'A Broadcasting Operation Washes the Hand of the Owning Corporation’

March 25, 2016

CounterSpin interview with Ben Bagdikian on media monopoly
By Janine Jackson

Janine Jackson interviewed Ben Bagdikian about media monopoly for CounterSpin in August 1995. CounterSpin reaired the interview as part of its March 18, 2016, show. This is a lightly edited transcript.



Journalist Ben Bagdikian died March 11 at age 96. He was a crucial influence on FAIR’s work, not only for his classic book The Media Monopoly, now called The New Media Monopoly and in its seventh printing, but also for the spirited journalism that preceded that work, including pushing the Pentagon Papers into print and going undercover as an inmate at a maximum security prison, and all the thoughtful, humanistic work that followed. He was a friend to us, and we’ll miss him.

CounterSpin spoke with Bagdikian in August 1995. Here’s that conversation.

Janine Jackson: Welcome to CounterSpin.

Ben Bagdikian: I’m glad to be on it.

JJ: One ironic point about Disney’s takeover of ABC to form this mega-corporation is that ABC itself was created in 1943 because NBC was forced to split off some of its stations, those that then became ABC. The courts, as you know, forced them to do that because they were concerned about too much concentration in media ownership. What is it that’s changed between now and then?

BB: Well, I think that your harking back to ’43 is very interesting on the point you mentioned. But also because when, finally, ABC was an independent service, it was proposed to be bought by the man who at the time owned Lifesavers candies. And the FCC at that time, a very different body from today, said that couldn’t be the purchaser, because the purchaser had shown prejudice against unions and therefore would not be a good broadcaster, because of that prejudice against an important part of American society.

So that—now what’s happened since then, especially in the ’80s, and now in a headlong dash in this Congress, is to wipe out all regulation that protects consumers, and, in the case of broadcasting, permits diversity and provides some kind of public service requirement for broadcasters.

JJ: Now, one question that we’ve been being asked lately at FAIR, and it may sound very strange, is people have been saying, Well, what exactly is wrong with so-called vertical integration? What’s wrong with having the same entity control the distribution network and the programming or the content? What’s the danger involved there?

BB: Well, if you control the gate to the only well in town, you can charge whatever you want, or you can deny access to whomever you want. And if you have a water company that distributes water in the community, you let them in and you then have something like a monopoly, and you can have the dirtiest water at the highest prices and there will be very little choice. And so that’s the problem, is that a monopoly or near-monopoly permits you to control the quality, including downward, and control the price, including upward.

JJ: Now, we’ve also heard the idea that, well, in the case of Disney and ABC, apart from ABC News, we’re really talking about just entertainment, it’s just entertainment and who really cares if ABC is now flooded with Disney product. And what’s your response to that notion that we needn’t worry about it because it’s really just entertainment issues?

BB: Well, first of all, if it affects ABC News, what Disney, the Disney connection, replaces or keeps silent means that there’s some things that don’t get reported that might otherwise. But also, there’s no such thing as just entertainment when it’s on a powerful medium like national television. It is not just entertainment. It socializes; it is a major socializing agent, along with family, schools, religious organizations, a socializer of each generation. And those entertainment values, whether it’s sex and violence or compassion and cooperation, help form every generation’s public values.

JJ: What about the concrete effects on news coverage?

BB: Well, it remains to be seen whether Disney has some embarrassing corporate problem, which it has had in the past, that becomes a matter of public concern, and whether ABC reports it thoroughly and without bias. We do know that, after General Electric bought NBC, that at one point when there was some stock ups and downs, the head of General Electric, Mr. Welch, called the head of NBC News, Larry Grossman, and said, “I hope you are not going to have anything on the news that will affect GE stock.”

So we’ve already had a demonstration that a big company with many interests, including nuclear power and so forth, that owns a news outlet, that they are very conscious of what the news says about them. The owners can have an effect and usually have not been loathe to try to control it, either by individual items or getting rid of an executive in charge of news who doesn’t remember that one hand washes the other in corporate life, and a broadcasting operation washes the hand of the owning corporation.

JJ: Let me ask you this finally, Ben Bagdikian. New York Times reporter William Glaberson, in a “Week in Review” piece on July 30, said—he was writing about the Gannett/Multimedia deal, and he said:

Not long ago, sales of newspapers to business behemoths had journalists and critics anguishing loudly about concentration of media power in a few grasping hands. Yet Gannett’s purchase of Multimedia barely provoked a peep of protest.

What’s your response to the notion that these current media mergers are going on with no protest whatsoever?

BB: Well, there are protests. There are protests by various consumer groups and others who are concerned with diversity in the society and the media. But they don’t seem to make much of a headline in the standard news, which is what notifies the public that there’s a problem. So what we are—increasingly we’re trapped, because those who can tell us what’s going on have a stake in not telling us what’s going on, or what its consequences may be.

JJ: That was Ben Bagdikian speaking with me 21 years ago. His message to his students was quoted in his New York Times obituary:

Never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you or to your editor or to your sources or to your friends or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.

http://fair.org/home/a-broadcasting-operation-washes-the-hand-of-the-owning-corporation/