Diplomatic Channels

THE news director of the rightwing French TV network, TF1, which is not known for its independence, said earlier this year: "Those famous United States networks we have heard so much about as examples of professional integrity are acting like propaganda tools for the Bush administration. They have lost all critical distance" (1). But what happened to the US media did not start with President George Bush II. As Bernie Sanders, one of the most progressive members of the US House of Representatives, said: "One of our best-kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of huge corporations control the flow of information in the US. Whether it is television, radio, news papers, magazines, books or the internet, a few giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read. And the situation is likely to become much worse" (2).

In 1983 the US had roughly 1,700 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio and 1,000 television stations, and 2,500 book publishers. At that time 50 multinationals, "all interlocked in common financial interest with other massive industries and with a few dominant international banks" (3), controlled the majority of the big outlets. Clearly, something had to be done. And so it was. But not what you would expect.

In 1996 the US Congress granted broadcasting frequencies worth some $70bn (and a lot more now) at no cost to the recipients. Viacom, Disney and General Electric - owners of the CBS, ABC and NBC networks - were the main beneficiaries. Protesting against the gift, Senator John McCain, a Republican, said during the congressional debate: "There will be hardly any talk of this decision on radio or TV because the radio and TV networks are the ones directly affected." In fact, during the nine months that elapsed between the introduction of the legislation and its final approval, the three main news networks devoted just 19 minutes to the subject. The question of whether the largest communications companies could afford to pay for the frequencies that the US government awarded them was never raised at all.

There is always a payoff for deeds such as these. Between 1996 and 2000, while Bill Clinton was president, the 50 largest media corpor ations and four of their trade associations spent more than $111m to lobby Congress and the White House. They poured political contributions into the coffers of the two parties. And as everyone knows, under the US system of political financing, "those who sign the cheques write the laws".

SINCE the 1980s control of the US media has grown ever more concentrated. By 1996 the two largest radio chains owned 115 stations. Today they own more than 1,400. Meanwhile the number of station owners has dwindled by a third. This year 10 giant companies reign over the information age (4). Three companies own half of the stations in the US. Clearly, something has to be done. And it will be. But, again, not what you would expect.

According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which largely determines US media policy, large conglomerates are too restricted by legal limits on market share. So the solution is a sweeping deregulation of the field, to be announced this month. A US Federal Court has ordered the FCC to reconsider its rule preventing broadcasters from reaching more than 35% of households in the US. Since everyone knows that FCC chairman Michael Powell, who was appointed by President Bush and is the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, opposes such limits, the court order will encourage big broadcasters to swallow smaller ones.

The FCC is reconsidering many of the rules that have previously preserved some media diversity, such as the regulation preventing the owners of a broadcast station from buying a newspaper in the same city, and vice versa, or from owning more than one TV station in the same market. This cross-ownership ban guarantees that communities will not find that their only local daily paper has been bought by one of the television networks. Also at stake is the regulation barring major television networks - ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC - from merging with each other. Michael Powell keeps repeating "the market is my religion" - summing up the mindset of the administration, which has successfully merged religious fundamentalism and greed. Lack of political diversity hardly bothers Powell: "I’m not so sure that Disney and Murdoch’s personal political interests are ever permitted by the board of directors or Wall Street to trump anything that would maximise value" (5). That "maximising value" may in itself be an ideological slant hardly seems to have crossed Powell’s mind.

What do conglomerates say? Companies such as News Corporation and Viacom protest that existing regulations deprive them of their first amendment rights to free speech. The rollback of the last checks on media consolidation seems likely. A further drop in quality and originality is therefore likely when newspapers are absorbed by the television industry or when journalists tailor their skills toward producing "content" which can immediately be used for television (6).

Mergers and cooperation between former competitors are multiplying: The Washington Post, which lost regular foreign distribution of its stories because the New York Times forced a buyout of the Post’s stake in the International Herald Tribune, will have its stories in the European and Asian editions of the Wall Street Journal. The Post has a similar arrangement with NBC, which features Post reporting on its MSNBC and CNBC cable television channels. During the war in Iraq, it was very hard to tell which outlet, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post or NBC, was the most hawkish.

The FCC argues that technologies such as the internet offer Americans access to more information than ever, so that worries about monopolies are unfounded. But studies also show that most Americans receive their news from a handful of outlets. And much of what appears on the internet is repackaged from those outlets. The leading 20 internet sites and cable channels are owned by GE-NBC, Disney, Fox, Gannett, AOL-Time Warner, Hearst, Microsoft, Cox, Dow Jones, the Washington Post and the New York Times. In 1999, 110 companies attracted 60% of the time web-users spent online; by 2001, just 14 com panies had the same market share.

The question of concentration is most acute at local level. In many communities, all activities are covered by only one institution. The concentration of power that should be abhorrent to all conservatives who preach for local control and individual participation is only assailed by a handful of them. Radio stations sound the same and dictate music sales. Companies that own multiple platforms - print, television, radio and internet - in the same city are integrating their news production process, using do-it-all journalists to create content for many media at once. The new regime often undermines a paper’s capacity to meet its own standards. Journalists get burned out performing several jobs at once. Because of meagre press coverage, most people probably have no idea what is happening.

What are the consequences? The libertarian newspaper columnist, William Safire, was a strong pro-Reagan type and is now pro-Bush, except on questions of civil liberties. He wrote: "You won’t find a movie nominated for an Oscar with the heroine - fighting to expose the domin ance of media conglomerates in the distribution of entertainment - crushed by the giant corpor ation that controls film financing, distribution and media criticism. You won’t find television magazine programmes fearlessly exposing the broadcast lobby’s pressure on Congress and the courts to allow station owners to gobble up more stations and cross-own local newspapers, thereby to determine what information residents of a local market receive. Nor will you find many newspaper chains assigning reporters to reveal the effect of media gigantism on local coverage or cover the way publishers induce coverage-hungry politicians to loosen antitrust restraints" (7).

Truly independent coverage of big media is vanishing. Television is where most Americans get their news and, without exception, every major network is owned by a huge conglomerate that has enormous conflicts of interest. Fox News Channel is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a rightwing Australian who already owns a significant portion of the world’s media. His "fair and balanced" network has close ties to the Repub lican party, and among his commentators is Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives and a leading hawk.

NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the largest corporations in the world, with a long history of anti-union activity. GE, a major contributor to the Republican party, has substantial interests in weapons manufacturing, finance and nuclear power. Former CEO Jack Welch was a leader in shutting down US plants and moving them to low-wage countries such as China and Mexico. NBC had used Ronald Reagan as a salesman for corporate values in 1954 and for some years after. Reagan then became enraged at taxes - he made a lot of money from the gig when marginal tax rates were up to 91%: that was before the Reagan revolution.

ABC is owned by the Disney Corp, which, besides movies, produces toys and products in developing countries with notoriously poor wages and working conditions. CBS is owned by Viacom, another huge media conglomerate that owns, among other entities, MTV, Showtime, Nickelodeon, VH1, TNN, CMT, 39 broadcast TV stations, 184 radio stations, Paramount Pictures and Blockbuster Inc.

A danger of concentrated ownership is that news organisations embedded in conglomerates will promote their own products or fail to in vestigate their vested interests critically. The website of ABC News heavily promoted a movie about Pearl Harbor produced by Disney: it was a Hollywood movie, but it was promoted as if it had historical value. Most networks and stations have refused to report on the news leading to the forthcoming decision of the FCC. Moreover, as most US news companies are governed by people with business degrees and backgrounds, concerns about "maximising value" drive the reorganisation of media enterprises.

When news becomes just another commodity, the distinctions between journalistic "products" - information, entertainment, infotainment - lose their significance, as do substantive reports. A synergy collision happened in 1997 at CBS News when reporters were spotted wearing the Nike swoosh logo at the Olympics, the unfortunate byproduct of a lucrative deal between CBS Sports and Nike. Meanwhile a CBS journalist was facing delays in her investigation of Nike’s labour practices.

Vertical integration of news and entertainment organisations goes with unreliable reporting. With consolidation, the balance of power is in the hands of a few companies with interests and investments across the media landscape - companies more interested in delivering viewers to advertisers than in serving the public.

Foreign policy coverage has been hit for the past 15 years. Before 11 September 2001, the Boston Globe explained: "International news coverage in most of America’s 1,500 mainstream papers has almost reached the vanishing point." Foreign stories accounted for about 10% of the average paper’s news content in 1972 but have shrunk to less than 2%. News magazines have followed the trend. From 1985 to 1995, Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report cut their foreign reporting from about 22% of the magazine to 12%. Editors explained then that foreign news was "less urgent" (Time), "less relevant" (US News) and meant a 25% drop in newsstand sales (Newsweek). The trend affected television news. Ten years ago, 40% of the three networks’ news programmes were devoted to foreign news. That has slipped below 12% (8).

This has consequences: according to a poll made public by Fox News, 40% of Americans said they were not sure whether the US or Slobodan Milosevic had won the war in Kosovo. That was in 2000, the year after the war. And 40% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with 11 September 2001. In non-war situations, even when news organisations do cover foreign events, they rely on a narrow range of local specialists, often speaking only English and drawn from the business sector.

IN the spring 1999 issue of Foreign Policy, the bias was explained this way: "Even the richest and most powerful news organisations, such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or Reuters or Bloomberg, can find themselves stretched thin, with correspondents in the largest and most important countries often responsible for covering a wider region. Smaller countries such as Argentina or Chile might share a journalist from a single publication. The result is harried reporters turning to the ’experts’. Part of the problem is that the usual suspects in one capital talk to their counterparts in another as though they represent their entire countries, which they do not. The representatives of the Washington consensus on economic policies speak to the representatives of the Moscow consensus or the Sao Paulo consensus. But Moscow no more represents all of Russia than rich Sao Paulo speaks for the poor populations of Brazil’s northeast. Analysts - themselves members of the elite - assess these situations based on what they hear from people just like themselves: other elites."

The events of 11 September, and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not changed this. Foreign coverage, which remains rare, is increasingly mediocre. During the war in Iraq, most US journalists did not speak Arabic and could not care less: wasn’t the Pentagon there to take care of all their questions? Foreign policy cover remains marginal, according to the last study by the Columbia Journalism Review, trailing far behind local crime and celebrity news. The marketing bias is so overwhelming that even when journalists know that diplomatic news matters more than local crime, they cannot give up pursuing the details of the crimes, even at the cost of overlooking the bigger picture.

The US has just been through some of the biggest business scandals in its history, partly because of the extreme lack of curiosity of most journalists. In 2001, CEO Gerald Levin was on the cover of Fortune (owned by AOL-Time Warner), as "among the smartest people we know". Shortly after, the merger he had engin eered was a disaster. Some star journalists, who were financially profiting from the stock market bubble, had little reason to challenge its long-term viability. And big journalistic names have taken corporate money: David Brinkley, Robert Novak, David Gergen, Cokie Roberts, Christopher Matthews, Larry King, Mark Shields, Fred Barnes, George Will and Michael Kinsley (who memorably said, "I didn’t do it for years, but it became more socially acceptable").

Most but not all journalists with Enron connections were free-market apologists on the right politically (9). Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan was paid for speechwriting. Lawrence Kudlow of CNBC and National Review said that he should have disclosed earlier he was paid $50,000 for consulting and research. The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol received $100,000 from the Enron advisory board, and sees nothing wrong about that. A Weekly Standard piece once praised Ken Lay and Enron for "leading the fight for competition" (10). As one revolutionary company after another has crashed, taking its retirement funds down with it, and uncovering in its wake greed, fraud and political payoffs Americans are asking what sort of business reporting they got from big media.

Corporate radio is overtly biased. There are dozens of rightwing talk shows. Rush Limbaugh, G Gordon Liddy, Bob Grant, Michael Savage, Michael Reagan and Pat Robertson pound a neoconservative or religious fundamentalist drumbeat into the US heartland. Together with the Republican party and its satellite thinktanks and advocacy groups, the network of partisan outlets - including the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative talk- radio shows - is an echo chamber where Republican-friendly stories can be promoted, repeated and amplified.

SINCE its 1996 launch, Murdoch’s Fox News has become the motor of the conservative movement’s media machine. Murdoch is not shy about his politics. A few weeks before the war in Iraq, he explained: "I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly, and I think he is going to go on with it. The fact is, a lot of the world can’t accept the idea that America is the one superpower in the world. The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country" (11).

Fox’s founder and president, Roger Ailes, was for decades one of the roughest Republican operatives in Washington, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan campaigns. (He is most infamous for his role in the media strategy in the 1988 senior Bush presidential race; this featured the publicity given to a black convict who had raped a white woman after he had been paroled by Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.) Fox’s managing editor is Brit Hume, a former ABC News White House correspondent and contributor to conservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard magazines.

Even public television has been affected. PBS broadcast a series about the global economy sponsored by major corporations - including Enron - with a clear interest in the content of the programmes. The series got a rave review from the Wall Street Journal: "PBS Likes Capitalism More Than the Commercial Networks Do" - the series was a "paean to private enterprise". Many Americans, however, still say that the US has a problem with the leftwing tilt of its media.

Yet, as Bernie Sanders has argued, "the essential problem with television is not just a rightwing bias, it is not even the transformation of politics and government into entertainment and sensationalism, the constant bombardment of advertising. It’s that the most important issues facing the middle-class and working people are rarely discussed." He points out that despite the economic boom of the 1990s, the average US worker now works longer hours for lower wages than 30 years ago. This is rarely investigated on television. Workers in unions earn 30% more than non-union people doing the same work. There are many programmes about how to get rich by investing in the stock market, but never any specials on how to form a union. The US has the most unfair distribution of wealth and income in the industrialised world, but few programmes stress that the richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 95%. Or that the CEOs of major corporations earn 691 times what their employees make (that was only 41 times in 1980).

Major US newspapers do not only participate in the promotion of inequality at home. They can also become leading players in diplomacy. On 30 January the Wall Street Journal’s front page was led by a story headlined "European Leaders Declare Support for US on Iraq: Letter From Eight Countries Isolates France, Germany, Smooths Path for a War". The reporter, from the London bureau, wrote: "In a broad statement supporting the US in its effort to strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, eight European leaders signed an op-ed article publicly calling for unity with the US position, further shifting the global political calculus toward support for war."

Proud pro-war role

Most op-ed articles are solicited by the section’s editors, as was the case here. As the Los Angeles Times noted, "The paper orchestrated a declaration of support for a Bush administration policy which its own editorial page has unstintingly supported, and then reported the event as news?" According to Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot, the piece originated with Mike Gonzalez, deputy editorial editor of the European edition. "After the flap about France and Germany opposing the US on Iraq," Gigot said, "Mike called the offices of two other heads of state, [Italy’s] Silvio Berlusconi and [Spain’s] Jose Maria Aznar, offering them the opportunity to do separate pieces on their positions. Aznar’s office apparently got the idea that they should see if they could get other prime ministers and heads of state on board. They took it from there and got [Britain’s] Tony Blair involved and it all snowballed. At that point, our only concern was to make sure it ran in our paper."

In an editorial, the paper proudly acknow ledged the political, pro-war role it had played: "Our sin seems to be that we assisted in exposing as fraudulent the conventional wisdom that France and Germany speak for all of Europe, and that all of Europe is now anti-American. We’ve been in favour of ousting Saddam Hussein for years, going back to the Gulf war and long before President Bush made it his policy. If the op-ed by Europe’s leaders somehow helped Mr Bush’s diplomacy in addition to selling newspapers, that’s fine with us" (12).

Gonzales claimed in the same issue: "The Journal is an independent newspaper . . . I placed a call to a source in the Italian government. I asked right away, ’So are you going to let the French and the Germans speak for all of Europe? Why doesn’t Berlusconi write us a piece?’ "At first, the response was tepid. But then, as Gonzales explained, "I was at a museum, trying to ease my disappointment with a dose of Brueghel and Rubens, when my wife’s cellphone rang." Blair (reached through Alistair Campbell), Aznar and Berlusconi instantly replaced Rubens and Brueghel.

Two things stand out. First, the link between economic policy and diplomacy. It is probably because of its unstinting support for the free market economic policies of Berlusconi, Aznar and Blair that the Journal, highly influential in corporate circles, gained the extraordinary leverage enabling it to call these leaders and directly advise policy on war in Iraq. Hardly any other newspaper, except the Financial Times, could be imagined directly lobbying for policies at this high a level in several countries at once. And if you want to understand the plight of the US press today, imagine what the reaction might have been if a US leftwing, pro-union paper had directly lobbied foreign heads of state to make a statement opposing US foreign policy.

June 2003

(1) Robert Namias, head of information at TF1, Le Monde, 29 January 2003. Jean-Claude Dassier, general director of LCI (the cable news network owned by TF1), added: "I used to admire American television newscasts. But, now instead of informing the public, they are exciting the rabble", Stratégies, Paris, 14 February, 2003.

(2) Op-ed column, The Hill, 14 June 2002.

(3) Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 6th Edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

(4) Eric Klinenberg, "Dix maitres pour les médias américains", Le Monde diplomatique, April 2003. Some of the data quoted have been drawn from this article.

(5) "FCC chairman: Consolidation hasn’t inhibited variety, fairness", Boston Globe, 17 April 2002.

(6) Eric Klinenberg, "Journalistes - tout-faire de la presse américaine", Le Monde diplomatique, February 1999.

(7) William Safire, International Herald Tribune, 21 January 2003.

(8) Serge Halimi, "Myopic and cheapskate journalism", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, September 1998.

(9) Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was involved with an Enron advisory board before joining the paper.

(10) Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 30 January 2002.

(11) Newsweek, February 17, 2002.

(12) Wall Street Journal, 3 February 2003.