Media Empiresby Serge Halimi
What has happened to the US media did not start with George W Bush. And it has also happened elsewhere. Let me begin with a quote. “One of our best-kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of huge corporations control the flow of information in the United States. Whether it is television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books or the internet, a few giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read. And the situation is likely to become much worse .“ You can dismiss that quote: after all it comes from Bernie Sanders, one of the most progressive members of the US House of Representatives. But, as a matter of record, in 1983 the US had roughly 1,700 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio and 1,000 television stations, and 2,500 book publishers. But at that time only 50 multinationals, all “interlocked in common financial interest with other massive industries and with a few dominant international banks,” controlled the majority of the big outlets. Clearly, something had to be done. So it was. But not what you would logically expect. In 1996 the US Congress, which had just cut federal aid to the poor,
granted frequencies worth some $70bn at that time (and a lot more now)
at no cost to the recipients. In fact during the nine months that elapsed between the introduction of the legislation and its final approval, the three main news networks devoted just 19 minutes to the subject. The question of whether the largest communications companies could afford to pay for the frequencies that the US government awarded them was not raised at all. There is always a payoff for bad deeds: between 1996 and 2000, while Bill Clinton was president, the 50 largest media corporations and four of their trade associations spent over $111 million to lobby Congress and the White House. In other words, they poured political contributions into the coffers of the two political parties. And, as everyone knows, in the very corrupt US system of political financing, “those who sign the checks write the laws”. Since the 1980s control of the media has grown ever more concentrated. This year, ten giant companies reign over the information age. Back in 1996, the two largest radio chains owned 115 stations. Today, those two own more than 1,400. Meanwhile the number of station owners has dwindled by a third. Clearly, something has to be done now. And it will be. But, again, not what you would logically expect. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which largely determines US media policy, the trouble is that large conglomerates are too restricted by legal limits on market share. The solution, then, is sweeping deregulation of the field. A US Federal Court has ordered the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its rule preventing broadcasters from reaching more than 35% of households in the United States. And since everyone knows that FCC chairman Michael Powell, appointed by President Bush and the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, opposes such limits, the court order will encourage big broadcasters to swallow smaller ones. The FCC is “reconsidering” many of the rules that have preserved some media diversity, such as the regulation preventing the owners of a broadcast station from buying a newspaper in the same city, and vice versa, or from owning more than one TV station in the same market. This newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban guarantees that communities will not find that their only local daily paper has been bought by one of the TV networks. Also at stake is the regulation barring major TV networks – ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC – from merging with each other. Michael Powell keeps repeating: “The market is my religion,” nicely summing up the mindset of this Bush administration which has successfully merged religious fundamentalism and unleashed greed. Moreover the lack of political diversity hardly bothers Powell: “I'm not so sure that Disney and Murdoch’s personal political interests are ever permitted by the board of directors or Wall Street to trump anything that would maximize value .” The fact that maximising value may amount to an ideological slant of sorts hardly seems to have crossed the FCC chairman’s mind. And what do conglomerates say on the matter? Companies such as News Corporation and Viacom are protesting that existing regulations deprive them of their First Amendment rights to free speech. The rollback of some of the last regulatory checks on media consolidation appears very likely, therefore. A further drop in news quality and original content will be likely if newspapers were to be absorbed by the broadcast TV industry. As we speak, mergers and cooperation between former competitors multiply: The Washington Post, which lost regular foreign distribution of its stories because of the New York Times' forced buyout of The Post's stake in the International Herald Tribune, will have have its stories appear in the European and Asian editions of the Wall Street Journal. The Post has a similar arrangement with NBC, which features Post reporting on its MSNBC and CNBC cable television channels . These days, it is hard to say which outlet, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post or NBC, is the most hawkish. ‘You want diversity? Go online!’ The FCC argues that technologies like the internet offer Americans access to more information than ever and thus worries about monopolies are unfounded. But studies also show that most Americans receive their news from a handful of outlets. Beyond this, much of what appears on the internet is repackaged from those outlets. The leading 20 internet sites and biggest cable channels are owned by GE-NBC, Disney, Fox, Gannett, AOL Time Warner, Hearst, Microsoft, Cox, Dow Jones, The Washington Post and The New York Times. In 1999, 110 companies attracted 60% of the time web users spent online; by 2001, 14 companies had taken the same market share . The question of concentration is most acute at the local level. In many communities, the vast range of activities is covered by only one institution. . State communism may be dead, but corporate communism is flourishing in the US. Companies that own multiple platforms (print, television, radio, and internet) in the same city are integrating their news production process, using do-it-all journalists to create content for many media at once . The new work regime often undermines a paper’s capacity to meet its own standards. As Columbia journalism professor John Pavlik reports, “people are putting in sixteen to twenty-hour days and getting burned out” as they do several jobs at once. And because of meagre press coverage, most people probably have no idea what is taking place. What are the consequences of this? Let me quote again, but this time from a Republican columnist. William Safire. He does not write for Le Monde diplomatique. He was a strong pro-Reagan type and is now very much pro-Bush, except on questions of civil liberties. “You won't find a movie nominated for an Oscar with the heroine – fighting to expose the dominance of media conglomerates in the distribution of entertainment – crushed by the giant corporation that controls film financing, distribution and media criticism. “You won't find television magazine programs fearlessly exposing 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. Nor will you find many newspaper chains assigning reporters to reveal the effect of media gigantism on local coverage or cover the way publishers induce coverage-hungry politicians to loosen antitrust restraints .” The media barons We seem to know better where increased competition led the American public,
or so we were told. Truly independent coverage of the big media is disappearing.
Television is where most Americans get their “news”. Well,
without exception, every major network is owned by a huge conglomerate
that has enormous conflicts of interest. Fox News Channel is owned by
Rupert Murdoch, a rightwing Australian who already owns a significant
portion of the world's media. His network has close ties to the Republican
Party, and among his "fair and balanced" commentators is Newt
Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives
and current war hawk regarding Iraq . A danger of concentrated ownership is that news organisations embedded in large conglomerates will promote their own products or fail to critically investigate their vested interests. Communications scholars have already discovered emerging evidence of a “synergy bias” inside conglomerates. Moreover, now that most American news companies are governed by MBAs, responsibilities to share holders and concerns about stock value are driving the reorganisation of media enterprises, often despite the protest of editors and producers . But when news becomes just another commodity, the distinctions between journalistic products – information, entertainment, infotainment, etc – lose their significance, as do substantive reports. A well-publicised synergy collision happened in 1997 at CBS News when reporters were spotted wearing the Nike "swoosh" at the Olympics, the unfortunate outgrowth of a lucrative financial deal between CBS Sports and Nike. At about the same time a CBS investigator was facing delays in her article on Nike's labour practices . Vertical integration of news and entertainment organisations goes along with unreliable reporting. With consolidation, the balance of power is firmly in the hands of a small number of companies with interests and investments spread across the media landscape . A small number of companies more interested in delivering viewers to advertisers than in serving the needs of the public. Parochialism and mediocrity Similarly, foreign policy coverage has been taking a hit for the last fifteen years. Before September 11, The Boston Globe explained: "International news coverage in most of America's 1,500 mainstream papers has almost reached the vanishing point”. Foreign stories that accounted for about 10% of the average newspaper's news content in 1972 have shrunk to less than 2%. News magazines have followed the downward trend. In the 10 years from 1985 to 1995, Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report cut their foreign reporting from about 22% of the magazine to about 12% Asked why, editors explain that foreign news is "less urgent." (Time), "less relevant," (US News) and mean a 25% drop in newsstand sales (Newsweek). The same trend is at work in network television news. Ten years ago, 40% of the three networks' news programs were devoted to foreign news. The figure has slipped below 12% ” This has consequences: according to a poll made public by Fox News three years ago, 40% of Americans said they were not sure whether the US or Slobodan Milosevic had won the war in Kosovo. That was in 2000, the year after the war had taken place . And as we speak, 35% to 40% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11th. Moreover, even when news organisations do cover foreign events, they tend to rely on a very narrow spectrum of local specialists, often speaking English and drawn from the business sector . September11th and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have barely changed
things in this regard. Foreign policy coverage remains very marginal according
to the last study published by the Columbia Journalism Review, trailing
far behind local crime stories and celebrity news. The marketing bias
is so overwhelming that even when journalists know that diplomatic news
matter a lot more than the latest neighbourhood burglary, they cannot
keep their hands off details of the latter even at the cost of overlooking
the former. The Enron Journalists It is true that some star journalists, who were financially profiting from the stock market bubble, had little reason to challenge its long-term viability. Moreover, luminaries of the profession have lined their pockets with corporate honoraria: David Brinkley, Robert Novak, David Gergen, Cokie Roberts, Christopher Matthews, Larry King, Mark Shields, Fred Barnes, George Will and Michael Kinsley, who memorably said “I didn't do it for years, but it became more socially acceptable .” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who got $50,000 from an Enron advisory board before joining the Times, blamed the criticism on an “effort by conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left.” Unfortunately for this line of argument, most of the Enron journalists are free-market apologists on the right. Wall Street Journal columnist and Bush fanatic Peggy Noonan received $25,000 to $50,000 for speechwriting help. Lawrence Kudlow of CNBC and National Review said that he should have disclosed earlier that he'd got $50,000 for consulting and research. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, received $100,000 from the advisory board, and sees nothing wrong with such work . A Weekly Standard piece by another Enron beneficiary, praised Lay and Enron for "leading the fight for competition." As Eric Klinenberg and Tom Frank have pointed out, among others, one
“revolutionary” fast company after the next has crashed amidst
reports of greed, deception, and illegal accounting – and workers
watched their retirement funds dwindle – Americans have reasons
to wonder about the type of reporting they got from big media on these
matters. Actually, it is even worse than that: corporate radio is just plain overt in its rightwing bias. There are dozens of rightwing talk show programmes. Rush Limbaugh, G Gordon Liddy, Bob Grant, Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, Pat Robertson, to name only a few of the voices that pound a rightwing drumbeat into the heartland of the United States . Since its 1996 launch, Fox has become a central hub of the conservative movement's well-oiled media machine. Together with the Republican Party and its satellite think tanks and advocacy groups, this network of fiercely partisan outlets – such as the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative talk-radio shows like Rush Limbaugh's--forms an effective rightwing echo chamber where Republican-friendly news stories can be promoted, repeated and amplified. Fox knows how to play this game better than anyone . Fox's founder and president, Roger Ailes, was for decades one of the savviest and most pugnacious Republican political operatives in Washington, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan campaigns. Ailes is most famous for his role in crafting the elder Bush's media strategy in the 1988 presidential race featuring a black convict, Willie Horton, who had raped a white woman after he had been paroled by Massachusetts governor Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Fox's managing editor is Brit Hume, a veteran TV journalist and contributor to the conservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard magazines. A special about foreign policy used to be hosted by Newt Gingrich. Even public television is taken in that trend. Last year, PBS has broadcast a six-hour series about the global economy which was sponsored by major corporations – including Enron – that have a clear interest in the show's content. The series has received a rave review from the Wall Street Journal (28 March 2002) under the headline "PBS Likes Capitalism More Than the Commercial Networks Do," in which the Journal hailed the series as a "paean to private enterprise" But, as Bernie Sanders has argued, “the essential problem with television is not just a right-wing bias in news and programming, it is not even the transformation of politics and government into entertainment and sensationalism, the constant bombardment of advertising. It's that the most important issues facing the middle-class and working people are rarely discussed.” And he cites the facts that despite the great "economic boom" of the 1990s, the average American worker is now working longer hours for lower wages than 30 years ago. Those subjects are rarely the staple of television investigations. Workers who are in unions earn 30% more than non-union people doing the same work. There are a lot of programs on television about how to get rich by investing in the stock market. But never any "specials" on how to go about forming a union? To which one may add that the United States has the most unfair distribution of wealth and income in the industrialised world, but few programmes belabour the fact that the richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 95%. Or that the CEOs of major corporations earn 691 times what their employees make. It was 41 times that much in 1980. The War Street Journal ? We now know that major US newspapers do not only participate in the promotion of inequality at home. They can also beat the war drum with great effectiveness and become a leading player in the diplomatic game. The point was driven home to us when on Thursday 30 January a story led the Wall Street Journal's front page. Under the headline, “European Leaders Declare Support for U.S. on Iraq: Letter From Eight Countries Isolates France, Germany, Smooths Path for a War," the reporter from the paper's London bureau reported: “In a broad statement supporting the U.S. in its effort to strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, eight European leaders signed an op-ed article publicly calling for unity with the U.S. position, further shifting the global political calculus toward support for war.” Most op-ed page articles are solicited by the section's editors. And that was the case with the Journal's statement by the European leaders. In other words, as the Los Angeles Times noted, “the paper had orchestrated a declaration of support for a Bush administration policy which its own editorial page has unstintingly supported, and then reported the event as news? “ According to Wall Street Journal editor Gigot, the unusual op-ed piece originated with an idea by Mike Gonzalez, the deputy editorial editor of the Journal's European edition. “After the flap about France and Germany opposing the U.S. on Iraq, » Gigot said, « Mike acted as a journalist and called the offices of two other heads of state, [Italy's] Silvio Berlusconi and [Spain's] Jose Maria Aznar, offering them the opportunity to do separate pieces on their positions. Aznar's office apparently got the idea that they should see if they could get other prime ministers and heads of state on board. They took it from there and got [Britain's] Tony Blair involved and it all snowballed. At that point, our only concern was to make sure it ran in our paper.” In an editorial, “The Op-Ed Alliance”, the Wall Street Journal scarcely claimed journalistic objectivity and proudly acknowledged the political, pro-war role it had played in the matter: “Our sin seems to be that we assisted in exposing as fraudulent the conventional wisdom that France and Germany speak for all of Europe, and that all of Europe is now anti-American. Those ideas were always false, but they were peddled as true because they served the political purposes of those, both in Europe and America, who oppose President Bush on Iraq. We've been in favor of ousting Saddam Hussein for years, going back to the Gulf War and long before President Bush made it his policy. If the op-ed by Europe's leaders somehow helped Mr. Bush's diplomacy in addition to selling newspapers, that's fine with us .” In the same issue, the deputy director of the Wall Street Journal and the man behind the scoop, Michael Gonzales, spells things out: “Let's be done with that right away. The Journal is an independent newspaper and doesn't carry water for any government. So here's what happened. About two weeks ago, I placed a call to a source in the Italian government. I asked right away, "So are you going to let the French and the Germans speak for all of Europe? Why doesn't Silvio Berlusconi write us a piece with his views?” At first, the response was tepid. But then, as Gonzales explains in a fascinating fashion, “I was at a museum, trying to ease my disappointment with a dose of Breughel and Rubens, when my wife's cellphone rang .” And the response was favourable. Blair (reached through Alistair Campbell), Aznar and Berlusconi instantly replaced Rubens and Breughel. It seems to me two things stand out here. First the link between economic policy and diplomacy. It is probably because of the unstinting editorial support the Wall Street Journal has lent to the economic policies of Berlusconi, Aznar and Blair that this newspaper, highly influential in corporate circles, has gained the extraordinary leverage enabling it to call these European leaders and directly advise policy on other matters, namely war in Iraq. I can hardly imagine any other newspaper in the world, save maybe for the Financial Times, directly lobbying for policies at this high a level in several countries at once. The second thing is this. If you want to know the plight of the American press today, just imagine what its reaction might have been if a leftwing, pro-union paper had directly lobbied foreign heads of state toward making a statement opposing US foreign policy. “Propaganda tools for the US administration” does not seem
too harsh a conclusion, from what we see and read coming from the United
States these days. Serge Halimi is Editorial Board Member of Le Monde Diplomatique CREATING A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY:
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