National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #22-98 Money, Politics, and U.S. Media
June 3, 1998

Program description and guest contact information at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/1998/9822.html

Phillip Babich:Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. This week, on Making Contact:

Molly Ivins: You look at, say, the average cast of the Brinkley Sunday chat show. What are you listening to, a range of political opinion? No, you're listening to five white millionaires discuss politics.

Bernie Sanders: One of the points that I want to make, and one of the very difficult issues that as it progresses, we have got to place way up there, close to the very top of our agenda, is corporate control over the media.

Phillip Babich: The US congress has failed to pass campaign finance reform and big money continues to fill the pockets of many politicians. This cash flow is not only affecting the way elected officials represent their constituents but also the way the news media cover public policy. On this program we look at the US media's effects on democracy. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact.

The recent wave of corporate mergers has triggered blockbuster headlines in US newspapers and many peppy reports in broadcast media. But little has been said about the consolidation of wealth and power and its impacts on working people. Making Contact's national producer, David Barsamian spoke with author and nationally syndicated columnist, Molly Ivins about some of these issues. Barsamian begins by asking Ivins about the title of her most recent book, You Got to Dance With Thum What Brung You.

David Barsamian: Well, Molly, I'm sorry, I'm from New York City and I don't speak Texas, can we have a translation?

Molly Ivins: You got to dance with thum what brung you, is the way that you say that, David, and it's one of the oldest sayings in politics. And what it used to mean, was that when you got elected to pubic office you voted with the folks who put you there. And by that you meant your constituents, your supporters particularly. But what it means more and more is that you vote with the corporate special interests that gave you the money to run for office. And it seems to me that that is the most striking change in our political system in recent years. The extent to which money has become the predominant factor by such an enormous margin. I grant you there was never a time when money was not a factor. There was never a time when American politics has been real pure and pristine. But what we see now is money so preeminent, so all-powerful that it has reduced everything else, including the public interest to insignificance.

David Barsamian: Was that perhaps reflected in the 1996 voter turn out - the lowest since 1924?

Molly Ivins: I think there's a direct connection. I think people probably understand that this system is not working for their benefit. And what's even worse, they feel there's not much they can do about it. The sense of powerlessness, the sense of government as other, as them, not us, not only our thing. Not something that we're in charge of, is now genuinely pervasive. And that very cynicism, that very disgust is part of the problem. Were we energetically angry we would have a far better shot a fixing the problem. Now, the good news is that I think it can be fixed. Not only can it be fixed, I think it's rather easily fixable. But you have to keep in mind that I am optimistic to the point of idiocy as a congenital defect. It may be that we're not going to get serious finance reform through this congress. The leadership has stopped it in both the house and the senate now. But you notice they really had to work to do it. And in the meantime I see all kinds of hopeful signs at the local levels. The State of Maine has passed public campaign financing, which is my idea of the perfect answer to the whole problem. In California they slapped limits on both the contributions and spending. Here in Colorado you all are trying yet a third way. I think it's going to happen at the State and local levels. And as we see how these different systems play out we'll look around and say, yup, that's the way to go.

David Barsamian: Well Ralph Nadar, Jimmy Hightower, Ronnie Dugger and others have pointed out that the democratic party has increasingly come to resemble the republican party. Nadar calls them "tweedlee-dum," "tweedlee-dee." Others describe it as the "republicrats" or the "demopublicans." So, is it just the question of campaign finance reform?

Molly Ivins: I've put tremendous emphasis on that. I realize that there are other problems on the scene as well. And we might say, well, if we had a little more fortitude, or a little more this, or a little more that. But I will tell you that we're not going to make any more progress in any of the other areas most of us are concerned about until we fix the way most campaigns are financed. We're not going to see any real progress on education or the environment or health care or whatever any citizens group's particular cause is until we fix the way campaigns are financed. Because the influence of corporate special interests on the entire system is just ungodly. And time and time again we see legislation coming out that is of corporate special interest, by corporate special interest and for corporate special interest. And that's not going to change until we fix this financing system.

David Barsamian: Would you favor, for example, free media time to candidates?

Molly Ivins: Absolutely. I think it can be mandated without touching the first amendment top side or bottom.

David Barsamian: One piece of legislation that's certainly attracted a great deal of attention is the 1996 telecommunications act which Clinton signed in early February of that year. So we've had a couple of years now to look back on an act that was supposed to promote competition, diversity, lower prices for consumers etc. etc. What's been the record over the last couple of years?

Molly Ivins: Well, I find that one of the most sour satisfactions in life is being able to stand back after some disaster has occurred and smugly say, "I told you so." It is really a singularly sour, bitter experience. I raised hell about the telecommunications act back in '66. So did a bunch of other people. One just spoke on the liberal side, senator John McCain, a republican out of Arizona, opposed it. Look, what happened was that that law was written by the telecommunications industry itself. It was practically high water mark for the lobbyists at that point in the then new republican congress. And they literally wrote the law themselves. This is not a smart idea, to allow this to happen. And you can see the consequences in the results of that law. I mean, all the things that they said would happen that would be good, haven't. And all the things that we said that would be bad, have. The concentration of ownership has increased, cable prices have written and so on across the board.

David Barsamian: Your publisher is Random House, of You got to Dance with Thum What Brung you, and Random House was just the target of one of the biggest mergers in certainly book publishing history: the German conglomerate Bertilsman. So I was wondering what you thought of that, and does that mean your royalties are going to be in deuchmarks from here on?

Molly Ivins: You know there is a bit... (maybe this is sort of 'dog in the mangery' of me) It is true that I think the concentration of ownership of media companies is a real danger, and a real threat to the diversity of voices, to... I think it limits the parameters of debate. I think that there are any number of very real and serious consequences. But I, perhaps churlishly, have been looking at the sort of outcry over the fact that Random House, the great New York, American publisher has been bought by this Bertilsman AG from Germany. Because it seems to me that this is finally the chatting classes being hit by the consequences of the insane wave of mergers and acquisitions that have dominated our economic life for many years now. And, you know, when tens of thousands of workers of the rather ordinary stripe are laid off you will hear a sort of 'ah, well this is part of the globalization of the economy.' Suddenly writers and people who have access to the media are being effected by the same thing. Oooh, what clucking has arisen.

David Barsamian: So you think in terms of class that this particular group that going to be effected might be more vocal and outspoken?

Molly Ivins: Oh, I know they are. And further more they are more in a position to make their feelings felt than guys who get laid off down at the rubber tire factory.

David Barsamian: Where does this increasing merger mania, as one called it, end? Take for example today's New York Times, the largest deal ever, "Citicorp plans merger with travelers group."

Molly Ivins: That is a particularly worrisome merger in that it is not a merger of two like entities. What we have here is the merger of a giant insurance group with a giant bank, leading to the creation of an all purpose financial monetary firm, a jugger not the like of which we have never seen. I am a great believer in populism, an old style political philosophy. And many of the things that populism stands for are embedded in the law, particularly the Glass Stegal Act of 1933 as a consequence of the Great Depression. It was realized at that time that allowing banks to be in the business of selling other financial entities such as stocks and bonds, even insurance policies, was a very poor idea. I'll just give you an old populous principle which is: never trust a banker; they all have hearts the size of caraway seeds. Again, I hesitate to stigmatize an entire group like that, a bleeding heart liberal myself would never be guilty of gross generalization. Nevertheless I suggest to you that trusting bankers is not a good idea.

David Barsamian: Ben Bagdickian has written now five editions of "The Media Monopoly." I was talking to him just in early March and he's now contemplation a sixth edition because it seems that as soon as one edition ends everything becomes obsolete and he doesn't see a cap on this trend toward conglomerate... more and more concentration. I mean, where is it going to end? One big corporation?

Molly Ivins: My worst nightmare is that we all end up working for Rupert Murdock, one of the worst boils on the behind of American journalism ever to make his presence felt. When you look at the stuff from Bagdickian's "Media Monopoly" what you find, and I'm not going to remember the exact number but I do know in terms of newspapers. At the end of WWII there were eleven thousand, five hundred independently owned daily newspapers in the United States. You could go on to enumerate independently owned book publishing houses, movie studios, television stations, radio stations, and so on through the spectrum of the media. By the time he got to edition numero three-o we were down to thirty corporations. We're now under twenty. And this insane concentration is continuing and, of course, I think that the consequences are ever more visible.

David Barsamian: Well what might some remedies be?

Molly Ivins: Well, there's always the anti-monopoly law. And it seems to me that particularly because a political democracy is so dependent on robust political debate, as the supreme court put it in one memorable decision, that we might actually put anti-monopoly laws into effect on the media with particular stringency. It seems to me that you can make a very good first amendment case, freedom of speech case, for doing exactly that.

Phillip Babich: Columnist Molly Ivins speaking with David Barsamian. We'll have more of that interview later in this program.

You are listening to Making Contact a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program please give us a call. It's toll free: 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts or if you want to make a comment or suggestion for future programs. That's 800-529-5736.

Phillip Babich: According to Congressman Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, corporate media have effectively changed the perception of reality particularly when reporting on the supposedly booming economy.

Bernie Sanders: One of the points that I want to make and one of the very difficult issues and that as it progressives, we have got to place way up there, close to the very top of our agenda is corporate control over the media. And the reason that that issue is so important is that all over this country people are working longer hours for lower wages. They can't afford health care. They can't afford to send their kids to college. They are hurting very badly. And then they turn on the television and they pick up the newspapers and what do they see? And what do they hear? They hear that for the eighty third straight year the economy is just humming along. Booming along. Should we have more growth, or maybe should we cut back on all of the growth? And I go out a couple of weeks ago, one of the fun things about being in congress, (a lot of things are not fun, but some things are fun) is that you have the opportunity to sit down with folks like Alan Greenspan, you see. And Mr. Greenspan gave us a half hour speech about how good the economy was doing under his management. And I invited Mr. Greenspan to come with me to the state of Vermont and to explain to the people in my state who are working sixty, seventy and eighty hours a week, just how good the economy was. Because they needed that cheering up. Well, when you work so hard and you have so little you need somebody to tell you just how good things are. And I thought that Alan with his beaming personality and warm smile would be just the guy to tell the people of my state: the family farmers who are losing their farms; the kids who are working for five or six buck and hour. They needed that help to be able to be told how good the economy is.

Now the point here, without getting off on a whole other tangent, and why the issue of corporate control of the media is so important is that back home, in Vermont and throughout this country the middle class and the working class and the low income people are hurting very badly. But they don't see their own pain and their own reality manifested on the television screen. They see a lot of things. They see O.J. Simpson, the final four, and the NCAA and a lot of other things, but they don't see their own pain. And the result of that is that they say, 'geez, I must be the only person in America working sixty hours a week and barely keeping my butt above water here. There must be something wrong with me because, heh, president Clinton says millions of jobs are being created. The economy is humming along. Greenspan's doing this. So I think what the fight is about is not only bringing people together. It's even changing the perception of reality.

What is reality? I had three town meetings in Vermont just yesterday, all over the state. Early morning. Late at night. And the fight that we had...we were talking about, 'what is reality?' How many people in the audience, fellow Vermont, just tell me. How is the economy doing for you? Anyone think it's doing well? They don't think it's doing well. So what the fight is, is that because corporate control of the media is in fact controlled by people for whom the economy is doing very well, GE is doing just great. Disney is doing terrific. So those guys are telling us the economy is doing well. We have got to have our own media organs to talk reality to the American people, to tell them that they're not alone.

Phillip Babich: Congressman Bernie Sanders.

Audio collage titled "News Goo," a rap mix that's critical of US media.

Phillip Babich: That was "News Goo," produced by Polarity 1. Words and music were by P. Levine and inspired by Danny Schechter's recent book, "The More You Watch, The Less You Know." We now return to David Barsamian's interview with columnist Molly Ivins. He asks Ivins about tabloid journalism.

David Barsamian: Is there a connection between media monopolies and the growth of tabloid journalism?

Molly Ivins: Well, I think there's two ways to look at that. The tradition in the American press, I speak now of printed press because for a long time the printed press pretty much set the agenda for television journalism as well, has developed in a different way from, for example the British press. The British press always had some two tiers of journalism. There was the tabloids emphasizing sex and jingoism. You know kind of ra ra for John Bull, lets go beat up on some dark skinned foreign peoples. I mean it's a long strong tradition in the British popular press, tabloid press. And then what they call the quality press. The Times of London, and these serious papers that address the great affairs of state. So in Britain they always had the two classes of journalism. In the United States we have a different tradition. Our press traditions really came out of those turn of the century yellow sheets. We originally started at the beginnings of the republic with a highly partisan political press where almost every newspaper was allied with a political party or faction thereof. But going back to around the turn of the century we had a press that was both popular and populist. Those old two penny yellow sheets. They used to call it "The Yellow Press." And it still has a pejorative connotation. But if you go back and look at the slogans of some of the mast heads of those old time newspapers you'll find some astonishing sentiment. It'll be something like, 'the daily jump up and hallelujah. We're with the people and against the bosses.' 'The daily disappointment: for the masses and against the tyrants.' I mean they have a quaint, almost socialist flavor to them. But what the press in that era felt was that we stood up for the little guys. We stood up for the little guys against the government, against the corporations, against the unions, against anybody who was big. We wrote for Joe Six-pack, the regular schmo. That was who we were for. And we were very much regular schmos ourselves. To be a newspaper man was not to be a college educated professional person, in fact when I started the word 'journalist' was considered a silly and pretentious and self-important sounding word. Our line was, "hell, a journalist is just somebody who borrows money from a reporter." And the inflation of pomposity in our business is just astonishing to me. As we have attempted to "professionalize" ourselves, I put that word in quotes, I think what we've done is just flat lost touch with regular folks, become part of the elite's of this country; become part of the establishment. And boy can you hear it when you listen to those talking heads out of Washington.

David Barsamian: Well you want people to get well paid for a job well done, don't you?

Molly Ivins: No, I never claim, around newspaper management, especially my own, that I think we shouldn't be well paid. But, one of my theories of the world betterment is that reporters should never be allowed to make more, and I include commentators, than the average public school teacher. I think this would be an excellent step forward. And let me tell you why. When you look at the people you see, particularly on television, (television folks being notoriously higher paid than those of us who are mere print people,) you look at say the average cast of the Brinkley Sunday chat show. What are you listening to? A range of political opinion? No, you're listening to five white millionaires discuss politics.

David Barsamian: James Fallow has been also very critical of what he calls celebrity journalists who talk at industry gatherings and in front of lobby groups and pull down enormous speaking fees. He calls them 'buck-rakers.' A kind of play on the old 'muck-rakers.' What's happened to that muck-raking tradition in journalism... good investigative reporting?

Molly Ivins: Yeah, again, I think that first of all it's one consequence of the increasing corporate concentration, corporate ownership. There's fewer and fewer resources to put in to investigative reporting. Because the emphasis with these media chains and giant media monopoly, conglomerates is always bottom line, bottom line, increase profits next quarter. Increase profits in the quarter after that. Increase profits the quarter after that. You get this constant cost squeeze which means that there's neither the time nor the money for good journalism. And it does take time to do investigative stuff instead of, you know, re-writing some press release from the beaucoup to bucks corporation. And, again, I think on the buck rakers, I do a fair amount of public speaking myself. Half of it is pro bono. And the other half where I do get paid money I limit it very carefully to groups that never have a dog in the fight in any legislative body I might cover, any political story I might cover. That pretty much limits me to college campuses.

David Barsamian: Texas, among twelve other states, has something called "food disparagement laws," on the books. You're laughing, Molly. This is a serious discussion. And there was, of course, the case in Amarillo involving Oprah Winfrey and Howard Lyman. Did you cover that?

Molly Ivins: Yes, I did. I was up in Amarillo and watched the trial for a couple of days. These are the so called veggie libel laws and if you are wondering how the fact that Oprah Winfrey dissed cattle and wound up being tried under a veggie libel bill, well you just do not understand the sheer creativity of the Texas legislature because cows are a vegetable as any fool can see. That really was...there are times when it's rather embarrassing to be a Texan, I have to confess that and the trial of Miss Winfrey for dissing cows was one of them. It did come to a happy conclusion and I'm sorry the law was not thrown out in its entirety but I think it probably will be next time. Let me point out the more serious problem here, aside from the sheer curiosity value of that particular episode.

Veggie libel laws are part of a larger effort by major economic interest groups, you see corporate groups with trade associations and others including the cattle breeders association, to make their critics shut up. It goes along with things like slap suits with environmentalists, part of a whole range of ways that special interest groups use both their own clout and then they get the government, as they have with these veggie libel laws, to step in and make people who might cost them money by pointing out that they are A. polluting, or B. poisoning people or whatever other corporate crime might be going on - to make those folks just be silent. And the reason I thought that Oprah Winfrey's winning that case was so important was that it was an vindication of the right of people to stand up and criticize and say...you know the issue....Actually I think I made a terrible p.r. blunder. The issue of cow cannibalism, which is the practice of grinding up dead cows and feeding them to live cows, was something that really has not been widely known or discussed until the trial. The fact that it was discussed one time on the Oprah Winfrey show...well, there's a world of folks out there who never watch Oprah's show. But there sure are a lot of people who know about cow cannibalism now who didn't before. I will tell you that there was a subtext in that trial of the fact that she, 'she's a rich woman.' And parenthetically 'black' was implied in these sub, subtext. And right now I'll say that I never heard anybody say that it court but I sure did hear it in discussions outside court. That somehow there were a bunch of poor little old ranchers down in Texas and this rich, powerful black lady had somehow done them wrong, was something they intended to set up in court. Frankly, it didn't wash.

Phillip Babich: Molly Ivins speaking with David Barsamian.

That's it for this addition of Making Contact, a look at the US media and democracy. Thanks for listening. And special thanks this week to Roger Lisner for recorded portions. I'm Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts or if you'd like to make a comment or suggestion for future programs. That's 800-529-5736.

Making Contact is an independent production funded by individual contributors. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. Our National Producer is David Barsamian. Phillip Babich is our managing producer. Our senior advisor is Norman Solomon. Peggy Law is our executive director. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter trio. For everyone at Making Contact, thanks for listening.