From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: alt.news-media
Subject: Re: Sources of Bias
Date: 27 Aug 92 13:31:54 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

maxwell@fnala.fnal.gov writes:
> Media organisms stay in business by selling a product.  People have to buy
> the product. Therefore one bias in reportage will be to provide a product
> that people are willing to buy.  Since most people don't like challenges to
> their world-view, reportage will tend to support the world-view of the
> people who consume the reporting.
> The logical consequence of repeatedly and profoundly challenging the world-
> view of the consumers of a media product will be that the consumers will 
> find a product more to their liking. 
> Similarly, the media organism will not produce a product hostile to its 
> subscriber base.

This naively ignores the actual economics and control mechanisms of the
mass media.  They are owned by large corporations which usually have many
other interests beside selling newspapers; and the people and institutions
that control those corporations have share portfolios that embrace other
corporations.  Those interests have quite specific effects on what gets
printed that have nothing whatever to do with market demand.  To a large
extent, a newspaper can print anything and still sell; they are in the
business of alleviating boredom, and it's possible to make just as good
entertainment out of anti-establishment news as from the stuff they
actually do print - any competent writer could have turned the story of
Bush's secret mistress into a headline-grabber at least as good as Woody
Allen's daughter, and done it years ago.

Some of these specific effects: the Glasgow Herald and the Observer were
owned until recently by Lonrho, a transnational mining corporation with
most of its interests in southern Africa.  News about Lonrho's revolting
activities there (which earned them the soubriquet "the unacceptable face
of capitalism" from a senior British Conservative politician) did not get
printed in its papers.  When Lonrho was engaged in a takeover battle with
the Fayed brothers for control of the House of Fraser (a chain of shops),
they spent over a million quid in special supplements of the Observer and
in defending these in court (they were obviously going to get sued for the
sort of allegations they made).  It was an important story all right, and
the Fayeds did need to be investigated, but it *didn't* sell copies of the
paper - Lonrho had to cover the loss from their other operations.  (It made
sense for the Financial Times - not a Lonrho paper - to cover it, and they
probably *did* please their readership by doing so; but they didn't go ape
with multi-page stories like the Observer).

Or take the sort of influences that control what goes into a paper whose
owner also runs satellite TV channels, like Murdoch.  If Sky TV is about to
run a Michael Jackson concert or a major golf tournament, do you think the
Murdoch papers are suddenly going to start reporting on Madonna or expand
their coverage of continental European football at the expense of golf, let
alone use the space for investigating the rise of state racism in Germany?
Nope.  You're going to find that Michael Jackson or Tony Jacklin getting on
a plane is headline news.  These papers have something more profitable than
newsprint to sell.

Most newspapers just break even and many have been loss-makers for years.
The commercial reality was pretty well characterized by Welles in "Citizen
Kane" fifty years ago, but Murdoch isn't just in it because he thinks it
would be fun.

These are British examples: US media have similar patterns of ownership,
and similar interests will generate similar patterns of selectivity in
coverage.

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
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