Some days ago I promised to offer a suggestion concerning why it is that even purportedly independent media have become little more than right-wing propaganda organs. Take the Times, for example, the supposed paper of the liberal elite. Yes, yes, the editorials are occasionally critical of Bush or his policies (or those associated with his thugish henchpersons), and the Times (perhaps hoping to end the course of destruction it has faciliated in the last 4 years) vigorously endorsed Kerry for president. But so what? Day after day, in its front pages the Times has effectively given the green light to the malignant imperatives of the Bush administration, most obviously by repeatedly and credulously trumpeting even the most obvious lies, burying dissent (when it is even noted) in tiny columns on the late inside pages, and generally either ignoring and grossly downplaying the scandals and abuses that are the daily fare of this administration. The same, of course, is true of all the major papers, and don't even talk about CNN, NBC, and the other TV stations.
This is all reprehensible and tragic, for obvious reasons. But the main thing that needs to be explained is why the kid gloves treatment of Bush and the rest of the Republican right, as compared to the raking over the coals of Democrats (Clinton, Gore, Dean and Kerry being the most recent examples).?
Remember Whitewater? Who could forget? But Bush's clear insider trading of his shares of Harkin Oil goes practically unremarked. Clinton fools around with a willing intern and gets impeached---gross, yes, but come on! Bush lies this country into an illegal war, with over a hundred thousand dead Iraqi civilians and thousands of dead and wounded U.S. forces (and who knows how many dead and wounded U.S. "private forces" there have been?), and no end to the devastation and destruction of Iraqi society (latest news: 400K Iraqi children are wasting away)---and barely a peep. Gore's supposed claim to have invented the internet is broadcast night and day, but Bush's gross exaggerations and lies about his past slide on by. Dean is painted as an out-of-control screamer (ignoring the fact that the mike wasn't picking up the roar of the crowd, over which he could barely be heard), while Bush's second debate moment where he bulldozed over the moderator and went on a barely coherent rant is ignored. Reporters and pundits endlessly agonize over whether Kerry threw his medals or only his ribbons away at an anti-war protest, and the entire month of August is devoted to whether he was "hero" enough to have gotten the medals in the first place, but the fact that Bush went AWOL and lied about it is barely mentioned---and the media happily gives up what little attention there has been to this subject when Rather uses some documents that appear to be copies as opposed to originals (though the person who said they were copies verified the correctness of the content!).
What explains such uneven treatment on the part of media organs that are not outright owned by conservatives like Murdoch? A possibility occurred to me recently when talking with a woman who has worked for several years as a journalist and who is now getting her doctorate in journalism. It turns out that there is something called "carve-out" which describes what inevitably happens when a media outlet depends upon advertisers for income: that is, the outlet avoids biting the hand that feeds it. So, for example, if a paper (or whatever) gets significant advertising dollars from department stores, then it is unlikely to do much to investigate possible wrongdoings or negative impacts by such stores, and if some scandal occurs concerning a store, this is likely to be ignored or downplayed. As she put it, bad news concerning department stores is "carved out" from the spectrum of subjects upon which it is acceptable to report.
What's the relevance of this to explaining media's sycophantic treatment of Repubs, given that Repubs and Dems advertise (mainly in campaign years) in about equal proportion? Well, carve-out can apply not only to those who advertise, but to those who make advertising dollars available. More recently---and arguably, much more lucratively---media degregulation has served as a potentially grossly profitable enterprise, as media companies aquire properties and thereby increase advertising revenue. So, for example, it turns out that the NY Times is part of the "New York Times Corporation", a multi-media company whose revenues increased 20% in 2004, from 2 billion to 2.4 billion, due largely to increased advertising revenues.
It's no secret that big media prefers Republican to Democratic administrations. As Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (which is the parent of CBS) put it in explaining his endorsement of Bush:
From a “Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal,” Redstone told an audience of CEOs in Hong Kong in late September, “because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.” In the widely-reported remarks, he added: “I vote for what’s good for Viacom.”
So there it is, folks---at least one large part of the explanation of why the media has stopped doing its job: because it's more profitable not to do so. Since Republican policies increase corporate profits, Republicans, astoundingly enough, have been effectively "carved out" of the spectrum of reporting. (Of course, some semblance of "reporting" on Republican wrongdoing must occur for the media to continue to have any legitimacy as a source of information, but as above it's nowhere near appropriate unto the task.) More generally, the upshot is that the job of media has changed: this is no longer to inform and educate the public, but rather to make money for stockholders and (yet more to the point) enrich the owners and executives:
Revenues reflect higher advertising rates and increased classified advertising sales. Earnings were offset by higher compensation expenses.
OFFICERS
Pay Exercised Arthur Sulzberger Jr., 52
Chairman and Publisher of the Times$ 1.75M N/A Russell Lewis, 56
Pres, Chief Exec. Officer, Director$ 1.78M N/A Michael Golden, 54
Vice Chairman, Sr. VP$ 896.00K N/A Leonard Forman, 58
Chief Financial Officer, Exec. VP$ 1.57M N/A
Yet another case of unregulated corporate capitalism: screwing up everything for everyone but the obscenely wealthy few.
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