THE MEDIA MONOPOLY

I believe that there is a disturbing pattern of the missing realities. It is the main media sin, but we may have a archaic way of looking at it. We tend to look for the sins of the past. We look for the screaming headlines and the blatant politics of William Randolf Hearst. We remember that when Hearst wanted the United States to go to war in Cuba against Spain, he sent Frederick Remington to Cuba to send back sketches of the atrocities which he said were being committed in a war which he said was being fought in Cuba. When Remington wired back, "There is no war here." Hearst wired back, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Which he did.

Today the problem lies with something far more subtle, more difficult and, in some ways, more harmful. For one thing., in Hearst's day, every city had many competing newspapers with competing political orientations. Some papers regularly refuted Hearst and printed information contrary to Hearst's information. Today, of American cities with a daily paper, 98% have a monopoly paper. And in the major source of most people's news, the network news, the three major networks are so similar and brief in their news content that they could almost be one outlet without the loss of much information. So there are almost no seriously contending approaches among our mainstream newspapers and broadcast news.

Furthermore, today very few publishers would think of putting those words of Hearst in a telegram or memorandum. Exposure of it would be a national scandal in the public and also among professional journalists. Today the departures from reality happen quite differently: less clumsily, more insidiously and often more unconsciously. It is done more by omission than by commission. The main problem in the news today is not what is false, but what is missing. The pattern begins when owners appoint executive editors and producers. Owners seldom appoint someone who is likely to be interested in emphasizing those events and interpretations that undermine the owners' political and economic interests. Some editors do so, and there is a steady record of their being fired or resigning or being otherwise penalized. In 1980 members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors were asked if they would feel free to publish news harmful to the parent corporation of their newspaper. One-third said they would not feel free to do so. It should be said that many of these companies that own newspapers and broadcast news operations are also owners of industries that are very sensitive to the news. General Electric owns NBC and it produces nuclear reactors and guidance systems for hydrogen bombs and many other things that are dependent on government policy and public opinion. This is true of many of the large news media companies. Given the fact that it is now embarrassing professionally for an editor to say that he would keep news out that he would otherwise think was significant simply because it might damage the parent firm's business, it's so embarrassing, I think we're safe in assuming that that 33% who said they would keep it away is a conservative figure.

So I think the patterns, when you look back, are clear. In foreign affairs the main news of the country follows official national policy. This does not bean that there's never any reporting contrary to officialdom, but it does mean that information that contradicts government versions gets into the news with greater difficulty and only briefly compared to the official view. It is not done by official censorship but by self-censorship. If journalists are as much improved as I think they are, it's fair to ask what causes this self-censorship. I think there are a number of reasons. One is the awareness of the top editors and executive producers that stories seriously affection their owner's interests will cause the editors some problems. So they put in such stories but do so infrequently, and usually with those developments that seem to be unavoidable.

There is a kind of generic experience that gets built into the subconscious of every journalist. For example, recently a new editor and several sub-editors at the Atlanta Constitution and Journal were brought in to make their paper the best one in the country, to be fearless and without restriction. As happens with many of us, we take such marching orders literally. The Atlanta Constitutions and Journal began writing stories about the problems of race in Atlanta and about some of the more harmful effects of high downtown development and some flaws in the Georgia corporate establishment. That editor is now out. He was one of the more respected, better-known editors in the country. I think every journalist in the country read about that, and I think it's stored in their memory not to rock the boat.

Several years ago, in the Dallas Morning News, a financial reporter of considerable experience discovered that one of the major banks in town was filled with federal examiners and the business community was talking about it fairly openly. It turned out that that bank was in really serious trouble. He did a rather careful story on the fact that it was under examination by the Feds. That reporter was fired. The editor who passed that story was fired. The next week the bank was closed. It was going to close anyway, the Examiner said. That, too, gets filed away, and not just within that organization. For years afterward it becomes accepted as somehow an edict coming down from the heavens that one does not write stories about banks in trouble. There are various other events which have a far-rippling effect which do not require any memo from an owner.

The self-censorship also comes from a basic strategy of American news, one that has many strong points in it. Since most of the revenues in the news media come from advertising, 80% for newspapers and almost 100% for broadcasting, there's a desire to maintain an audience of as many affluent people as possible. The newspapers aren't terribly interested in non-affluent people or people who are over 50 because they aren't buying lots of furniture and things of that sort. Therefore they aren't good targets for the mass advertisers. There is a desire in the news organizations not to offend too many people who are good advertising targets. This is done in two ways: One is to attribute everything to as high an authority as possible, so that no one can argue that the newspaper or the broadcast organization had any special interest in quoting this particular person or this particular set of facts. If you have a high enough person, whether it's the sergeant at an intersection accident or the President of the United States on some foreign policy statement, very few people can argue that it was not justified to print that information. The other method is to give American news a kind of political tone-deafness, an appearance of neutrality without political, economic or social context for its facts. When you give the context of events, you begin to be political. Accurate reports of events with interpretation by high officials become safe. But the result of this is not neutral, though it seems to be neutral. If you strain out the independent political and economic contexts, if you do not pursue the likely causes and consequences of events as they affect the average person, if you emphasize or use exclusively the words ideas of the highest officials, public and private, and when you add to that the Cold War anti-communism and its effects throughout our whole life, it is safer to swing to the right than look to the left, and it is safer to quote the words and information from the centers of power than from more independent but perfectly credentialed other sources. The status quo in politics and corporation life is, of course, sharply skewed to the conservative side. It resists significant change in society.

Finally, self-censorship in the standard news media comes from twenty years of accusations against American journalists by neo-conservative intellectuals and academics and from conservative political leaders who have said that the American Journalist is biased against the established order and conservative politics. These accusations, when they are based on anything real, are based on surveys of journalists who, when asked whether they tend to be Democrats or Republicans, say that they tend to be more liberal than conservative. That happens to be precisely the pattern of the American electorate, but that seems to make no difference. While recent Presidential elections have gone Republican, country-wide voting for Congress, state office, and local office continues heavily Democratic. But accusations by conservatives have had the effect on so many journalists of leaning over backward to be favorable to conservatives to she that they are not biased against conservatives. They follow my rule of journalistic gymnastics that you can lean over so far backward that you can fall flat on your face.

There is more than coincidence, I think, in these factors to produce support of the status quo and conservatively skewed selection of news. It happens to conform with the politics and economics of the major owners of our news media. If there is noticeable embarrassing news for conservatives and it is pursued, there is regularly asked within news organizations that I know of and that I have been involved with whether that reporting is really being fair. I have never heard similar questions being asked about the treatment of Ralf Nader, Common Cause, labor unions and forces on the other political side. When we look back it seems to me there are large events that show this rather consistent skewing.

For example, the Cold War began with very real fears of Stalinist Russia. But it was quickly converted in this country into a holy war, partly hysterical and partly cynical. The main body of the news was an enthusiastic pursuer of the irrational version, even though there was obvious evidence that the hysteria was damaging our society, our government and even our armed forces. That same kind of widespread press hysteria did not occur in the democratic press of Western Europe, even though Western Europe really was under the shadow of Stalin's armies and even though many of the countries had significant domestic Communist parties. When Joseph McCarthy paralyzed the government and much of the civil society, the fact that he was lying or faking and never uncovered a single spy who had not already been detected was known to reporters but seldom reported until he fell, for other reasons. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam was more than 10 years old before a handful of reporters, like David Halberstam and Malcom Browne, were able to break into the standard news with the truth about the national illusions.

Not much has changed in the interim. Public knowledge of actual events in Nicaragua and El Salvador has suffered from an astonishing failure of the mainstream news media to do continuous reporting from the field, despite the fact that Central America has remained the center of White House attention and activities and the closest we have been since Vietnam to being actively engaged in a foreign war. The main body of the news seldom checked out assertions about events in those countries in any systematic way, and for years the news took official declarations at face value, often when there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There are other events which have their ripple effect in this way. For a time, the New York Times had a reporter, Raymond Bonner, in El Salvador, who reported in what was considered professionally a sound way the fact that the war in El Salvador was in fact a civil war that had many ugly aspects to it on the government side as well as others and that the death squads of the military were still active. He was recalled by the New York Times and replaced by a reporter who was much more influenced by the press releases from our embassy in San Salvador. No memo needed to be posted that reports from places like Nicaragua and El Salvador that ran contrary to the official view would produce pressure which would probably be acceded to . The Iran/contra exercise in violation of the Constitution and contrary to the word of our highest officials was exposed fairly early by the alternative press of this country and finally was blown open by and obscure publication in Beirut, not by a mainstream American news organization.

In domestic affairs there is a steady pattern of looking the other way, of avoiding obvious causes and consequences whenever doing so might seriously weaken the status quo. President Reagan's economic program of supply-side economics, with huge military spending accompanied by large tax cuts, had enormous support in corporate life, but it was seen from the start by people with perfectly respectable expert credentials as a formula for disaster. Nevertheless, for years, most of the judgments reported in the news came from organizations and individuals who were beneficiaries of those economic policies, like specialists at Drexel-Lambert, junk bond purveyors, administration economists, Milton Friedman, and others who truly believe in class warfare. Even after David Stcokman, one of the architects of the idea went on record to say that it was all really a cover to take money from the poor and give it to the rich, the main media continued to quote almost exclusively these same beneficiaries, as though Stock man and serious economists had never spoken. If there was a bow in the news to the nay sayers, it was usually in the seventeenth paragraph.

We have had massive deregulation of our economy, with some good results and some bad. But for more than ten years, the news was close to silent on the bad results. One is tempted to say that some of the serious negative effects of deregulation finally broke into the standard news only when corporate officials themselves began to worry about the safety of airplanes they were riding in. To this day there is close to a zone of silence on the negative effects of mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, ominous levels of corporate debt, and monopolistic levels of market domination including and especially the news business. We have turned our economy on its head by eliminating the progressive income tax, the only sane and fair way to build our public institutions and get our way out of our present problems. The media have turned a deaf ear to those who say so and an open ear to those who say it cannot be used. The causes and consequences of some public acts are seldom made clear. Usually there are clear sources of events or certainly sources that make sense and a spectrum of relevant opinion of consequences. For example, in the miles of newsprint and the hours of television reporting on fantastically high real estate prices for middle class and the millions of homeless, how often have a few incontrovertible but relevant facts been repeated as giving some help to the public on how to solve this problem? For example, in the 1970s there were 200,000 low-cost housing units built each year with federal help, in the 1980s only 17,000. Another fact: The increase in the homeless can be directly related to that reduced federal housing support and to reductions in Social Security and other benefits during the 1980s. It is clearly the fact that there is growing separation in this country between the poor and the rich. In our so-called prosperity of recent years, the lowest third in family incomes have lost purchasing power.

Another reason has been what comes from almost every municipality of any size taking advantage of tax support for commercial building, even if much of it remains vacant, and not into residential building to an equal degree. A regular story on the economy is the need for greater productivity in the workplace in order to compete with foreign firms and with countries with low-wage labor. This has been accompanied by dramatic coverage of strikes and union activities with corporate and governmental sources regularly accusing the unions of causing our reduced productivity. How often have you seen in such stories the established idea, true for years, that productivity has increased in unionized activities and decrease at managerial and administrative levels? In the last Presidential election we had no lack of serious issues with which the next President has to grapple: nuclear arms and disarmament, upheaval in the communist states, global warming that is melting the polar ice caps, explosions waiting to happen in the Middle East, and at home our public sector, like schools, libraries, roads and bridges are deteriorating. There is a growing housing crisis, of which the homeless are only a small manifestation, a growing gap between the rich and poor, ominous instabilities in our banking system, drug addiction that is destroying whole generations in some neighborhoods and corrupting civil life.

Now it's true that candidates always prefer to wave flags and repeat slogans, as candidates always do. But occasionally in fact, even in this election, they did discuss some issues seriously, and on those occasions they received very little attentions in the next day's news. Instead, they and we were inundated with examinations of candidates sex lives, their ability as dramatic actors, daily footage of their symbolic gestures, like saluting in a flag factory or riding in a tank, journalistic judgments of the Presidential debates, using the word "debates" loosely made issues subsidiary to endless articles about a candidate's effective use of hands, of fingers pointed accusingly, of zingers of wisecracks, as though these were auditions for Studio One instead of the Oval Office. The whole society, including government and corporations, suffer in the long run because accountability and correction of faulty policies require good information. Damaging or ineffective policies continue longer than they should, and positive opportunities are lost. The spectrum of allowable context for facts and news runs in our main media from right to center. The other day on the network news the White House made a policy statement on the economy. On the major network I was watching, they had three pieces of commentary reaction. The original newscast of what was said was 15 seconds. There were about 12 seconds with words as interview with the Chairman of the House Committee, about 13 seconds with a spokesperson from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank, and about 12 seconds with a spokesperson from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing thinktank. That was the spectrum of commentary and context. That was the extent of it. But even that does not describe adequately the narrowness of the news, because much historical or interpretive background to the news are not left or right but cut across partisan lines, like the environment or health care. By keeping the news tone-deaf but weighted heavily towards facts as spokespersons from the centers of power, the national discourse becomes more sterile each year. Ideas for solutions to problems, alternatives to present policies fade, and the status quo seems unchangeable. Yet we see how suddenly energized a whole portion of the electorate could be when someone like Jesse Jackson began addressing directly problems of that part of the electorate, who heard no one else talking about their particular problems.

The effective homogenized narrow spectrum of news and context is profound. A country whose major news media are homogenized and confined to a narrow spectrum of ideas and information oriented around the centers of power will soon have national politics also homogenized around the centers of power, and that, I'm afraid, is what we have today. To day our national political discourse is sterile in ideas for necessary change, deficient in its confrontation with the realities of social justice and therefore narrow in plausible alternatives held out to the public. When masses of people are bedeviled by problems but see no possibility of significant change, the result is hopelessness and apathy. Many who have no hope become destructive. It is not surprising that each year since 1960 the percentage of eligible voters who actually go to the polls has declined. When the cause of suffering remains mysterious, people will find scapegoats. When we look for scapegoats, we move to the right and to hatred of those different than us, specifically race hatred.

What can we as individuals do? most useful information about public affairs appears in the standard news media sooner or later, though too often obscurely and infrequently. It means that on subjects that each of us cares about we have to become assiduous clippers and filers because the mainstream news on these basic economic and political issues seldom pull it all together for us. We need to depend n alternative and specialized publications and broadcast sources for information, ideas and possible remedies for problems and possible opportunities for improvement coming from academics and others who are independent of officials in positions of power. And I think we all need to complain more. I preach it, I don't always practice it, but I think that's one of the things we have to learn to become better at is complaining to the media, to Congress, to the White House, letters that are clear, direct and un-bombastic sent to editors and broadcast news producers have a greater impact than you might imagine. The White House and Congressional offices still count mail.

But if we want to change the structure of the main media, I think it will take a change in our electoral process. Because few members of Congress and almost no President is going to offend the mass media owners who control politicians' access and imaged before the public. The only thing politicians fear more than media owners is being voted out of office. So when members of Congress proposed measures about the media you agree with, organize and write. When your particular members of Congress oppose such measures, organize and write. Legislators who try to change things for better are very lonely in that effort, frequently. Organize around those issues you most care about and then make trouble for your political party if it does not conform. The electoral process is now in a scandalous state. Our selection of Presidents is mainly dependent on 20-second political commercials in contrived daily propaganda. The cost of running for office is exorbitant, and the amount of money flooding into incumbents makes it very difficult to change legislatures and the Congress.

Political action committees have almost guaranteed semi-permanent membership. Only intense public service lobbying will bring real change in financing of candidates for office. I think the FCC should forbid paid political campaign commercials. Instead, every broadcast license holder should be required to give substantial free time, in substantial chunks of time, not measured in seconds, for two months before elections, and to make it available to representatives of parties that have polled five percent or more in the previous election. Schemes of this sort exist in some other democratic countries; it is unheard of in this country.

The Anti-Trust Division of the department of Justice should be awakened from its long sleep. It will be hard to undo the conglomerates already in being, but it is time to stop further aggrandizement by the giants and uncontrolled mergers and takeovers. The further disappearance of independent information and ideas for our democratic society should not be left to the tender mercies of junk bond manipulators. I think professional news staffs should elect their own editors and put some more separation between church and state, between corporate interests and the news organization and the news reporting function. That is done in some of the more distinguished papers in Europe. There is increasing involvement of the editors of our newspapers in the profit function of the newspapers. Until they are made responsible for the amount of advertising, they get generous bonuses on the basis of the levels of profit. There is one chain that gives its top editor 50% of every cut he makes in their news and editorial budget. Our standard news media need to expand the display of all thoughtful ideas and information in our society, not just those issued by those in power. Even people in dictatorships have the power to vote for the status quo. What distinguishes the electoral process in a democracy is not an election, because almost every country has an election sooner or later. Its a national discourse that argues true alternatives month by month between elections and talks about contending programs and alternative roads to improvement. Only when our main news media pursue a wide spectrum of ideas and relevant information will elections present voters with candidates and ideas that represent genuine choices. A democracy that has no clear choices presented in its regular news will not have clear choices presented in its elections. There's something to John Kenneth Galbraith's formulation, in which he said that in Washington, politicians solemnly get together and put together a misleading statement which they issue to the news media. The correspondents solemnly read this and reproduce it. Then, the same politicians read it, and believe it! He said it's the only successful system yet devised for the recycling of garbage. I think there is enough of that to be true to be disturbing. But I don't think there's any question that there's a kind of interacting, mirror-like cooperation on agenda-setting between the media and political people. I think it is true that if the media reported substantially and emphatically on those political speeches that dealt with substance on central issues, that's wheat the political people would be forced to respond to, because they don't like to speak to an un-listening audience. Part of what they assume about the audience is what they see on television and what they read in the papers. When I covered campaigns, every Presidential, Vice-Presidential, statewide candidate made five or ten stops a day and inevitably made the same speech. It made sense. They'd stop at an airport and talk for ten minutes about how they were glad to be in this beautiful count and in this beautiful setting, and we were filling in the blanks each time, and then usually once a day, or every other day, they would introduce a new statement, maybe a policy statement, and they'd see how it played in the media. if it didn't play, they dropped it and tried something else. So while I think the media don't have a unitary, exclusive power to create the public agenda, they are a very powerful part of the interaction that does, between what politicians say and what gets reflected to the general public in the media. When these things, when the media lose their independence of social and political view, they begin reflecting the same things, and I think that's the sate we've increasingly been in the last 15 years.

Let me conclude with a parable that happens to be true but which I think is an analogy of what I'm talking about.

During World War II, I was an aerial navigator and for a time instructed new aerial navigators. One exercise was to pick a distant target, without informing the student, and after four or five hours of flying during the night, to ask about where we would be in about half an hour. One night, about half an hour from the target, I asked on the intercom for students to tell me where we would be in half an hour. A note came up with a time and notation: "We will be five miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico." Sure enough, in about half an hour, a large, lighted city appeared underneath us, right in time. The student navigator was elated. When we got on the ground, he couldn't contain himself and said, "Right on the button, zero-zero, right, Lieutenant?" And I had a painful task to inform him that unfortunately we were not in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but El Paso, Texas. The student was stunned. He reached into his briefcase and took out his navigator's log and shook it in desperation and said, "But, sir, I have here figures to prove we're in Albuquerque." But the sign on the air base said El Paso.