From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Ben Bagdikian: The Media Monopoly
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Distribution: na
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 03:31:36 GMT

/** media.issues: 197.0 **/
** Topic: Bagdikian*Media Monopoly **
** Written  2:39 pm  Apr  3, 1992 by researchdesk in cdp:media.issues **

                                 BEN BAGDIKIAN

                              The Media Monopoly

                       Madison, Wisconsin, April 21, 1989


BEN BAGDIKIAN is one of this country's most distinguished journalists. He is
the author of The Media Monopoly, published by Beacon. He is a recipient of
the Pulitzer Prize and professor and former dean of the School of Journalism
of the University of California at Berkeley. 

Henry Watteson was editor of the Louisville Courier Journal after the Civil
War and made that paper one of the most respected through his powerful
editorials. He was an imposing man with white hair, Kentucky Colonel's goatee,
and a ferocious temper. After a hard day's work at the office, he liked to
spend his evenings in his combined hobbies: fervent political arguments and
fervent absorbing of good Kentucky bourbon. At the end of each day, Mr.
Watteson would go to the bookkeeper's office at the paper, open up the till
and take out a fistful of money to finance his evening's eating, drinking and
arguing. One evening he went to take the money and there was a plaintive note
from the bookkeeper. The bookkeeper, in very apologetic language, said, ``Mr.
Watteson, of course you are entitled to any amount of money that you would
like. But please, leave a note on how much you take out so we can make our
books right the next morning.'' The next morning, the bookkeeper, knowing Mr.
Watteson's temper, opened the cash drawer with trepidation and was relieved to
see a note from Mr. Watteson. He opened the note. The note said, ``I took it
all.'' [laughter]

The modern owners of our news media seem to have taken their lesson from Mr.
Watteson. Today a small number of multinational corporations control most of
our media, including printed and broadcast news. There are taking it all, but
what they mean by ``all'' makes Mr. Watteson look quaint. The major owners of
our media mean three things by ``all'': First, each is trying to collect as
many outlets as possible in any one media. For example, of our 1600 daily
newspapers, about a dozen corporations now control more than half of all
national daily circulation. Of our 11,000 magazines with individual titles, a
half dozen corporations have most of the revenues. Of our four television
networks and 900 commercial stations, three corporations have most of the
audience and the revenues. There are at least 2500 book publishing houses, but
a half dozen corporations have most of the sales in the book industry. Three
major studios have most of the movie business.

The new owners have something else in mind when they drive to take it all.
They're also trying to buy control or market domination not just in one
medium, but in all the media. The aim is to control the entire process, from
an original manuscript or news series to its use in as many forms as possible.
A magazine article owned by the company becomes a book owned by the company.
That becomes a television program owned by the company, which then becomes a
movie owned by the company. It's shown in theaters owned by the company and
the movie sound track is issued on a record label owned by the company and the
vocalist on the cover of one of the company magazines. It does not take an
angel from heaven to tell us that the company will be less enthusiastic about
outside ideas for productions that it does not own. And more and more we will
be dealing with closed circuits to control access to most of the public.

Lastly, ``all'' seems to mean all the profit that can be quickly and
ruthlessly taken from their media properties. Since the growth of
concentration of ownership, average newspaper pre-tax annual profits, always
generous, have risen sharply and now range between 20% and 40% annually.
Affiliated television stations now make an average of between 30% and 50%
annually. Since cable became dominated by newspapers, broadcasters and movie
company owners and was deregulated, thanks to their combined lobbying, cable
fees around the country have risen radically, approximately 30% to 50% more
than the costs of production. 

Almost weekly we read of another great media merger. Time/Warner forms the
largest media conglomerate in the world. Rupert Murdoch adds another major
segment to his global empire. They all gobble up each new medium as it gets
popular, like cable and videocassettes. When you look at it all, including
corporations dominant in more than one medium, you see an extraordinary race
toward monopoly or monopoly-like control which gets more rapid all the time.
In 1982, 50 corporations had half or more of all the business in all the major
media in the United States. Today, that number is less than 25 and shrinking.


Perhaps that's why our theme asks two main questions: First, who owns our
media?

To name a few names: In daily papers, the leading ones are Gannett, which owns
USA Today and 88 other daily papers, for about 6 million total daily
circulation; International Thompson, with 116 papers; Knight-Ridder, Newhouse
and about 8 others. The chief owners of magazines in the general news are
dominated by Time/Warner, which controls more than 40% of the country's
magazine business. Other major owners are Rupert Murdoch, Hearst and Newhouse,
although not all issue general news. Newsweek, which does carry news, is owned
by the Washington Post Company. In broadcasting, despite some loss of
audience, the three networks - ABC, CBS and NBC - still have most of the
television audience and business. In books, some of the major owners are Gulf
& Western, which owns Simon & Shuster, Time/Warner, Reader's Digest
Association, Bertelsmann, a German firm, Maxwell, a British firm, Hachette, a
French firm, and Thompson, a Canadian firm. 

That gives some idea of the major owners of the news and of books, which are
an important source of knowledge about public affairs.

Our second question is: How well do they serve the public? Well, as with life
in general, there's good news and bad news. The good news about American
reporting is that in some technical matters it is the best news in the world.
It's journalists are the most highly educated in the world and far better
educated than any earlier generation of American journalists. We sometimes
make the mistake of comparing our average with other countries' elite. But our
average in terms of preparation and care of journalists is better than the
average anyplace else. They operate under higher professional ethics than
journalists elsewhere and higher than at any time in the past. They lie less
than journalists elsewhere, fictionalize less, and on the whole take seriously
their individual duty to provide the public with accurate information.
Collectively they issue daily an extraordinary volume of daily news items. But
if things are so good, why are they so bad? Or at least, as troublesome as I
believe they are?

The problem lies, I think, mainly with the institutions and the conventions of
standard American journalism. Most reporters in the standard media can say
correctly, ``No editor ever tells me to lie.'' And I think that is correct.
There are exceptions, but I think they're rare. But most reporters are told
every day what to write about. There are 50,000 print journalists in this
country and 50,000 broadcast reporters. Each day, each week, each month, they
are pointed toward particular tasks, particular stories, particular
personalities, particular government activities, particular foreign scenes,
and particular series in some depth. In the resulting mass of stories there
are often articles of importance and sometimes of distinction. There is a
daily volume of routine, factual and important local and national information.
The problem lies in something beyond the mass of useful items. Each day
editors necessarily select some stories for emphasis and some for de-emphasis,
some for the wastebasket. Certain kinds of stories, certain public figures,
certain social data, certain analysts of social and political events are
regularly on the network evening news and the front page, while others
stories, other spokespersons and analysts are mentioned obscurely, if at all.
This kind of selection is a legitimate and necessary part of the news process.
But when we look at the selection process over time, how often is the result a
serious departure from the realities of our social, economic and political
life?

I believe that there is a disturbing pattern of the missing realities. It is
the main media sin, but we may have a archaic way of looking for it. We tend
to look for the sins of the past. We look for the screaming headlines and the
blatant politics of William Randolph Hearst. We remember that when Hearst
wanted the United States to go to war in Cuba against Spain, he sent Frederick
Remington to Cuba to send back sketches of the atrocities which he said were
being committed in a war which he said was being fought in Cuba. When
Remington wired back, ``There is no war here.'' Hearst wired back, ``You
furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.'' Which he did.

Today the problem lies with something far more subtle, more difficult and, in
some ways, more harmful. For one thing, in Hearst's day, every city had many
competing newspapers with competing political orientations. Some papers
regularly refuted Hearst and printed information contrary to Hearst's
information. Today, of American cities with a daily paper, 98% have a monopoly
paper. And in the major source of most people's news, the network news, the
three major networks are so similar and brief in their news content that they
could almost be one outlet without the loss of much information. So there are
almost no seriously contending approaches among our mainstream newspapers and
broadcast news. 

Furthermore, today very few publishers would think of putting those words of
Hearst in a telegram or memorandum. Exposure of it would be a national scandal
in the public and also among professional journalists. Today the departures
from reality happen quite differently: less clumsily, more insidiously and
often more unconsciously. It is done more by omission than by commission. The
main problem in the news today is not what is false, but what is missing. The
pattern begins when owners appoint executive editors and producers. Owners
seldom appoint someone who is likely to be interested in emphasizing those
events and interpretations that undermine the owners' political and economic
interests. Some editors do so, and there is a steady record of their being
fired or resigning or being otherwise penalized. In 1980 members of the
American Society of Newspaper Editors were asked if they would feel free to
publish news harmful to the parent corporation of their newspaper. One-third
said they would not feel free to do so. It should be said that many of these
companies that own newspapers and broadcast news operations are also owners of
industries that are very sensitive to the news. General Electric owns NBC and
it produces nuclear reactors and guidance systems for hydrogen bombs and many
other things that are dependent on government policy and public opinion. This
is true of many of the large news media companies. Given the fact that it is
now embarrassing professionally for an editor to say that he would keep news
out that he would otherwise think was significant simply because it might
damage the parent firm's business, it's so embarrassing, I think we're safe in
assuming that that 33% who said they would keep it away is a conservative
figure.

So I think the patterns, when you look back, are clear. In foreign affairs the
main news of the country follows official national policy. This does not mean
that there's never any reporting contrary to officialdom, but it does mean
that information that contradicts government versions gets into the news with
greater difficulty and only briefly compared to the official view. It is not
done by official censorship but by self-censorship. If journalists are as much
improved as I think they are, it's fair to ask what causes this self-
censorship. I think there are a number of reasons. One is the awareness of the
top editors and executive producers that stories seriously affecting their
owners' interests will cause the editors some problems. So they put in such
stories but do so infrequently, and usually with those developments that seem
to be unavoidable. 

There is a kind of generic experience that gets built into the subconscious of
every journalist. For example, recently a new editor and several sub-editors
at the Atlanta Constitution and Journal were brought in to make their paper
the best one in the country, to be fearless and without restriction. As
happens with many of us, we take such marching orders literally. The Atlanta
Constitution and Journal began writing stories about the problems of race in
Atlanta and about some of the more harmful effect of high downtown development
and some flaws in the Georgia corporate establishment. That editor is now out.
He was one of the more respected, better-known editors in the country. I think
every journalist in the country read about that, and I think it's stored in
the memory.

Several years ago, in the Dallas Morning News, a financial reporter of
considerable experience discovered that one of the major banks in town was
filled with federal examiners and the business community was talking about it
fairly openly. It turned out that that bank was in really serious trouble. He
did a rather careful story on the fact that it was under examination by the
Feds. That reporter was fired. The editor who passed that story was fired. The
next week the bank closed. It was going to close anyway, the Examiner said.
That, too, gets filed away, and not just within that organization. For years
afterward it becomes accepted as somehow an edict coming down from the heavens
that one does not write stories about banks in trouble. Something we are now
inheriting in the number of our banks in trouble. There are various other
events which have a far-rippling effect which do not require any memo from an
owner. 

The self-censorship also comes from a basic strategy of American news, one
that has many strong points in it. Since most of the revenues in the news
media come from advertising E80% for newspapers and almost 100% for
broadcasting Ethere's a desire to maintain an audience of as many affluent
people as possible. The newspapers aren't terribly interested in non- affluent
people or people who are over 50 because they aren't buying lots of furniture
and things of that sort. Therefore they aren't good targets for the mass
advertisers. There is a desire in the news organizations not to offend too
many people who are good advertising targets. This is done in two ways: One is
to attribute everything to as high an authority as possible, so that no one
can argue that the newspaper or the broadcast organization had any special
interest in quoting this particular person or this particular set of facts. If
you have a high enough person, whether it's the sergeant at an intersection
accident or the President of the United States on some foreign policy
statement, very few people can argue that it was not justified to print that
information. The other method is to give American news a kind of political
tone-deafness, an appearance of neutrality without political, economic or
social context for its facts. When you give the context of events, you begin
to be political. Accurate reports of events with interpretation by high
officials become safe. But the result of this is not neutral, though it seems
to be neutral. If you strain out independent political and economic contexts,
if you do not pursue the likely causes and consequences of events as they
affect the average person, if you emphasize or use exclusively the words and
ideas of the highest officials, public and private, and when you add to that
the Cold War and anti-communism and its effects throughout our whole life, it
is safer to swing to the right than look to the left, and it is safer to quote
the words and information from the centers of power than from more independent
but perfectly credentialed other sources. The status quo in politics and
corporation life is, of course, sharply skewed to the conservative side. It
resists significant change in society.

Finally, self-censorship in the standard news media comes from twenty years of
accusations against American journalists by neo-conservative intellectuals and
academics and from conservative political leaders who have said that the
American journalist is biased against the established order and conservative
politics. These accusations, when they are based on anything real, are based
on surveys of journalists who, when asked whether they tend to be Democrats or
Republicans, say that they tend more to be Democrats than Republicans or tend
to be more liberal than conservative. That happens to be precisely the pattern
of the American electorate, but that seems to make no difference. While recent
Presidential elections have gone Republican, country-wide voting for Congress,
state office, and local office continues heavily Democratic. But the
accusations by conservatives have had the effect on so many journalists of
leaning over backward to be favorable to conservatives to show that they are
not biased against conservatives. They follow my rule of journalistic
gymnastics that you can lean over so far backward that you can fall flat on
your face.

There is more than coincidence, I think, in these factors to produce support
of the status quo and conservatively skewed selection of news. It happens to
conform with the politics and economics of the major owners of our news media.
If there is noticeable embarrassing news for conservatives and it is pursued,
there is regularly asked within news organizations that I know of and that I
have been involved with whether that reporting is really being fair. I have
never heard similar questions being asked about the treatment of Ralph Nader,
Common Cause, labor unions and forces on the other political side. When we
look back it seems to me there are large events that show this rather
consistent skewing.

For example, the Cold War began with very real fears of Stalinist Russia. But
it was quickly converted in this country into a holy war, partly hysterical
and partly cynical. The main body of the news was an enthusiastic pursuer of
the irrational version, even though there was obvious evidence that the
hysteria was damaging our society, our government and even our armed forces.
That same kind of widespread press hysteria did not occur in the democratic
press of Western Europe, even though Western Europe really was under the
shadow of Stalin's armies and even though many of the countries had
significant domestic Communist parties. When Joseph McCarthy paralyzed the
government and much of civil society, the fact that he was lying or faking and
never uncovered a single spy who had not already been detected was known to
reporters but seldom reported until he fell, for other reasons. Our
involvement in the war in Vietnam was more than 10 years old before a handful
of reporters, like David Halberstam and Malcom Browne, were able to break into
the standard news with the truth about the national illusions. 

Not much has changed in the interim. Public knowledge of actual events in
Nicaragua and El Salvador has suffered from an astonishing failure of the
mainstream news media to do continuous reporting from the field, despite the
fact that Central America has remained the center of White House attention and
activities and the closest we have been since Vietnam to being actively
engaged in a foreign war. The main body of the news seldom checked out
assertions about events in those countries in any systematic way, and for
years the news took official declarations at face value, often when there was
overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There are other events which have their
ripple effect in this way. For a time, the New York Times had a reporter,
Raymond Bonner, in El Salvador, who reported in what was considered
professionally a sound way the fact that the war in El Salvador was in fact a
civil war that had many ugly aspects to it on the government side as well as
others and that the death squads of the military were still active. He was
recalled by the New York Times and replaced by a reporter who was much more
influenced by the press releases from our embassy in San Salvador. No memo
needed to be posted that reports from places like Nicaragua and El Salvador
that ran contrary to the official view would produce pressure which would
probably be acceded to. The Iran/contra exercise in violation of the
Constitution and contrary to the word of our highest officials was exposed
fairly early by the alternative press of this country and finally was blown
open by an obscure publication in Beirut, not by a mainstream American news
organization.

In domestic affairs there is a steady pattern of looking the other way, of
avoiding obvious causes and consequences whenever doing so might seriously
weaken the status quo. President Reagan's economic program of supply-side
economics, with huge military spending accompanied by large tax cuts, had
enormous support in corporate life, but it was seen from the start by people
with perfectly respectable expert credentials as a formula for disaster.
Nevertheless, for years, most of the judgments reported in the news came from
organizations and individuals who were beneficiaries of those economic
policies, like specialists at Drexel-Lambert, junk bond purveyors,
administration economists, Milton Friedman, and others who truly believe in
class warfare. Even after David Stockman, one of the architects of the idea,
went on record to say that it was all really a cover to take money from the
poor and give it to the rich, the main media continued to quote almost
exclusively these same beneficiaries, as though Stockman and serious
economists had never spoken. If there was a bow in the news to the nay sayers,
it was usually in the seventeenth paragraph.

We have had massive deregulation of our economy, with some good results and
some bad. But for more than ten years, the news was close to silent on the bad
results. One is tempted to say that some of the serious negative effects of
deregulation finally broke into the standard news only when corporate
officials themselves began to worry about the safety of airplanes they were
riding in. To this day there is close to a zone of silence on the negative
effects of mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, ominous levels of
corporate debt, and monopolistic levels of market domination including and
especially the news business. We have turned our economy on its head by
eliminating the progressive income tax, the only sane and fair way to build
our public institutions and get our way out of our present problems. The media
have turned a deaf ear to those who say so and an open ear to those who say it
cannot be used. The causes and consequences of some public acts are seldom
made clear. Usually there are clear sources of events or certainly sources
that make sense and a spectrum of relevant opinion on consequences. For
example, in the miles of newsprint and the hours of television reporting on
fantastically high real estate prices for the middle class and the millions of
homeless, how often have a few incontrovertible but relevant facts been
repeated as giving some help to the public on how to solve this problem? For
example, in the 1970s there were 200,000 low-cost housing units built each
year with federal help, in the 1980s only 17,000. Another fact: The increase
in the homeless can be directly related to that reduced federal housing
support and to reductions in Social Security and other benefits during the
1980s. It is clearly the fact that there is growing separation in this country
between the poor and the rich. In our so-called prosperity of recent years,
the lowest third in family incomes have lost purchasing power. 

Another reason has been what comes from almost every municipality of any size
taking advantage of tax support for commercial building, even if much of it
remains vacant, and not into residential building to an equal degree. A
regular story on the economy is the need for greater productivity in the
workplace in order to compete with foreign firms and with countries with low-
wage labor. This has been accompanied by dramatic coverage of strikes and
union activities with corporate and governmental sources regularly accusing
the unions of causing our reduced productivity. How often have you seen in
such stories the established data, true for years, that productivity has
increased in unionized activities and decreased at managerial and
administrative levels? In the last Presidential election we had no lack of
serious issues with which the next President has to grapple: nuclear arms and
disarmament, upheaval in the communist states, global warming that is melting
the polar icecaps, explosions waiting to happen in the Middle East, and at
home our public sector, like schools, libraries, roads and bridges are
deteriorating. There is a growing housing crisis, of which the homeless are
only a small manifestation, a growing gap between the rich and poor, ominous
instabilities in our banking system, drug addiction that is destroying whole
generations in some neighborhoods and corrupting civil life.

Now it's true that candidates always prefer to wave flags and repeat slogans,
as candidates always do. But occasionally in fact, even in this election, they
did discuss some issues seriously, and on those occasions they received very
little attention in the next day's news. Instead, they and we were inundated
with examinations of candidates' sex lives, their ability as dramatic actors,
daily footage of their symbolic gestures, like saluting in a flag factory or
riding in a tank, journalistic judgments of the Presidential debates, using
the word ``debates'' loosely made issues subsidiary to endless articles about
a candidate's effective use of hands, of fingers pointed accusingly, of
zingers of wisecracks, as though these were auditions for Studio One instead
of the Oval Office. The whole society, including government and corporations,
suffer in the long run because accountability and correction of faulty
policies require good information. Damaging or ineffective policies continue
longer than they should, and positive opportunities are lost. The spectrum of
allowable context for facts and news runs in our main media from right to
center. The other day on the network news the White House made a policy
statement on the economy. On the major network I was watching, they had three
pieces of commentary reaction. The original newscast of what was said was 15
seconds. There were about 12 seconds with words as interview with the Chairman
of the House Committee, about 13 seconds with a spokesperson from the American
Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank, and about 12 seconds with a
spokesperson from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing thinktank. That was
the spectrum of commentary and context. That was the extent of it. But even
that does not describe adequately the narrowness of the news, because much
historical or interpretive background to the news are not left or right but
cut across partisan lines, like the environment or health care. By keeping the
news tone-deaf but weighted heavily towards facts as spokespersons from the
centers of power, the national discourse becomes more sterile each year. Ideas
for solutions to problems, alternatives to present policies fade, and the
status quo seems unchangeable. Yet we see how suddenly energized a whole
portion of the electorate could be when someone like Jesse Jackson began
addressing directly problems of that part of the electorate, who heard no one
else talking about their particular problems.

The effective homogenized narrow spectrum of news and context is profound. A
country whose major news media are homogenized and confined to a narrow
spectrum of ideas and information oriented around the centers of power will
soon have national politics also homogenized around the centers of power, and
that, I'm afraid, is what we have today. Today our national political
discourse is sterile in ideas for necessary change, deficient in its
confrontation with the realities of social justice and therefore narrow in
plausible alternatives held out to the public. When masses of people are
bedeviled by problems but see no possibility of significant change, the result
is hopelessness and apathy. Many who have no hope become destructive. It is
not surprising that each year since 1960 the percentage of eligible voters who
actually go to the polls has declined. When the cause of suffering remains
mysterious, people will find scapegoats. When we look for scapegoats, we move
to the right and to race hatred.

What can we as individuals do? Most useful information about public affairs
appears in the standard news media sooner or later, though too often obscurely
and infrequently. It means that on subjects that each of us cares about we
have to become assiduous clippers and filers because the mainstream news on
these basic economic and political issues seldom pull it all together for us.
We need to depend on alternative and specialized publications and broadcast
sources for the information, ideas and possible remedies for problems and
possible opportunities for improvement coming from academics and others who
are independent of officials in positions of power. And I think we all need to
complain more. I preach it, I don't always practice it, but I think that's one
of the things we have to learn to become better at is complaining to the
media, to Congress, to the White House, letters that are clear, direct and
unbombastic sent to editors and broadcast news producers have a greater impact
than you might imagine. The White House and Congressional offices still count
mail. 

But if we want to change the structure of the main media, I think it will take
a change in our electoral process. Because few members of Congress and almost
no President is going to offend the mass media owners who control the
politicians' access and image before the public. The only thing politicians
fear more than media owners is being voted out of office. So when members of
Congress proposed measures about the media you agree with, organize and write.
When your particular members of Congress oppose such measures, organize and
write. Legislators who try to change things for the better are very lonely in
that effort, frequently. Organize around those issues you most care about and
then make trouble for your political party if it does not conform. The
electoral process is now in a scandalous state. Our selection of Presidents is
mainly dependent on 20-second political commercials in contrived daily
propaganda. The cost of running for office is exorbitant, and the amount of
money flooding into incumbents makes it very difficult to change legislatures
and the Congress. Political action committees have almost guaranteed semi-
permanent membership. Only intense public service lobbying will bring real
change in financing of candidates for office. I think the FCC should forbid
paid political campaign commercials. [applause] Instead, every broadcast
license holder should be required to give substantial free time, in
substantial chunks of time, not measured in seconds, for two months before the
elections, and to make it available to representatives of parties that have
polled five percent or more in the previous election. [applause] Schemes of
this sort exist in some other democratic countries; it is unheard of in this
country.

The Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice should be awakened from
its long sleep. It will be hard to undo the conglomerates already in being,
but it is time to stop further aggrandizement by the giants and uncontrolled
mergers and takeovers. The further disappearance of independent information
and ideas for our democratic society should not be left to the tender mercies
of junk bond manipulators. I think professional news staffs should elect their
own editors and put some more separation between church and state, between the
corporate interests of the news organization and the news reporting function.
That is done in some of the more distinguished papers in Europe. There is
increasing involvement of the editors of our newspapers in the profit function
of their newspapers. Until they are made responsible for the amount of
advertising, they get generous bonuses on the basis of the levels of profit.
There is one chain that gives its top editor 50% of every cut he makes in
their news and editorial budget. Our standard news media need to expand the
display of all thoughtful ideas and information in our society, not just those
issued by those in power. Even people in dictatorships have the power to vote
for the status quo. What distinguishes the electoral process in a democracy is
not an election, because almost every country has an election sooner or later.
It is a national discourse that argues true alternatives month by month
between elections and talks about contending programs and alternative roads to
improvement. Only when our main news media pursue a wide spectrum of ideas and
relevant information will elections present voters with candidates and ideas
that represent genuine choices. A democracy that has no clear choices
presented in its regular news will not have clear choices presented in its
elections.

Let me conclude with a parable that happens to be true but which I think is an
analogy of what I'm talking about.

During World War II I was an aerial navigator and for a time instructed new
aerial navigators. One exercise was to pick a distant target, without
informing the student, and after four or five hours of flying the night to ask
about where we would be in about half an hour. One night, about half an hour
from the target, I asked on the intercom for one of the students to tell me
where we would be in half an hour. A note came up with a time and the
notation: ``We will be five miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico.'' Sure
enough, in about half an hour, a large, lighted city appeared underneath us,
right in time. The student navigator was elated. When we got on the ground, he
couldn't contain himself and said, ``Right on the button, zero-zero, right,
Lieutenant?'' And I had the painful task to inform him that unfortunately we
were not in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but in El Paso, Texas. The student was
stunned. He reached into his briefcase and took out his navigator's log and
shook it in desperation and said, ``But, sir, I have here figures to prove
we're in Albuquerque.'' But the sign on the air base said El Paso.

Our mainstream news media too often have found figures to prove what the world
looks like from the standpoint of policymakers in Washington, from the
interplay of loyal lobbyists and legislators and regulators, from the opinions
of conservative thinktanks, from executive boardrooms of corporations and from
the floor of stock exchanges. But that is a long way from the compelling
realities that most of our citizens live in. There's another reality in our
streets, where millions sleep in doorways, where most children can no longer
expect to live in families with one income or buy a house or go to a
university, where the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer, where ever
more lavish skyscrapers and luxury hotels cast shadows on deteriorating
schools and libraries, where air and water is increasing unhealthy, where 37
million people have no health coverage, where millions of children in hopeless
neighborhoods with hopeless schools and hopeless prospects for jobs are
killing themselves with drugs, drugs often imported from countries we favor
because they call themselves anti-communist. All this in a rich country, still
full of vitality and with millions willing to work for policies that will
improve their lives. But the ideas for the plausible policies of this kind of
vitality and change to take effect must enter into our national discussion,
must be the subject of elections at every level. This cannot happen unless
these ideas and possible solutions enter into our mainstream news media, not
as abstracted verbiage in the dialogue between Wall Street and Washington, in
the 10-second slogans of campaigns, but directed clearly and primarily at the
realities of our cities and towns. That, in essence, is what is missing in our
main media and therefore in our politics. [applause]



Q&A

You mentioned in your talk several concrete suggestions for how the public
might influence the mainstream media, the major networks and newspapers, to do
a better job of including diverse opinions and perhaps reporting on the kinds
of events that they usually exclude now. However, something implicit in your
talk is how one gets informed about these kinds of diverse opinions and issues
now, that is, the alternative press. Another strategy, it seems to me, that
I'd like your comments on, is a rededication of liberal and progressive
thinkers to creating alternative media and supporting existing alternative
media and that in doing so, and in encouraging constituencies for those media,
that is supportive communities, the mainstream media will see that as an
incentive to begin to do a better job because they'll find essentially that
their audiences are turning away from them and are finding this as a concrete
sign that they are no longer trusted. Could you comment on that alternative
strategy for influencing the mainstream press?

I agree with you completely. I think one of the things I should have
mentioned, except by recommending support of them, was the role of alternative
publications and alternative radio like Pacifica and the public stations.
Because I think it is from them that we frequently get the ideas that we need
and there's a pretty good track record of that. Every year at Sonoma State
University in California there's an exercise called Project Censor. What it
really is is a series of stories that appeared briefly in minor publications
or only fragmentarily in the major publications that should have been covered
by the major media in substance but were not. There is a series of judges that
picked the ten most, one of them is Nick Johnson, I've done that too, and
there are many others. If you look at that, it turns out to be regularly true
that many of the important stories which the media began reporting a year or
so later were first reported in some of the alternative media. So I think
that's true, and I think that acts as a goad and as a information conduit to
those who are exposed to those alternative publications. I think that one
should support whatever publications make sense to you. Unfortunately, the
majority of voters and people don't have or get access to that. I think they
would be better off if they did.

One of the things you didn't talk about was the role of journalism schools and
journalism students. I suspect that there are some professors and students
here. Would you talk to them about what they should be doing in order to
counter the monopolies?

There's not much that journalism students or journalists can do to counter a
monopoly without being born heir to a publishing empire, but it's a serious
question and I agree with it. What happens in our journalism schools that
could be useful in this way? I don't know what happens in all of them because
there are hundreds of them. I think we have one of the better ones, and there
are a lot of good ones. I think in the better ones students do come out of
journalism school with a sense not only of their responsibility to do good and
accurate reporting, but of their role in a democracy in letting people know
what they need to know. But I think that what happens afterward is that
journalists are very quickly socialized, because the only definition that
makes any news operationally of what news is is what appears in the newspaper
on page 1 and what appears on the evening broadcast news, because that is the
model which every reporter follows if he or she wants to get into the news.
After a while it gets internalized into a convention of what is news. Even
though there are many socially conscious and responsible journalists who are
working for major news organizations, they don't very often have the power or
the ability to do things in any substance in those areas that are not covered
properly, and when they don't, it isn't as though they do meaningless or empty
tasks, because there are many interesting things to cover. I think what
happens to the best new journalists, with many exceptions, thank goodness, is
that they quickly get absorbed into the conventions and then pretty much
conform to those.

In the search for good information upon which to base our political opinions,
do you have any recommendations in the country today which media you think are
most thorough, less biased and perhaps less influenced by the preservation of
the status quo?

One of the things that is difficult is that how well you get served by a
newspaper or broadcast station is pretty much a matter of luck. If you happen
to be in a city where the owner has a greater sense of responsibility than,
say, the city next door, you might get better information. Commercial
broadcasting is fearful of words, talking heads, and only can give one message
at a time, so they tend to keep everything very brief. That's why I think that
people who have a deep interest in a particular subject find themselves
increasingly dependent on specialized publications and sometimes, where its
available, specialized broadcasting on the special public radio stations. It's
a little hard for me to say specific things as I find that there's a whole
spectrum of things that address themselves to the problems I'm interested in:
legislation, things like Common Cause, Ralph Nader's publications, and things
of that sort. But I think that one has to concentrate on those things that
they care most about. In the environment, there are a number of publications
that are very useful. I'm afraid that what it does do is the fact that so much
of urgent questions that require substance does not appear in our main media
often enough forces all of us to resort to the specialized publications of our
choosing depending on our interests. I think those cover a very large range,
and I think it would be useful if someone put out an index based on political-
social subject matter: environment, pollution, legislative reform, etc. of all
the publications available. I find that there's a kind of liberal Reader's
Digest called Utne Reader which is useful. It does excerpts from various
publications that are off the mainstream but frequently very interesting. But
I'm afraid that this is a search that each of us has to do on the basis of our
own interests.

I'd like to know to what extent you think political and social agenda setting
occurs consciously among major media outlets, that is, do you believe that
there's cooperation among major media outlets, or do you think that there's a
follow-the-leader effect?

About agenda setting: There's something to John Kenneth Galbraith's
formulation, in which he said that in Washington politicians solemnly get
together and put together a misleading statement which they issue to the news
media. The correspondents solemnly read this and reproduce it. Then the same
politicians read it and believe it. [laughter] He said it's the only
successful system yet devised for the recycling of garbage. [laughter] I think
there is enough of that to be true to be disturbing. But I don't think there's
any question that there's a kind of interacting, mirror-like cooperation on
agenda-setting between the media and political people. I think it is true that
if the media reported substantially and emphatically on those political
speeches that dealt with substance on central issues, that's what the
political people would be forced to respond to, because they don't like to
speak to an unlistening audience. Part of what they assume about the audience
is what they see on television and what they read in the papers. When I
covered campaigns, every Presidential, Vice-Presidential, statewide candidate
made five or ten stops a day and inevitably made the same speech. It made
sense. They'd stop at an airport and talk for ten minutes about how they were
glad to be in this beautiful county in this beautiful setting, and we were
filling in the blanks each time, and then usually once a day, or every other
day, they would introduce one new statement, maybe a policy statement, and
they'd see how it played in the media. If it didn't play, they dropped it and
tried something else. So while I think the media don't have a unitary,
exclusive power to create the public agenda, they are a very powerful part of
the interaction that does, between what politicians say and what gets
reflected to the general public in the media. When these things, when the
media lose their independence of social and political view, they begin
reflecting the same things, and I think that's the state we've increasingly
been in the last 15 years.

For information about obtaining cassette copies or transcripts of this or
other programs, please write to:
David Barsamian
1814 Spruce
Boulder, CO 80302

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