New Media Monopoly

You begin The New Media Monopoly with an interesting incident that happened in the small North Dakota town of Minot. Why did you select t hat? 

It was such a tragic demonstration of unregulated media power. Minot, North Dakota, has six radio stations. They belong to an organization called Clear Channel, which has 1,200 stations and only 200 employees. The reason they can run 1,200 stations with 200 employees is they run canned material all day long, including Rush Limbaugh. What happened in Minot was that a train was derailed with tank cars carrying anhydrous ammonia. Anhydrous ammonia is terrible stuff. It causes blindness, it causes clothing to stick to your skin. The police said, “We’ve got to let the whole community know. Keep everybody inside. Schools, don’t let the kids out. Shut your windows, shut your doors.” They said, “We have six stations. Beautiful. We will go to them and ask them to announce that immediately.” They went to all of these stations that were broadcasting and found the doors locked. Their signals were from more than 1,000 miles away. That’s Clear Channel, which dwarfs all other radio and is run by a very reactionary organization that makes lots of money. It’s bigger than any other radio broadcaster. Even the wretched 1996 Telecommunications Act, which gave the big media people exactly what they asked for, says they’re supposed to operate in the public interest. Where else would they show their public interest except in the communities where they have their studios? Here was a dramatic case, when people died, they were hospitalized, they were blinded because the station disobeyed the law, with the blessings of the majority of the Bush FCC. 

Clear Channel has 12 radio stations in Los Angeles, 8 in Denver, 4 in Eugene, Oregon, and 6 in this town in North Dakota. Clear Channel has also been implicated in organizing pro-war rallies around the country. 

That’s one of the things I mean when I say they’re dropping the veil. They have right-wing politics and they display them openly. The majority of the FCC, which is appointed by the president of the United States, believes that we don’t need to regulate these corporations, they can regulate themselves. They know best what the public wants. 

There are real consequences for this kind of media monopoly. People live and die by it. They do other things, too. They have to function in a world that is falsely portrayed in what they see and hear in their broadcasting and in most of their newspapers. 

Ted Koppel is a senior TV journalist, longtime host of ABC’s “Nightline.” In early 2004, he attempted to produce a program where he would name the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. In some instances, he would show the photographs as well, with no commentary. It was a roll call. Nevertheless, a group of TV stations owned by Sinclair decided that this was inflammatory and hostile to the interests of President Bush and refused to carry the broadcast. 

It doesn’t get more explicit than that. So there is evidence that the Bush people are denying people the fruits of democracy. No matter how much they complain, how much they demonstrate, how much the polls show that they feel differently than what the government is doing, the Bush people have the power. They are using it both in Orwellian terms in their propaganda and they are using it to favor those corporations which are useful to it. Halliburton is an obvious case, the vice president’s former firm. It got all of these contracts without bidding. It overcharged the United States Army and the soldiers that they’re supposed to feed. There are shameless ways in which the people in the White House can ignore what is legal and humane.

In the epigraph to your book The New Media Monopoly , you quote the chief justice of the United States Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, David Bazelon. He says, “In this job, you have to ask the questions that tend toward greater fairness. Without the right questions, you’ll never get the facts that will lead you to better answers.” How do you get to the right questions? 

You will get it by having the media people who put on programs raise the questions and you do it by an opposition party that is free to openly ask questions. The Democratic Party for years has been dominated by the Democratic Leadership Council, whose policy has always been, move toward the center, move toward where the Republicans are and that way we will get more votes. That way what we have got is more Republican-like legislation and representation. The Internet has some independent outlets. In addition to MoveOn, there are alternet, tompaine, buzzflash, commondreams, znet, and many others. They are making a difference in the information flow. 

You have to ask the right questions in order to get the answers. For example, before we went to war, Senator Robert Byrd gave a speech in the Senate in which he said that he grieves for his country because it is doing something so dangerous and irrational. He gave the history of what happened to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, of how there were these shifty deals that subsidized 24 U.S. corporations in the 1980s to supply Iraq with these weapons. Iraq used them against the Iranians, who were our enemy number one at the time and the poison gas to kill their Kurdish minority. Byrd put that whole history on the record. 

What did the TV news show? They showed a picture of this elderly, white-haired senator saying he grieved for his country. They treated it as a kind of comical little episode. 

What accounts for the plethora of journalists who have been exposed for plagiarism? Is this just one of the things that happened in the trade or has there really been an increase? There have been some very well publicized affairs at the Washington Post , the New Republic , the New York Times . 

It was always kind of true, but now it is a national obsession. Get what you want any way you can. What happened in the early 2000s and late 1990s when JP Morgan and our biggest investment houses, like Merrill Lynch, were robbing people of their money by under-the-table deals, hundreds of billions of dollars? Not just the Enrons and the Tycos. Those were bad enough. But these are the big institutions. These temples were crooked. Winning is everything. You can lie and you can cheat and as long as you know the government isn’t going to do anything about it, why not? And I think that’s what happened. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission has rules, which they chose not to enforce. What happens when most American working people discover that they’ve been robbed and cheated, have lost their pensions, and the economy becomes the economy of the poor and the rich is very frightening to me, because I don’t think the Bush people have any hesitation in using police methods that are well known in what we used to think of as banana republics and third-world countries, where tyrants ran things, of breaking up crowds, making them suffer. I think we are heading directly into that kind of situation with a second Bush administration. 

Since Vietnam, every Administration has tightly controlled news reporting of war, starting with Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, and now in the Iraq war, there are embedded journalists. Did you ever think in all your years as a journalist that you would encounter a phrase that is so freighted with the boudoir?  

I think it would be an interesting semantic analysis for this term “embedded,” as in bed with. What we were not told is that in this famous embedment, which I agree is a term that exposes itself, these people were not with the front-line troops.

The best Pentagon reporter I know, George Wilson, who writes for the National Journal , went to Iraq. He was not embedded and he told me that after the first few days, “Something is fishy, something is very strange.” We’ve been telling Iraq for months that we were going to invade them. There were no tank traps, there were no big mounds of earth to stop vehicles, there were no highly concentrated mine fields where the troops would have to go through. There was this cakewalk into Baghdad and no Republican Guard. It was perfectly obvious the Republican guard took off their uniforms and went back and formed a civilian militia. 

What accounts for the timidity of most of the corporate media when it comes to critical issues like war and peace? 

When you look at the boards of directors of the big media companies and you look at the benefits that they get from a permissive government regulatory structure, you begin to understand why they are not going to take a strong position against the Bush policies because Bush is giving them everything they want. I think it’s an alliance of our biggest, most highly organized conglomerates that cover news and background with the kind of antediluvian economics of the Bush White House, so that it favors the big corporations, of which the media conglomerates are a part. They aren’t going to disturb this great gift to them. 

Going back to the journalists, many of them in surveys say that they are liberal, yet they work in structures that are hierarchical. Wouldn’t it be a great way for a young journalist getting into the field to make a name to debunk some of the propaganda that comes from the Administration? For example, just go back to a period you’re very familiar with, around the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, when two young guys at the Washington Post, W oodward and Bernstein, went up against the Nixon administration. You don’t see those kinds of young journalists out there today. 

I think it’s because increasingly these big conglomerates, which include the news media, don’t want to rock the boat. The Pentagon Papers case would not be supported the way it was if it were repeated. Woodward and Bernstein would not be supported if they were going to rock a whole Administration because the owners have too much of an interest in what the government  provides for them. 

Journalists live and die by what gets into the paper, what gets on the evening news and on TV. If you write stories that either don’t appear or are on page 23 or are maybe 15 seconds at the last item on the radio or TV report or not at all, you quickly learn a lesson. 

Periodically we have waves of losing our best journalists. They leave news reporting and go into writing books and writing magazine articles. For example, every time a newspaper has done what the LA Times did and what other papers have done, which is let the advertising department have a voice in what will be printed as news, they lose their best reporters. 

There was a seminal essay in 1954 by Warren Breed called “Socialization in the Newsroom.” He shows how reporters are socialized. If you write a story about the abuses of used car salespeople, it’s not likely to get in the paper because they are major advertisers. If you do a story on a huge new housing development that is in fact on unstable toxic ground, it may not get into the paper because the developers are huge advertisers. Pretty soon you learn that if you step on the wrong toes, you’re not going to get in the paper. As a matter of fact, you will begin to be looked at as a troublemaker. You disappear. 

It’s a simple way of socializing journalists into the doctrine of the organization they work for. Two things happen. Most of them conform—they have families, they have mortgages, they have kids who are going to college—or they quit. Both things are happening, and they’ve happened for some time. They’re happening more readily now because the news media have so many other interests besides informing the public.