Breaking The News: Do Media Mergers Really Undermine America's Democracy?

[Gary Ruskin]

Commercial Alert 					June 28, 2000

Following is an excellent book review on media mergers in the June 25
edition of the Los Angeles Times.

Breaking The News: Do Media Mergers Really Undermine America's
Democracy?
by Russ Baker

http://www.calendarlive.com/calendarlive/books/lat_0625baker.htm

These days, consumed with our own hectic lives, we seem able to
apprehend only discrete events, not the big picture. Score: Trees 1,
Forest 0. Take corporate mergers. Once they were big news, harbingers of
powerful societal realignments to come. Lately, these organizational
swallowings, hitch-ups and disembowelings have become so routine --
except as they relate to our investments -- that we scarcely consider
their cumulative effect.
                  
Is this proof that we have become a nation of bookkeepers, with our eyes
increasingly trained down at the bottom line or up at the clock? Or is
our inability to focus on so serious a problem itself a symptom of the
problem? Have we lost sight of what really matters in the stampede for
personal and corporate gain, or are we merely buying the self-serving
spin placed on mergers by the corporate interests behind them?
   
While real democracy -- active participation in civic life and
self-government by an informed, substantial part of the populace--may
stand in real danger, the very institutions we traditionally count on to
shout warnings from the ramparts have themselves become increasingly
compromised.
                   
Anyone interested in understanding the consequences of this trend can
turn to several recent books. Foremost among them is Robert McChesney's
"Rich Media, Poor Democracy," which ranges broadly over the macrocosm of
the information age. Three other books -- Michael Janeway's "Republic of
Denial"; "The Business of Journalism," edited by William Serrin; and Jay
Rosen's "What Are Journalists For?" -- fit inside like Russian nesting
dolls, taking on narrower aspects of the nexus of commerce, politics and
journalism. Together these books remind us that journalism can serve a
greater purpose than offering tips on hard abs, hot stocks and summer
blockbusters. 
                   
McChesney explores what is unquestionably an ongoing assault on the
reliability and independence of the media we count on to explain the
world to us. He walks us through the increasingly complex relationship
between music, movie, cable, telephone, radio, TV, newspaper,
advertising, Internet providers and software companies, which together
determine what we learn and how it is presented to us. As technologies
converge and media companies merge, as information is sliced, diced,
injected with ads and plumped for entertainment value, it becomes
increasingly turned into a commodity, so that what is being sold
subsumes what is being told. Thirty years after Marshall McLuhan became
famous for saying it, the medium -- farther reaching than ever -- is
more and more the message. 

McChesney also spotlights the federal government's rush to shed its role
as guardian of public resources and guarantor of a vigorous and diverse
press. Since 1934, when it officially opened up the airwaves to commerce
while in the same breath declaring them public property, Washington has
stood by as commercial media steadily advances upon the public sphere.
The forward march turned into a mad dash in 1996, after the government
deregulated cable and telecommunications industries and significantly
relaxed broadcast cross-ownership rules. McChesney amply chronicles
this long sorry history of abdication, which has left "We, the People"
with virtually no say in three areas central to a modern functioning
democracy: We are denied the right to choose what goes over limited
"publicly owned" cables and airwaves. We do not determine who profits
from technology developed with taxpayer funds. We have no part in
deciding how much control of the media any one player gets. 

Recent events have corroborated his analysis. AOL swallowed Time Warner,
Viacom devoured CBS and AT&T consumed MediaOne. Each deal took advantage
of relaxed government regulations to aggrandize an existing media
megalith. If all goes as planned, AT&T will control one third of the
nation's cable network; four of the most mammoth media conglomerates
will own six major TV networks; CBS-Viacom will reach (and surpass, if
lobbying efforts are successful) the recently elevated government cap of
35% of the national audience; and the old-media giant Time Warner will
emerge a more powerful new-media giant.
                   
While everyone was busy contemplating Los Angeles Times' then-publisher
Mark Willes' emphasis on the bottom line at all costs--and the related,
controversial profit-sharing pact between the Staples Center and The
Times' Sunday magazine -- the paper's parent company, Times Mirror, got
swallowed up by the Chicago-based Tribune Co. (That move, ironically,
almost came as a relief after the ex-cereal executive's mercantile
reign.) Tribune Co. adds The Times to a local empire that includes
KTLA-TV Channel 5 and could conceivably include -- if the company
chooses to purchase it--the Daily News of Los Angeles. (If anything
bears out McChesney on the retreat of competition-minded government
action, it is the fact that Tribune actually owned the Daily News until
1986, when it was forced to divest the paper to get KTLA. Now, pretty
much anything goes.)

McChesney, a communications professor and media historian at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is not a journalist, which
may partly explain why he sees journalism as but an inseparable strand
in an ever-more-tightly woven cloth of commerce. As such, he says, it is
run according to the market-driven imperative of capitalism: more profit
with less risk. The best way is to grow as large as possible. And not
just big but tall, or "vertically integrated." The most powerful media
companies not only produce content but also own the channels that
distribute it. The excitement surrounding new technologies and the
propagandistic rhetoric of "free trade" and the "marketplace of ideas"
drown out concern about the meaning of "free media" in an oligopoly.
This concentration in ownership, says McChesney, exacerbates the worst
in existing media trends -- commercial exchange at the expense of public
dialogue, advertising instead of education, entertainment rather than
analysis -- making it no less than "a poison pill for democracy."

Most journalists would resist McChesney's argument, saying their
"objectivity" shields them from corporatization and conglomeration of
the news business. But McChesney points out that journalism's
much-acclaimed professionalization was part and parcel of these trends,
rather than an enlightened in-house effort to protect and improve the
craft by applying internal standards. "To the contrary," he says,
"professional journalism emerged as a pragmatic response to the
commercial limitations of partisan journalism in the new era of chain
newspapers, advertising support, and one-newspaper towns." His
conclusion: Reporters, however unbiased, cannot protect themselves from
profit pressures or commercialization of the news. McChesney views
modern journalism as an essential part of the corporate mechanism, whose
owners rely on it to legitimize their product and, especially, to yield
ripe synergistic opportunities.	

For McChesney, the only way journalism might become the independent and
public-minded profession it should be is through drastic economic reform
in media. He urges expansion of noncommercial and nonprofit media,
establishment of an integrated public broadcasting network and
strengthening of antitrust, cross-ownership and advertising restrictions
on commercial media. These steps are necessary because our media system
does not merely suffer the decline in representative democracy but has
itself become "a significant anti-democratic force."

Maybe his is not such a lonely cry in the dark. The government's lawsuit
against Microsoft and the recent court ruling that the company must
split into two will undoubtedly have significant consequences and they
raise the question of whether a new will exists to put a halt to
monopolistic practices. Besides the general antitrust implications, it
is important to remember that Microsoft is not just a software company
anymore: Its holdings of MSNBC and several of the world's largest photo
archives, as well as its online magazine Slate, make it a prominent
player in the world of journalism. 
                   
The shadow of the media oligopoly extends beyond what were once largely
in-house discussions of what's good and bad about contemporary
journalism. Richard Reeves, a syndicated columnist and faculty member at
USC's Annenberg School for Communication, argues in "What the People
Know" that we are practically in a post-news era. Real news, he says, is
that which "you and I need to keep our freedom--accurate and timely
information on laws and wars, police and politicians, taxes and toxics."
Classic good journalism, says Reeves, is anathema to media kingpins
because it is controversial, expensive and not necessarily advantageous
to the bottom line. Among his evidence: A quarter century ago, more than
half the stories in major news outlets -- including The New York Times
and the Los Angeles Times -- were straight news accounts; now only one
in three is a hard news story. Over the same period, celebrity coverage
tripled. From 1977 to 1987, Newsweek and Time reduced their public
policy-oriented covers from one in five to one in 20. 
 
At the same time, real news is often relegated to the fringes of
mainstream media. Recently thumbing through the Wall Street Journal, I
spotted a two-inch news agency dispatch, squirreled away at the bottom
of the business section's second page. Headlined "Groups Ask Agency to
Reject AOL Deal," it contained a rare note of criticism -- a consumer
coalition's warning that the buy-out should be rejected unless
anti-monopolistic safeguards are imposed. Then came AOL's boilerplate
response: The deal "would deliver tremendous benefits to consumers." The
benefits were not mentioned, but we know what the company likes to tout:
one-stop shopping; faster download time; all-in-one Internet, cable and
phone service; and the convenience of, say, CNN viewable 24-7 over AOL.
Apparently, not all consumers are convinced that these benefits outweigh
the negative consequences to democratic media, but their voices have
been so marginalized that hardly anyone will know it.

Although the press is commonly characterized as a collection of bleeding
heart liberals, McChesney argues persuasively that whatever journalists'
personal politics, the media's dominant ideology is pro-market and
business class-biased and rests on the assumption that the news business
works just fine or, at most, requires only minor tinkering. Rosen, chair
of the New York University graduate journalism department, is one of
those with a plan for modest adjustment.
   
Rosen is a founding member of the reform movement he calls "public
journalism." His thrust is that standards of objectivity, accuracy and
fairness are not the end of reporters' obligations. Journalists not only
give the news but also craft a world. Rosen says they must encourage the
public to engage in that world by reclaiming from corporate interests,
campaign managers and PR spin-meisters the right to say what is
important. If only journalism could get beyond horse race-style campaign
coverage, spend less time investigating private foibles and more time
reporting on public issues. Then, the thinking goes, faith in the
profession might be restored and representative democracy rejuvenated to
boot. Rosen describes the movement's high hopes: "Politics and public
life, journalism and its professional identity, could be renewed along
civic lines. . . . If citizens joined in the action where possible, kept
an ear tuned to current debate, found a place for themselves in the
drama of politics, got to exercise their skills and voice their
concerns, then maybe democracy didn't have to be the desultory affair it
seemed to have become." 

In "Republic of Denial," Janeway, director of Columbia University's
National Arts Journalism Program and former Boston Globe editor, takes
up where Rosen leaves off. He is more interested in the larger forces --
economic, social and, especially, political--that influence both
journalism and civic life. Janeway sees the press as orbiting the
political planet, roiling its waters yet forever in its pull. Both
revolve around, and depend for their existence on, a lively public body.
"The real problem, the very devil, is the fragmentation of society and
the disintegration of political culture," he declares. And the
bottom-line imperative of the corporate news business leaves no room for
exploring ways to exorcise it. On the contrary, says Janeway, it
"demands of the press that instead of considering the argument for
combating social fragmentation, it figure out how to profit from it." 

Janeway holds little hope that good journalism alone can revive debate
among an atomized public of individuals who, although greatly optimistic
about their own futures, are surprisingly less so about that of their
nation. (Perhaps not so surprisingly: Isn't this a foreseeable condition
in a country with tens of millions of impoverished children for every
Ted Turner? Maybe, but we don't see it that way.) We belong to a
republic of denial, says Janeway, unlikely to awaken to the imperiled
state of our so-called representative democracy, never mind mobilize for
the political reforms--party, campaign, electoral and
Constitutional--that might help save it.

In William Serrin's "The Business of Journalism," the former New York
Times labor reporter and ex-chair of the New York University graduate
journalism department assembled a collection of essays that illustrate
the wretched unwritten rules of the contemporary newsroom. These say,
essentially, tread lightly on corporate interests (in-house and out),
don't be too generous with time or money and stay within the ideological
limits of the news business.  

Although Rosen argues that "journalism is neither a science nor a
business," the first line of Serrin's introduction challenges that
notion: "A nasty, unreported truth about journalism is this: Journalism
is a business." Serrin knows it better than anyone: His former beat has
shriveled in the blinding light of a booming economy fueled by dot-com
fever and merger mania. As McChesney points out, our nation's daily
newspapers today have hordes of business scribes but collectively employ
fewer than 10 labor reporters.
                   
Cynics like Jack Shafer, writing for Slate (the ultimate in new media
hybridization), like to accuse reformers of yearning for a golden age of
journalism that never existed. All of the authors discussed here would
agree there was no golden age. But, as Serrin's collection shows, that
doesn't mean the business hasn't been transformed. The biggest changes
are in ownership concentration, mounting profit pressures, the
profession's socioeconomic elevation, growing (but still inadequate)
newsroom diversity and eroding public trust. Contrary to the belief that
reporters operate within some sort of magic bubble that insulates them
from all outside influence, contributors to "The Business of Journalism"
show that changes like the ones described above affect newsroom
operations as well as reporters' sense of ethics and professionalism.
After all, notes Serrin, journalists are often their own severest
censors.
                   
If so, then it takes a nonjournalist like McChesney to get the big
picture. Something of an unapologetic alarmist and political radical, he
favors language like "socialism" and "solution is left reform. . . ."
That's scary to a lot of people but probably not as scary as a world in
which a handful of like-minded people control all media. As McChesney
points out, the annual private Idaho retreat, at which the heads of
major media companies--Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corp., Sony and
Microsoft included--meet to discuss their industry and strategize for
the future, bears "the earmarks of a cartel." 
                   
It's hard to imagine that Americans of any political or philosophical
bent would be comfortable living in what McChesney argues is our future.
Some may find his prognosis overly pessimistic. But every thinking
person is likely to agree that a serious start needs to be made
somewhere. Journalists engaging other journalists in discussions of
purpose, à la Rosen, is one approach. A more consequential strategy is
to press top public figures to acknowledge the gravity of the threat to
our democracy. We might begin by asking someone other than Ralph Nader
if he or she thinks this matters at all. Perhaps Al Gore and George W.
Bush would like to distinguish themselves by taking on a truly
presidential challenge. 

Russ Baker writes frequently on the media for the Columbia Journalism
Review. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire and
The New Republic. 

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times

<----------article ends here----------->
To read more of Russ Baker's work, see his web page at
<http://www.russbaker.com/>.

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