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Published on Wednesday, November 12, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1112-10.htm
Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform
by Bill Moyers
Founding Director, Public Affairs Television
President, The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy
November 8, 2003
Madison, Wisconsin
Thank you for inviting me
tonight. I’m flattered to be speaking to a gathering as high-powered as this one
that’s come together with an objective as compelling as “media reform.” I must
confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with other journalists, about
the very term “media.” Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve,
articulated my concerns better than I could when he wrote in The Chronicle of
Higher Education (November 23, 2001)
that the very concept of
media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in
with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a
camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same. David Broder is not
Matt Drudge. “Meet the Press” is not “Temptation Island.” And I am not Jerry
Springer. I do not speak for him. He does not speak for me. Yet ‘the media”
speaks for us all.
That’s how I felt when I saw
Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing our embattled troops to
respond to his repetitive and belittling question, “Does Fox Rock? Does Fox
Rock?” Oliver North and I may be in the same “media” but we are not part of the
same message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us live in “medialand,”
and God knows we need some “media reform.” I’m sure you know those two words are
really an incomplete description of the job ahead. Taken alone, they suggest
that you’ve assembled a convention of efficiency experts, tightening the bolts
and boosting the output of the machinery of public enlightenment, or else a
conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding each other’s sermons. But we need
to be – and we will be – much more than that. Because what we’re talking about
is nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in danger
of being paralyzed and pulverized.
Alarming words, I know. But
the realities we face should trigger alarms. Free and responsible government by
popular consent just can’t exist without an informed public. That’s a cliché, I
know, but I agree with the presidential candidate who once said that truisms are
true and clichés mean what they say (an observation that no doubt helped to lose
him the election.) It’s a reality: democracy can’t exist without an informed
public. Here’s an example: Only 13% of eligible young people cast ballots in the
last presidential election. A recent National Youth Survey revealed that only
half of the fifteen hundred young people polled believe that voting is
important, and only 46% think they can make a difference in solving community
problems. We’re talking here about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie
Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds and asked them,
“Why don’t more young people vote or get involved?” Of the nearly two thousand
respondents, the main answer was that they did not have enough information about
issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it again: democracy can’t exist
without an informed public. So I say without qualification that it’s not simply
the cause of journalism that’s at stake today, but the cause of American liberty
itself. As Tom Paine put it, “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.”
He was talking about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that
revolution ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny
press. Freedom and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future
United States. They grew up together, and neither has fared very well in the
other’s absence. Boom times for the one have been boom times for the other.
Yet today, despite plenty of
lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press radio and TV, three
powerful forces are undermining that very freedom, damming the streams of
significant public interest news that irrigate and nourish the flowering of
self-determination. The first of these is the centuries-old reluctance of
governments – even elected governments – to operate in the sunshine of
disclosure and criticism. The second is more subtle and more recent. It’s the
tendency of media giants, operating on big-business principles, to exalt
commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run what
Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting’s “money-making
machine” at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the journalism
that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth; they are
isolating serious coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling “news holes” or
far from prime- time; and they are gobbling up small and independent
publications competing for the attention of the American people.
It’s hardly a new or
surprising story. But there are fresh and disturbing chapters.
In earlier times our
governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt
instruments of the law – padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken
editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts
and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they’ve found
new ones now, in the name of “national security.” The classifier’s Top Secret
stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. And
beyond what is officially labeled “secret” there hovers a culture of sealed
official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of government by leak and
innuendo and spin, of misnamed “public information” offices that churn out
blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying exaggerations and,
occasionally, just plain damned lies. Censorship without officially appointed
censors.
Add to that the
censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires digesting the bones of
swallowed independents, and you’ve got a major shrinkage of the crucial
information that thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that coming as long
as a century ago when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then of
concentration in the young radio industry, became apparent. And so in the zesty
progressivism of early New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was
passed (more on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy,
mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the “public interest,
convenience and necessity.” The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of
commercial values from overwhelming democratic values – to assure that the
official view of reality – corporate or government – was not the only view of
reality that reached the people. Regulators and regulated, media and government
were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving those checks and balances that
is the bulwark of our Constitutional order.
What would happen, however,
if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting
ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news
second to free-market economics? That’s exactly what’s happening now under the
ideological banner of “deregulation.” Giant megamedia conglomerates that our
founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an
imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of
liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage
of church and state.
Consider where we are today.
Never has there been an
administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping
information from the people at large and – in defiance of the Constitution –
from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so powerful a media
oligopoly – the word is Barry Diller’s, not mine – been so unabashed in reaching
like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted
together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for
the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people’s need to know. When
the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to
define “real news”, he answered: “The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”
When journalism throws in with power that’s the first news marched by censors to
the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when
journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly
independent of it.
Which brings me to the third
powerful force – beyond governmental secrecy and megamedia conglomerates – that
is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that
quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian
administration that in turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful interests
in the world. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas
today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor the notion of a
vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure
coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power and its
many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of honey. Stretching
from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert
Murdoch’s empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of
think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates – the religious, partisan and
corporate right have raised a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and
political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals
embodied in our founding documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition
party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be
democracy’s best friend. That is why so many journalists joined with you in
questioning Michael Powell’s bid – blessed by the White House – to permit
further concentration of media ownership. If free and independent journalism
committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen
goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way to intimidate and then silence
mainstream journalism than to be the boss.
If you doubt me, read Jane
Kramer’s chilling account in the current New Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The
Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is also its first media
mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives or his proxies own, or
directly or indirectly control, includes the state television networks and radio
stations, three of Italy’s four commercial television networks, two big
publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country’s
largest movie production-and-distribution company, and a chunk of its Internet
services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would enable him to
purchase more media properties, including the most influential paper in the
country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the reporters in Italy work
for Berlusconi, and the other half think they might have to. Small wonder he has
managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee his fortune – or that his
name is commonly attached to such unpleasant things as contempt for the law,
conflict of interest, bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, “his power
over what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think, is
overwhelming.” The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked recently why
a British magazine was devoting so much space to an Italian Prime Minister. He
replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two things the magazine stood for:
capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It can happen here. By the way,
Berlusconi’s close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes Jane
Kramer, programming on nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched
automatically to Murdoch’s Sky Italia
So the issues bringing us
here tonight are bigger and far more critical than simply “media reform.” That’s
why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look around you. I’m serious: Look to
your left and now to your right. You are looking at your allies in one of the
great ongoing struggles of the American experience – the struggle for the soul
of democracy, for government “of, by, and for the people.”
It’s a battle we can win
only if we work together. We’ve seen that this year. Just a few months ago the
FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the newspaper, broadcasting and cable
interests, prepared a relaxation of the rules governing ownership of media
outlets that would allow still more diversity-killing mergers among media
giants. The proceedings were conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored
by all the major media, who were of course interested parties. In June Chairman
Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised
regulations as a done deal.
But they didn’t count on the
voice of independent journalists and citizens like you. Because of coverage in
independent outlets – including PBS, which was the only broadcasting system that
encouraged its journalists to report what was really happening – and because
citizens like you took quick action, this largely invisible issue burst out as a
major political cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You exposed
Powell’s failure to conduct an open discussion of the rule changes save for a
single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led to a real participatory
discussion, with open meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and
Atlanta. Then the organizing that followed generated millions of letters and
“filings”at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, the outcry mobilized
unexpected support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules that
cleared the Senate – although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it
prisoner in the House. But who would have thought six months ago that the cause
would win support from such allies as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey
Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have moved “media reform” to center-stage,
where it may even now become a catalyst for a new era of democratic renewal.
We working journalists have
something special to bring to this work. This weekend at your conference there
will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics of reform. What laws are needed?
What advocacy programs and strategies? How can we protect and extend the reach
of those tools that give us some countervailing power against media monopoly –
instruments like the Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and public
broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and opinion.
But without passion, without
a message that has a beating heart, these won’t be enough. There’s where
journalism comes in. It isn’t the only agent of freedom, obviously; in fact,
journalism is a deeply human and therefore deeply flawed craft – yours truly
being a conspicuous example. But at times it has risen to great occasions, and
at times it has made other freedoms possible. That’s what the draftsmen of the
First Amendment knew and it’s what we can’t afford to forget. So to remind us of
what our free press has been at its best and can be again, I will call on the
help of unseen presences, men and women of journalism’s often checkered but
sometimes courageous past.
Think with me for a moment
on the reasons behind the establishment of press freedom. It wasn’t ordained to
protect hucksters, and it didn’t drop like the gentle rain from heaven. It was
fought and sacrificed for by unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their
hands inky at their own hand presses and called themselves simply “printers.”
The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair put out in
Boston in September of 1690. Its name was Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and
Domestick and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply wanted “to give
an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention.” The
government shut it down after one issue – just one issue! – for the official
reason that printer Ben Harris hadn’t applied for the required government
license to publish. But I wonder if some Massachusetts pooh-bah didn’t take
personally one of Harris’s proclaimed motives for starting the paper – “to cure
the spirit of Lying much among us”?
No one seems to have
objected when Harris and his paper disappeared – that was the way things were.
But some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter Zenger was jailed in New
York for criticizing its royal governor, things were different. The colony
brought Zenger to trial on a charge of “seditious libel,” and since it didn’t
matter whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But the
jury ignored the judge’s charge and freed Zenger, not only because the governor
was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal of Zenger’s lawyer,
Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client’s case was:
Not the cause of the poor
Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . every Man
who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless and honour You, as Men who.
. .by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation
for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, to which
Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a Right, -- the Liberty – both
of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power…by speaking and writing – Truth.
Still a pretty good mission statement!
During the War for
Independence itself most of the three dozen little weekly newspapers in the
colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by giving space to
anti-British letters, news of Parliament’s latest outrages, and calls to action.
But the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was the onetime editor of
the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England
where he left a trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 1776 – just
before enlisting in Washington’s army – he published Common Sense, a
hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts to make an
uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It’s been called
the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought by a small literate
population. Paine followed it up with another convincing collection of essays
written in the field and given another punchy title, The Crisis. Passed from
hand to hand and reprinted in other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to
thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up here is because he had something
we need to restore – an unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people with
the message that they mattered and could stand up for themselves. He couched his
gospel of human rights and equality in a popular style that any working writer
can envy. “As it is my design,” he said, “to make those that can scarcely read
understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in
language as plain as the alphabet.”
That plain language spun off
memorable one-liners that we’re still quoting. “These are the times that try
men’s souls.” “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” “What we obtain too
cheap, we esteem too lightly.” “Virtue is not hereditary.” And this: “Of more
worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned
ruffians that ever lived.” I don’t know what Paine would have thought of
political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but he could have held his own
in any modern campaign.
There were also editors who
felt responsible to audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and ‘88 the little
New-York Independent Advertiser ran all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist ,
those serious essays in favor of ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as
clear arguments, but they are, and they were, unforgiving in their demand for
concentrated attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed the best
to its readers, and the readers knew that the issues of self-government deserved
their best attention. I pray your goal of “media reform” includes a press as
conscientious as the New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as
public-spirited as both. Because it takes those qualities to fight against the
relentless pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the
First Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered
in law. It wasn’t. Only seven years later, in the midst of a war scare with
France, Congress passed and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. The act
made it a crime – just listen to how broad a brush the government could swing –
to circulate opinions “tending to induce a belief” that lawmakers might have
unconstitutional or repressive motives, or “directly or indirectly tending” to
justify France or to “criminate,” whatever that meant, the President or other
Federal officials. No wonder that opponents called it a scheme to “excite a
fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at home.” John
Ashcroft would have loved it.
But here’s what happened. At
least a dozen editors refused to be frightened and went defiantly to prison,
some under state prosecutions. One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat
in the House of Representatives, languished for four months in an unheated cell
during a Vermont winter. But such was the spirit of liberty abroad in the land
that admirers chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when he emerged
his district re-elected him by a landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a
built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time President Jefferson – who hated
it from the first – pardoned those remaining under indictment. So the story has
an upbeat ending, and so can ours, but it will take the kind of courage that
those early printers and their readers showed.
Courage is a timeless
quality and surfaces when the government is tempted to hit the bottle of
censorship again during national emergencies, real or manufactured. As so many
of you will recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration
resurrected the doctrine of “prior restraint” from the crypt and tried to ban
the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the Washington
Post – even though the documents themselves were a classified history of events
during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times,
and Katherine Graham of the Post were both warned by their lawyers that they and
their top managers could face criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they
printed the material that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked – and, by the way, offered
without success to the three major television networks. Or at the least,
punitive lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious Nixon team could
devise. But after internal debates – and the threats of some of their best-known
editors to resign rather than fold under pressure – both owners gave the green
light – and were vindicated by the Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy.
Bi-partisan fairness
requires me to note that the Carter administration, in 1979, tried to prevent
the Progressive magazine, published right here in Madison, from running an
article called “How to Make an H-Bomb.” The grounds were a supposed threat to
“national security.” But Howard Morland had compiled the piece entirely from
sources open to the public, mainly to show that much of the classification
system was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again rejected the
government’s claim, but it’s noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by that
time had retreated to a small left-wing publication like the Progressive.
In all three of those cases,
confronted with a clear and present danger of punishment, none of the owners
flinched. Can we think of a single executive of today’s big media conglomerates
showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll did?
Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn’t even want ABC News reporting on
its parent company, Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC’s Robert Wright.
He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the network didn’t want to offend
conservatives with a liberal sensibility during the invasion of Iraq. Instead,
NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael Savage whose diatribes on radio had
described non-white countries as “turd-world nations” and who characterized gay
men and women as part of “the grand plan to cut down on the white race.” I am
not sure what it says that the GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue
was offensive to conservatives, Savage was not.
And then there’s Leslie
Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week that the once-Tiffany Network was
celebrating its 75th anniversary – and taking kudos for its glory days when it
was unafraid to broadcast “The Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the
Pentagon” – the network’s famous eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and
relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the Republican National Committee
– and at a time when its parent company has billions resting on whether the
White House, Congress, and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations than
currently permissible – CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries about Ronald
Reagan that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at
CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his decision. But earlier
this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series about Adolf Hitler,
Moonves sang a different tune: “If you want to play it safe and put on
milquetoast then you get criticized…There are times when as a broadcaster when
you take chances.” This obviously wasn’t one of those times. Granted,
made-for-television movies about living figures are about as vital as the wax
figures at Madame Tussaud’s – and even less authentic – granted that the
canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn’t even seen the film before they set to
howling; granted, on the surface it’s a silly tempest in a teapot; still, when a
once-great network falls obsequiously to the ground at the feet of a partisan
mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one would have taken seriously
as history, you have to wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the
First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to come, when the
stakes are really high. And you have to wonder what concessions the media
tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.
So what must we devise to
make the media safe for individuals stubborn about protecting freedom and
serving the truth? And what do we all – educators, administrators, legislators
and agitators – need to do to restore the disappearing diversity of media
opinions? America had plenty of that in the early days when the republic and the
press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit –
just a few hundred dollars – to start a paper, especially with a little
political sponsorship and help. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840,
mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren’t objective by any stretch. Here’s
William Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine, shouting his
creed in the opening number of his 1790s paper, Porcupine’s Gazette. “Peter
Porcupine,” Cobbett’s self-bestowed nickname, declared:
Professions of
impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless, and are besides perfect
nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not relate news as he
finds it, is something worse than partial; and . . . he that does not exercise
his own judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is sent him, is a poor
passive tool, and not an editor.
In Cobbett’s day you could
flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict serious
damage on open public discussion because there were plenty of competitors. It
didn’t matter if the local gazette presented the day’s events entirely through a
Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or Republican choice handy –
there were, in other words, choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many
blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well informed. They also
made it possible for Americans to exercise one of their most democratic habits –
that of forming associations to carry out civic enterprises. And they operated
against the dreaded tyranny of the majority by letting lonely thinkers know that
they had allies elsewhere. Here’s how de Tocqueville put it in his own words:
It often happens in
democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that
light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to
associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they
do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a
newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been
presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in
the shadows finally meet each other and unite.
No wandering spirit could
fail to find a voice in print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion of
humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press that put the yeast in
freedom’s ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers that spoke for
Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming
America’s Manifest Destiny to dominate North America. But one way or another,
journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction.
Past and present are never
as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor of the New
York Tribune, not only kept his pages “ever open to the plaints of the wronged
and suffering,” but said that whoever sat in an editor’s chair and didn’t work
to promote human progress hadn’t tasted “the luxury” of journalism. I liken that
to the words of a kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his
four-page little I.F. Stone’s Weekly, “Izzy” loved to catch the government’s
lies and contradictions in the government’s own official documents. And amid the
thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he said: “I have so much fun I ought
to be arrested.” Think about that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing that
being in a position to fight the good fight isn’t a burden but a lucky break.
How can our work here bring that attitude back into the newsrooms?
That era of a wide-open and
crowded newspaper playing field began to fade as the old hand-presses gave way
to giant machines with press runs and readerships in the hundreds of thousands
and costs in the millions. But that didn’t necessarily or immediately kill
public spirited journalism. Not so long as the new owners were still
strong-minded individuals with big professional egos to match their thick
pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter for a
German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883 he was
already a millionaire in the making. But here’s his recommended short platform
for politicians:
- Tax luxuries
- Tax Inheritances
- Tax Large Incomes
- Tax monopolies
- Tax the Privileged Corporation
- A Tariff for Revenue
- Reform the Civil Service
- Punish Corrupt Officers
- Punish Vote Buying
- Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections
Also not a bad mission
statement. Can you imagine one of today’s huge newspaper chains taking that on
as an agenda?
Don’t get me wrong. The
World certainly offered people plenty of the spice that they wanted –
entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living – but not at the expense of
news that let them know who was on their side against the boodlers and bosses.
Nor did big-time, big-town,
big bucks journalism extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded investigative
journalism that took the name of muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those
days of early last century saw a second great awakening of the democratic
impulse. What brought it into being was a reaction against the Social Darwinism
and unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force today.
Certain popular magazines made space for – and profited by – the work of such
journalists – to name only a few – as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton
Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham Phillips. They ripped the veils
from – among other things – the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts,
the treason of the Senate and the villainies of those who sold tainted meat and
poisonous medicines. And why were they given those opportunities? Because, in
the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of McClure’s Magazine, when special
interests defied the law and flouted the general welfare, there was a social
debt incurred. And, as he put it: “We have to pay in the end, every one of us.
And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our liberty.”
Muckraking lingers on today,
but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in
high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get
back to putting the rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the
public and the abuse of its faith in good government.
When that landmark
Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a vigorous public movement of
educators, labor officials, and religious and institutional leaders emerged to
argue for a broadcast system that would serve the interests of citizens and
communities. A movement like that is coming to life again and we now have to
build on this momentum.
It won’t be easy, because
the tide’s been flowing the other way for a long time. The deregulation pressure
began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said that
TV didn’t need much regulation because it was just a “toaster with pictures,”
eliminated many public-interest rules. That opened the door for networks to cut
their news staffs, scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to “The Harvest of
Shame” and “The Selling of the Pentagon”), and exile investigative producers and
reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of independent production. It was like
turning out searchlights on dark and dangerous corners. A crowning achievement
of that drive was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate
welfare program ever for the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates
in the world – passed, I must add, with support from both parties.
And the beat of
“convergence” between once-distinct forms of media goes on at increased tempo,
with the communications conglomerates and the advertisers calling the tune. As
safeguards to competition fall, an octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be
able to secure cable channels that can deliver interactive multimedia content –
text, sound and images – to digital TVs, home computers, personal video
recorders and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The goal? To corner
the market on new ways of selling more things to more people for more hours in
the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized pitches to
you and your children. That will melt down the surviving boundaries between
editorial and marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to the new-media
hucksters as “branded entertainment.”
Let’s consider what’s
happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of
America reports that two-thirds of today’s newspaper markets are monopolies. And
now most of the country’s powerful newspaper chains are lobbying for
co-ownership of newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing
their grip on community after community. And are they up-front about it? Hear
this: Last December 3 such media giants as The New York Times, Gannett, Cox, and
Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost all the country’s
broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the case for that
cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They actually told the FCC that
lifting the regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local journalism. But
did those same news organizations tell their readers what they were doing? Not
all. None of them on that day believed they had an obligation to report in their
own news pages what their parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge
media conglomerates increase their control over what we see, read, and hear,
they rarely report on how they are themselves are using their power to further
their own interests and power as big business, including their influence over
the political process.
Take a look at a new book
called Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering
published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under
the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who produced the book all
love newspapers – Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times;
Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton,
a veteran wire service reporter and news and feature editor at the Philadelphia
Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and
Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry is in the middle of the most
momentous change in its three hundred year history – a change that is
diminishing the amount of real news available to the consumer. A generation of
relentless corporatization is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz
of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies
to the humblest weeklies. It is a world where “small hometown dailies in
particular are being bought and sold like hog futures. Where chains, once
content to grow one property at a time, now devour other chains whole. Where
they are effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, further
minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the business from interests
with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations
newspapers have to democracy.” They go on to describe the toll that the
never-ending drive for profits is taking on the news. In Cumberland, Maryland,
for example, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him he no longer
had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But newspaper
management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax machine in the police station
and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. In New
Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher
who slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the space for news, and was
rewarded by being named Gannett’s Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the
way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them now own thirteen of the
state’s nineteen dailies, or seventy three percent of all the circulation of New
Jersey-based papers. Then there is The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with
a circulation of 23,500. Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided itself
on being in hometown hands since the Johnson administration – the Andrew Johnson
administration. But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the space of
two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three
years.
You’d better get used to it,
concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because the real momentum of consolidation is
just beginning – it won’t be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen
major print conglomerates.
You can see the results even
now in the waning of robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth reporting as
news organizations try to do more with fewer resources. In the failure of the
major news organizations to cover their own corporate deals and lobbying as well
as other forms of “crime in the suites” such as Enron story. And in helping
people understand what their government is up to. The report by the Roberts team
includes a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat in coverage of
nineteen key departments and agencies in Washington. Regular reporting of the
Supreme Court and State Department dropped off considerably through the decade.
At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every
American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and,
incredibly, at the Interior Department, which controls five to six hundred
million acres of public land and looks after everything from the National Park
Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no full-time reporters
around.
That’s in Washington, our
nation’s capital. Out across the country there is simultaneously a near blackout
of local politics by broadcasters. The public interest group Alliance for Better
Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six cities in one week in October. Out
of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public
affairs – less than one-half of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town
councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time from broadcasters who have
filled their coffers by looting the public airwaves over which they were placed
as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang up in the House of
Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey the law that says they
must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office at the lowest commercial
rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the Congress to heel. So much for the
“public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
So what do we do? What is
our strategy for taking on what seems a hopeless fight for a media system that
serves as effectively as it sells – one that holds all the institutions of
society, itself included, accountable?
There’s plenty we can do.
Here’s one journalist’s list of some of the overlapping and connected goals that
a vital media reform movement might pursue.
First, we have to take Tom
Paine’s example – and Danny Schecter’s advice – and reach out to regular
citizens. We have to raise an even bigger tent than you have here. Those of us
in this place speak a common language about the “media.” We must reach the
audience that’s not here – carry the fight to radio talk shows, local
television, and the letters columns of our newspapers. As Danny says, we must
engage the mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our fellow citizens
to understand that what they see, hear, and read is not only the taste of
programmers and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by the people
we vote for.
We have to fight to keep the
gates to the Internet open to all. The web has enabled many new voices in our
democracy – and globally – to be heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals,
non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can speak online, and often with an
impact greater than in the days when orators had to climb on soap box in a park.
The media industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it’s why concerns
about media concentration are ill founded in an environment where anyone can
speak and where there are literally hundreds of competing channels. What those
lobbyists for big media don’t tell you is that the traffic patterns of the
online world are beginning to resemble those of television and radio. In one
study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then known) accounted for nearly
a third of all user time spent online. And two others companies – Yahoo and
Microsoft – bring that figure to fully 50%. As for the growing number of
channels available on today’s cable systems, most are owned by a small handful
of companies. Of the ninety-one major networks that appear on most cable
systems, 79 are part of such multiple network groups such as Time Warner,
Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a channel on cable
today, you must either be owned by or affiliated with one of the giants. If
we’re not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be transformed
into a system in which a handful of companies use their control over high-speed
access to ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in the broadband era
at the expense of the democratic potential of this amazing technology. So we
must fight to make sure the Internet remains open to all as the present-day
analogue of that many-tongued world of small newspapers so admired by de
Tocqueville.
We must fight for a
regulatory, market and public opinion environment that lets local and
community-based content be heard rather than drowned out by nationwide
commercial programming.
We must fight to limit
conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and
cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing
companies and other information sources. Let the message go forth: No
Berlusconis in America!
We must fight to expand a
noncommercial media system – something made possible in part by new digital
spectrum awarded to PBS stations – and fight off attempts to privatize what’s
left of public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be the only free speech
in America!
We must fight to create new
opportunities, through public policies and private agreements, to let
historically marginalized media players into more ownership of channels and
control of content.
Let us encourage traditional
mainstream journalism to get tougher about keeping a critical eye on those in
public and private power and keeping us all informed of what’s important – not
necessarily simple or entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news is
“Entertainment Tonight.” And news departments are trustees of the public, not
the corporate media’s stockholders
In that last job, schools of
journalism and professional news associations have their work cut out. We need
journalism graduates who are not only better informed in a whole spectrum of
special fields – and the schools do a competent job there – but who take from
their training a strong sense of public service. And also graduates who are
perhaps a little more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present crop, though
that’s hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of education, we get very few
recruits from the ranks of those who do the world’s unglamorous and low-paid
work. But as a onetime “cub” in a very different kind of setting, I cherish H.L.
Mencken’s description of what being a young Baltimore reporter a hundred years
ago meant to him. “I was at large,” he wrote,
in a wicked seaport of half
a million people with a front seat at every public . . [B]y all orthodox
cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low, for the heavy reading of
my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . .But it would be an
exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was
meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender,
a shyster lawyer or a midwife.
We need some of that worldly
wisdom in our newsrooms. Let’s figure out how to attract youngsters who have
acquired it.
And as for those
professional associations of editors they might remember that in union there is
strength. One journalist alone can’t extract from an employer a commitment to
let editors and not accountants choose the appropriate subject matter for
coverage. But what if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly
managements? What if foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia Journalism
Review sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic bias,
failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply refused any
longer to quote anonymous sources – or give Kobe Bryant’s trial more than the
minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard – or to run stories planted by
the Defense Department and impossible, for alleged security reasons, to verify?
What if a professional association backed them to the hilt? Or required the same
stance from all its members? It would take courage to confront powerful
ownerships that way. But not as much courage as is asked of those brave
journalists in some countries who face the dungeon, the executioner or the
secret assassin for speaking out.
All this may be in the
domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not. What I know to be real is that we
are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a romantic about democracy or
journalism; the writer Andre Gide may have been right when he said that all
things human, given time, go badly. But I know journalism and democracy are
deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings have to redress our grievances,
renew our politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult
tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as this,
when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the republic. But too much
is at stake for our spirits to flag. Earlier this week the Library of Congress
gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the Humanities to the Polish philosopher
Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview Kolakowski said: “There is one freedom on
which all other liberties depend – and that is freedom of expression, freedom of
speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least
it would be soon suppressed.”
That’s the flame of truth
your movement must carry forward. I am older than almost all of you and am not
likely to be around for the duration; I have said for several years now that I
will retire from active journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart
from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the
muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or
forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did not flinch. I take heart in
your presence here. It’s your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.
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Democracy
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Orange County