Missing from the News

Bagdikian, Ben H.

MEDIA Ben H. Bagdikian Missing from the News Almost weekly we read of yet another great media merger. Time-Warner attempts to form the largest media conglomerate in the world, or Rupert Murdoch...

...Accurate reports of events, with interpretation by high officials, is much safer...
...Time-Warner attempts to form the largest media conglomerate in the world, or Rupert Murdoch adds another major segment to his global empire...
...One-third said they would not feel free to do so...
...When you add to that the Cold War and the nature of anticommunism in American politics, it is always safer to swing to the Right than to the Left...
...But no memorandum has to instruct that news staff or others around the country that stories disclosing flaws in specific banks will get them into trouble...
...They lie less than journalists elsewhere, fictionalize less, and, on the whole, take seriously their individual duty to provide the public with accurate information...
...Positive opportunities are lost...
...There are 50,000 print reporters and 50,000 broadcast reporters in the country, and each day, each week, each month they are pointed toward particular tasks, particular stories, particular personalities, particular government activities, particular foreign scenes, particular series...
...When you give the context of events, you begin to be political...
...Hachette, a French firm...
...It is not done by official censorship, but by self-censorship...
...There is another reality, in our streets where millions sleep in doorways...
...The leading owners of our daily newspapers include Gannett, which owns USA Today and eighty-eight other dailies, or about six million in total daily circulation...
...where ever-more-lavish skyscrapers and luxury hotels cast shadows on deteriorating schools and libraries...
...If you strain out independent political and economic contexts, if you do not pursue the likely causes and consequences of events, if you emphasize or rely exclusively on the words and ideas of the highest officials, public and private, you have presented a picture of an uncontested and inevitable status quo...
...where the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer...
...More and more, we will be dealing with closed circuits...
...They operate under higher professional ethics than journalists elsewhere and higher than at any time in the past...
...Self-censorship also comes from a basic strategy of American news...
...These charges, when they are based on anything at all, are based on surveys of journalists who, when asked whether they tend to be Democrats or Republicans, say they tend more to be Democrats than Republicans, or tend to be more liberal than conservative...
...There are at least 2,500 book-publishing companies, but a half dozen corporations have most of the sales in the book industry...
...That, in essence, is what is missing in our main media, and, therefore, in our politics...
...Given how offensive the very idea is to professional journalists, I think we're safe in assuming that 33 per cent is a conservative figure...
...In the resulting mass of stories, there are often articles of importance and distinction, and there is a daily volume of routine, factual, essential local and national information...
...For years the news media took official declarations at face value, often when there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
...By keeping the news tone-deaf, but weighted heavily toward facts and spokespersons from the centers of power, the media render the national discourse more sterile each year...
...All this in a rich society, still full of vitality and with millions willing to work for policies that will improve their lives...
...Among our 1,600 daily newspapers, for example, about a dozen corporations now control more than half the circulation...
...The movie is then shown in theaters owned by the company, and the movie's sound track is issued by a record label owned by the company...
...But most reporters are told every day what to write about...
...One is to attribute every fact and judgment to as high an authority as possible, so that no one can accuse a journalist of selective reporting...
...Other major owners are Rupert Murdoch, Hearst, and Newhouse, though not all issue general news...
...A magazine article owned by the company becomes a book owned by the company, then becomes a television program owned by the company, then becomes a movie owned by the company...
...A country whose major news media are oriented around the centers of power will soon have national politics also homogenized around centers of power...
...Our mainstream news media have fine figures to prove what the world looks like from the standpoint of policymakers in Washington, from the interplay of lawyer-lobbyists and legislators, from the opinions of conservative think tanks, the board rooms of corporations, and the floors of stock exchanges...
...The problem lies in something beyond the mass of useful items...
...Ben H. Bagdikian, a member of The Progressive's Editoral Advisory Board, is a professor of communications at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of "The Media Monopoly," published by Beacon Press...
...Newsweek, which does carry news, is owned by the Washington Post Company...
...Recent examples include the case of Raymond Bonner, a correspondent for The New York Times, who was withdrawn from El Salvador because he reported that a real civil war existed in that country, and that atrocities were committed on both sides, including the side supported by American aid...
...But people with perfectly respectable expert credentials saw it from the start as a formula for disaster...
...The recent departure of William Ko-vach as editor of the Atlanta Constitution & Journal illustrates the editor's dilemma...
...When masses of people are bedeviled by problems but see no possibility of significant change, the result is hopelessness and apathy...
...Nevertheless, for years, most of the judgments reported in the news came from organizations and individuals who were beneficiaries of those economic policies...
...4) it comes from tax advantages to the builders of commercial property even if it remains empty and has replaced urban residential housing...
...Reader's Digest Association...
...In foreign affairs, the main news of the country follows the official national policy...
...The main body of news coverage has never checked out assertions about events in those countries in any systematic way...
...International Thomson, with 116 papers and two million circulation...
...where air and water are increasingly unhealthy...
...Maxwell, a British firm...
...Several years ago, a reporter and editor at the Dallas Morning News did a documented story about a bank in serious trouble...
...Such stories do appear, but infrequently...
...President Reagan's program of supply-side economics, with huge military spending accompanied by large tax cuts, had enormous support in corporate America...
...Among our 11,000 individual magazine titles, a half dozen corporations have most of the revenue...
...To this day, there is a zone of silence on the negative effects of mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, ominous levels of corporate debt, and monopolistic levels of market domination, including those in the news business...
...If journalists are as much improved as I think they are, it's fair to ask what causes this self-censorship...
...In broadcasting, despite some loss of audience, the three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, still have most of the television viewers and business...
...Our national political discourse is sterile in ideas for necessary change, deficient in its confrontation with the realities of social injustice, and therefore narrow in plausible alternatives held out to the public...
...The pattern begins when owners appoint executive editors and producers...
...where thirty-seven million people have no health-insurance coverage...
...And they usually focus on those developments that are, in effect, unavoidable...
...Many who have no hope become destructive...
...increase in the homeless population can be directly related to that reduction and to cuts in Social Security and other benefits during the 1980s...
...The effect of the homogenized, narrow spectrum of information and context in American news is profound...
...If criticism ever was aired, it was in the seventeenth paragraph...
...But it does mean that information that contradicts governmental versions gets into the news with greater difficulty and only briefly compared to the official view...
...If the breaking news is noticeably embarrassing for conservatives, the question regularly asked within news organizations is whether the reporting is really being fair to the conservatives...
...The whole society, including government and corporations, suffers in the long run because accountability and correction of faulty policies require good information that simply isn't available...
...One of the major networks recently had a brief announcement of proposed economic policy and followed it with three commentaries: fifteen seconds from the chair of a House committee, twelve seconds from a spokesperson for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and eleven seconds from a spokesperson from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group...
...Newhouse, and about eight others...
...where most children can no longer expect to live in families with one income or buy a house or go to a university...
...This has been accompanied by dramatic coverage of strikes and union activities, with corporate sources regularly citing unions as the problem...
...Damaging or ineffective policies continue longer than they should...
...This article is based on remarks he delivered last spring at a conference sponsored by the Madison Institute in Madison, Wisconsin...
...Public knowledge of events in Nicaragua and El Salvador has suffered from an astonishing failure of the mainstream news media to do continuous reporting from the field, though Central America remains the center of White House attention and activities, and the closest we have been to a new war...
...3) it is clearly connected to the growing separation in this country between the rich and the poor, thanks to changes in tax and welfare policies...
...Today, that number is less than twenty-five and shrinking...
...Some editors do so, and there is a steady record of their being fired or resigning to protest restrictions...
...And when the cause of suffering remains mysterious, people find scapegoats...
...How often have you seen in such stories the established data, true for years, that show productivity has increased in unionized activities and decreased at managerial and administrative levels...
...These pressures to support the status quo happen to conform with the politics and economics of the major media owners...
...He was squeezed out, and it took no memorandum from the publisher to let the staff know that stories of that kind will get reporters and their editors in trouble with the owners...
...Ideas for solutions to problems are not aired, alternatives to present policies fade, and the status quo seems unchangeable...
...While recent Presidential elections have gone Republican, countrywide voting for Congress and for state and local office continues to be heavily Democratic...
...In domestic affairs, there is a steady pattern of looking the other way, of avoiding obvious causes and consequences, so as not to disturb or threaten the status quo...
...We have turned our economy on its head by eliminating the progressive income tax, the only sane and fair way to build our public institutions, but the media have turned a deaf ear to those who say so...
...But the result is not neutral...
...Collectively, they issue an extraordinary volume of news every day...
...Obviously, the company will not be enthusiastic about outside ideas and productions that it does not own...
...Since most of the revenues of the news media are derived from advertising and there is an incentive to maintain an audience of as many affluent people as possible, news policies are designed not to offend the political sensibilities of the advertising target-audience...
...I have never heard of similiar questions of fairness being raised in regard to the treatment of Ralph Nader, Common Cause, labor unions, and other forces on the other side...
...This is done in two ways...
...2) the There is a steady pattern of looking the other way, of avoiding obvious causes and effects, so as not to threaten the status quo...
...The other method is to give the news a kind of political tone-deafness, an appearance of neutrality without political, social, or economic context...
...He had been told to be fearless and make his paper the best in the country...
...When we look for scapegoats, we move to the Right and we move to race hatred...
...A regular story on the economy is the need for greater productivity in the workplace...
...Three major studios have most of the movie business...
...Most reporters in the standard media can say, truthfully, "No editor tells me to lie...
...The main problem in the news today is not what is false, but what is missing...
...One reason is the awareness by the top editors and executive producers that stories seriously affecting their owners' interests will cause the editor problems...
...The chief owners of magazines dealing with the general news will be dominated by Time-Warner, which will control more than 40 per cent of the country's magazine business...
...This does not mean that there is never any reporting contrary to officialdom...
...The causes and consequences of some public acts are seldom made clear...
...Certain kinds of stories, certain public figures, certain social data, certain analysts of social and political events are regularly on the network evening news and the front page, while other stories, spokespersons, and analysts are mentioned obscurely if at all...
...What these giants seek is control or market domination not just in one medium, but in all the media...
...Among our four television networks and 900 commercial stations, three corporations have most of the audience and revenue...
...How well do these major owners of the news and knowledge serve the public...
...For example, in the miles of newsprint and hours of television reporting on fantastically high real-estate prices for the middle class and the millions of homeless, how often has this been placed in the context of a number of rather clear causes: (1) in the 1970s, 200,000 low-cost housing units were built each year with Federal help, and in the 1980s only 17,000 a year...
...Bertelsmann, a German firm...
...The reporter was fired, and so was the editor who passed the story...
...In 1982, fifty corporations had half or more of all the business in the major media of the United States...
...But for more than ten years, the news media were close to silent on the bad results...
...But if things are so good, why are they so bad...
...The Iran-contra exercise, in violation of the Constitution and contrary to the word of our highest officials, was exposed fairly early by the alternative press in this country and finally was blown open by an obscure publication in Beirut, not a mainstream American news organization...
...As we all know, there are no problems with banks and sav-ings-and-loan associations in the state of Texas, or anyplace else...
...The aim is to control the entire process from an original manuscript to its use in as many forms as possible...
...But that is a long way from the compelling realities in which most of our citizens live...
...We have had massive deregulation of our economy, with some good results and some bad...
...One is tempted to say that some of the serious negative effects of deregulation finally broke into the standard news only when corporate officials themselves began to worry about the safety of the airplanes they were riding in...
...In books, some of the major owners are Gulf + Western, owners of Simon & Schuster...
...That is what we have today...
...His recall did not require a printed order to other correspondents warning them that departing from the official line in Washington or at the American embassies can get them in trouble with their editors...
...But the ideas for plausible policies to take advantage of this vitality, the ideas to produce change, must enter the national discussion...
...Owners seldom appoint someone who is likely to be interested in emphasizing those events and interpretations that undermine the owners' political and economic interests...
...And this cannot happen unless these ideas and possible solutions enter our mainstream news media, not as abstracted verbiage in the dialogue between Wall Street and Washington and the ten-second television slogans of election campaigns, but in the reporting about our whole society, directed clearly and primarily to the realities in our cities and towns...
...Each day, editors necessarily select some stories for emphasis, some for de-emphasis, and some for the waste basket...
...Finally, self-censorship in the standard news media comes from twenty years of accusations against American journalists by neoconservative intellectuals and academics and conservative political leaders who have branded journalists, individually and as a group, for being biased against the established order and conservative politics...
...That this is precisely the pattern of the American electorate seems not to make any difference...
...It is not surprising that each year since 1960, the percentage of eligible voters who go to the polls has declined...
...The good news about American reporting is that in some technical matters, it is the best in the world...
...The problem lies with the institutions and the conventions of standard American journalism...
...Its journalists are the best educated, far better educated than any earlier generation of American journalists...
...and Thomson, a Canadian firm...
...It resists significant change in society...
...Knight-Rid-der, with three million...
...The status quo, in politics and in corporate life is, of course, sharply skewed to the conservative side...
...He took this literally, and his paper began publishing stories about problems in Atlanta-problems of race, of commercial development, and of flaws in the establishment...
...But the accusations by conservatives have had the effect of making many journalists lean over backward to favor conservatives to show that they are not biased...
...In 1980, members of the American Society of Newspapers Editors were asked whether they would feel free to publish news harmful to the parent corporation of their newspaper...
...We are witnessing an extraordinary race toward monopoly control...
...The consequences, I believe, are clear...
...Even after David Stockman, one of the architects of the idea, went on record to say it was all really a cover to shift wealth from the poor to the rich, the mainstream media continued to quote almost exclusively these same beneficiaries, as though Stockman and serious economists had never spoken...
...where millions of children in hopeless neighborhoods with hopeless schools and no hopes for good jobs are killing themselves with drugs-drugs often imported from countries we favor because their governments call themselves anticommunist...
...The bank did fail, and the story was confirmed...
...The spectrum of allowable context in the news runs vaguely from right to center...

Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8


 
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