Private Media and the State
Deeb-Paul Kitchen
"Information is the currency of democracy" -Ralph Nader
The media is very crucial to a healthy democracy. The fourth estate, as it has come to be known in the United States, is expected to provide information to people that will express the accurate range of views and points of debate on topics of salience in peoples lives. It is supposed to be a counterweight to government and power elites. This critical role of the media is considered a bedrock of American democracy, commonly described as the traditional Jeffersonian role of the media. By these standards media should be "a cantankerous, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process".1 Unfortunately, this is hardly the case here in the U.S.A.
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman offer a different, conception of the media here that is a more realistic notion of how one should expect the commercial media to act.2 Their "propaganda model" suggests that because big corporations run media conglomerates and set their agendas, people should expect that they would push agendas that are for the benefit of those big corporations and the rich men who own them. A picture of the world is presented "which defends and inculcates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore largely control the government".3
This is not to suggest that the state policy will always be championed in the media coverage. What will be covered are all of the various perspectives and interests of the masters in our society, but only particular elites hold power in government at any given time. When various privileged people or groups oppose any state policy it will be reported. It is crucial that it gets reported and that there is an intense debate over the issue in order to preserve an illusion of democracy. It is also important that this debate remain within the framework dictated by the powerful media conglomerates. When there is agreement among the powerful on any issues (and there are many) those issues are never discussed.4 The most obvious example of this is the actual political system.
The state does, however, have an enormous advantage in getting their opinions into the media. When covering news for profit, the corporations are naturally going to send reporters to the most fruitful sources to collect news. It cuts overhead by requiring less reporters and requiring those reporters to travel less. The government can provide more official facts and figures and people with fancy titles to report them than any news agency could afford to gather on their own, so they cover those government sources more diligently; it is simply wise allocation of resources. How often do media outlets report the results of their own investigations into the accuracy of government data? This never happens because they dont want to cut into profits by increasing their overhead. Hiring enough people to do these investigations would mean more money out for wages and pensions and benefits.
The state is aware of this, so they do generate more data than any other source. Then they offer first access to it to those reporters and news agencies that have covered them most favorably. The pure volume of data generated by the state guarantees that it will dominate the news. It just makes sense, economically, that the news media will focus on primarily on the sources that provide the most stories the most frequently. This begs the asking of Amy Goodmans provocative question: "If it were state media, how would it be any different?"5
Rarely are the daily tactics and strategies that major corporations employ the object of reporting. This makes sense, for by not reporting on this corporate power it is shielded from critique, which allows it to remain, for the most part, unchallenged. Again, this makes sense because corporations are empowered when other corporations are empowered, for they usual have fairly similar interests. (This works the other way too. When people are well organized and politically active, it makes other peoples activism more effective.)
The control over the media has been increasingly in fewer hands over the course of the last couple of decades. Ben Bagdikian reports in his book The New Media Monopoly that in 1983 there were fifty corporations that dominated the media; now in 2005 there are five: AOL Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdochs News Corp., Viacom, and Bertelsman.6 This consolidation has been rapidly accelerated by legislation such as the 1996 Telecommunications Act that was signed by "liberal" Democratic president Bill Clinton that allowed corporations to increase the number of media outlets they own in each market. This was increased even further in 2003 after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell, son of then Secretary of State Colin Powell (and this will be important later on) announced that it would not be a bad thing if one broadcast corporation owned every station in a metropolitan area. Although modern media is reaching more citizens than ever before, fewer people than ever before control it.
This is a far cry from the competitive system that Adam Smith wrote about. Instead of media providers competing for viewers by keeping cost low and the quality of their products high, there is a system of oligopoly (the rule of few in which any of them can, acting alone, alter the market conditions). Not only is the field of "competitors" tiny, but also they are not really competing. Sure, they want to be number one among the group, but they like having the others around. Together they form an incredibly powerful lobbying force that has been effective at influencing policy makers: The National Association of Broadcasters.7 They can determine which politicians get covered in the news, and how they get covered. Those in power typically try to please them.
Other than lobbying together in Washington D.C., the five major media powers are interconnected in other ways. Their boards of directors share members. Viacom, Disney, AOL Time Warner, and News Corporation have forty- five members who serve on the board of directors for more than one of the corporations. It would be illegal for people to sit on a competitors board of directors if a merger of the corporations would form a monopoly. Furthermore they have 141 joint ventures.8 That means that they are business partners in 141 different ways.
This concentration is detrimental to smaller media providers. Very few local news organizations can afford to send a reporter to Iraq or Chile, so they are dependent on what the giants are offering in the way of information on these distant places if they are to write or report on events that have happened there. In this way the five media powers can influence even that media which they do not own.
State Management of the Media
As stated previously, nothing in the propaganda model suggests that the line pushed by the state will be the only view covered or even is covered favorably. The powerful elites who run the government are not always the exact same powerful elites who run the media. This leads agents of the state to try to manage the media, so that they receive favorable coverage. There have been some rather extreme examples of this recently.
In the past year, the Government Accountability Office has found the Administration of George W. Bush in violation of the law for creating fake news clips and distributing them to media providers. These "news" clips that have been handed out have no indication that they were prepared by the Pentagon; they are made to look like they were shot and edited by legitimate reporters who are trying to report facts.9
What is really even worse than the fact that the government would distribute this blatant propaganda is the fact that television stations in the United States aired these fake reports without any suggestion that they were filmed by the very institution they were supposedly reporting on. It makes sense for one to expect the news outlets to gladly participate in this type of lie, for it cuts down on their overhead; they dont have to pay reporters, film crews, and power bills. Their product is paid for and produced by somebody else. All that is left is for them to do is stick the film in and press play. It really does help their bottom lines.
This type of action which, as stated previously, is a crime in the United States, is perfectly legal in Iraq, and again the same culprits have acted in the same way over there. As Jeff Gerth and Scott Shane have reported, the Pentagon has been paying a public relations firm, the Lincoln Group, millions of dollars to produce and plant a storyboard of propaganda articles in the Iraqi news.10 Using letters to newspapers does this. The Pentagon writes, in the guise of an average Iraqi, translating them to Arabic, and sending them to Iraqi newspapers. Furthermore, several millions of dollars have been spent to pay Iraqi reporters a monthly stipend for pushing their talking points.
Paying reporters is another play out of the Bush Administrations domestic playbook. Earlier this year it was discovered that Armstrong Williams, a well-known conservative pundit, was paid to promote an education bill. This was of course accompanied by a short propaganda film created by a public relations firm hired by the Education Department that ran as a news clip. Again, there was no indication that the government sponsored the film.11
This is all happening or happened while the United States government is fighting a war that is supposedly to promote freedom and democracy. The State Department is currently paying millions of dollars to train Iraqi reporters on the ethics and techniques of western journalists and promote independent media.12
One other instance in particular makes the fake news clips and bribes to reporters look downright honorable. Shortly after it was discovered that Mr. Williams was on the White House payroll, a reporter in the White House press corp. asked the president a suspiciously easy, partisan question about working with Democrats. An investigation into Jeff Gannon revealed that a) he was not really a reporter, b) that his real name was James Guckert and c) that he actually was a gay, male prostitute.13 At the time he asked his softball question, pictures of Mr. Guckert, who charged $200 an hour, had advertisements for his services online at web sights such as hotmilitarystuds.com. His columns were printed at talonnews.com, and they usually were verbatim from White House press releases. Of course proper citations were missing. This is in violation of a ban on fake news.14
The really interesting thing is that even though this website did not exist until after Mr. Guckert was in the press corp., and he had naked pictures of himself online, he somehow passed the secret services background check. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan claims that this happened because it is hard to distinguish legitimate news sources from bogus ones in this age of constantly changing media. Oddly enough, acclaimed journalist Maureen Dowd was denied a press pass by the Bush administration.
In Britain, the government has threatened members of the press with criminal prosecution under the Official Secrets Act if they print the contents of a leaked memo in which Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently had a discussion with President Bush about bombing the headquarters of al-Jazzera, an Arabic news provider, in Qatar, an ally of the United States.15 Likewise, in the United States, reporter Judith Miller spent several weeks in jail for refusing to reveal a source. These constitute the use of coercive and military powers by a nation state to try and manage the media.
The previously mentioned consideration of an attack on the al-Jazeera news headquarters is part of a wider, violent attempt at controlling the media on the part of the nation state. An al-Jazeera office was bombed in Kabul in the war against the Taliban. The Pentagon claimed this as an accident.16 Al-Jazeera gave the Pentagon their lines of latitude, longitude and the height of their building.17 In Baghdad, the United State also "accidentally" bombed the Palestine hotel, which was known to be housing several reporters.18
Iraq
In an attempt to receive first access to the best war footage, which would go to those news providers who covered the state most favorably, the American mainstream media completely ignored any serious debate in the lead-up to the Iraq war once the Bush administration had made its intention to attack clear. In the week before and after Colin Powells speech to the United Nations assembly, the public in the United States were not convinced that an attack without the consent of the U.N. was necessary.19
It was Colin Powells speech that brought much of the America public on board with the war. In that infamous speech, Secretary Powell held up a small vile of white powder and made claims to the damage that Saddam Hussein could do with just that much anthrax. This white powder was used deliberately as a rhetorical device because of the anthrax scare that had occurred in the United States, but the anthrax that Saddam Hussein was accused of having was supposedly not a white powder; it was actually a black sludge that looks much more like Pepsi Cola than table salt.20 Certainly the Secretary of State was aware of this deliberate scare tactic. He has since expressed regret about that speech, in which he effectively sold the war to the American Public. Those in the press who had so diligently reported the accusations of weapons of mass destruction also certainly knew the truth about the accusations and therefore the lie that Secretary Powell told. Why was it never reported?
Why would Collin Powell risk his reputation with such a dirty lie? Could it be that at the same time he was doing the bidding of the neo-cons he was also making a bunch of money off the actions of his son who Bush appointed to chair the Federal communications Commission? This was right at the same time his son Michael Powell was pushing through changes in the ownership rules for major media conglomerates. Secretary Powell owns a considerable number of shares in the largest media giant in the world, AOL Time Warner. He was profiting handsomely off those changes to the rules.21
At this same crucial point in the lead-up to and immediately following Powells speech, the media aided the war efforts by ignoring any debate over the war and the reasons given for its necessity. Fairness and Accuracy in reporting did a study that analyzed the evening news shows of NBC, ABC, CBS, and even "liberal" PBS. They found that of the 393 people on these shows who were there to speak about the war, only three opposed the war, while three hundred and ninety of them supported it.22 That is astonishing and no reasonable person can claim that that did not affect the public support for the war.
The news media acted this way simply because they learned the lesson taught by CNN during the first war on the Iraqis in the early 1990s: cover the war favorably, with flags waving, and make it look like an action movie, and there is a bunch of money to be made in advertising sales. The people running the news agencies know a good business model when they see one. This time around all the news media marched in step. That is why there are no pictures of Iraqi hospital wards on the evening news. There are plenty of explosions from a distance and airplanes taking off from aircraft carriers.
NBC, MSNBC, and of course, FOX News went as far as to call their coverage of the war by the name that the Pentagon called the mission: Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Pentagon thoroughly researches the most effective names in terms of selling these missions to the public. It is utterly inexcusable for a supposedly objective news source to use the states propaganda line. (Originally the Pentagon wanted to use Operation Iraqi Liberation, but the acronym was unwittingly honest: O.I.L.) Again the question begs to be asked, "if it were state media, how would it be any different?"23
Dumbed-Down Audience Over the course of the last couple of decades, as this drastic consolidation of media ownership has taken place, the content of broadcasting has become more and more pointless. The daytime talk shows that used to provide a forum for consumer advocates or public service outlets have been turned into an endless parade of celebrities and entertainers. Shows like Donahue, the Merv Griffin Show, and Mike Douglas Show, never underrepresented pop culture or shied away from eccentric guests, but also managed to bring on guests with causes to talk about such as Dr. Sidney Wolfe (author of "Worst Pills Best Pills") or Ralph Nader. Now shows like Jerry Springers endless display of humanitys sadomasochistic side and Oprahs pandering shower of gifts have replaced these.24 This new programming is an important de- politicizing force in U.S. culture. It keeps people focused daily on fashionable consumption and celebrity news. Of course every four years there is intense coverage of political races for the very top positions in government (those that are truly the most symbolic) in order to perpetuate an illusion of democracy. It is also the ideal audience for corporations to sell to, and this is why the news media act the way they do. You see, the news media is selling an audience to advertisers. They are not selling a news product.25 An audience that is left utterly uninformed is left utterly uncritical and is more susceptible to corporate advertising. The ideal product to sell to advertisers is what Michel Foucault called "docile bodies".26 That is why MTV, since the start of the Iraq War, have banned videos of political songs.27 Can any reasonable person deny the galvanizing effect rock music had on the youth activists of the 1960s and 70s? It is not like the news providers do not know how to do good journalism that really equips consumers with useful, empowering information. Sports journalists do a great job analyzing and distributing credit and blame. They cover histories of organizations, labor disputes, strategy. They talk to fans. And when fans call radio shows, they have no problem challenging experts and expressing their own views. The public has not been denied the resources to do those kinds of analyses. As long as private corporations are allowed to use public airways (we own all of them under common law 28) rent-free for their own benefit, it makes sense that they will act the way they do. The propaganda model is a more fitting description of what should be expected in terms of the relationship between the state and the press. Corporations are legally only beholden to their stockholders not to citizens or democracy.29 We cannot expect the government to hold these five corporations accountable as long as we keep turning solely to those five corporations to dictate how we view and choose our leaders. Change must start with support for independent media. Calling the press the "fourth estate" is a reference to pre- revolutionary Frances Estates- General, which was made up of representatives of the nobility, the clergy, and the people: the first, second, and third estates. Each estate had one vote, regardless of what proportion of the population it represented. (You can guess how much the peoples will was considered.) The role of the estates was essentially to echo and legitimize the wishes of the Royalty by perpetuating a vague illusion of democracy. It seems that here in the United States of America the name is perfectly fitting.
Deeb-Paul Kitchen, II is a two-year veteran of AmeriCorps. He is currently a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Florida. His email address is dkitchen@ufl.edu. 1. Mitchell, Peter R. and Schoeffel, John, ed. 2002. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. New York, NY: New Press, pg. 15.Notes
2. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.
3. Mitchell and Schoeffel, op. cit.
4. Ibid.
5. Goodman, Amy. 2003. Independent Media in a Time of War. A Production of Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center.
6. Bagdikian, Ben H. 2004. The New Media Monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Gerth, Jeff and Scott Shane. 2005. "U.S. is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers." The New York Times, December 1.
10. Ibid.
11. Isenberg, David. 2005. "It's Propaganda (Shock, Horror)!" Mediachannel.org, December 3.
12. Gerth and Shane, op. cit.
13. Isenberg, op. cit.
14. Ibid.
15. Maguire, Kevin and Andy Lines. 2005. "Bush Plot to Bomb Arab Ally." The Mirror, November 22; and Scahill Jeremy. 2005. "Beyond the Memo: Bush Wanted al-Jazzera Gone." Common Dreams News Center, December 2.
16. Editorial Staff. 2005. "Outlandish Indeed." Arab News, November 27.
17. Goodman, op. cit.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Greenwald, Robert. 2003. Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War. Artists Unlimited Productions.
21. Moore, Michael. 2003. Dude, Wheres My Country? New York: Warner.
22. Goodman, op. cit.
23. Ibid.
24. Nader, Ralph. 2005. "Dumbing Down the Audience." Common Dreams News Center, November 28.
25. Mitchell and Schoeffel, op. cit.
26. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage.
27. Goodman, op. cit.
28. Mitchell and Schoeffel, op. cit.
29. Bagdikian, op. cit.
