From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: rec.mag
Subject: The Media Monopoly (part 4)
Date: 5 Oct 1992 00:40:32 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

/* Written  5:38 pm  Sep 24, 1992 by bfrg9732@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu in cdp:alt.activism */
/* ---------- "The Media Monopoly (part 4)" ---------- */

The Media Monopoly

by Ben H. Bagdikian

Part 4 -- Information as a Corporate By-Product

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"One hand washes the other."
	      -- Old Country Saying


In the early 1970s Warner Modular, a minor subsidiary of Warner 
Communications, had as their publisher one Claude McCaleb. Mr. 
McCaleb was attempting to publish a small book entitled "Counter- 
Revolutionary Violence" by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman 
when, on August 27, 1973, he received a call from one William 
Sarnoff, chief of *all* Warner book operations.

Sarnoff was worried that this book might be potentially 
embarrassing to the Warner conglomerate. "Was this another 
'Pentagon Papers' case that would embarrass the parent firm? The 
answer was no, this was an analysis of public material by two 
established academics."

Two hours later, Sarnoff called again. He ordered the publisher 
to hand-carry a copy of the manuscript to his office in New York. 
The next day, after Sarnoff had received the copy of the 
manuscript, McCaleb received another phone call. He was ordered 
to report to Sarnoff's office at once. When McCaleb arrived, 
"Sarnoff immediately launched into a violent verbal attack on me 
for having published CRV [Counter-Revolutionary Violence] saying, 
among other things, that it was a pack of lies..."

According to McCaleb, "He [Sarnoff] then announced that he had 
ordered the printer not to release a single copy to me and that 
the... [book] would not be published." McCaleb pointed out to 
Sarnoff that "...at that very moment 10,000 of the books were 
coming off the presses." According to McCaleb, Sarnoff responded 
that "...he didn't give a damn." The books were destroyed.

"In countries like the Soviet Union a state publishing house 
imposes a political test on what will be printed. If the same 
kind of control over public ideas is exercised by a private 
entrepreneur, the effect of a corporate line is not so different 
from that of a party line."

Censorship is not always so explicit as in the McCaleb/Sarnoff 
example. "Most bosses do not have to tell their subordinates what 
they like and dislike. Or if such an explanation is necessary, it 
is not necessary to repeat the lesson."

In August of 1982 Earl Golz, a reporter for the Dallas Morning 
News, was fired "...because of a story Golz wrote that offended a 
major Dallas bank, the Abilene National Bank." In his newspaper 
story, Golz reported that "...the bank had loan problems so 
serious that it was in danger of failing." The chairman of the 
Abilene National Bank was enraged by the story and the paper 
fired Golz. Less than two weeks later "...the bank failed and 
federal examiners found that the bank had loan losses far beyond 
its assets." But Golz was never rehired by the Dallas Morning 
News. No reporter on that paper "... will have to be told for a 
long time what the boss expects. There will be no need for 
memorandums or spoken words. Subordinates, to be safe, may go 
even further in self-censorship than the boss requires. But no 
official intervention will show."


There is a mythology amongst media people that there is no 
problem of intervention of owners into the content of the news.
However this is not the case. "Bruce Ware Roche, in his 
dissertation 'The Effects of Newspaper Owners Non-Media Business 
Interests on News Judgements of Members of News Staffs,' lists 
numerous corporate interventions in newspapers." For example:

* -- Walter Annenberg, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, 
"...routinely banished from the news the names of people he 
disliked, including people normally reported."

* -- "When the Du Ponts owned the dominant newspapers in Delaware 
they regularly censored news stories or ordered emphasis in 
display depending on how the stories would affect family 
interests, actions so blatant that a distinguished editor 
resigned rather than comply."


The most long lasting power of media giants is the power to 
create ideas and movements which reflect "...the strictly private 
desires of the media owner. Once public attention has been 
aroused, the media owner can pretend to be reporting a 
spontaneous public phenomena." For example:

* -- In 1949, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, both heads 
of powerful media empires, were concerned about communism and the 
growth of liberalism in the U.S. They interviewed an obscure 
preacher named Billy Graham and converted him into "...an almost 
instantaneous national and, later, international figure preaching 
anticommunism. In late 1949 Hearst sent a telegram to all Hearst 
editors: 'Puff Graham.' The editors did."

* -- The Hearst empire also helped create Senator Joseph 
McCarthy. In 1950, McCarthy made his historic "I have here in my 
hand a list of 205 names known to the Secretary of State as being 
members of the Communist Party" speech. As Hearst's son related 
in a subsequent interview, "Joe [McCarthy] gave me a call not 
long after that speech. And you know what? He didn't have a damn 
thing on that list. Nothing." Did Hearst put this stunning 
information into his newspapers after receiving McCarthy's phone 
call? No. "Instead, he formed a cadre of Hearst journalists and 
researchers... to provide McCarthy with as much help as possible 
to keep the anticommunist hysteria alive."


This power of the media monopoly caused two negative effects on 
the quality of public discourse:
1) It allowed them to create the national atmosphere that they 
desired.
2) By choosing what issues to focus on, it had the effect of *de- 
focussing* on other issues. It had the effect "...of 
undernourishing society of other news and ideas necessary for 
informed democratic decision making."

"The result of the overwhelming power of relatively narrow 
corporate ideologies has been the creation of widely established 
political and economic illusions in the United States with little 
visible contradiction in the media to which a majority of the 
population is exclusively exposed."

"Some intervention by owners [in deciding what information the 
public will be bombarded with] is direct and blunt. But most of 
the screening is subtle... as when subordinates learn by habit to 
conform to owners' ideas. But subtle or not, the ultimate result 
is distorted reality and impoverished ideas."


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Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman
"Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well."
End part 4