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The Real Conflict Of Interest
The final installment of a 3-part series on the propriety of journalists making political campaign contributions.
By John Wydra
WydeWorld.com
07/01/07
In his in-depth and very detailed article published on June 21st, MSNBC investigative reporter, Bill Dedman profiled 143 print and broadcast journalists, myself among them, who were on record with the Federal Election Commission as having given political campaign donations in recent years, www.politics.msnbc.com. Some went to entities like the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. Some went to individual candidates. With few exceptions, the donations averaged in the hundreds of dollars each. With few exceptions, journalists are not flush with cash. However, the companies they work for are.
Many of the individuals who responded to Dedman’s story expressed shock and outrage on learning individual journalists make such donations. Perhaps they would be apoplectic and enraged if they were to consider the real problem in the media’s conflict of interest imbroglio.
Here’s a proposition for Mr. Dedman. Since he so thoroughly and expertly applied his impressive investigative reporting skills to exposing the ethical questions involving individual journalists, then I challenge him to do the same with the corporate owners of the stations and papers those journalists work for. I would like to see Mr. Dedman do as thorough an investigation of media conglomerates, including the owners of his employer, MSNBC and lets see where the real ethical lapses, where the real influence compromises are.
I have previously acknowledged there is an ethical problem raised by personal donations from reporters, but I invite a comparison of those paltry contributions to the huge, unchecked and largely ignored influence peddling by their employers. I am certainly not excusing or dismissing the former, but the ethical problems posed by the latter are of tectonic scale.
Corporate media conglomerates are hardly profiles in liberalism, yet the loud mouths on the right blame “the liberal media” for everything wrong with the country and they repeat it ad nauseam. Corporate media conglomerates now own nearly all media outlets, print and broadcast and their expansion around the globe has been breathtaking. When those on the right belly-ache about the “liberal media” it takes on a level of farce and absurdity that would have made Moliere envious. What’s the difference? Let’s distill it this way. For every liberal reporter's $200 donation to say the DNC, there is at least a $1-million lobbying or campaign contribution made to mostly conservative candidates or causes by the multi-media company he or she works for. By necessity, with the change of power in Congress, those corporate “investments” are shifting to the left.
In those instances where certain media “clamped down” on journalists making such donations, there was no clamping down on the big companies employing them, media giants making far larger contributions, distributing in-kind favors, like publishing literarily suspect or worthless books by some members of Congress, funding influential and productive lobbying efforts, and most troubling of all, deliberately skewing their news product as a means to an end. I refer you to Paul Krugman’s op-ed piece in the June 29th edition of the New York Times, “The Murdoch Factor” as well as to the Times front page story of June 25th entitled “An Empire Builder, Still Playing Tough” profiling the huge media empire of Rupert Murdoch, both at www.nytimes.com.
Murdoch and others who control such huge media conglomerates have perfected a tail-wags-the-dog scenario where rules meant to govern their enterprises are not only bent, but melted down and re-cast as corporate-friendly. Oversight is overlooked at the FCC, and in the mad rush to embrace the gift of globalization to multi-nationals, the policy of anti-trust, which began with Teddy Roosevelt’s crusade to control corporate greed and exploitation, is now a mere quaint historical afterthought. As the sanctions and governance were removed, corporate greed and exploitation re-emerged to a level in contemporary America unimagined by the robber-barons of Teddy’s time.
The irony of it all is that in the most technologically-advanced society in history, we are becoming increasingly deprived of relevant information. And if you think the internet is a salvation, just remember that with the exception of a few remaining responsible mainstream media, anyone can say anything on it with no editorial or traditional journalistic oversight.
The FCC’s ownership policy, minutes-per-hour commercial limitations, and the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” all attempted to address the general problems of bias and access, but it was all dismantled over time with the appointments of media conglomerate-friendly commissioners like Michael son-of-Colin Powell doing great damage to the Commission‘s “mission statement.” An agency that is supposed to regulate media business practices has been reduced to lapdog status, more interested in policing potty mouths than in enforcing its central mandate, which is to fairly regulate the broadcast industry.
Gone are the days of community access. Public service requirements to sustain a broadcast license are passé. The FCC is now little more than a rubber stamp for the only true interests of a smaller but increasingly powerful number of station owners, namely bottom lines and mergers and acquisitions. In principal, and I’m always amazed when people don’t believe me when I tell them this, the airwaves belong to the public. That’s what the licensure and oversight procedures were meant to represent, the public interest.
On the technical side, from the lowest of frequencies assigned to underwater communication, to the highest microwaves that butt up against the very spectrum of light itself, the FCC has done a remarkable job of delineating and enforcing frequency assignments. But when it comes to the product side, it has gone deaf, dumb and blind. It has allowed media giants like Clear Channel Communications, www.clearchannel.com and Sinclair Broadcast Group, www.sbgi.net to gobble up local stations and use those public property licenses as cash cows, with little or no accountability, zero community access, and where public relations is disguised as public service.
(In April, Clear Channel agreed to sell its 56 television stations in 24 markets to Providence Equity Partners Inc. for $1.2-billion. Providence, www.provequity.com owns $21-billion worth of media-related companies in 20 countries, including Metro Goldwyn Mayer and YES, the Yankees Entertainment Sports Network. Clear Channel is also in the process of divesting itself of over half of its 1,200-plus radio stations. Its subsidiary, Premiere Radio Inc., www.premiereradio.com, syndicates 90 radio programs and services to more than 4,600 radio affiliates. Local shows and formats have been replaced by generic pre-packaged programs. Among its syndicated programs is the Rush Limbaugh Show. Sinclair owns 62 TV stations in 36 markets accounting for 25% of total US audience, and gained notoriety when it refused to carry a Ted Koppel Nightline program on its ABC affiliated stations where Koppel simply read the names of those military members killed in Iraq. In Orwellian doublespeak, Sinclair said it was anti-patriotic.)
It’s all about entertainment. Most radio station news rooms, such as they were, disappeared long ago, and with them a once taken-for-granted source of information, no matter how terse. About all that’s left are about a dozen all-news radio stations nationwide. Small and medium market newspapers have made sometimes draconian cuts in reporting staff, fewer people sent out to cover fewer stories. Hundreds of local papers have shut down. Much of this was driven by an increasing disinterest in reading or learning about current events that matter. Television “news” emulates People Magazine, not the New York Times. Oh, and please do not say that talk radio is news. Talk radio is to news as Paris Hilton is to fine art.
One interesting fact is that although the broadcast media had the FCC watchdog, which has now been rendered toothless, the print media historically had no such oversight. The reason was always framed in a free-speech posit. A problem has evolved in that giant media companies now own both stations and papers. Corporate owners understandably ask…if our newspapers aren’t regulated, why should our stations be?
One of the first relaxations rendered by the FCC was a rule to not allow one company to own more than one outlet in any given market. Expediency soon eclipsed the old-fashioned idea of fair access and public service requirements, and it’s been all downhill ever since. As the media corporations were allowed to swallow up all the papers and stations they wanted, the purpose-driven “synergies” that are required in all M&A’s and consolidations led to inevitable and preordained cuts in staffing and other economies. That translated into severe reductions in the coverage of news or community events, and when coupled with the corporate media’s profit-driven entertainment modus-operandi, we have been left with an American public nearly totally uninformed about all but the most grave of issues or the most pithy of interests.
The result is that America is both the best entertained and the worst informed in history. It’s a classic catch-22. The more we are entertained by the media, the less interested we are to seek relevant information from the media. News has morphed into “infotainment.“ I think one of the best examples is CNN’s “Headline News.” It was originally conceived as a get-to-the point news program for busy people who wanted to stay in touch with the world. Now its celebrity-oriented fluff and puff where the only mainstream story of any importance that makes its rundown is violent in nature, ie school shootings, hurricanes or roadside bombings in Iraq.
Or how about the coverage of the 2004 major party political conventions? The “big 3.” CBS, NBC, and ABC all decided, for the first time, to skip in-depth coverage, explaining that since the conventions have now become merely coronations of already decided upon candidates and platforms, why bother? Good point. But the real reason was more fundamental. They didn’t want to lose big audiences and big ad dollars generated by their entertainment programs on those nights. CSI was more important than the GOP.
Any wonder then that those elected to public office are usually the ones with the best song and dance, not the best ideas? In today’s America, Abraham Lincoln would be laughed off the public stage. Perhaps someone in his leadership image is out there somewhere, someone this nation desperately needs, but as certain as Lincoln was gangly and awkward, his contemporary is unknown, unrecognizable and unelectable.
It is stupid to suggest that media companies cannot make money. The problem is their central “mission statement” is just that, making money and making investors happy. That tunnel vision comes at a price. Public access, accountability, fairness, objectivity, and yes, even the truth have all taken a back seat to the single-minded pursuit of profits. In nearly every conglomerate media’s case, there is no argument framed in terms of journalistic integrity, responsibility or any ethical question of what stories to report. The argument is almost always now framed in terms of return on investment. Oh there are policies written and memos posted about “journalistic integrity” and being “fair and balanced,” but its obfuscation, wallpaper, pro forma exercise meant to resemble interest in journalistic principles. Late in my career I worked for a news director who actually put out a memo to the staff that said, and this is not an exact quote, but close: “We have to give the public the impression we’re giving them the news.”
In sum, the so-called news business has been downsized, sanitized, homogenized and, in the genre of talk-radio, radicalized. It serves less the purpose of public interest and more the purpose of making money. It has less and less to do with the necessary flow of relevant information to sustain a democracy, and more and more to do with ensuring the flow of money to sustain and expand big business. What the FCC used to enforce, an equilibrium between public access and profit-making, is gone.
As this anti-information bias expands, it imperils us. How easy it was to offer phony and unchallenged information to launch an unjust war in Iraq. How easy it was to exploit unknown threats in the wake of 9/11 and frame them in the all-encompassing theatre of fear. How easy it was to make the argument for huge tax cuts supposedly for everyone’s benefit that turned out to benefit only the well-off few. How easy it was to sell the Prescription Drug Plan or Part D of Medicare as a benefit for seniors, when it was written by and directly benefits insurance companies and health care providers.
How easy it also is, given enough money, to mount campaigns for office by people we know little or nothing about, beyond what their campaign managers want us to know. (I ran for US Congress once. I know how it works.) How easy it is to conceal what they really think about anything substantive. In politics, its called “spin” and a compliant or emasculated media does little or nothing to challenge it, sometimes because it can’t and sometimes because it won’t. In the days leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and in the weeks and months afterward, the White House press corps swallowed that spin like so much lunch meat.
In George Orwell’s world of “1984,” it was the radical notion of Big Brother government thought control. In contemporary America, Big Brother isn’t the government, although some people have reason to think so, given for instance, the Bush War on Terror doctrine of spying on Americans. No, Big Brother is conglomerate media providing entertainment-driven distraction, giving you less and less relevant information to think about and more and more thoughtless drivel. Others have said it before. It’s the process of dumbing-down America.
There is no better proof than how George W. Bush got elected, twice. America responds to visceral manipulations and abstractions, not to reason, not to comprehension. The preeminent casualty… is the truth.
John Wydra |
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