Conglomerate ownership = even crappier TV news

A couple years ago, I saw a report investigating what it looked like to drive 55 on Detroit freeways.

Many cars and trucks passed the news van, shockingly, going faster than the speed limit.

 

It's not just corporate ownership that skews the news (ie. NBC being owned by huge defense contractor GE and thereby having an immediate interst in convincing people that the USA has to go to a war which will, surprise surprise, require lots of Ge-made weapons) but corporate advertisers are also being allowed to dictate the content of magazines (the famous Coca Cola memo to magazines saying they don't want their ads near "negative" stories) and the spiking of news stories themselves:

http://www.fair.org/extra/9806/foxbgh.html

If anyone thinks censorship is something only a government does, think again.

 

Try this on for size. How often do you see stories that are:

-related to violent crime/drugs/crime against children/a racket
-related to consumer saftey
-related to health care and the latest drug and/or treatement for a specified disease.
-related to entertainment, specifically shows on that network
-sports

How often do you see stories that are:
- related to serious non-sexual political malfeasance
- related to important but non-sexy legislation in your city, town, state e.g. environmental, health care, labor relations, etc.

The preponderance of the former and the relative lack of the latter are all driven by money. Real journalism costs money.

News at the local level is a cash cow for the stations. They dare not risk lowering the profit margins by investing in a better brand of journalism. At the network level of the Big 3 + Fox the news departments are in a struggle against CNN's and MSNBC's. Competing with them costs so much that they have few resources left for hard news that is not that day's or week's top story.

I don't know what CNN's problem is. With all their resources they could easily multi-task. Instead they elect to team-cover stuff to death.

This symptom of both the networks and CNN's "top story" myopia was brillaintly illustrated two weeks ago when the Challenger totally pushed Iraq off the tube for like three days. I mean, it was like the rest of the world just dissapeared until the resltess eye of CNN decided to refocus.


CNN does produce some really good specials (paging Christian Amanpour) but they consistently bury them in late-prime time or really late at night. There's always 60 Minutes, I guess. But your basic half-hour, 6 p.m. feed is just worthless crap.

 

Here's some choice:
http://wwitv.com/portal.htm

That's how I watch the news.
Other than that, newspapers ( on-line, mostly)

 

Larry King?

 

I know one thing they love a good blizzard.

 

I'm actually teaching a unit on "Media and Democracy" right now, and all of these issues are key. If you can find a copy, try to see "Fear and Favor in the Newsroom." I'm hosting a viewing of it on Wednesday night, and then a panel discussion next month with a few Journalism and Culture Studies professors. Should be quite good.

http://www.fearandfavor.org/

It's very helpful and concrete in a way that "Manufacturing Consent" is not (though that is still a classic...just too much Chomsky-worship).

Also check out Project Censored--their archives are pretty useful as well.

http://www.projectcensored.org/

The bottom line is that the press is given "special" status in the Constitution for a reason, and the turn towards "press as profit machine" has pretty much made that status a inconsequential.

 

The idea that local TV news is crap is not news. Local TV news, like all television programming, is meant to make money. If people watched serious debate on serious issues, producers would put it on. They don't.

There was a story a couple of years back in the NYT Magazine about an Orlando news producer who deliberately avoided sensationalist programming, and hired reporters to cover minutae like school board meetings and zoning laws. The station touted the fact that they were not going to show skiing hamsters and Victoria's Secret fashion shows. As a result, they got pummeled by the "extreme news" that the other networks had, and the producer was fired.

Could it work in another market? Maybe, but I doubt it.

 

obie,

You are of course correct. But tell me you're not "ok" with it, which is somewhat how you sound here. For instance, the idea that local news (any news programs, for that matter) is "meant to make money," is actually not entirely true. Sure, they have morphed into profit-machines recently, but this hasn't always been the case, and it's still not pure profit-centered the way, say, a candy bar manufacturer is. Unfortunately, it is getting close to this in some areas.

Anyway, the key point is to educate people that not only is this NOT the way it has always been, but in fact it goes absolutely against everything our founding fathers thought about the role of the press in a democracy (Jefferson especially). And right on up the line, they've been very clear about setting the press off as a "special" industry in need of special rules to KEEP it from becoming just another profit machine. The founder of CBS said something like, "The day the press becomes for profit will be the day democracy dies," or something like that....

 

That would be fantastic. I think it'd be nice if historical tv/films were somehow regulated as well so they dont stray too far into fancy. Those media are SO powerful...

 

Another perfect example was the EXTENSIVE coverage CNN provided of the worldwide protests. Im serious; they went to correspondents around the world, and stayed with this as their main stroy for about 1.5 hours. It was just the thing I needed...at 2:30 in the morning.

Come the AM, very little to nothing from CNN, allowing them to both submit "Hey, we're REAL jounralism, we covered the protests for 1.5 hours." and satisfy the ad-whores and the Bush admin by NOT covering it when normal humans would freakin' SEE it...

FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION, by Jerry Mander. Read it. Know it. Live it.

 

I realize this will be too difficult for many to understand, but businesses try to give consumers what they want. Most people prefer junk news to real news. Most people prefer junk food to real food. Ignore it. With the web, I don't see much to complain about. We still have public tv and radio as well.

 

This may be hard for some people to believe here, but I'm a hard-core capitalist. If people want to watch crap on TV, they should have the right to watch crap on TV. While I personally wish that local news was more substantive, I have found other venues to find out what's really going on in my community. It's crazy to think that a for-profit company should be forced to show a sustained money-losing program such as substantive local news when people don't watch it.

This is not meant to say that things about broadcasting in general shouldn't be changed -- I think that the FCC has given away the public airwaves far too freely, and TV channels & radio stations should be paying market rental rates to use them. Those funds could be used to purchase / reserve community stations, perhaps. But that's another issue entirely, and you shouldn't solve bad broadcasting rules by demanding better local newscasts.

The consolidation of media has diluted all substance, since it's cheaper to make a single product centrally and distribute it to your affiliates. But if the public listens or watches this pablum, who's to fault the networks?

The answer to this problem is for (a) local municipalities to oppose the purchase of their local TV station, if it still exists, (b) buy it themselves, and/or (c) legislate locally for more local news coverage. But the need for it varies from city to city, so a national mandate is unnecessary.

But what's the solution? Is the solution to mandate news programming? If so, how do you do that -- what news coverage is considered substantive enough to pass muster? If there's a national or global issue that takes precedence, does the local news fall out of compliance if they don't cover the local angle? As the FCC children's programming rules prove, you can regulate quantity, but you cannot regulate quality.

I don't think that people can consider the news to be a public service when it's privately-owned and in competition for ad dollars with other stations / media outlets. If you want to solve that, your only options are non-profits like PBS (which hasn't been real "public" TV in years) or government-run news outlets, which are fodder for patronage. I don't think that there's a real solution to this other than consumers turning off the crap and demanding better local TV news.

 

If it's all about capitalism, then make the media companies start paying the government rent for their use of the public airwaves. In a top ten market, for example, that comes out to about $4 million a year for a single FM dial spot. THEN, I have no problem letting broadcasters do whatever they want.

PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is top quality national journalism

 

You read my second paragraph, then?

Yes it is, as is most of the in-depth news reporting that PBS does (Frontline has been the best show on TV for years). But almost nobody watches, which should tell you that high-level reporting on a commercial station would fail to attract enough viewers to keep it on the air.

But somehow, 60 Minutes survives and thrives, which is amazing to me. Good show, good ratings -- proves that in some cases, people will support quality and companies can make money doing it.

 

No. I unintentionally skipped it.

 

It's sad that for many (but not all) people both pro and con, the mere fact of Chomsky's existence has become more important than his ideas.

Without "Manufacturing Consent" there would be no realistic model of how the mass news media actually operate and we'd be stuck with vague conspiracy theories about "the liberal media".

The trouble is that the basis of democracy is an informed and active citizen and the mass media has been deliberately used to work against this ideal and not towards it. Right now the vast majority of the populace is neither informed (or, worse, is misinformed) nor active and part of the reason for this is that the ruling class has used to mass media to train them to see self-rule as something boring and unnecessary.

As if that wasn't bad enough, right now we have an administration that is using the mass media to whip up support for their war by spreading lies. Our supposedly "watchdog" media is sleeping on the job by failing to ask the tough questions that are necessary to make such a decision. Contrary to the old saying, the truth is that what you don't know CAN hurt you.

Finally, we should be concerned about the deleterious effects of the current concentrated corporate media because it is such a one way street thereby masking it a perfect tool for demagogues. What the recent communications legislation has done is raise the "entry barrier" so that only the plutocrats can afford to have the kind of power that mass media ownership brings. Sure, a lack of concentration does not absolutely guarantee diversity and quality but we know that hyper-concentration sure as hell can't provide even what little quality and diversity we used to get pre-1992.

 

Krugman in today's NYT on tele-journalism and coverage of the war:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/opinion/18KRUG.html

Excerpts:

The coverage of Saturday's antiwar rallies was a reminder of the extent to which U.S. cable news, in particular, seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media.

What would someone watching cable news have seen? On Saturday, news anchors on Fox described the demonstrators in New York as "the usual protesters" or "serial protesters." CNN wasn't quite so dismissive, but on Sunday morning the headline on the network's Web site read "Antiwar rallies delight Iraq," and the accompanying picture showed marchers in Baghdad, not London or New York.

This wasn't at all the way the rest of the world's media reported Saturday's events, but it wasn't out of character. For months both major U.S. cable news networks have acted as if the decision to invade Iraq
has already been made, and have in effect seen it as their job to prepare the American public for the coming war.

and

There are two possible explanations for the great trans-Atlantic media divide. One is that European media have a pervasive anti-American bias that leads them to distort the news, even in countries like the U.K. where the leaders of both major parties are pro-Bush and support an attack on Iraq. The other is that some U.S. media outlets — operating in an environment in which anyone who questions the administration's foreign policy is accused of being unpatriotic — have taken it as their assignment to sell the war, not to present a mix of information that might call the justification for war into question.

So which is it? I've reported, you decide.

 

I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but is it really a "new" thing? WR Hearst (who lost the '04 NY Governor's race despite owning over 20 major newspapers that gave him glowing reviews) and Joe Pulitzer were as sensationalist as anyone is today, and in an effort to sell papers they pushed the US into the Spanish-American War. They're now seen as pillars of great journalism; today they'd be the equivalent of Drudge.

In my opinion, to say that media consolidation has diluted the news gives too much credit to journalism history.

 

Fox News: We Distort, You Abide.

When other networks had experts in terrorism, skyscraper construction or emergency servcies in their studios on 9/11, who did Fox have as their pundits that day? Ollie North and Pat Robertson. That's pretty much all you need to know about where Fox is coming from.

Well, how else are they going to spin it? Their role is that of cheerleader for Bush and the warhawks. While they can't completely ignore the points brought up by leaders of other countries, they'll give big ups and coverage to anything pro-war and ignore or downplay anything anti-war.

In some cases, there is a clear conflict of interest between reporting what's true and reporting what's good for the corporate party line. Take NBC. They're owned by GE, one of the biggest "defense" contractors who stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars if there is a war. Do you seriously think they'll ask any tough questions about the need for a war right now? Puh-leez.

Other media outlets will toe the pro-war line because their bosses understand their role as cheerleaders or they don't want to piss off the administration and lose access to sources within the White House, the Pentagon and Congress. After all, it's easier and less expensive to just uncritically quote official sources than to do investigative journalism like they're supposed to. Besides, just think how high their ratings (and therefore advertising fees) will jump once the war does start. In the current corporate media system, the media have every reason to be biased for war and no reason to ask tough questions or provide ugly, inconvenient truths.

Attacking Saddam was a campaign theme for Bush long before 9/11. So yes, the decision had been made without public debate and the only thing to do was sell it to the American people and foreign leaders. The problem for the Bushies is that they bungled that job so badly that what should have been a slam dunk has instead become an embarrassing trail of lies, pissed off allies and a divided nation. So now they have to paint all anti-war protestors at home as communists and abroad as "America-haters" (that's where the mass media does their job) and they have to turn up the bullying on foreign leaders who so far have shown amazing spine against US aggression.

 

Ok, I don't have a problem with this. This is the way the system was more or less designed to work in the 1930's. The problem is that over the years the FCC has been allowed to drift towards deregulation and demphasis of the "public service" clause of broadcast licenses, and Congress has done nothing to stem that drift. The media aren't going to narc on themselves and thus the republic remains ingorant of the situation. It is a vicious circle.

 

There were, however, alternate sources of news that had much more circulation than is possible today. The "muckrakers" who gained a mass audience and started the so-called "Progressive era" would not be possible today.

In both England and the USA, there was a wide selection of mass-circulation newspapers that held differing points of view, including that of Hearst and Pulitzer until the advent of advertising in the last decades of the 1800s when corporate advertisers could throw their financial weight behind media outlets that shared their views or did their bidding. Only in the aftermath of this did the first round of consolidation begin and alternative voices began to be pushed to the margins so that by the time of WW2, only the national corporate mass media backed by national corporate advertisers dominated the news media.

Of course, radio and TV also helped kill off the diversity of viewpoints that was formerly found in the print medium despite initial claims made by the media corporations that they'd make sure that didn't happen. Each time, radio and TV were supposed to be these great tools for democracy and the common man. Well, we can all see how both of them got digested by power structure here.

So while the situation was never perfect and there was no unadultered, pure Golden Age of Truth and Beauty, things have undisputably devolved even further since then.