This morning, Politico reported (http://bit.ly/Vgax1) that the Washington Post was offering lobbyists “off-the-record, non-confrontational” access to the paper’s own reporters and editors for a whopping fee of $25,000 to $250,000.
According to Politico, a promotional flyer for the first “Washington Post Salon,” focusing on health care, promised lobbyists an “exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done.” In addition to access to reporters and editors, the paper promised to hand-deliver Obama administration officials and members of Congress to any lobbyist willing to pay for access.
But within moments after news of the promotion hit social networks and blogs, the Post cancelled the plan. “This should never have happened,” Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Post, said in an article on the paper’s site. “The fliers got out and weren’t vetted. They didn’t represent at all what we were attempting to do. We’re not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom.”
The crisis in journalism has sparked unparalleled experimentation and innovation from new and old newsrooms alike. But this kind of “pay-for- access” model should be a non-starter in newsrooms, and it’s good to see leadership at the Post acting swiftly to shut down the ill-advised scheme.
With the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and an unprecedented drive to maximize profits at media conglomerates, we have seen too many examples of news organizations forgoing their independence in exchange for a place in the halls of power. These Washington Post salons would have taken this one step further, auctioning off its access to corporate lobbyists.
If held, this kind of an event would have been an outrageous violation of journalistic standards. While we know that journalism is in crisis around the country, and that the economic downturn has collided with fundamental technological, cultural and ideological changes, the future of journalism is not in selling access to reporters and contacts to the highest bidder.
The backlash against the Post was swift, spreading across social media and fueled by the marketing materials that seemed blind to the inherent conflicts of interest in this model. The promotional flyer for the salons said that these events “are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard.”
Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli took up the issue of journalistic ethics in the Post’s article, saying, “We do not offer access to the newsroom for money. We just are not in that business.” He went on to say that the newsroom was never involved in this plan, nor would it have taken part in such an event.
Yet, the fact that this idea got as far as it did is another example of how Big Media serve corporate interests instead of the public interest. The notion of holding these events suggests that for the Post, the real stakeholders in the health care debate seemed to be lobbyists and the companies they represent, not the American people whom the Post is supposed to inform, educate and represent.
It’s telling that throughout the flyer, the Post reassures corporate representatives that the conversation will be non-confrontational – there will be no afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted here.
The irony of this whole debacle is that journalists and policy makers ought to be getting in the same room more often. But we need them to be working together in search of policy solutions to the crisis in journalism and to ensure that our communities get the information they need – not to trade influence and cash in on their contacts.
If you are on Twitter, use this petition (http://act.ly/6l) to thank the Washington Post’s editors for backing down and reinforce the fact that we need real public interest journalism.
While news about the mainstream media seems to get worse by the day, the same can’t be said for ethnic media.
A recent study by New America Media revealed that the launch of ethnic media outlets and their reach have been increasing over the past four years. The audience for ethnic media grew by 16 percent during this period, reaching 57 million people on a regular basis.The study also found:
Ethnic media reach 82 percent of all Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American adults;
The percentage of the Asian-American adult population reached by television programming targeting Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Filipino viewers has grown by 30 percent over last four years. For Asian-Americans, watching news about their countries of origin is a major reason for viewing these stations;
The penetration of Spanish-language television is now almost universal; and,
Chinese and Korean newspapers now reach 70 percent and 64 percent, respectively, of their adult populations. Newspapers like Sing Tao, the World Journal, Korea Daily and Korea Times have substantially increased their circulation.
While the advertising downturn, among other things, has caused the mainstream media to spiral into crisis, ethnic media have been able to withstand the economic meltdown. It’s not that ethnic outlets aren’t facing tough times as the recession hits local businesses, but ethnic media have always struggled to secure national advertisers, making them less dependent on corporate ad dollars.
“Advertising is more of a mosaic of small businesses, causing no big holes in ad revenue as it would by big corporate advertisers,” Juana Ponce de Leon, the executive director of the New York Community Media Alliance, told Colorlines magazine.
Julian Do, the Southern California director for New America Media, added: “Their (ethnic media) model is more resilient with standing up to the crisis. They are more flexible to cutbacks… they won’t totally shut down [as mainstream media might]. A number of ethnic media did close, but when compared to the mainstream media, it pales in comparison.”
Ethnic media are also in a better position to withstand the economic crisis because of their historic mission to serve the community.
A Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism study found that 68 percent of ethnic media outlets believe that providing a voice for their community is the most important goal for their organization.
This commitment is reflected in the longevity of ethnic media staffers. Despite traditionally low-to-modest salaries, the study found that 39 percent of participants worked for their companies for 11 years and that 32 percent believe their jobs provide them with an opportunity to grow in their careers.
But the report did touch upon the technological challenges facing ethnic media outlets. While Spanish-language and African-American-oriented Web sites have expanded their reach, only about one in five Hispanic and African-American adults visit those sites on a regular basis.
The news is better for Asian-Americans. Asian language Web sites have greater penetration. More than half of all Chinese-American adults visit sites in Cantonese or Mandarin, and about one-third of Korean-American and Vietnamese-American adults visit sites in their native languages.Asian-Americans are far more likely to have broadband access at home than any other ethnic group in the country.
As we work on new solutions to save quality reporting, maybe we should take a few tips from the ethnic media outlets that are still serving their communities – and doing it well.
It’s hard to empathize with struggling newspapers when those running them continue to suffer from the short-sightedness that got their industry into a mess.
The editors at the Washington Post put on a display of such backward thinking on Saturday, when they published an op-ed by two lawyers from the influential D.C. firm Baker Hostetler.
In writing this op-ed, the lawyers hide certain conflicts of interest that should weigh heavily against their analysis. The Post ’s editors might have connected the dots for readers, but didn’t.
But the piece is just so stunningly stupid that it falls apart all by itself. In it, Esq. Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown call for reactionary legal measures that would stifle access to news and information and return us to the grand old days of consolidated ownership, bloated media giants and information gatekeepers.
To save journalism, Brown and Sanford argue, we must “eliminate ownership restrictions” and open floodgates to a new wave of media concentration.
We should also “grant an antitrust exemption” for consolidated media, allowing them to join together and wall off content from users. “Antitrust immunity is necessary because most individual news sites can’t go it alone,” they explain in the op-ed. “Readers will simply jump to sites that are still free.”
They urge readers to support more stringent copyright restrictions that would bar bloggers, Web sites and all others from the online sharing of even a small portion of mainstream media news content.
Nowhere in this silliness do they see the consolidation and walling off of news for what it is: more the real culprit in the demise of newspapers than is their favorite bogeyman — the free flowing Internet.
We have nearly survived an era of media mergers that shackled newspapers with massive amounts of debt and high shareholder expectations. Look no further than real estate magnate Sam Zell, who in 2007 purchased the Tribune Company using financial contortions and shifting debt structures that made heads spin among even the most seasoned bean counters.
Zell is not alone. Media consolidation over the last 20 years has been typified by leveraged deals and unserviceable debts.
But consider this. Just a few years ago, the average profit margin for newspapers was 20 percent — with some raking in twice as much or more.”
Did they use these astronomical profits to invest in the quality of their products or to innovate for the future?” asked Free Press’ Craig Aaron on Thursday. “No. They just bought up more newspapers and TV stations.” (On May 12 Free Press released a National Journalism Strategy that outlines forward-thinking policies to save journalism, and not merely prop up the creaking old guard.)
This debt-loaded structure began to implode as their monopolies over local advertising revenue were undercut by Internet upstarts such as Craigslist and Google News.
The recent economic downturn was the final straw. And the aftermath has been dire — at least for journalists. By one count, 24,000 journalism jobs have been lost since 2008. Foreign, Washington and statehouse bureaus have been shuttered. Major news organizations are in bankruptcy. Others, like the Rocky Mountain News, have closed their doors for good. Newspaper circulation is nose-diving. The Seattle Post Intelligencer and Tuscon Citizen have shed their print operations opting (far too late) to take exclusively to the Web.
In Saturday’s Post op-ed, both Brown and Sanford are nostalgic for the corporate media oligarchs that predated the Internet. This fantasy is so far removed from the contours of today’s media landscape that it’s easy to dismiss these two lawyers as ancient barristers who rely on secretaries to print and hand deliver their email.
They aren’t. And that is what’s disturbing about this article.Undisclosed by neither Brown and Sanford nor the Washington Post is the A-list of corporate media clients represented by the authors.
Here’s what I found from quick scan of the Baker Hostetler Web site: Sanford has been counsel in cases representing publishers E.W. Scripps Co, Tribune Co., the Hearst Corporation, Random House, Simon & Schuster and Bertelsmann, A.G. He also represents consolidated broadcasters Clear Channel Communications, ABC/Disney, NBC, Fox Television as well as AOL/Time Warner. Brown has represented Scripps Howard Broadcasting Co. and the New York Times.
This list is not complete. As far as I can tell the Post doesn’t seek counsel from Baker Hostetler. But that doesn’t preclude the paper’s publishers from benefiting from Brown and Sanford’s myopia.
That these two lawyers have sold themselves out to corporate media seems no surprise in a city of lobbyists and snake oil. What’s disturbing is the lengths to which the Washington Post will go to promote such swill without full disclosure to readers.
Wednesday’s Senate hearing on the future of newspapers felt more like an autopsy. Call it CSI: Newspapers.
At a time when we need to step back and take a holistic approach to examine the crisis facing journalism, the participants in yesterday’s hearing seemed all too ready to hone in on one culprit: the Internet.In doing so, they were ignoring a vast crime scene, with a slew of villains and victims on every side.
As it unfolded, the hearing began to resemble an interrogation room where the police – or in this case, the Senators – gathered evidence from their key witnesses. The witnesses took sides early on, and an old dichotomy emerged: print versus Web. The Dallas Morning News and the Baltimore Sun versus Google and the Huffington Post. Fingers were pointed, and accusations were made that the Internet has killed print journalism.
Meanwhile, the majority in the room ignored the incriminating evidence that the current challenges facing the newspaper industry are self-inflicted, mostly due to greed and media consolidation. Most large newspaper companies are publicly traded. For decades, Wall Street has demanded these companies return unrealistic profit margins. And thanks to bad policymaking, newspapers have consolidated and slashed staff to maximize profit over the last few decades. Thus, our policymakers and regulators should have also been in the witness chair as accomplices to this crime.
A Case of Bad Behavior
With lax policies encouraging their bad behavior, newspaper companies rushed to buy up more media outlets and took on greater debt, which is why they find themselves overleveraged and having a hard time paying off their debt. Even still, the newspaper industry continues to make an average annual profit margin of 12 to 15 percent. The newspaper properties at companies like McClatchy and Gannett made 21 percent and 18 percent profit margins last year, respectively.
You won’t see newspapers reporting on the bad business decisions made by their own industry. Instead, most newspapers report on their declining ad revenues, giving you the impression they bare no responsibility for their current predicament.
Mounting Evidence
A remarkable thing happened nearly two hours into Wednesday’s hearing. James M. Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News, gave the senators the evidence they needed to understand what’s really happened to newspapers. He said that newspapers were struggling due to the debt they took on as a result of consolidation.
Sen. Kerry, chairman of the subcommittee, initially picked up on the admission and pressed Moroney on how bad business decisions may have created the crisis in journalism we see today. But quickly thereafter, the blame was shifted back to the Internet and those pesky bloggers.
Case Unclosed
The journalism industry faces short-term and long-term problems. The short-term issue is what will happen to all the closing local newspapers and the journalists who work there. But more critical to this debate is how to create policies that support the production of quality journalism, regardless of platform, by funding the experimentation of emerging media companies.
Wednesday’s hearing spent too much time trying to track down fingerprints on the old, broken model of journalism, when it should have focused on seeking out how to move forward. We need to explore how government policy can help stop the bleeding and help ensure such a crime never happens again. This means searching out long-term solutions that don’t prop up old business models, but instead invest in new ideas.
The most intriguing discussion about the future of news in America came from the two people in the room advocating for new nonprofit news models: Alberto Ibargüen, president of the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation and former publisher of the Miami Herald, and Steve Coll, president of the New America Foundation and former managing editor of The Washington Post. They both made an important case about the need to invest in experimentation, innovation, and noncommercial media to save journalism.
Pointing fingers aside, it’s key to remember that while newspapers may be threatened, the news is far from dying. There is still much left to discuss and investigate before we draw the chalk outlines on the sidewalk and close the book on this case.
Ever since the country’s largest radio broadcasters were forced to stop their payola – or “pay-for-play” – practices and include more independent music in their playlists, the radio dials have been flooded with… the same old songs. Wait, what?
Maybe you didn’t need a study to tell you that non-mainstream music still isn’t making it on the air, but at least now we’ve got the data to back it up. The Future of Music Coalition recently released a report that found the nation’s biggest radio broadcasters have not been playing local and independent music, despite a government decree to do so.
In April 2007, Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Citadel and Entercom agreed to collectively air 4,200 hours of local, regional, unsigned and independent artists after the FCC caught them accepting illegal gifts in exchange for promoting music from major record labels.
We should have seen a surge of new artists on the airwaves, but what we got was simply more of the same. The FMC report says there were only incremental changes in airplay from 2005 – 2008, with major labels scoring 78 to 82 percent of airtime.
What we’re dealing with here isn’t just radio stations’ rejection of a few artists, but a more systemic problem. When the majority of radio stations in the United States are owned by just a handful of corporations, we will continue to see the same cookie-cutter programming from New York City to Bozeman, Mont., whether or not that programming reflects community tastes.
We need to keep fighting to make commercial radio accountable to the people, but we can also do one better – get radio stations into the hands of the people.
Right now, we’re pushing Congress to support the Local Community Radio Act, a bill that would deliver more Low Power FM radio stations to communities across the country.
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.
