Broadcast journalism has never been this
awful. If you’ve ever watched a few minutes of Fox News, CNN,
or even Springfield’s own WICS (Channel 20) news and wondered
how such programming could be aired, the answer is simple: Most of
the major broadcast outlets have been gobbled up by a handful of
companies in recent years. And it would not be an exaggeration to
say that this consolidation of media is the single greatest
contributor to the slow death of our democracy.
Media scholar Robert McChesney, professor of
communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
writes that the purpose of journalism is to perform three tasks: to
monitor the powerful, to winnow the truth from the lies, and to
present a range of informed positions on important issues. But the
journalism produced by media conglomerates does the opposite. The
junk news they broadcast is intended to protect the wealthy and
idiotize the masses while trivializing crucially important issues.
The holdings of just five of the big media
owners — General Electric, Walt Disney Co., Viacom, Time
Warner, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — show that
little of the mass media has escaped the corporate Moloch.
Disney’s media properties include ABC, ESPN, A&E, the
History Channel, and several motion-picture studios. General
Electric owns NBC, Universal Pictures, and the Spanish-language
Telemundo. News Corp.’s holdings include Fox, DirecTV, the New York Post, and
HarperCollins Publishers. Viacom owns CBS, Simon & Schuster,
Paramount Pictures, and Blockbuster. Time Warner’s properties
include CNN, America Online, HBO, and New Line Cinema. The people
who run these companies and decide what we need to know are some of
the wealthiest men on earth. As CEOs of enormous businesses, their
job is sell a journalism that is the cheapest to produce, appeals
to the largest market, and brings in the most profit. These values
are not compatible with good journalism. Instead of thoughtful
reports on global warming or the link between military spending and
the national deficit, the news they give us is dominated by Michael
Jackson or whoever the freak du jour happens to be.
Many people have complained that during the
lead-up to the most recent war in Iraq, the media failed to do its
job. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky
has noted, the truth is that the corporate media did their job
perfectly: The media’s assignment was to sell a criminal war
to a naïve public — and that they did, with great
success. In the months before the war, it was difficult to flip
through the channels without being harangued by a series of
store-bought senators and military gasbags debating just how truly
superior our fighting force was and just how enthusiastically we would
be greeted by the Iraqis. Like bumpkins at a county fair, Americans
bought their snake oil. An unfortunate side effect of this sales job
has been the deaths of some 100,000 Iraqis and more than 1,500
Americans.
We have learned nothing from this. The powers
that control the media and put George W. Bush in office continue to
manipulate and lie with impunity. It was recently revealed that
television commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 to
promote Bush’s education policies, and syndicated columnists
Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus were paid $21,500 and $10,000,
respectively, to advocate Bush’s marriage initiatives. This
money was provided by U.S. taxpayers, and all of it was completely
illegal. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 forbids the domestic
dissemination of government propaganda designed to sway public
policy. Materials that serve “a solely partisan
purpose” are expressly prohibited.
Williams, McManus, and Gallagher were caught
being paid directly by the Bush administration, but it’s hard
to imagine any journalist employed by the corporations listed above
not performing essentially the same service. Those who do not
present stories in a manner acceptable to the wealthy soon find
themselves out of a job. He who pays the piper calls the tune, or,
as New York Times columnist Russell Baker has written:
“Journalists who have made it are those who have had the
capacity for outrage bred out of them.”
As long as a handful of extremely wealthy
individuals are allowed to control and filter the flow of
information in this country, toothless trash journalism will be the
standard and issues critical to our future will not be addressed.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2005.
