A Review of

The Problem Of The Media by Robert W. McChesney

by Ron Kaufman

 

"Eleven companies in this country control 90 percent of what ordinary people are able to read and watch on their television. That's wrong. We need to have a wide variety of opinions in every community. We don't have that because of Michael Powell and what George Bush has tried to do to the FCC.

"What I'm going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one."

-- former Vermont Governor Howard Dean on the MSNBC show Hardball with Chris Matthews on December 2, 2003. Six weeks later, General Electric-owned MSNBC and every other major network replayed an out-of-context scream by Dean during a campaign rally hundreds of times which effectively ended his presidential bid.

 

The Problem Of The Media is a brilliant analysis of the complex issues surrounding the state of American media in 2004. The author is Robert McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of eight books on media issues. McChesney is also an organizer of FreePress.net, a non-profit organization that tries to involve and inform the public in media policymaking. McChesney also hosts the Media Matters radio program on AM 580 at the University of Illinois (the show can also be downloaded).

The main thesis of his book is that U.S. communication policy in the 21st Century threatens a healthy democracy. The emergence of large conglomerates which control vast sectors of American industry now dominate the media landscape. Early in the 20th Century, media in America -- radio, television, newspapers, periodicals and other journalistic endeavors -- changed so that large audiences could be served with timely information. The concept of "mass media" ushered in a new reliance on journalists to present information and news to the public. Riding on the strength of new technologies (radio and then television), mass media became essential to the functioning of government and politics in the United States. The early 20th Century also saw the concept of "journalistic integrity" and "unbiased reporting" enter the lexicon and become staples of the industry.


Author Robert McChesney

However, as A. J. Liebling once noted, "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one" and the last quarter of the 20th Century saw the rise of the "corporate media spin." Major news outlets, once fiercely independent from corporate control, began to reflect more and more the politics and views of their owners. The Problem Of The Media explores the impacts and implications of corporate ownership and control of the media. The book also explores what citizens can do to guard against the overwhelming power of corporate lobbies and influence the media system to once again serve the public interest.

McChesney knows his subject well and has thought deeply about the impacts of media policy in the United States. "Democratic theory posits that society needs journalism to perform three main duties: to act as a rigorous watchdog of the powerful and those who wish to be powerful; to ferret out truth from lies; and to present a wide range of informed positions on key issues," writes McChesney. "Each medium need not do all these things, but the media system as a whole should make this caliber of journalism readily available to the citizenry." He argues that modern U.S. journalism fails in all these areas and that government regulations keep the monopoly/oligopoly corporations in control. He explains that concentrated private control of the press with the goal of profit maximization has created a crisis for journalism.

"A commitment to anything remotely resembling bona fide democracy requires a vastly superior journalism, and we can only realistically expect such journalism if sweeping changes in media policies and structures make it a rational expectation," he writes.

The collusion of government and corporate media companies makes modern media a closed industry and stifle journalistic integrity. The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to support media in the public interest. One fallacy McChesney explodes is the idea that the modern FCC is "deregulating" the industry and "deregulation is good." Government does not deregulate, but re-regulates and changes the rules to serve the corporate interests. "The U.S. media system -- even its most 'free market' sectors -- is the direct result of explicitly government policies and in fact would not exist without those policies.

"Most dominant media firms exist because of government-granted and government-enforced monopoly broadcasting licenses, telecommunications franchises, and rights to content (a.k.a. copyright)." In the U.S. is is illegal (i.e.. against federal law) to broadcast without a license. As a matter of law, however, the airwaves are the property of the people. In theory, it is the FCC's responsibility to make sure broadcasters serve the public and the body can revoke broadcast licenses if standards are not met.

Since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the Congress and FCC have created a welcome environment for media monopolies. "The corruption of media policy making culminated in the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, arguably one of the most important pieces of U.S. legislation . . . the law sailed through both houses of Congress and was signed by a jubilant President Clinton in February 1996 . . . Corporate CEOs regarded the bill as their 'Magna Carta.'"

The emergence of the Big Ten media firms shows how the U.S. government has coddled and encouraged the rise of vertically-structured media corporations (the 11th big firm would be Clear Channel Communications, owner of 1200 radio stations and more).

The 1996 law re-regulated the industry to allow greater amounts of media concentration. The U.S. government has destroyed the free market in the media industry. Economics 101 says that free markets work best when economic pressures force companies to present useful products to the public. Conservative free-marketersshould argue that if government does not interfere, media firms will produce content that most serves the public or risk going out of business. McChesney explains that "if people desire a particular media content, competition will force media corporations . . . to provide such content."

Sadly, media in America is under control of AOL/Time Warner, AT&T, General Electric, News Corp., Viacom, Bertelsmann, Walt Disney, Vivendi Universal, Liberty Media, Sony and Clear Channel (with a shout-out to Comcast). "Contemporary media markets are not even remotely comparable to competitive markets in the microeconomic sense of the term," write McChesney. "Media markets are in many respects textbook examples of corporate-dominated oligopolistic markets ruled by a small number of firms."

In a monopoly situation, free market forces do not apply. Firms have no interest in serving the public, but in only increasing their profits. Monopolistic markets with high barriers to entry and economic concentration lead to the creation of more monopolies.

Companies wanting to make a profit is not inherently bad. However, in the case of media companies, news reporting suffers and true investigative journalism becomes nonexistent. In terms of story selection, journalists are not entirely unbiased. There is an effort to maintain neutrality and fairness in most news organizations (Fox News as a notable exception), however, the company still has to sell a product. Also, in order to be fair, journalists began to rely heavily on "expert" sources or "official government" sources for their news. This trend forces journalists to only report what people will talk about and not what may be the real story. This gives rise to a strong element of public relations in news. News stories also give fair treatment to all sides of an issue, no matter how inaccurate, biased or untrue one source/side may be. "Political journalism has largely degenerated into simply chronicling what one party leader says and then documenting the dissenting reply from a leader on the other side of the aisle," says McChesney. Even a lie is given the same weight in a news story as the truth -- and by remaining "objective," the journalist does not try to discount false claims.

"This reliance on official sources may give the news a conventional and mainstream feel, but it does not necessarily lead to a rigorous examination of major issues," he writes. If news organizations do not get an "official source" a story is not likely to receive any attention.

The corporate control of journalism is explained by McChesney as having a overarching hold on news organizations. "No credible scholarly analysis of journalism posits that journalists have the decisive power to determine what is news, what is not news, and how news should be covered," explains McChesney. "In commercial media, owners hire, fire, set budgets, and determine the overarching aims of the enterprise." He goes on to note that journalists who move up the hierarchy of a news organization internalize the goals of the company and stay within the realm of acceptable news gathering.

Commercial pressures, from the wishes of owners to the desires of advertisers, influence the news. Television news is one industry that is nearly entirely influenced by ownership and advertising. McChesney refers to the advertising influence as the "hyper-commercialism" of the media. TV news focuses on the trivial and panders to the sensationalist stories for ratings and advertising dollars. "Politicians stand a far greater chance of becoming the object of news media scrutiny if they are rumored to have ten outstanding parking tickets or to have skipped out on a bar bill at a topless club than if they quietly use their power to funnel billions of public dollars to powerful special interests," says McChesney.

"Fluff is cheaper and easier to cover than hard news and rarely angers those in power," he says. McChesney notes that in 2000, more than one-third of Americans got their news from comedy shows and late night talk shows than from TV news programs. The monopolistic and hyper-commercilized situation of television networks hurts the ability of real news stories from rising to prominence. Viewers do not have the choice and must watch whatever TV programming is shown. "People may wish to see more documentaries on television, even as they watch The Jerry Springer Show," but McChesney goes on to explain that without any other choices, consumers cannot rely on the free market of ideas to express their desires. The book gives a wonderful detailed analysis of how media has been changed to serve many market forces, except the consumer.

"In much of economic theory, competitive markets are regarded as much better at serving the public interest than are concentrated markets" and he explains that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" works its magic with diversity of opinion and competition. "By virtually all known theories of democracy and according to world history, concentration in media ownership is highly correlated with authoritarianism and political corruption. The bias in free societies must therefore be toward diverse and decentralized media ownership whenever possible."

The solution is for citizens to mobilize and force government to change the rules. He cites as an example how, with nearly no public debate or media coverage, new FCC rules leading to increased media consolidation were able to be stopped through effective citizen action. The FCC is still trying, with increasing public displeasure, to push through new standards which favor monopolies and media conglomerates. The Republican leader of the FCC, Michael Powell, cut short any effort to have the public express opinions on increased media consolidation. "Michael Powell's campaign to advance the case for loosening media ownership rules in the spring of 2003 was based upon contradictory arguments constructed with dubious evidence," explains McChesney. Media awareness groups and the two Democrat FCC commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, worked and succeeded in increasing public awareness and temporarily stopping the changes.

McChesney states that without citizen awareness and action, the problems with the media will only get worse. Ultimately, this will lead to the deterioration of our democracy.

"Democracy needs journalism; viable self-government in our times is unthinkable without it. But journalism also requires democracy. Unless the citizenry depends upon journalism and takes it seriously, reporters can lose incentive for completing the hard work that generates excellent journalism. The political system then becomes less responsive and corruption grows."

 

© 2004 review by Ron Kaufman @ TurnOffYourTV.com

The Problem Of The Media can be ordered from the book's website, from the Monthly Review Press website, or from Amazon.com.