1. What we can do to address the problem: Write your Congressional reps to SUPPORT the Media Ownership Reform Act of 2005, which would roll back de-regulation and restore the Fairness Doctrine:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=109x21930 :
Democrats Move to Re-Regulate Media
Do not expect the LMSM to report on this
<snip>
Two liberal House members who recently have been critical of what they view as attempts by conservative Republicans to take over America’s mass media and public broadcasting have now introduced a sweeping bill that would re-regulate radio and TV back to the days before the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
The Media Ownership Reform Act of 2005 (MORA) is co-sponsored by Reps. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y. and Diane Watson, D-Calif. In a written announcement, MORA is described as legislation “that seeks to undo the massive consolidation of the media that has been ongoing for nearly 20 years.”
The measure would restore the Fairness doctrine, reinstate a national cap on radio ownership and lower the number of radio stations a company can own in a local market. It also reinstates a 25% national television ownership cap and requires stations to submit regular public interest reports to the Federal Communications Commission.
<end of snip>
http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/189 2. More info for anyone who doubts:
Some of this is a bit dated but may be helpful by way of background.
From the Media Reform Information Center at
http://www.corporations.org/media/: In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.
In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x386840 :
Compare notes with
http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachineCompanies.htm on ownership of voting systems companies.
Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America
By Peter Phillips
July 4, 2005
Mainstream media is the term often used to describe the collective group of big TV, radio and newspapers in the United States. Mainstream implies that the news being produced is for the benefit and enlightenment of the mainstream population-the majority of people living in the US. Mainstream media include a number of communication mediums that carry almost all the news and information on world affairs that most Americans receive. The word media is plural, implying a diversity of news sources.
However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream population-nor should we consider the media as plural. Instead it is more accurate to speak of big media in the US today as the corporate media and to use the term in the singular tense-as it refers to the singular monolithic top-down power structure of self-interested news giants.
A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests. The following are but a few of the corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:
New York Times: Caryle Group, Eli Lilly, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hallmark,
Lehman Brothers, Staples, Pepsi
Washington Post: Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette,
G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, Moody's
Knight-Ridder: Adobe Systems, Echelon, H&R Block, Kimberly-Clark, Starwood Hotels
The Tribune (Chicago & LA Times): 3M, Allstate, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Kraft,
McDonalds, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Shering Plough, Wells Fargo
News Corp (Fox): British Airways, Rothschild Investments
GE (NBC): Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca-Cola, Dell, GM,
Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble,
Disney (ABC): Boeing, Northwest Airlines, Clorox, Estee Lauder, FedEx, Gillette,
Halliburton, Kmart, McKesson, Staples, Yahoo,
Viacom (CBS): American Express, Consolidated Edison, Oracle, Lafarge North America
Gannett: AP, Lockheed-Martin, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, Target,
Pepsi,AOL-Time Warner (CNN): Citigroup, Estee Lauder, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton
More:
http://globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=632http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1793284Emotional Rather blasts 'new journalism order'
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050920/tv_nm/television_rather_dc_1By Paul J. Gough
Mon Sep 19,11:11 PM ET
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.
Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent.
Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians "of every persuasion" had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a "new journalism order."
He said this pressure -- along with the "dumbed-down, tarted-up" coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics -- has taken its toll on the news business. "All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms," Rather said.
Rather was accompanied by HBO Documentary and Family president Sheila Nevins, both of whom were due to receive lifetime achievement awards at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards on Monday evening.
Nevins said that even in the documentary world, there's a certain kind of intimidation brought to bear these days, particularly from the religious right.
"If you made a movie about (evolutionary biologist Charles) Darwin now, it would be revolutionary," Nevins said. "If we did a documentary on Darwin, I'd get a thousand hate e-mails."
Nevin asked Rather if he felt the same type of repressive forces in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush administration.
"No, I do not," Rather said. That's not to say there weren't forces trying to remove him from the White House beat while reporting on Watergate; but Rather said he felt supported by everyone above him, from Washington bureau chief Bill Small to then-news president Dick Salant and CBS chief William S. Paley.
"There was a connection between the leadership and the led . . . a sense of, 'we're in this together,"' Rather said. It's not that the then-leadership of CBS wasn't interested in shareholder value and profits, Rather said, but they also saw news as a public service. Rather said he knew very little of the intense pressure to remove him in the early 1970s because of his bosses' support.
(More at link)
Here’s a good introductory article by Ted Turner, founder of CNN and chairman of Turner Enterprises, at
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0407.turner.html:My Beef With Big Media
How government protects big media--and shuts out upstarts like me.
By Ted Turner
(snip)
Today, media companies are more concentrated than at any time over the past 40 years, thanks to a continual loosening of ownership rules by Washington. The media giants now own not only broadcast networks and local stations; they also own the cable companies that pipe in the signals of their competitors and the studios that produce most of the programming. To get a flavor of how consolidated the industry has become, consider this: In 1990, the major broadcast networks--ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox--fully or partially owned just 12.5 percent of the new series they aired. By 2000, it was 56.3 percent. Just two years later, it had surged to 77.5 percent.
(snip)
Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage of what we see--and what we don't see--will be shaped by the profit motives and political interests of large, publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer, and so will the quality of our public life. Let me be clear: As a business proposition, consolidation makes sense. The moguls behind the mergers are acting in their corporate interests and playing by the rules. We just shouldn't have those rules. They make sense for a corporation. But for a society, it's like over-fishing the oceans. When the independent businesses are gone, where will the new ideas come from? We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces.
The big squeeze
In the 1970s, I became convinced that a 24-hour all-news network could make money, and perhaps even change the world. But when I invited two large media corporations to invest in the launch of CNN, they turned me down. I couldn't believe it. Together we could have launched the network for a fraction of what it would have taken me alone; they had all the infrastructure, contacts, experience, knowledge. When no one would go in with me, I risked my personal wealth to start CNN. Soon after our launch in 1980, our expenses were twice what we had expected and revenues half what we had projected. Our losses were so high that our loans were called in. I refinanced at 18 percent interest, up from 9, and stayed just a step ahead of the bankers. Eventually, we not only became profitable, but also changed the nature of news--from watching something that happened to watching it as it happened.
But even as CNN was getting its start, the climate for independent broadcasting was turning hostile. This trend began in 1984, when the FCC raised the number of stations a single entity could own from seven--where it had been capped since the 1950s--to 12. A year later, it revised its rule again, adding a national audience-reach cap of 25 percent to the 12 station limit--meaning media companies were prohibited from owning TV stations that together reached more than 25 percent of the national audience. In 1996, the FCC did away with numerical caps altogether and raised the audience-reach cap to 35 percent. This wasn't necessarily bad for Turner Broadcasting; we had already achieved scale. But seeing these rules changed was like watching someone knock down the ladder I had already climbed.
Meanwhile, the forces of consolidation focused their attention on another rule, one that restricted ownership of content. Throughout the 1980s, network lobbyists worked to overturn the so-called Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, or fin-syn, which had been put in place in 1970, after federal officials became alarmed at the networks' growing control over programming. As the FCC wrote in the fin-syn decision: "The power to determine form and content rests only in the three networks and is exercised extensively and exclusively by them, hourly and daily." In 1957, the commission pointed out, independent companies had produced a third of all network shows; by 1968, that number had dropped to 4 percent. The rules essentially forbade networks from profiting from reselling programs that they had already aired.
(snip)
First, the "competitive presence of cable" is a mirage. Broadcast networks have for years pointed to their loss of prime-time viewers to cable networks--but they are losing viewers to cable networks that they themselves own. Ninety percent of the top 50 cable TV stations are owned by the same parent companies that own the broadcast networks. Yes, Disney's ABC network has lost viewers to cable networks. But it's losing viewers to cable networks like Disney's ESPN, Disney's ESPN2, and Disney's Disney Channel. The media giants are getting a deal from Congress and the FCC because their broadcast networks are losing share to their own cable networks. It's a scam.
Second, the decision cites the "diversity-enhancing value of the Internet." The FCC is confusing diversity with variety. The top 20 Internet news sites are owned by the same media conglomerates that control the broadcast and cable networks. Sure, a hundred-person choir gives you a choice of voices, but they're all singing the same song.
(snip)
Loss of localism
Consolidation has also meant a decline in the local focus of both news and programming. After analyzing 23,000 stories on 172 news programs over five years, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that big media news organizations relied more on syndicated feeds and were more likely to air national stories with no local connection.
(snip)
Loss of localism also undercuts the public-service mission of the media, and this can have dangerous consequences. In early 2002, when a freight train derailed near Minot, N.D., releasing a cloud of anhydrous ammonia over the town, police tried to call local radio stations, six of which are owned by radio mammoth Clear Channel Communications. According to news reports, it took them over an hour to reach anyone--no one was answering the Clear Channel phone. By the next day, 300 people had been hospitalized, many partially blinded by the ammonia. Pets and livestock died. And Clear Channel continued beaming its signal from headquarters in San Antonio, Texas--some 1,600 miles away.
Loss of democratic debate
When media companies dominate their markets, it undercuts our democracy. Justice Hugo Black, in a landmark media-ownership case in 1945, wrote: "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
These big companies are not antagonistic; they do billions of dollars in business with each other. They don't compete; they cooperate to inhibit competition. You and I have both felt the impact. I felt it in 1981, when CBS, NBC, and ABC all came together to try to keep CNN from covering the White House. You've felt the impact over the past two years, as you saw little news from ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, or CNN on the FCC's actions. In early 2003, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans had heard "nothing at all" about the proposed FCC rule changes. Why? One never knows for sure, but it must have been clear to news directors that the more they covered this issue, the harder it would be for their corporate bosses to get the policy result they wanted.
A few media conglomerates now exercise a near-monopoly over television news. There is always a risk that news organizations can emphasize or ignore stories to serve their corporate purpose. But the risk is far greater when there are no independent competitors to air the side of the story the corporation wants to ignore. More consolidation has often meant more news-sharing. But closing bureaus and downsizing staff have more than economic consequences. A smaller press is less capable of holding our leaders accountable. When Viacom merged two news stations it owned in Los Angeles, reports The American Journalism Review, "field reporters began carrying microphones labeled KCBS on one side and KCAL on the other." This was no accident. As the Viacom executive in charge told The Los Angeles Business Journal: "In this duopoly, we should be able to control the news in the marketplace."
This ability to control the news is especially worrisome when a large media organization is itself the subject of a news story. Disney's boss, after buying ABC in 1995, was quoted in LA Weekly as saying, "I would prefer ABC not cover Disney." A few days later, ABC killed a "20/20" story critical of the parent company.
But networks have also been compromised when it comes to non-news programs which involve their corporate parent's business interests. General Electric subsidiary NBC Sports raised eyebrows by apologizing to the Chinese government for Bob Costas's reference to China's "problems with human rights" during a telecast of the Atlanta Olympic Games. China, of course, is a huge market for GE products.
Consolidation has given big media companies new power over what is said not just on the air, but off it as well. Cumulus Media banned the Dixie Chicks on its 42 country music stations for 30 days after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized President Bush for the war in Iraq. It's hard to imagine Cumulus would have been so bold if its listeners had more of a choice in country music stations. And Disney recently provoked an uproar when it prevented its subsidiary Miramax from distributing Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11. As a senior Disney executive told The New York Times: "It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle." Follow the logic, and you can see what lies ahead: If the only media companies are major corporations, controversial and dissenting views may not be aired at all.
Naturally, corporations say they would never suppress speech. But it's not their intentions that matter; it's their capabilities. Consolidation gives them more power to tilt the news and cut important ideas out of the public debate. And it's precisely that power that the rules should prevent.
(snip)
At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental to the survival of small, emerging companies, that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates. We've done this before: to the railroad trusts in the first part of the 20th century, to Ma Bell more recently. Indeed, big media itself was cut down to size in the 1970s, and a period of staggering innovation and growth followed. Breaking up the reconstituted media conglomerates may seem like an impossible task when their grip on the policy-making process in Washington seems so sure. But the public's broad and bipartisan rebellion against the FCC's pro-consolidation decisions suggests something different. Politically, big media may again be on the wrong side of history--and up against a country unwilling to lose its independents.
Some current stories slanted or ignored by mainstream media
From
http://www.fair.org/views.html (if you go to this web page, there are numerous links you can click on for more info):
• Nineteen Chris Matthews Show Panels in 2004 Skewed Right; Seven Skewed Left, by Katie Barge et al (Media Matters, 11/24/04). It's much more common to see conservatives without liberals than the reverse.
• Rather Quitting as CBS Anchor in Abrupt Move, by Jacques Steinberg & Bill Carter (New York Times, 11/24/04). The Times frames Dan Rather's sudden retirement from CBS Evening News--he still plans to work with 60 Minutes--in terms of a "too liberal" anchor embattled by the investigation into CBS's Bush National Guard memo fiasco; Rather says that's not the case--but nobody is discussing the more egregious journalistic history that would merit questioning of Rather's career among serious critics:
Patriotism & Censorship: Some journalists are silenced, while others seem happy to silence themselves, by Peter Hart & Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 11-12/01)
Print Media Protect Rather: Biased Afghan Coverage At CBS (Extra!, 10-11/89)
• U.S. Media Miss Rumsfeld's ''Dirty Wars'' Talk, by Jim Lobe (Inter Press Service, 11/24/04). As the Pentagon chief urges Latin American militaries to ignore human rights in the fight against ''terrorism,'' the U.S. press is mum.
Plus Bias Crimes, by Joy Press (Village Voice, 11/24/04). PBS's move towards the right continues with the departure of Bill Moyers, and the downsizing of his slightly-left-leaning show, Now; and She's Right, by Jarrett Murphy (Village Voice, 11/23/04). MSNBC moves even farther to the right, with its newest commentator: "Miss October in the 2005 Great American Conservative Women calendar"--really.
• Not Schrodinger's Cat, by Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo, 11/24/04). The Washington Post reports on the "controversial tax-return provision" in the Istook Amendment--without bothering to figure out who wrote the offensive language into the bill. See also What You Won't Learn About the "Istook Amendment" from the New York Times, by Duncan B. Black & Michael Kanick (Media Matters, 11/23/04).
• Action Alert: Arab-Bashing on MSNBC Morning Program, by Tracy Van Slyke (In These Times, 11/23/04). A week of "anti-Arab and Islamophobic remarks" on Imus in the Morning has generated two action alerts from the the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
• Stenographers to Power, by John Nichols (The Nation, 11/23/04). The British Daily Mirror asks of the U.S.: "How can 59,054,087 be so dumb?" The London Guardian answers: "Maybe it's the papers they're reading." See also No One Is Taken In by the U.S. Lies, by Rana Kabbani (London Guardian, 11/23/04). Al-Jazeera "has become more necessary than ever," even as Ayad Allawi follows U.S. lead in condemning the "channel of terrorism."
• Election Angst Update: Clark Kent Vs. the Media Wimps, by Maureen Farrell (BuzzFlash, 11/23/04). Big media take "the usual safe and tired tact" in lackluster coverage of election irregularities.
• Family of Spanish Journalist Killed by U.S. Forces in Baghdad Accuses U.S. of War Crime, by Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, 11/23/04). U.S. soldiers on trial in Spain for intentionally shooting cameraman.
• DeLay Tactic, by Zachary Roth (CJR Daily, 11/23/04). L.A. Times writer characterizes Tom DeLay's corruption and abuse of power as "hard-charging" and "bold" tactics. Plus High Stakes, by Brian Montopoli (CJR Daily, 11/23/04). Nebraska paper discloses its financial ties to voting-machine company "whenever we write about" it--but what about when they choose not to?
• Viacom, FCC Reach $3.5 Million Agreement (AP, 11/23/04). Another monumental fine for shock jock "indecency."
• Limbaugh on NBA Fight: "This Is the Hip-Hop Culture on Parade," by Andrew Seifter (Media Matters, 11/23/04). Rush confuses his racisms by then calling Detroit "New Fallujah, Michigan." Plus Tucker Carlson: "Grouchy Feminists With Mustaches" Control the Democratic Party, by Nicole Casta (Media Matters, 11/23/04).
• Kim Jong-Bush?, by Evan Derkacz, 11/23/04). Would Clear Channel have been accused of liberal bias had it erected giant billboards in homage to Bill Clinton?
• Why Does New York Times Call Casualty Count from April Fallujah Battle ''Unconfirmed'' or ''Inflated''? by Erin Olson (Editor & Publisher, 11/23/04). Public editor Daniel Okrent is looking into why the paper discounted the civilian toll. Plus Shoot the Messenger, by Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 11/23/04). Hate mail for a reporter who defended covering the reality of war.
• Clinton to ABC News: It's Payback Time, by Eric Boehlert (11/23/04). The former president takes Petter Jennings to task for ABC's particularly "sleazy" Whitewater coverage record. It has since been reported that ABC producer Chris Vlasto at that time took on a unique role as a kind of unofficial advisor to the Starr legal team as he worked behind the scenes and confronted fellow journalists who did not hew to Starr's line.
From
http://www.sfbg.com/38/42/cover_freepress.html:Invasion of the Media Snatchers
The grassroots effort to prevent more media consolidations will come to a head at an upcoming hearing in Monterey your newspapers and broadcast stations aren't telling you about. A look at the state of our "free press."
By Camille T. Taiara
THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS Commission will hold a public hearing in Monterey July 21 to help determine how well local TV and radio stations are serving their communities. It's the only such hearing for the entire West Coast – one of six nationwide – and a rare opportunity for the public to influence federal regulations on media ownership.
But if you weren't reading this article, chances are you wouldn't even know the FCC hearing is happening. The San Francisco news media – which are dominated to a profound extent by a handful of big, out-of-town corporations – have largely blacked out the story, thus illustrating the problem posed by the modern mass media.
Media democracy activists last year launched a successful – indeed, downright stunning – grassroots coup d'état. The FCC received more than two million comments about rule changes spearheaded by chair Michael Powell that would have allowed the same company to own both a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same market, raised local TV ownership caps from 35 to 45 percent of a region's viewership, and made other concessions to the industry. Almost all the comments opposed Powell's plan – and although he rammed his deregulation scheme through anyway, a federal appeals court has forced the FCC to reopen the case.
Among the court's points: the commission needs to take more account of public concern and the local impacts of media consolidations. That makes the Monterey hearing critical.
Powell relied on a dangerously flawed argument in lobbying for loosening the ownership restrictions. He claimed new technologies such as cable, satellite TV, and the Internet created heightened competition that made the old rules obsolete and imposed unfair restrictions on the economic viability of the traditional media behemoths.
The same thesis is reflected in a cover story titled "Rethinking Media Monopoly," by Will Harper, in the July 7 issue of the East Bay Express – a paper owned by SF Weekly parent company New Times, the nation's largest alternative weekly chain. Interestingly, even Harper's article made no mention of the upcoming FCC hearing.
But a closer look reveals trends whose implications undercut the logic of Powell, Harper, and other big-media apologists:
• Five giants – AOL/Time Warner, Walt Disney Co./ABC, Viacom, News Corp., and Bertelsmann – now control the equivalent of what 50 corporations dominated 20 years ago, according to The New Media Monopoly, the latest edition of renowned media critic Ben Bagdikian's book. Those five already control more than 80 percent of prime-time programming.
• The vast majority of Americans – 54 percent – still rely on television for their news. Only 8 percent look to the Internet as their primary news source, and half of those sites are owned by the top media giants, according to media watchdog group Free Press.
• Corporate control of cable and satellite TV is even more striking, with monopolies representing 98 percent of all cable markets nationwide, and two companies controlling satellite TV.
• The FCC – which is now heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists and myopic free marketeers – has consistently strengthened the grip powerful media conglomerates have on what Americans see, hear, and read with moves such as handing the digital spectrum to current TV station owners for free five years ago (a gift worth $80 billion at the time) and fighting low-power FM radio stations.
• If the past is any indication, any independent new media outlet that begins to garner a reasonable audience will almost certainly get overtaken by traditional media conglomerates – as seen when Time Warner merged with AOL.
Those on the inside see the flaws in Powell's premise. A study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported in April 2000 that "73 percent of journalists believe that buyouts of news organizations by big, diversified corporations has a negative effect on journalism."
And if you want a clear indication of why media consolidation is such a disaster, you don't have to look any further than San Francisco.
Tuning out the public
In San Francisco today, Clear Channel and Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting own a grand total of 16 radio stations available on the local dial. None of the major TV stations are locally owned. And one daily – Hearst Corp.'s San Francisco Chronicle – dominates the newspaper market.
As in the rest of the nation, the most drastic consequences of media consolidation can be seen in radio.
"San Francisco played a pioneering role in radio during the 1960s and 1970s," characterized by a rich diversity of locally produced news and information and a healthy range of noncommercial music, KALW-FM general manager Nicole Sawaya told the Bay Guardian.
Then came the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated radio and allowed two companies to gobble up stations and transform the industry. Clear Channel grew from 40 stations nationwide to 1,240 – yet the company operates with only 200 employees, according to Bagdikian's latest findings.
This is the same Clear Channel that overwhelms the national airwaves with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura. It's the same Clear Channel that fired popular local DJ Davey D after he interviewed Rep. Barbara Lee on the air; that blacklisted the Dixie Chicks and 160 songs following Sept. 11, 2001; and that refuses to accept liberal political ads on its radio stations and billboards.
Today Clear Channel and Infinity control almost 50 percent of San Francisco's radio market share – as well as most of the city's billboard concessions and many of the region's large concert venues.
And while Clear Channel benefited from economies of scale, its local stations and listeners felt the repercussions: shared top-level management (with multiple stations being operated out of the same building), voice tracking (a practice by which an announcer in one part of the country prerecords content for large numbers of radio stations and ads in sound bites to make it seem as if he or she is transmitting locally), centralized news and information feeds, nationally syndicated talk shows, and mass-produced music.
In fact, at least one local station features no locally originated programming whatsoever: Infinity-owned KBAY-FM simply airs the exact same content as KBAA-FM, an Infinity-owned station in San Jose, according to Andy Baker, broadcast director at the San Francisco office of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).
"Progressive deregulation has eviscerated the radio news business," Larry Bensky, a 35-year veteran of Bay Area radio, told us. (Bensky also teaches media studies at Stanford University and Cal State Hayward and hosts KPFA-FM's Sunday Salon.) Whereas 20 or 30 years ago, most stations had full-time news staff, "maybe 10 percent of the jobs that once existed in radio news still exist," he said. Nationally syndicated – and overwhelmingly right-wing, reactionary – talk shows have since taken the place of many locally produced shows.
(snip)
Stanford University's Grade the News similarly found that the mainstream news failed horribly to inform local audiences of the issues and campaigns leading up to the 2002 elections. In a study of local newspaper and TV campaign coverage during two of the three weeks leading up to the election, the group found that none of the region's top five TV stations provided any analysis whatsoever of claims made in political ads – which by nature tend to be one-sided and leave out critical information. Instead the stations relied on those ads in their coverage without bothering to investigate whether the claims they made were true, and in some cases they granted more air time to the ads than to elections news. "In 2002 ... political campaigns spent $34 million on advertising in the Bay Area market, according to the Alliance for Better Campaigns, a public-interest research organization in Washington, D.C.," Grade the News' Michael Stoll wrote.
Parallel convergence trends can be found among local print media, too, in which multiple papers owned by the same parent company share top management and even staff positions. Grade the News recently discovered that the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times have been running the same stories by a half-dozen reporters assigned to parent company Knight-Ridder's Sacramento bureau. Yet both papers claim those writers as staff.
It's a trend that's become all too common, said local Newspaper Guild representative Erin Tyson Poh. Poh points to Denver-based William Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group, which owns 22 dailies throughout northern California, as a prime example. "You have fewer voices than previously, when those papers were separate and less clustered," she said. "The San Mateo County Times, Hayward Daily Review, Fremont Argus, Tri-Valley Herald
(which is also the San Ramon Valley Herald), the Oakland Tribune, and, well, there used to be the Alameda Times-Star, which is now just an edition of the Oakland Trib – all share reporters. So you can pick up any one of their papers or look at their Web sites and they'll be carrying the same stories. They also share stories on a less frequent basis with the Marin Independent Journal and the Vallejo Times-Herald. And those reporters will be identified as staff reporters."
Wrong direction
The overwhelming majority of analysts and industry insiders we spoke to expressed grave concerns about the profit motive taking precedence over the public interest in our nation's media policy. "News is a business whose job it is to occasionally offend its customers," Grade the News director John McManus told us. Yet large media companies' increasingly diversified business holdings have made the mainstream outlets less willing to challenge corporate misdeeds.
Meanwhile, small, independently owned media are squeezed out by conglomerates, and limited budgets make it difficult for public outlets to compete. In the end, critical voices are lost and our democracy suffers.
But these same analysts say it doesn't have to be this way. They point to Canada and the U.K. – which provide plenty of public funding for media and have erected a firewall around the industry that helps maintain its independence from economic and political pressures – as examples of systems that more closely serve the greater good.
It's with such models in mind that local activists are now gearing up to make their case in front of the FCC July 21. The time has come, they say, to take the nation's corporate media behemoths to task.
The following is from http://www.bmedia.org/archives/00000296.php, as reported by Salon:
TV networks keep mum on FCC media consolidation vote
Thursday, May 22, 2003 @ 3:28AM EST
On June 2, <2003> the Federal Communications Commission will make a decision that will probably radically change how Americans receive their news. But if, like most people, you rely on television as your primary information source, chances are you haven't heard a word about it.
At stake are the current rules on how many different properties a media conglomerate can own. Eager to create new economic efficiencies, media companies such as Viacom, AOL Time Warner and the Tribune Co. have been pressing the FCC for years to relax limits on cross-ownership on such things as TV stations and newspapers in the same city. Meanwhile Congress has held several high-profile hearings discussing the likely ramifications of the FCC's decision to invite greater media consolidation.
But to date, most network and cable news operations have all but ignored the story; a story their parent companies have taken extraordinary interest in and spent millions of dollars paying lobbyists to make a reality. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the two television news operations most reluctant to cover the FCC debate -- CBS and Fox -- are owned by the two media conglomerates with the most to gain from a lenient FCC ruling: Viacom and the News Corp.
"The broadcast media has been absolutely atrocious on this issue," says Robert McChesney, author of "Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communications Politics in Dubious Times." "The coverage has been virtually nonexistent."
The claim of a news blackout was recently boosted by a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, which found 72 percent of Americans had heard "nothing at all" about the possible change in media ownership rules.
"That's pretty pathetic," complains one Democratic Hill source who has been working on the consolidation issue. "The press has an obligation to inform."
What's frustrating for consumer advocates and others is that the current coverage of the FCC debate simply reinforces the concerns they have about how Americans get their news, and what happens when fewer and fewer media companies control the flow of information. "The deep irony is there's a concern that media companies already control too much of the news, yet the public today is not being informed about a decision that media companies would benefit from," says Michael Bracy, director of government relations for the Future of Music Coalition, which opposes relaxing ownership limits.
Why the silence? "There is a certain amount of self-censorship for broadcast networks," suggests Peter Hart, media analyst for the left-leaning advocacy group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. "Reporters and editors understand you have to be careful about what you're going to put on the air" when the story involves the business preferences of the parent company. Skeptics suggest that if the story dealt with the imminent deregulation of the pharmaceutical or telephone industry, news outlets would find a way to cover it more thoroughly.
(snip)
And according to most press accounts, the outcome at the FCC has already been determined, with the three Republican FCC commissioners committed to a yes vote on easing ownership limits, and the two Democratic commissioners opposing the change. Come June 2, the FCC is expected to overturn decade-old rules and allow one company to own both a newspaper and a television station in the same market, acquire many more local affiliate stations, and own up to three TV stations in a single large market. The FCC is expected, however, to retain the rule forbidding any two of America's four broadcast networks from merging.
The bottom line is that one company could own television, radio and newspaper outlets in the same market. And, in theory, NBC could purchase Gannett and become the country's largest newspaper publisher.
Critics say a better time for the press to begin informing the public about the consequences of the rule changes, as well as the grassroots campaign being waged against them, would have been at the end of February, when the FCC held its only scheduled public hearing on the ownership issue. None of the networks covered the event, nor did the cable outlets, and neither did the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, the Hartford Courant, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Constitution, the Miami Herald, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Arizona Republic, the San Diego Tribune, the Portland Oregonian, the Denver Post, the Kansas City Star, the Indianapolis Star or the Detroit Free Press.
Not all those newspaper are owned by conglomerates in favor of lifting the ownership caps, but the laundry list does illustrate how little attention the mainstream press was giving the story while the commission was actually wrestling with the specifics.
"Napoleon said it's not necessary to censor the news -- it's sufficient to delay the news until it no longer matters," notes Norm Solomon, author of "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in the Mainstream News."
Additional coverage after June 3 "will be too little, too late," complains Elizabeth Ellis, publisher of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn. She wrote a column earlier this year complaining that the Tribune Co., which owns two television stations as well as the major newspaper in nearby Hartford, was "withholding news about even as Tribune is lobbying furiously" to get cross-ownership rules repealed.
"Mum's the word," Ellis tells Salon. "Media companies don't want the public to understand what the story is because there is no public benefit to it. Media companies simply want to increase profits and decrease competition."
The Hartford Courant's ombudsman wrote a column refuting Ellis' charge of withholding information. But it wasn't the first time the daily has had to answer charges the paper was putting corporate concerns about media ownership before independent coverage.
During the 2000 presidential debate, the Courant's editorial page, which had been dependably liberal throughout the 1990s, stunned its readers by endorsing George Bush, in part because he was more "likable." Local radio talk show hosts, as well as some of the readers who flooded the paper with angry letters, suggested the Courant's publisher, Jack Davis, who made the final endorsement call, did so in hopes that a Bush administration would ease the ownership limits, which the Tribune Co. so badly wants. Davis denied the charge at the time, but did stress, "Al Gore has been an obstacle to fair treatment of the cross-ownership question." (President Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but only after stripping out many of the cross-ownership provisions the FCC now wants to implement. Clinton told an administration official he never could have been elected governor of Arkansas if the state's largest newspaper owner had been allowed to run television stations in Little Rock, too.)
One of the major rules under consideration by the FCC is whether to lift the 35 percent cap on station affiliates. Currently, a network cannot own so many individual television stations that they collectively reach more than 35 percent of the U.S. television audience. Both Viacom and News Corp. are in violation of that 35 percent cap and will have to sell off profitable stations in local markets if the FCC does not relax the ownership limits. That's why Viacom's president, Mel Karmazin, was up on the Capitol Hill last week testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee, and why earlier this year News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch personally lobbied FCC commissioners, urging them to relax the ownership cap.
Yet according to a search of the LexisNexis electronic database of news transcripts, neither CBS News (home to such well-known programs as "Early Morning," "CBS Evening News With Dan Rather," "48 Hours," "Face the Nation," "60 Minutes" and "60 Minutes II"), or Fox News ("The Big Show With John Gibson," "Special Report With Brit Hume" and "The O'Reilly Factor") have run a single segment about the pending issue of media consolidation.
(snip)
Interestingly, three times during a four-month span in which the commission was working through the new rules, FCC Chairman Michael Powell appeared on Fox News' "Your World," hosted by Neil Cavuto. Not once though, did Cavuto ask Powell about the issue of media consolidation, which Cavuto's boss, Murdoch, has taken such a keen interest in.
(snip)
Perhaps it's telling that the news program that has devoted the most time and resources to covering the FCC debate doesn't air on commercial television: Bill Moyers' "Now," the weekly public affairs program on PBS. "Now" has returned to the topic time and again, often bringing a critical perspective. "There's Bill Moyers and there's nobody else," quips the Democratic staffer.
Moyers' persistence seems to have annoyed the leading congressional crusader for media concentration, Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La. Appearing on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" earlier this month, Tauzin, who has been a relentless champion of widespread media deregulation, teed off on Moyers in an unusually personal way. "We know that Moyers, regardless of how many Emmys or other awards he's won, has gone from being a respected journalist to being a crusader for liberal causes," he told O'Reilly, whose program regularly attacks Moyers on the air.
The next day, Moyers' "Now" called Tauzin's office to invite the congressman to appear on the PBS show to continue the debate. Tauzin declined.
Others have run into troubles when trying to broach the topic of media concentration. Author Norm Solomon says not long ago he was a radio talk show guest on KFI in Los Angeles, a Clear Channel station, when the topic of runaway media consolidation came up. Solomon cited Clear Channel by name: It's the largest radio operator in the country and has come under strong criticism for the effect that its consolidation of control has had over radio and large parts of the music industry. It wasn't until later in the program, when a listener called in to complain about Solomon's answer getting bleeped off the air, that he realized his response had never been broadcast. A station engineer, apparently anxious about the Clear Channel reference, muted his on-air critique.
"That says something about the climate for discussion today," says Solomon.
Some other good sites with charts or other info:
http://www.freepress.net/ownership/
http://www.freepress.net/ownership/resources.php
http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html
http://www.mediachannel.org/new/
http://www.mediachannel.org/ownership/chart.shtml
http://www.openairwaves.org/telecom/default.aspx
Good introduction re- tv station ownership—but the rule revisions described as proposed or under review, which would allow even greater consolidation—have been adopted by the FCC since this was written, despite the greatest volume in FCC history of public comment opposing the changes.
Current status of the pending FCC rule changes:
From: http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=192086
Media Consolidation
Common Cause members, along with more than 3 million Americans, rallied to overturn the ill-conceived media ownership rules that were promulgated by the FCC in June 2003. Efforts in Congress to overturn the rules continue and Common Cause members have bird-dogged the issue at every turn.
While Congress has yet to overturn the rules, the US District Court in Philadelphia handed media reformers a huge victory. The court told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it had to reconsider its sweeping deregulation of media ownership. The court also said it would block the FCC from implementing any of its new media ownership rules -- approved June 2, 2003, despite major public opposition -- until the agency comes up with a better justification for approving the rules, or modifies the rules based on the court's opinion.
If the relaxed ownership rules had been allowed to go into effect, they would have allowed one corporation to own the local newspaper, up to three TV stations, up to eight radio stations, and the local cable system in one media market. That would severely limit the number of voices and independent sources of news and information on the airwaves, a real threat to an informed democracy.
FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein called the decision a "vindication for the vast majority of the American public who opposed these rule changes." FCC Commissioner Michael Copps agreed, noting that it demonstrates that the "rush to media consolidation approved by the FCC last June <2003> was wrong as a matter of law and policy."
The FCC must come up with new rules, and Common Cause, working with a broad coalition of media reform groups, is continuing to make the case against media consolidation.
From http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/tncs/mergers/0602cronkite.htm:
Media Consolidation and Corporate Power
An Interview with Walter Cronkite and Others
June 2, 2003
On June 2, the FCC will undertake the most massive reexamination of media ownership rules in the agency’s history. Their decisions will have profound implications on how Americans get their news and information, and from which sources. In an exclusive interview for WorldLink TV’s The Active Opposition: Your New$ and the Bottom Line, Walter Cronkite, dean of American broadcasting, explored the impact of media consolidation, including why, since the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the number of major U.S. news organizations has shrunk to six.
Hosted by film and television actor and activist Peter Coyote, Your New$ and the Bottom Line also featured a panel of media experts including: Jeff Chester, author and director of the Teledemocracy Project, a D.C. media watchdog group; Michael Parenti, author and media critic; David Honig, Director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Counsel and Adam Thierer from the CATO institute. The show was part of WorldLink TV’s The Active Opposition series, which features public figures who are actively involved in the national policy debate and is produced by Stephen Olsson in the network’s San Francisco studios. Your News $ TheBottom Line is available via streaming video at www.worldlinktv.org .
WorldLink TV, a nationwide public satellite television network offering a global perspective on world events, issues and cultures. Its programs air on DirectTV channel 375 and Dish Network channel 9410 and are selectively streamed on the Internet. WorldLink TV’s primetime programming consists of documentaries on global and domestic issues, investigative reports on the environment and human rights, as well as current affairs series, foreign feature films and the best of World Music. The network’s daytime hours are often devoted to international news programming, including television news reports from national broadcasters in the Middle East, presented with English translation.
PETER COYOTE- Good evening and welcome to the Active Opposition, tonight we’re presenting a national story which our corporate media has chosen to largely ignore, the consolidation of media ownership in America and how that affects what news and information we are allowed to receive.
(Much more at link)
The consolidation of ownership of Internet providers should not be taken lightly. From http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/stories.php?story=03/11/26/5488520:
AT&T Wireless Blocks Employees’ Access to News Stories About Offshoring
By D. David Beckman, WashTech News
AT&T Wireless is now tracking all Internet browsing by its employees, at one point last week even blocking access to online media stories that were perceived by company officials as critical of its offshoring activities.
Employees reported last Thursday that when they attempted to read online news reports about AT&T Wireless offshoring activities on The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Web sites, a blocking alert appeared on their Web browsers warning them that access to those stories was blocked.
"Warning Notice," the alert reads. "You have attempted to access a site that has been deemed inappropriate by our business and blocked from ALL internal access. A record of this request has been logged and will be provided to Business Security upon request."
Below the message, in capital letters, a line reads, "PLEASE REFRAIN FROM ANY FURTHUR ATTEMPTS!"
Company employees who spoke to WashTech News on the condition that they would not be identified said that currently navigating from their work computer to any Internet site that carries news reports critical of AT&T Wireless produces a similar alert, but the sites are now accessible.
"It really makes you feel like Big Brother is watching," said one employee. "It's intimidating."
Last Wednesday (Nov. 19) WashTech News and the Wall Street Journal published stories detailing how AT&T Wireless is reducing its domestic IT workforce, and forcing many current employees to train their foreign replacements. Internal company documents obtained by WashTech News show that the replacements are employees of Indian offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, Ltd.
The following day (Nov. 20), the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times newspapers published similar stories.
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