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MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #14-00 Whose Free Press? Media Consolidation and Democracy
April 5, 2000

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2000/0014.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact....

Norman Solomon: On cable television we have a lot of choices and they're mostly controlled by just a few corporations, deciding the positive veto, what's going to be mass distributed. We're free to choose from choices that are handed down from on high, and they call it democracy.

Janine Jackson: Concentration in any industry means the consolidation of power and control in fewer and fewer hands. And when the industry that we're talking about is information, well then it's all that much more dire and all that much more something we need to be concerned and active about.

Phillip Babich: Fewer than ten media corporations now control, through ownership, most of the news and information we get in the United States. That number continues to shrink as these conglomerates cut mega-merger deals. On this program we take a look at the influence of money and corporate priorities on a basic democratic principle: freedom of the press. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information.

On January 10, 2000, the largest corporate merger in history, totaling $350 billion dollars, was announced between America Online and Time Warner. The colossal deal drew cheers from investors. But, what are the implications for the free flow of information? Time Warner owns a constellation of media entities with 200 subsidiaries, including CNN and HBO. America Online is the largest Internet service provider in the world.

Shortly after the Time Warner/AOL merger announcement, Southern Oregon University in Ashland held a "Forum on the First Amendment." Author and media critic Norman Solomon was the keynote speaker. What follows are excerpts from that talk. Solomon, who is Making Contact's senior advisor, begins by challenging a commonly held assumption that a privately-owned press can be equated with a free press.

Norman Solomon: In this era of privatization, when we're told that the era of big government is over--with the usual exception for the Pentagon--we have been more than ever encouraged to believe that a free press equals a privately owned press. Now how's that for a propaganda model. And as long as you have a privately owned press, you have a free press. Well it sounds pretty good if we've grown up with that idea for decades and decades. It may well sound like sensible, political analysis. And more and more, of course, the way that we look at issues of mass media and communications is in this very, very broad context of what's happening throughout our society. The classic term for the free press has to do with the notion that somehow without fear of favor the news media can help us to transact in the discourse of democracy. And yet there's a very incisive comment that was made several decades ago by A.J. Leibling, the press critic who said freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. Sounds kind of quaint these days since were not just talking about presses, we're talking about a whole wide range of different communication media.

A few weeks ago, just after the new millennium began I was watching CNN and I saw on it a panel discussion about the future of media and the camera frequently went to a guy, you may have heard of him, Gerald Levin. It so happens that Time Warner, which he heads, owns CNN. And this was eight days before the announcement that there was going to be this new conglomerate called AOL/Time Warner and Mr. Levin was talking about what he saw for the future. And I want to quote just a few words:

"Global media will be and is fast becoming the predominant media of the twenty- first century. We're in a new economic age and what may happen assuming that's true is it's more important than government. It's more important than educational institutions and non-profits."

And Mr. Levin went on to say, "...so what's going to be necessary is we're going to need to have these corporations redefined as instruments of public service because they have the resources, they have the reach, they have the skill base, and maybe there's a new generation. Maybe there's a new generation coming up that wants to achieve meaning in that context and have an impact and that may be a more efficient way to deal with society's problems than bureaucratic governments."

And you know when I heard him say that I immediately thought of the introduction to a Brave New World, where Aldous Huxley talks about how in the technological age, inefficiency will be considered the great sin against the Holy Ghost. Efficiency, profit margin above all, economies of scale and synergy, presto, AOL/Time Warner.

Well here's one more sentence from Mr. Levin. Of course he had a little secret which the world was about to learn forthwith. He said, "It's going to forced anyhow, because when you have a system that is instantly available anywhere in the world then immediately, the old fashioned regulatory system has to give away."

Well, we don't have midnight raids on newspaper offices in this country. We don't have troops or police officers banging down the doors of television stations. Our censorship system in the United States in the year 2000 operates differently.

And to try to capture some of the dynamics of the censorship system that flourishes in the United States of America, I found it helpful to go back and see the writings of some of the great press critics of earlier eras. George Seldes, who worked for the Chicago Tribune, who went on to be a great media critic, talked about how something.. that there's a smell in the air of newsrooms. It's understood what it's wanted and what is not wanted, like a particular odor that one becomes familiar with.

About half a century ago, George Orwell described the process this way: Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip but the really well trained dog is the one that turns a somersault when there is no whip. There are no whips in the news rooms and production studios of America. There are a lot of somersaults.

Part of the propaganda system that has flourished in this country encourages us to believe that as long as the government isn't running the media show, as I mentioned, that things are all right. The first amendment is alive and well. And yet you look at, at least in theory, what all major political ideologies will tell us. In theory at least. Whatever, just almost whatever you call yourself, if you call yourself anything, the ideology wil--within it's parameters--hold that too much power in too few hands is dangerous, is bad. It limits the kind of possibilities that we want very badly to create. And yet, if you look back to 1983 and you look in the first edition of the book by former Dean of Journalism and assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bagdikian, you see his document-- fifteen corporations back then controlled through ownership most of essentially the news and information flow in the United States. And with each edition, that number has dropped. The sixth edition of the book is coming out in March. The number has fallen to six.

Well, increasingly though, we're being told that-- don't worry. And you know this has been going on for a very long time. I think of it as just kind of a classic scam. And a lot of it involves, you know, the mythology of the "techno fix." Oh, don't worry, there's a new technology that'll fix that. The widening gap between rich and poor, don't worry about it. There's a new technology coming along that'll fix it. You're worried about the environment? You know, fill in the blank.

The late 1920s was a time of great excitement about this new technology called radio. You look in Business Week, the early 1930s. There was some discussion about-- now what is the potential of radio? And then there were articles and letters and so forth. Strange as it might seem to us here today, back in the early 1930s there were advertising jingles on the radio. And for people who found in radio enormous promise, some of them felt that that was really weird. I mean, you have this great public utility, so to speak, that could have all kinds of diverse perspectives, useful for education and civic involvement and democratic debate and on and on, and there are advertising jingles on it. That wasn't a God-ordained reality. That was something that was gradually imposed as radio got stronger as a technology and more and more people had radios. That was imposed and by the early 30s and 1934 there it was. There it was. Commercialized transition of the radio band.

And if you look at what the New York Times wrote at the time, they said, that the communications act of 1934 would be a monument for democratic use of the radio airwaves. And I think we can look back and say it was much closer to a tombstone. Radio, basically, will spin the dial, and you know what I'm talking about.

Mid-century, broadcast television-- the great new technology would be really just... we'll understand what each other thinks, what we're creating, how we live. Enough said about broadcast television.

The 1970s cable TV. You look at Alvin Toffler's book, The Third Wave --towards the end of it, published, what, around 1980 or so. There's this great new technology, cable television, it's going to, in his words, "de-massify news media." We're going to have so much more democratic discourse because of cable television. The illusion of choice. Yeah, on cable television we have a lot of choices and they're mostly controlled by just a few corporations deciding, again, for the positive veto. What's going to be mass distributed. We're free to choose from choices that are handed down from on high, and they call it democracy. And they say that the first amendment is alive and well.

Phillip Babich: Norman Solomon speaking at a "Forum on the First Amendment" in Ashland, Oregon. We'll have more of his talk in a few moments.

>b>Stephanie Welch: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you'd like to get in touch with us we'll be giving out our toll-free number at the end of this broadcast.

Phillip Babich: In this part of Norman Solomon's talk he begins by discussing the Internet and freedom of the press.

Norman Solomon: I think it's helpful to assess the Internet in terms of the first screen. What's on the first screen for twenty two million subscribers to AOL? What's on the first screen for other people who are going through the major providers? Now it's true you can find other things even if you go up through AOL, which certainly has the economies of scale and the mass capital behind it to make it more and more close to ubiquitous in communities around the country and elsewhere. You can go elsewhere, but instead of one click it may take you three of five or seven. It's out there. You can find other stuff there. But the essence of propaganda is repetition. It's true on the radio, it's true on television, it's true on the Internet. And frankly, if I'm George Bush or Bill Clinton or whoever else comes in next, I don't really care very much what you do with your little website. I really don't. Now if you mobilize, like folks did in Seattle a few weeks ago, that's a different matter. But in terms of your website, great. You can go up against MSNBC which is soon to become Newsweek MSNBC, quite literally. You know it's like, yeah we can pass the hat. You want to start a national daily? We can go up against Gannett and USA today. This is the....Was it Anatole France who commented about a hundred years ago, he said something like, "the law in its majestic wisdom has forbidden rich and poor alike to steel bread or sleep under bridges." A very egalitarian system.

So on the Internet what we have more and more, and AOL/Time Warner is part of the process, the construction, the mass marketing, the huge dissemination of defacto, the Internet cul de sac. You know, forget the information super-highway. By the way I did an Nexus search on that. That term has gone through the floor in the last five years. If you plot it on a graph in major newspapers, since 1995, the term "information super highway." What a bore. You know, through the floor. You know what has taken it's place and much more widely discussed: e-commerce, right? Electronic commerce, our salvation. So the cul de sac is about driving people into this huge closed loop. And we won't particularly know it. Because when you go on, whether it's Time Warner, EMI, whatever, through AOL, those are the easy clicks. Those are the first screens. That's where the process takes us. If it were another society we would call it a propaganda system. But since we have the first amendment on parchment and since we have such a good propaganda system, we don't call it a propaganda system.

What we're up against, and I don't mean to be defeatist about it at all, because we wouldn't be here if we weren't willing to consider our real options and how we can make creative change. But I think it's fair to say we're up against the mass distribution of the corporatization of consciousness. A lot has changed since those few words were written about congress making no law respecting establishment religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or bridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, et cetera, et cetera. We know that a tremendous amount has changed. And yet, I think a lot of the issues remain, if not the same then at least concentric. I grew up learning about Peter Zenger who was a printer and publisher who defied the overt censorship of that era, coming from the British crown. A public hangman burned the New York weekly that he wrote in, four different times. And this is what Zenger said in 1733. He said, "The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of liberty in the press. For it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole."

In the year 2000, as best as I can tell, the first amendment is gasping for breath. And we have the opportunity to give it oxygen.

Phillip Babich: Norman Solomon speaking at a forum of the first amendment in Ashland, Oregon... Media concentration and the drive for profits has also effected another vital issue: diversity on the airwaves. In 1999, the NAACP blasted the four major television networks in the United States for virtually "whitewashing" the new fall season prime time line-up. According to the NAACP, none of the 26 shows slated for the season on ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX had a person of color in a leading or starring role. Janine Jackson is program director at the media watch organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, also known as FAIR. She says lack of diversity at the networks goes beyond casting. She writes in an article that appeared in FAIR's magazine Extra!, that minority writers, for example, make up just 7 percent of prime time network writers. She joined us from her office in New York.

Janine Jackson: I think it's one of the most important things for people to understand. How much many of the problems we have about media including problems about under-representation of people of color, and women in the media, how even that comes back to economics. So earlier, or late last year we had a discussion, protests from the NAACP and a range of groups about racism. What they called a "white-wash" in programming. Based on the fact that the networks came out with their new fall prime time line up and there were no non-white actors in any lead roles.

And as we discussed this question of racism, a lot of folks had it - thought it really had to do with personal feelings, personal biases of executives. That they didn't like black people, or they didn't like Latinos, or they thought Latinos couldn't write, you know or something like that. Now the truth is those stereotypical images and that kind of just ignorance does exist and does have an effect but it's important to understand that the bias in television can really go much deeper than that. It's just as you say that it's not simply under-representation on screen, it's also in decision-making roles, behind the scenes, both as producers and writers. And then even more, the situation is even more drastic as you get up towards the top in the studios. Who are the executives? There are very, very few non-white folks in positions of power.

But it goes deeper. It goes into advertising and that is, people need to realize that it is often dismissed as a question of ratings. You don't see black shows, or shows with black actors because they just don't get the ratings. And that's really not true. The truth is there's an open secret in television and that is discounting. The fact that we may know that television shows garner their success based on how much they can get sponsors to pay to buy ads during that show. But you may not know that sponsors, corporate advertisers, pay less for shows that get non-white audiences. They simply accord a smaller cash value to a show that is reaching seven million black people than to a show that is reaching the same number of white people. So yes, there is plain old fashioned institutional racism that we need to deal with. But it also comes back in a different way to the fact that we allow media to be run simply as a business, simply as a for-profit business. And we don't have in it the kind of checks and balances that would mitigate against this kind of economic racism.

Phillip Babich: Just to highlight a couple examples that you mention in your article, discussing this issue of discounting, and I'll just quote from your article. You write: "Last year an internal memo from media representation firm CATS media group came to light in which the company advised its sales staff not to place ads on so called urban stations, explaining that businesses want prospects, not suspects." Is that a common example of what your talking about in regards to discounting?

Janine Jackson: It's absolutely common, and in fact you will find very few people who will deny it. Although that CATS memo that you site was very important because there it was written down on paper. So it made it a little bit more obvious, a little harder to deny. But in fact, folks who work in television and in radio say they confront these kinds of attitudes all the time.

Phillip Babich: And the FCC is aware of this too, right?

Janine Jackson: The FCC, in fact has done some of the research that indicates these sorts of problems. We unfortunately haven't seen them take the next step, now that they have the knowledge, to really enforcing the regulations and the laws that do exist.

Phillip Babich: You cite an FCC study saying that a buyer for Ivory soap advertising time refused to purchase time on a Latino formatted station because "Hispanics don't bathe as frequently as non-Hispanics."

Janine Jackson: There you go. There you go. That kind of attitude and, you know, we, you almost want to chuckle because you think it's in the past. Unfortunately, it's not in the past and what I would like to make clear is that when folks say: Oh, you know it's just a question of ratings, there isn't really bias involved, there still is, really, bias involved.

Phillip Babich: What are the effects--you were touching on this a few moments ago, but I wonder if you could go a little bit deeper on that--What are the effects if people of color aren't adequately represented in the media, in programming, et cetera, what's the effect on society.

Janine Jackson: Well, that's something that I think is very important to think about. I mean I think we all can kind of imagine. We know the influence that media has in shaping our understanding of the world and of other people. I think it might, for those of us who live in cities. Here I am in New York, it's hard for me to realize but there are many places in which people may never see a non-white person except for on television. So those images matter very, very much. And of course it's not - it matters here too, in New York. They're where we learn what people are like, how people can interact, how society works. So when that image isn't representative, it has a very, a very negative impact on society.

And in fact there's research, recent research talking about children in particular, and how children are very much effected by, for example, stereotypical images. The fact that young black girls don't see people like themselves in leadership roles on television really effects their sense of their potential and where they can go in life. It's a dramatic effect that media has, and as much as we see the negative effects, think of what positive effects it could have if we really did have media that was diverse and was creative and inclusive and engaging of all the sorts of people and ways of living and places in the country. Think how fantastic that could be. So as much as I recognize the negative impact of the media we have, I also like to dream about the positive impact of the media we might have because I think we all see how important an influence it is on our lives.

Phillip Babich: And getting those changes may seem daunting to some, you know it involves confronting some of the largest corporations in the world. What are some of the recommendations you make to people to begin to confront these issues?

Janine Jackson: Well, one thing I to keep informing yourself independently. I know we're all tired at the end of the day when we come home from work and it's easy to just kind of let the news wash over us. But unfortunately we can't do that. We have to keep our critical faculties going all the time. So as much effort as you can make to find some alternative sources of information. Some independent, non-commercial media, whether it's print, or radio or cable TV. Find that, and sharpen your critical skills so that you can think more carefully about the mainstream media.

And then in getting active, the hardest thing is starting, but you really have to just start and pick up the phone and call. Maybe at a local level first. Call that radio station that had a debate that you thought was tilted, or that local TV station that did a story that you thought was good but that you thought was so rare that you'd like them to do more of it. Just call with one personal opinion about one show or one item that you've seen and I think you might be surprised that somebody will listen to you. Perhaps they'll give you an argument but they might listen to you and recognize that you're being heard. Start small and just do a little bit around the issues that are of the most concern for you. But even when just doing that little bit you're starting to change the way you think about media. You're starting to recognize that it's not a gift that you're getting from these corporations, but that it's actually your right to communicate. It's a right and it's something that you can demand. And you can demand accountability from these media outlets that have so much power. So start where you are, start where you can, but encourage other people to stop thinking of media as something that the people have no say in, because we do.

Phillip Babich: Janine Jackson, thanks so much for joining us on Making Contact.

Janine Jackson: Thank you.

Phillip Babich: Janine Jackson is program director at FAIR. She also produces and hosts FAIR-syndicated radio program, Counter Spin.

That's it for this edition of Making Contact: A look at corporate media and freedom of the press. Thanks for listening. And special thanks this week to Keith Hente for recorded portions.

Laura Livoti is our managing director. Peggy Law is executive director. Associate producer, Stephanie Welch. Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National producer, David Barsamian. Women's desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman. Prison desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt. Production assistant, Shereen Meraji. Archivist, Din Abdullah. And I'm your host and managing producer 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. That's 800-529-5736. You can also go to our website at www.radioproject.org. That's www.radioproject.org.

Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs we'd like to hear from you.

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