How power shapes the news

Fear & Favor 2004 — FAIR's Fifth Annual Report
How power shapes the news

Extra! March/April 2005

By Peter Hart and Julie Hollar

“We can get five reporters a month to do news stories about your product. If you want to be interviewed by 10 to 20 reporters per month, we can arrange that, too. . . . Media Relations, Inc. has placed tens of thousands of news stories on behalf of more than 1,000 clients.

—Media Relations, Inc. solicitation


The PR agency’s promises are a stark reminder that the news is, in many ways, a collision of different interests. The traditional tenets of journalism are challenged and undermined by other factors: Advertisers demand “friendly copy,” while other commercial interests work to place news items that serve the same function as advertising. Media owners exert pressure to promote the parent company’s self-interest. Powerful local and national interests demand softball treatment. And government power is exerted to craft stories, influence content—and even to make up phony “news” that can be passed off as the real thing.

Journalists, on the whole, understand these pressures all too well. A survey of media workers by four industry labor unions (Media Professionals and Their Industry, 7/20/04) found respondents concerned about “pressure from advertisers trying to shape coverage” as well as “outside control of editorial policy.” In May, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a survey of media professionals that found reporters concerned about how bottom-line pressures were affecting news quality and integrity. In their summary of the report, Bill Kovach, Tom Rosensteil and Amy Mitchell wrote that journalists “report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of the newsroom.”

The Fear & Favor report is an attempt to illustrate this growing encroachment on journalism with real examples that have been made public—not an exhaustive list by any means, but a reminder that such pressures exist, and that reporters serve the best interests of citizens and the journalistic profession by coming forward with their own accounts.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2486

That is a situation that plays into the hands of disinformation specialists like John Poindexter who can call any PR firm to place a manufactured news item in any of our major print media like WSJ or NYT or WaPO as he admitted during the Iran-Contra hearings.