The marriage of Comcast and NBC is bad news for consumers. But Washington and Wall Street have already bought into the idea that it's a done deal. That's why Americans need to speak out now and stop the mega-merger!
What’s more newsworthy: President Obama’s decision to declassify C.I.A. documents on torture, or the actual contents of those documents? The U.S. media chose the former, and in doing so, has once again failed the public in providing clarity and context on a complex issue – failing to ask hard-hitting, provocative questions, and failing to hold our political leaders accountable.
Rather than investigate what these memos reveal about the harsh interrogation techniques implemented under the Bush administration and who can be implicated for using torture, our media has focused their debate on political posturing and gossip surrounding Obama’s decision to release the memos.
A report by Link TV compares U.S. coverage of the torture memos to the international press coverage in countries like Chile, Iran, and France. If we’re ashamed as a nation about torture, we should also be embarrassed about how our press coverage of torture stacks up.
The U.S. media detracted from the actual story, instead asking, “Should the memos have been released?” and “What impact will this have on Obama?” But commentators and journalists worldwide asked more important and hard-hitting questions such as, “What’s the impact of torture on international affairs?” and “Who is to blame for allowing such acts?” The U.S. media has steered clear in leading a discussion about the moral ramifications of torture, instead asking whether the practices were effective in gaining information from detainees.
The U.S. media routinely reports on conflicts without telling us anything of substance about the real issues at the root of the controversy, as evidenced by the media’s response to the release of the Abu Ghraib torture photos. Much of the reporting focused on the photos themselves and the situation of their release, instead of on the acts that the photos documented.
This soft, off-target coverage of social issues highlights two core elements of our media system that are failing the public and harming our democracy. The first is a weakness built into the DNA of our corporate media system, and the second is a function of the way that media system has grown (or perhaps “shrunk” is more apt).
Rampant Media Consolidation
For decades, the companies that own newspapers and broadcast news outlets have raked in record profits. Instead of investing those profits back into newsgathering, investigative journalism, and critical analysis, media owners have siphoned off that money to buy up other outlets, pay off old debts, and line stockholders’ pockets. After years of slashing jobs and closing news bureaus, mainstream media has resorted to cheap and easy to produce “he-said/she-said” reporting in place of investigative journalism and in-depth analysis. In essence, journalism has become a “for-profit” business, and press coverage is determined by market forces rather than a commitment to protect the public.
Rampant consolidation drastically decreases the diversity of voices and viewpoints owning and making the news, and also creates a troubling echo chamber across all sectors of the media. Paired with our media’s penchant for gossip and sensationalism, we get a glut of junk news promoted and repeated until it becomes a “national story.” The impact of this echo chamber effect is dramatic; indeed, it can be a matter of life and death.
The Dangerous Media Echo Chamber
The media’s complicity in our march to war in Iraq, especially its regurgitation of the Bush administration’s bogus WMD talking points, has been well documented here and here. And just recently the New York Times reported how once again the media influenced the public through a similar echo chamber that made torture palatable, acceptable and even necessary to the American people.
In his article, “How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate,” Times reporter Brian Stelter describes an interview between ABC News and John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer. During the interview, Kiriakou asserts that waterboarding was used by the agency in a limited way and that “the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.” His statement was used across the media to defend torture. Stelter writes:
“His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo. […] During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding.”
Only now, months after the heightened waterboarding scandal has died down and we have an official memo to refer to, is the media beginning to question the truth behind Kiriakou and others’ statements. But where was the media when he made his initial claim? The media whitewashed the story, and led the public to believe that waterboarding was something less than a cruel interrogation technique, but a simple “thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”
With the release of the torture memos, the media now has another chance to hold accountable those responsible for enforcing and carrying out torture, and give a nation space to grow and heal after committing such acts. But if the media continues to use the memos as a quick and cheap news bite to banter about Obama’s decision, the egregiousness of torture will continue because the substantive debate has been silenced.
The crisis in journalism has reached such proportions that any efforts to fix it seem impossible.A new report by the Radio-Television News Directors Association last week found that nationwide, local television news stations slashed 4.3 percent – or 1,200 – newsroom jobs last year.
Meanwhile, the American Society of News Editors announced this month daily papers collectively reduced their staff last year by an astonishing 11 percent, or close to 6,000 jobs. Meanwhile, minority newsroom employment continues its decline with a loss of 854 journalists of color last year. Minorities now make up just 13 percent of the newsroom work force. But the actual number of journalists of color working in the newsroom (6,300) is at the lowest level since 1998.
If you dig deeper, the ASNE report reveals even more disturbing trends about dwindling diversity in the newsroom. African-American employment at newspapers fell by 13.5 percent, Asian American employment by 13.3 percent, and Hispanic employment by slightly less than 11 percent last year.
“The headline for me is that diversity has been demoted,” said Barbara Ciara, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists. She added that African American journalists were “the single most targeted group for job losses in newsrooms across the country.”
UNITY: Journalists of Color, a coalition of four minority journalism organizations, is calling for all journalism stakeholders to convene a summit this summer to find ways to prevent further declines in minority newsroom employment.
And while newsrooms and the public suffer from a diminished press corps, news organizations and media reform groups like Free Press are trying to stave off efforts to allow for more media consolidation – one of the main reasons we’re facing this journalism crisis in the first place.
During a hearing in Congress about the journalism industry, Newspaper Guild President Bernard Lunzer rejected any efforts to allow for further newspaper consolidation. The hearing was held after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to consider relaxing anti-trust laws to allow her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, to explore merger opportunities. The Chronicle has threatened to shut its doors because it’s losing money.
Meanwhile, Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott also testified at the hearing and called for a national journalism strategy that would bring together government, industry and public stakeholders to work on developing policy solutions to support the production of quality journalism across platforms.
It’s easy to get mired in hopelessness and despair as thousands of fired journalists close their reporters’ notebooks, shelve their AP Stylebooks, and leave their posts, their beats often left unfilled.
It’s easy to feel a sense of righteousness as newspapers across the country crumble under a greedy business model that puts profit before quality journalism and protecting the public’s interest. And it’s easy to simply hope that the Internet provides a new vehicle for a robust press.
It’s a lot harder to make the shift from failing market-supported journalism to sustainable new models that support the production of journalism as a public good.
Today, Free Press’ Policy Director Ben Scott called on Congress to embark on a national journalism strategy, to develop policy solutions to the collapsing newspaper industry, and to promote a vibrant news marketplace.
In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy, Scott weighed in on how to approach the work of “saving journalism”:
What we need to have journalism is journalists – and lots of them. The biggest problem we face today is not the collapsing business model of print newspapers, it is the possibility that this market failure will result in the dissipation of tens of thousands of highly trained and experienced reporters into other sectors of the economy. Or that it will dissuade tens of thousands of talented students from going to journalism school. I am not arguing that all journalists must be professionally trained to earn the moniker. Nor am I arguing that professionally trained journalists are necessarily better than those who are not.
But I am arguing that for the future of journalism to work, we need to create and sustain a model of news production in which it is possible to earn a living writing the news. And to return to my earlier vision that this crisis is an opportunity – we should strive for a model that makes it possible for more journalists than are working today to earn a living writing the news.
Combining the best elements of traditional and new media forms, we need to create and sustain models of news production in which it is possible to earn a living writing the news. These new institutions of journalism need to have the resources to cover expensive beats like international affairs and investigative reporting as well as the essential news about the workings of local government.
These policy solutions don’t need to mimic the business models that failed us, nor do they need to bail out the media companies that chased short-term revenue through disastrous media mergers. Scott said the knee-jerk reaction by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and others to allow for more media consolidation is not the answer:
This is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. Not only does it reward bad business decisions—namely, leveraging news organizations with crippling debts to finance the last round of consolidation—but it also brings no new jobs, no new voices, and effectively props up a failed model. In other words, we should not subject journalism’s fate to the corporate consolidators who got us into this mess. It is not unlike rewarding the banks who drove our economy into the ground. Instead, we should seize this rare opportunity to liberate journalists and journalism from the downward spiral they’ve been stuck in for years.
Asking the government to help support the Fourth Estate has prickled some people who fear government regulation of speech. But Scott argued that government policies that restrict speech or favor particular speakers should not be tolerated:
There is nothing wrong with government policies that promote speech of all kinds. In fact, inherent to the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of the press is the responsibility of the government to promote the widest possible dissemination of diverse viewpoints.
In order to support journalism and journalists as a public good, we need to re-imagine how we think of journalism enterprises and consider subsidy models sustained by grants, tax incentives, or public investments in education and infrastructure.
And we need to fully face the digital divide between America’s Internet haves and have-nots, which keeps more than one-third of the population from getting their news online.
Saving journalism is urgent, but it doesn’t need to be haphazard. In his testimony today, Scott outlined a series of guiding principles to help shape the policies and approaches that a national journalism strategy should include:
Protect the First Amendment: Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are essential to a free society and a functioning democracy. Everyone should have the right to access and impart information through the media of their choice.
Produce Quality Coverage: To self-govern in a democratic society, the public needs in-depth reporting that is accurate, credible and verifiable on local issues as well as national and international affairs.
Provide Adversarial Perspectives: Reporting must hold the powerful accountable by scrutinizing the actions of government and corporations. Journalism should foster genuine debate.
Promote Public Accountability: Newsrooms must serve the public interest, not private or government aims, and should be treated primarily as a public service, not a commodity. Journalism must be responsive to the needs of diverse and changing communities.
Prioritize Innovation: Journalists must use new tools and technologies to report and deliver the news. The public needs journalism that crosses traditional boundaries and is accessible to the broadest range of people across platforms.
Certainly, it’s a frightening time for one of America’s most vital institutions, and for our democracy. But out of the current system’s failures comes opportunity, and we will only be thwarted by an inability to use our imaginations to support what journalism is at its very core – a record of events disseminated to the people.
It’s easy to simply hope the journalism crisis somehow gets solved. But we need concrete action and a comprehensive policy approach. We need to develop a national journalism strategy, not to find the answer, but a multitude of answers.
There are profound and immediate consequences of the current crisis of media ownership, in which only a few companies control nearly everything we read, watch and hear.
As corporations have increased their media holdings, news has become a commodity, and a profit-driven bottom line has replaced a dedication to real journalism. We are reminded daily of this breach of contract with our democracy when the corporate media routinely falters in providing the public with hard-hitting, quality journalism.
More profound is the way media consolidation is endangering our citizens directly, whether it is the media’s failure to ask tough questions about the Iraq war, report on the harmful effects of sentencing laws, or provide non-sensationalistic coverage of natural disasters that gives the public pertinent public safety information.
The Seattle Medium, a local, independent newspaper, highlighted one particular way Big Media is harming citizens: by failing to report on missing persons based on race.
The article’s investigation shows, “…national media operations often fail to present what is in fact a very diverse missing persons population,” instead focusing primarily on white victims.
Why the preferential treatment? The corporate news media approach missing persons as another news segment that will draw advertising revenue. In other words, only a certain segment of missing persons is viewed as important enough to cover.
Take, for example, Latasha Norman, a black Jackson State University honor student who went missing for more than two weeks in late 2007, and barely got the media’s attention. It was only after her body was found in Greenville, Miss., two weeks later that CNN picked up the story (only to quickly drop it).
At the same time, Stacey Peterson, a Caucasian woman who also disappeared, was becoming a household name due to constant media coverage on all the major TV stations. This is not to say that Stacey Peterson’s disappearance should not have been covered. But why weren’t both women given equal airtime when they went missing and needed the public’s eye to help find them?
The Seattle Medium’s article reported the difference between the two women was indeed race, including an ABCnews.com quote from the Jackson police chief who investigated Latasha Norman’s disappearance:
“It’s a small college in the South. It’s the daughter of simple people who maybe are not important outside of their circle, and maybe we don’t attach the same importance to them that we do for other people,” said Malcolm McMillin in the ABC article.
There are dangerous consequences when Big Media view people as commodities rather than as human beings. Instead of simply reporting on missing persons in the critical first few hours, the corporate media decide if the missing person will “play well” on TV.
What a perverse calculation: that a missing black woman is not worth mentioning because she may not get the same ratings as her white counterpart.
This disturbing trend makes it clear how important it is that we have diverse media ownership and diversity in the newsrooms. If owners and media workers were more representative of the U.S. population, missing persons who need media attention would have a voice to advocate for their inclusion.
According to studies by Free Press in 2006 and 2007, people of color make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, but own just 3 percent of all TV stations and 7.7 percent of full-power radio stations.
For many missing Americans, the ownership crisis is literally a matter of life and death. Information that is crucial to saving lives is being left out of the news cycle if it doesn’t turn a profit.
This week, the Federal Communications Commission finally took a major step toward accurately assessing the number of broadcast stations owned by people of color and women in this country.
This is a critical — and long overdue — boost for U.S. media diversity. The FCC is revamping a broadcast ownership form to include much greater detail on the racial and ethnic makeup of station owners. Broadcast stations must submit the form to the commission every two years.
A few tweaks to a form may not sound like a big deal, but it is. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
In 2006 and 2007, Free Press released two studies — Out of the Picture and Off the Dial — on the state of minority and female ownership of TV and radio stations. In the process of conducting these studies, we learned that the commission had collected inaccurate date on minority and female ownership since 1998. Many stations had filled out their ownership forms incorrectly – omitting key diversity data — but the FCC had failed to monitor or verify the accuracy of the submitted information. Instead, the agency released ownership figures that were simply wrong.
In conducting our own research, Free Press took a different tack. Prior to publishing our reports, we verified the ownership figures for every broadcast station in the United States, with the result that our reports are widely believed to include the most accurate ownership figures compiled to date.
Free Press research found that people of color make up 33 percent of the U.S. population, but own just 7 percent of all radio and TV stations. Women own just 6 percent of all outlets, despite making up 51 percent of the population.
In addition, the reports concluded that people of color own more stations in less concentrated markets and that the number of minority-owned stations has declined because of media consolidation.
Yet even after the publication of the Free Press reports, the FCC once again released inaccurate data in 2007 when it considered allowing for greater consolidation of our country’s media outlets. In fact, the agency-sponsored studies failed to identify 69 percent of all minority TV owners and 75 percent of female owners.
That’s just unacceptable. It is simply outrageous that a government agency with a public mandate would continue to adopt critical broadcast regulations without having accurate data to determine the impact of its rule changes on minority and female ownership.
“The sad truth is that we simply do not know the precise state of minority and female ownership in this country,” said FCC Acting Chairman Michael Copps. “The official term for it is, ‘We don’t have a clue.’ We will never get to where we need to go unless we know where we are. Try getting driving directions on MapQuest without entering a starting location and you’ll see what I mean.”
This week’s action by the Copps-led FCC will help to ensure the commission and the public have the right directions to bolster minority and female media ownership.
NPR reported last week that General Motors had provided thousands of its white-collar employees with free cars and gas. And while this benefit has been around for decades, it’s being seen in a new light now that federal funds are propping up the automaker. GM’s story recalls the excesses of another company, AIG, which handed out millions of dollars in bonuses to executives as taxpayers were underwriting its failed business.
A fair question raised by the media in both of these instances is, “Should taxpayer dollars fund this kind of thing?”
Watching mainstream media pundits wag their fingers at these companies recalls the old saying about throwing stones from glass houses. If the media are so concerned with keeping a watchful eye on corporations getting government assistance, then they had better be prepared to turn that attention to themselves.
Big media have been on the receiving end of government handouts since the FCC first started issuing broadcast licenses. The airwaves that are used to broadcast TV and radio actually belong to the public, in the same way that your sidewalk or your local park does. By some estimates, these airwaves are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but Big Media get to use them free of charge. In return, they are required by law to serve the public interest.
So while we are taking a hard look at the behavior of companies that get wads of taxpayer money, let’s hold Big Media accountable as well.
Across the board, media conglomerates have failed to meet even the most basic standards of community service. Instead of producing the kind of local reporting we need, television stations repackage syndicated celebrity gossip and sensationalism and present it to viewers as news. Public interest programs usually air during the early morning hours when few people are watching.
Big media executives may not have flown on private jets to Washington, D.C. in search of a handout, but they are siphoning off your tax dollars just the same.
In recent weeks, we have heard a lot about incredible salaries, bonuses and perks for bankers and auto execs. Let’s put Big Media under the same spotlight. According to the ALF-CIO’s Executive PayWatch Database and the Securities Exchange Commission, AIG CEO Martin J. Sullivan and GM CEO G. Richard Wagoner each made roughly $14,000,000 in total compensation in 2007.
That same year, Viacom CEO Philippe P. Dauman raked in $20,597,090. Robert A. Iger, CEO of Walt Disney, brought home an astounding $27,699,201 in total compensation. And in 2008, News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch pulled in almost $28,000,000, according to the SEC.
Year after year, Big Media bosses sit atop the executive pay scale. And they have you – and your airwaves – to thank for it.
So, what are Americans getting in return for our investment in Big Media? And should we think about reinvesting that money to save journalism?
While Congress debates retroactive taxes on AIG bonuses, we should also discuss stricter broadcaster licensing requirements. Or we could just start charging Big Media for their use of our airwaves. Let’s reclaim those hundreds of billions of dollars from the broadcasters and use it to help put journalists back to work in our communities.
