need to be careful
about creating “media events,” recognize that dramatic actions,
colorful signs, theater and catchy phrases will attract press attention.
Reporters need to sell the stories to their editors, and the attractiveness
of the story can move it from page 22 to page 3.
Build relationships, and credibility—Prove yourself to
be an accurate and reliable source of information. If you build personal
connections with journalists they will be more responsive and see
you as a source for future stories.
Follow up—Take the time to express thanks for a good story,
and don’t hesitate to respectfully respond when you feel that
you have been misquoted or the story is inaccurate.
Andy is the co-coordinator of the Peace Council.
If you’re interested in participating in the Peace Council’s
media work or in attending a workshop on Working with the Media in
the fall, contact him at 472-5478 or <andy@peacecouncil.net>.
Lessons
in How to Lie About Iraq
The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind
of things we think about
by Brian Eno
Sunday, August 17, 2003 by the Observer/UK
When
I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose
father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were talking
about life during 'the period of stagnation' - the Brezhnev era. 'It
must have been strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,'
I said.
'Ah,
but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' replied Sacha.
That
is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians
were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government
operated in its own interests and any message coming from it was probably
slanted - and they discounted it.
In
the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political
and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more
effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice
it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch the democratic
process taking place - heated debates in which we feel we could have
a voice - and think that, because we have 'free' media, it would be
hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without
someone calling them on it.
It
takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look
a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get here?' How exactly did
it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus active
wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion
people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about
for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem?
Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was important
and had to be fixed right now - even though a few months before few
had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim.
In
the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that
the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of Mass Deception
, it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify
an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated
and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition of
the willing - far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks, insanely pugilistic
media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies - worked together
to pull off a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs
is a study of modern propaganda.
What
occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach
to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that
it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more,
it's 'prop-agenda '. It's not so much the control of what we think,
but the control of what we think about. When our governments want
to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the
only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about.
And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images,
devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false
'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. (What else can the spat between
the BBC and Alastair Campbell be but a prime example of this?)
With
the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then 'use the
democratic process' to agree or disagree - for, after all, their intention
is to mobilize enough headlines and conversation to make the whole
thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate, the better.
Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
An
example of this process is one highlighted by Rampton and Stauber
which, more than any other, consolidated public and congressional
approval for the 1991 Gulf war. We recall the horrifying stories,
incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals ripped out of
their incubators and left to die while the Iraqis shipped the incubators
back to Baghdad - 312 babies, we were told.
The
story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-old 'nurse'
who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Nayirah had been
tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR agency (which
in turn received $14 million from the American government for their
work in promoting the war). Her story was entirely discredited within
weeks but by then its purpose had been served: it had created an outraged
and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational discussion.
As
we are seeing now, the most recent Gulf war entailed many similar
deceits: false linkages made between Saddam, al-Qaeda and 9/11, stories
of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist, of nuclear programs
never embarked upon. As Rampton and Stauber show, many of these allegations
were discredited as they were being made, not least by this newspaper,
but nevertheless were retold.
Throughout
all this, the hired-gun PR companies were busy, preconditioning the
emotional landscape. Their marketing talents were particularly useful
in the large-scale manipulation of language that the campaign entailed.
The Bushites realized, as all ideologues do, that words create realities,
and that the right words can over whelm any chance of balanced discussion.
Guided by the overtly imperial vision of the Project for a New American
Century (whose members now form the core of the American administration),
the PR companies helped finesse the language to create an atmosphere
of simmering panic where American imperialism would come to seem not
only acceptable but right, obvious, inevitable and even somehow kind.
Aside
from the incessant 'weapons of mass destruction', there were 'regime
change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defense' (attacking a country
that is not attacking you), 'critical regions' (countries we want
to control), the 'axis of evil' (countries we want to attack), 'shock
and awe' (massive obliteration) and 'the war on terror' (a hold-all
excuse for projecting American military force anywhere).
Meanwhile,
US federal employees and military personnel were told to refer to
the invasion as 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi paramilitaries
as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic American TV networks
spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' - just as the Pentagon asked them
to - thus consolidating the supposition that Iraqi freedom was the
point of the war. Anybody questioning the invasion was 'soft on terror'
(liberal) or, in the case of the UN, 'in danger of losing its relevance'.
When
I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not,
he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought
I should know how it's done so I would recognize when I was being
lied to. I hope writers such as Rampton and Stauber and others may
have the same effect and help to emasculate the culture of spin and
dissembling that is overtaking our political establishments.
A
longer version of this article will appear in the new literary magazine,
Zembla. Weapons
of Mass Deception by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber is published
by Robinson at £6.99
©
Brian Eno 2003
