A further problem is that the owners' class interests are
reinforced
by a variety of other filters that we discuss below.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
See Noam Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors (New York: Claremont, 1986), chapter 3.
As we show throughout the present book, a series of lies by the government, successively exposed, never seems to arouse skepticism in the media regarding the next government claim.
3. For a description of the government's strategy of deflecting attention away from the Nicaraguan election by the fabricated MIG story, and the media's service in this government program, see chapter 3, under "The MIG Crisis Staged during the Nicaraguan Election Week. "
4. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 24?
5. Quoted in ibid. , p. 23.
6. Ibid. , p. 34.
7? Ibid. , pp. 38-39.
8. Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in Amen'ca (New York: Macmil- lan, 1937), pp. 166, 173.
9? Earl Vance, "Freedom of the Press for Whom," Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1945), quoted in Survival of a Free, Competitive Press: The Small Newspaper: Democracy's Grass Roots, Report of the Chairman, Senate Small Business Committee, 80th Cong. , 1st session, 1947, p. 54.
10. Note that we are speaking of media with substantial outreach-mass media. It has always been possible to start small-circulation journals and to produce mimeographed or photocopied news letters sent around to a tiny audience. But even small journals in the United States today typically survive only by virtue of contributions from wealthy financial angels.
II. In 1987, the Times-Mirror Company, for example, owned newspapers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, and Hartford, Connecticut, had book pub- lishing and magazine subsidiaries, and owned cable systems and seven televi- sion stations.
12. Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. xvi.
13. David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media. Power. Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 7; Stephen Hess, The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices (Washington: Brookings, 1984), pp. 99-100. 14. The four major Western wire services-Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence-France-Presse-account for some 80 per- cent of the international news circulating in the world today. AP is owned by member newspapers; UPI is privately owned; Reuters was owned mainly by the British media until it went public in 1984, but control was retained by the original owners by giving lesser voting rights to the new stockholders; Agence- France-Presse is heavily subsidized by the French government. As is pointed out by Jonathan Fenby, the wire services "exist to serve markets," and their
prime concern, accordingly, "is with the rich media markets of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and increasingly with the business com- munity. . . . " They compete fiercely, but AP and UPI "are really U. S. enter- prises that operate on an international scale. . . . Without their domestic base, the AP and UPI could not operate as international agencies. With it, they must be American organizations, subject to American pressures and requirements" (The International News Services [New York: Schocken, 1986], pp. 7, 9, 73-74)? See also Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics ofInformation: How Western Culture Dominates the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 3. 15. The fourteenth annual Roper survey, "Public Attitudes toward Television and Other Media in a Time of Change" (May 1985), indicates that in 1984, 64 percent of the sample mentioned television as the place "where you usually get most of your news about what's going on in the world today . . . " (p. 3). It has often been noted that the television networks themselves depend heavily on the prestige newspapers, wire services, and government for their choices of news. Their autonomy as newsmakers can be easily exaggerated.
16. The members of the very top tier qualify by audience outreach, importance as setters of news standards, and asset and profit totals. The last half dozen or so in our twenty-four involve a certain amount of arbitrariness of choice, although audience size is still our primary criterion. McGraw-Hill is included
jj" NUn;~ TU ! 'AGES 5-lS
NOTES TO PAGES 8-n 337
because of its joint strength in trade books and magazines of political content and outreach.
17. As noted in table I-I, note 7, Storer came under the temporary control of the securities firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1985. As its ultimate fate was unclear at the time of writing, and as financial data were no longer available after 1984, we have kept Storer on the table and list it here, despite its uncertain status.
18. John Kluge, having taken the Metromedia system private in a leveraged buyout in 1984 worth $I. I billion, sold off various parts of this system in 1985-86 for $5. 5 billion, at a personal profit of some $3 billion (Gary Hector, "Are Shareholders Cheated by LBOs? " Fortune, Jan. 17, 1987, p. 100). Station KDLA-TV, in Los Angeles, which had been bought by a management-outsider group in a leveraged buyout in 1983 for $245 million, was sold to the Tribune Company for $5IO million two years later (Richard Stevenson, "Tribune in TV Deal for $5IO Million," New York Times, May 7, 1985). See also "The Media Magnates: Why Huge Fortunes Roll Off the Presses," Fortune, October 12, 1987.
19. A split among the the heirs of James E. Scripps eventually resulted in the sale of the Detroit Evening News. According to one news article, "Daniel Marentette, a Scripps family member and a self described 'angry shareholder,' says family members want a better return on their money. 'We get better yields investing in a New York checking account,' says Mr. Marentette, who sells race horses" (Damon Darlin, "Takeover Rumors Hit Detroit News Parent," Wall Street Journa~ July 18, 1985). The Bingham family division on these matters led to the sale ofthe Louisville Coun'er-Journal; the New Haven papers of the Jackson family were sold after years of squabbling, and "the sale price [of the New Haven papers], $185 million, has only served to publicize the potential value of family holdings of family newspapers elsewhere" (Geraldine Fabrikant, "Newspaper Properties, Hotter Than Ever," New York Times, Aug. 17, 1986).
20. The Reagan administration strengthened the control of existing holders of television-station licenses by increasing their term from three to five years, and its FCC made renewals essentially automatic. The FCC also greatly facilitated speculation and trading in television properties by a rule change reducing the required holding period before sale of a newly acquired property from three years to one year.
The Reagan era FCC and Department of Justice also refused to challenge mergers and takeover bids that would significantly increase the concentration of power (GE-RCA) or media concentration (Capital Cities-ABC). Further- more, beginning April 2, 1985, media owners could own as many as twelve television stations, as long as their total audience didn't exceed 25 percent of the nation's television households; and they could also hold twelve AM and twelve FM stations, as the 1953 "7-7-7 rule" was replaced with a "12-12-12 rule. " See Herbert H. Howard, "Group and Cross-Media Ownership of Tele- vision Stations: 1985" (Washington: National Association of Broadcasters,
1985).
21. This was justified by Reagan-era FCC chairman Mark Fowler on the grounds that market options are opening up and that the public should be free to choose. Criticized by Fred Friendly for doing away with the law's public-
interest standard, Fowler replied that Friendly "distrusts the ability of the viewing public to make decisions on its own through the marketplace mecha- nism. I do not" (Jeanne Saddler, "Clear Channel: Broadcast Takeovers Meet Less FCC Static, and Critics Are Upset," Wall Street Journa~ June II, 1985). Among other problems, Fowler ignores the fact that true freedom of choice involves the ability to select options that may not be offered by an oligopoly selling audiences to advertisers.
22. CBS increased its debt by about $1 billion in 1985 to finance the purchase of 21 percent of its own stock, in order to fend off a takeover attempt by Ted Turner. The Wall Street Journal noted that "With debt now standing at 60% of capital, it needs to keep advertising revenue up to repay borrowings and interest" (Peter Barnes, "CBS Profit Hinges on Better TV Ratings," June 6, 1986). With the slowed-up growth of advertising revenues, CBS embarked on an employment cutback of as many as six hundred broadcast division em- ployees, the most extensive for CBS since the loss of cigarette advertising in 1971 (Peter Barnes, "CBS Will Cut up to 600 Posts in Broadcasting," Wall StreetJourna~ July I, 1986). In June 1986, Time, Inc. , embarked on a program to buy back as much as 10 million shares, or 16 percent of its common stock, at an expected cost of some $900 million, again to reduce the threat of a hostile takeover (Laura Landro, "Time Will Buy as Much as 16% of Its Common," Wall Stt'eet Journa~ June 20, 1986).
23. In response to the Jesse Helms and Turner threats to CBS, Laurence Tisch, of Loews Corporation, was encouraged to increase his holdings in CBS stock, already at 11. 7 percent. In August 1986, the Loews interest was raised to 24. 9 percent, and Tisch obtained a position of virtual control. In combina- tion with William Paley, who owned 8. 1 percent of the 8hares, the chief executive officer of CBS was removed and Tisch took over that role himself, on a temporary basis (Peter Barnes, "Loews Increases Its Stake in CBS to Almost 25%," Wall Street Journa~ Aug. 12, 1986).
24. The number would be eight if we included the estate of Lila Wallace, who died in 1984, leaving the controlling stock interest in Reader's Digest to the care of trustees.
25. As we noted in the preface, the neoconservatives speak regularly of "lib- eral" domination of the media, assuming or pretending that the underlings call the shots, not the people who own or control the media. These data, showing the wealth position ofmedia owners, are understandably something they prefer to ignore. Sometimes, however, the neoconservatives go "populist," a n d - while financed by Mobil Oil Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife-pretend to be speaking for the "masses" in opposition to a monied elite dominating the media. For further discussion, see Edward S. Herman's review of The Spirit ofDemocratic Capitalism, "Michael Novak's Promised Land: Unfettered Cor- porate Capitalism," Monthly Review (October 1983), and the works cited in the preface, note 3.
26. Similar results are found in Peter Dreier, "The Position of the Press in the U. S. Power Structure," Social Problems (February 1982), pp. 298-310.
27. Benjamin Compaine et aI. , Anatomy of the Communications Industry: Who Owns the Media? (White Plains, N. Y. : Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982),
P? 463?
28. Ibid. , pp. 458-60.
29. See Edward S. Herman, Corporate Contro~ Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 26-54.
30. For the interests of fifteen major newspaper companies in other media fields, and a checklist of other fields entered by leading firms in a variety of media industries, see Compaine, Anatomy of the Communications Industry, tables 2. 19 and 8. 1, pp. II and 452-53.
31. The merger had been sanctioned by the FCC but was stymied by interven- tion of the Department of Justice. See "A broken engagement for ITT and ABC," Business Week, January 6, 1967.
32. Ibid.
33. On the enormous and effective lobbying operations of GE, see Thomas B. Edsall, "Bringing Good Things to GE: Firm's Political Savvy Scores in Wash- ington," Washington Post, April 13, 1985;
34. The widely quoted joke by A. I. Liebling-that if you don't like what your newspaper says you are perfectly free to start or buy one ofyour own-stressed the impotence of the individual. In a favorable political climate such as that provided by the Reagan administration, however, a giant corporation not liking media performance can buy its own, as exemplified by GE.
35. Allan Sloan, "Understanding Murdoch-The Numbers Aren't What Re- ally Matters," Forbes, March 10, 1986, pp. II4ff.
36. On the Nixon-Agnew campaign to bully the media by publicity attacks and threats, see Marilyn Lashner, The Chilling Effect in TV News (New York: Praeger, 1984). Lashner concluded that the Nixon White House's attempt to quiet the media "succeeded handily, at least as far as television is con- cerned . . . " (p. 167). See also Fred Powledge, The Engineering ofRestraint: The Nixon Administration and the Press (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971), and William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).
37. Of the 290 directors in his sample of large newspapers, 36 had high-level positions-past or present-in the federal government (Dreier, "The Position of the Press," p. 303).
38. One study showed that of sixty-five FCC commissioners and high-level staff personnel who left the FCC between 1945 and 1970, twel"e had come out of the private-communications sector before their FCC sel ;e, and thirty- four went into private-firm service after leaving the commission (Roger Noll et aI. , Economic Aspects ofTelevision Regulation [Washington: Brookings, 1973], p. 123).
39. "The symbiotic growth of American television and global enterprise has made them so interrelated that they cannot be thought of as separate. They are essentially the same phenomenon. Preceded far and wide by military advisers, lobbyists, equipment salesmen, advertising specialists, merchandising experts, and telefilm salesmen as advance agents, the enterprise penetrates much of the non-socialist world. Television is simply its most visible portion" (Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], p. 158). For a broader picture, see Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultu- ral Domination (White Plains, N. Y. : International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), especially chapters 3-4.
40. Is it not possible that if the populace "demands" program content greatly disliked by the owners, competition and the quest for profits will cause them
to offer such programming? There is some truth in this, and it, along with the limited autonomy of media personnel, may help explain the "surprises" that crop up occasionally in the mass media. One limit to the force of public demand, however, is that the millions of customers have no means of register- ing their demand for products that are not offered to them.
A further problem is that the owners' class interests are reinforced by a variety of other filters that we discuss below.
41. Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 31.
42. Ibid. , p. 41.
43. ". . . producers presenting patrons [advertisers] with the greatest oppor- tunities to make a profit through their publics will receive support while those that cannot compete on this score will not survive" (Joseph Turow, Media Industries: The Production of News and Entertainment [New York: Longman, 1984], p. 52).
44. Noncommercial television is also at a huge disadvantage for the same reason, and will require a public subsidy to be able to compete. Because public television does not have the built-in constraints of ownership by the wealthy, and the need to appease advertisers, it poses a threat to a narrow elite control of mass communications. This is why conservatives struggle to keep public television on a short leash, with annual funding decisions, and funding at a low level (see Barnouw, The Sponsor, pp. 179-82). Another option pursued in the Carter-Reagan era has been to force it into the commercial nexus by sharp defunding.
45. Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. II8-26. " 'The dominant paper ultimately thrives,' Gannett Chairman Allen H. Neuharth says. 'The weaker paper ulti- mately dies' " (Joseph B. White, "Knight-Ridder's No-Lose Plan Backfires," Wall Street Journa~ Jan. 4, 1988).
46. Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 43.
47. "Advertising and the Press," in James Curran, ed. , The British Press: A
Manifesto (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 252-55.
48. Ibid. , p. 254.
49. 1984 CBS Annual Report, p. 13. This is a further refinement in the measure- ment of "efficiency" in "delivering an audience. " In the magazine business, the standard measure is CPM, or "costs per thousand," to an advertiser to reach buyers through a full-page, black-and-white ad. Recent developments, like CBS's CAP , have been in the direction o f identifying the special characteristics of the audience delivered. In selling itself to advertisers, the Soap Opera Digest says: "But you probably want to know about our first milestone: today Soap Opera Digest delivers more women in the 18-49 category at the lowest CPM than any other women's magazine" (quoted in Turow, Media Industries, P. 55). 50. William Evan, Organization Theory (New York: Wiley, 1976), p. 123.
51. Turow asserts that "The continual interaction of producers and primary patrons plays a dominant part in setting the general boundary conditions for day-to-day production activity" (Media Industries, p. 51).
52. Quoted in Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983),
P? 253?
53. Pat Aufderheide, "What Makes Public TV Public? " The Progressive (Janu-
ary 1988).
54. "Castor oil or Camelot? " December 5,1987. For further materials on such
340 NOTES TO PAGES 17-20
NOTES TO PAGES 20-22 341
interventions, see Harry Hammitt, "Advertising Pressures on Media," Free- dom of Information Center Report no. 367 (School of Journalism, University of Missouri at Columbia, February 1977). See also James Aronson, Deadline
for the Media (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 261-63.
55. According to Procter & Gamble's instructions to their ad agency, "There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking in all sentiment or spiritual motivation. " The manager of corporate communications for General Electric has said: "We insist on a program environment that reinforces our corporate messages" (quoted in Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, p. 160). We may recall that GE now owns NBC-TV.
56. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 135.
57. Advertisers may also be offended by attacks on themselves or their pro- ducts. On the tendency of the media to avoid criticism of advertised products even when very important to consumer welfare [e. g. , the effects of smoking], see Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. 168-73.
58. This is hard to prove statistically, given the poor data made available by the FCC over the years. The long-term trend in advertising time/programming time is dramatically revealed by the fact that in 1929 the National Association of Broadcasting adopted as a standard of commercial practice on radio the following: "Commercial announcements . . . shall not be broadcast between 7 and II P. M. " William Paley testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in 1930 that only 22 percent of CBS's time was allocated to commercially sponsored programs, with t. he other 78 percent sustaining; and he noted that advertising took up only "seven-tenths of I percent of all our time" (quoted in Public Service Responsibility ofBroadcast Licensees, FCC [Washington: GPO,
Mar. 7, 1946], p. 42). Frank Wolf states in reference to public-affairs program- ming: "That such programs were even shown at all on commercial television may have been the result of FCC regulation" (Television Programmingfor News and Public Affairs [New York: Praeger, 1972], p. 138; see also pp. 99-139). 59. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 134.
60. For Alcoa's post-antitrust-suit sponsorship of Edward R. Murrow, and ITT's post-earlY-1970s-scandals sponsorship of "The Big Blue Marble," see Barnouw, The Sponsor, ibid. , pp. 51-52, 84-86. Barnouw shows that network news coverage of ITT was sharply constrained during the period of ITT program sponsorship.
61. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 150.
62. Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 198o), p. 143.
63? Ibid. , pp. 144-45.
64. Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 2 (1972), pp. 662-64?
65. United States Air Force, "Fact Sheet: The United States Air Force Infor- mation Program" (March 1979); "News Releases: 600,000 in a Year," Air Force Times, April 28, 1980.
66. ]. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (New York: H. Live- right, 1970), p. 88.
67. Ibid. , p. 90.
68. An Associated Press report on "Newspapers Mustered as Air Force De- fends BIB," published in the Washington Post, April 3, 1987, indicates that the U. S. Air Force had 277 newspapers in 1987, as compared with 140 in 1979? 69. "DOD Kills 205 Periodicals; Still Publishes 1,203 Others," Armed Forces
Journal International (August 1982), p. 16.
70. Its nine regional offices also had some public-information operations, but personnel and funding are not readily allocable to this function. They are smaller than the central office aggregate.
The AFSC aggregate public-information budget is about the same size as the contract given by the State Department to International Business Com- munications (! BC) for lobbying on behalf of the contras ($419,000). This was only one of twenty-five contracts investigated by the GAO that "the Latin American Public Diplomacy office awarded to individuals for research and papers on Central America, said a GAO official involved in the investigation" (Rita Beamish, "Pro-contra Contracts are Probed," Philadelphia Inquirer, July 22, 1987, p. 4A).
71. The NCC's news services are concentrated in the Office of Information, but it has some dispersed staff in communications functions elsewhere in the organization that produce a few newsletters, magazines, and some videotapes and filmstrips.
72. In 1980, Mobil Oil had a public-relations budget of $21 million and a public-relations staff of seventy-three. Between 1976 and 1981 it produced at least a dozen televised special reports on such issues as gasoline prices, with a hired television journalist interviewing Mobil executives and other experts, that are shown frequently on television, often without indication of Mobil sponsorship. See A. Kent MacDougall, Ninety Seconds To Tell It All (Home- wood, Ill. : Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981), pp. II7-20.
73. John S. Saloma III, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), p. 79.
74. MacDougall, Ninety Seconds, pp. II6-17.
75. Thomas B. Edsall, The New Politics ofInequality (New York: Norton, 1984), p. IIO.
76. Peggy Dardenne, "Corporate Advertising," Public Relations Journal (No- vember 1982), p. 36.
77. S. Prakash Sethi, Handbook ofAdvocacy Advertising: Strategies and Applica- tions (Cambridge, Mass. : Ballinger, 1987), p. 22. See also Edsall, New Politics, chapter 3, "The Politicization of the Business Community"; and Saloma, Ominous Politics, chapter 6, "The Corporations: Making Our Voices Heard. " 78. The April 14, 1986, U. S. bombing of Libya was the first military action timed to preempt attention on 7 P. M. prime-time television news. See Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors, P. 147.
79. For the masterful way the Reagan administration used these to manipulate the press, see "Standups," The New Yorker, December 2, 1985, pp. 81ff.
80. Fishman, Manufacturing the News, p. 153.
81. See note 70.
82. On January 16, 1986, the American Friends Service Committee issued a news release, based on extended Freedom of Information Act inquiries, which showed that there had been 381 navy nuclear-weapons accidents and "inci- dents" in the period 1965-77, a figure far higher than that previously claimed.
. .
342 NOTI! S TO PAGES 22-25
NOTES TO PAGES 25-28 343
The mass media did not cover this hot story directly but through the filter of the navy's reply, which downplayed the significance of the new findings and eliminated or relegated to the background the AFSC's full range of facts and interpretation of the meaning of what they had un~overed. ~ typic~headin~; "Navy Lists Nuclear Mishaps: None of 630 Impenlled Pubhc, ServIce Says, Washington Post, January 16, 1986.
83. The Harvard professor in charge of t~eprogram, Harvey ~. ansfield,stated that the invitation to White had been a mIstake anyway, as he IS a representa- tive of the far left," whereas the forum was intended to involve a debate "between liberals and conservatives" (Harvard Crimson, May 14, 1986).
84. See Edward S. Herman and Frank.
3. For a description of the government's strategy of deflecting attention away from the Nicaraguan election by the fabricated MIG story, and the media's service in this government program, see chapter 3, under "The MIG Crisis Staged during the Nicaraguan Election Week. "
4. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 24?
5. Quoted in ibid. , p. 23.
6. Ibid. , p. 34.
7? Ibid. , pp. 38-39.
8. Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in Amen'ca (New York: Macmil- lan, 1937), pp. 166, 173.
9? Earl Vance, "Freedom of the Press for Whom," Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1945), quoted in Survival of a Free, Competitive Press: The Small Newspaper: Democracy's Grass Roots, Report of the Chairman, Senate Small Business Committee, 80th Cong. , 1st session, 1947, p. 54.
10. Note that we are speaking of media with substantial outreach-mass media. It has always been possible to start small-circulation journals and to produce mimeographed or photocopied news letters sent around to a tiny audience. But even small journals in the United States today typically survive only by virtue of contributions from wealthy financial angels.
II. In 1987, the Times-Mirror Company, for example, owned newspapers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, and Hartford, Connecticut, had book pub- lishing and magazine subsidiaries, and owned cable systems and seven televi- sion stations.
12. Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. xvi.
13. David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media. Power. Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 7; Stephen Hess, The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices (Washington: Brookings, 1984), pp. 99-100. 14. The four major Western wire services-Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence-France-Presse-account for some 80 per- cent of the international news circulating in the world today. AP is owned by member newspapers; UPI is privately owned; Reuters was owned mainly by the British media until it went public in 1984, but control was retained by the original owners by giving lesser voting rights to the new stockholders; Agence- France-Presse is heavily subsidized by the French government. As is pointed out by Jonathan Fenby, the wire services "exist to serve markets," and their
prime concern, accordingly, "is with the rich media markets of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, and increasingly with the business com- munity. . . . " They compete fiercely, but AP and UPI "are really U. S. enter- prises that operate on an international scale. . . . Without their domestic base, the AP and UPI could not operate as international agencies. With it, they must be American organizations, subject to American pressures and requirements" (The International News Services [New York: Schocken, 1986], pp. 7, 9, 73-74)? See also Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics ofInformation: How Western Culture Dominates the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 3. 15. The fourteenth annual Roper survey, "Public Attitudes toward Television and Other Media in a Time of Change" (May 1985), indicates that in 1984, 64 percent of the sample mentioned television as the place "where you usually get most of your news about what's going on in the world today . . . " (p. 3). It has often been noted that the television networks themselves depend heavily on the prestige newspapers, wire services, and government for their choices of news. Their autonomy as newsmakers can be easily exaggerated.
16. The members of the very top tier qualify by audience outreach, importance as setters of news standards, and asset and profit totals. The last half dozen or so in our twenty-four involve a certain amount of arbitrariness of choice, although audience size is still our primary criterion. McGraw-Hill is included
jj" NUn;~ TU ! 'AGES 5-lS
NOTES TO PAGES 8-n 337
because of its joint strength in trade books and magazines of political content and outreach.
17. As noted in table I-I, note 7, Storer came under the temporary control of the securities firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1985. As its ultimate fate was unclear at the time of writing, and as financial data were no longer available after 1984, we have kept Storer on the table and list it here, despite its uncertain status.
18. John Kluge, having taken the Metromedia system private in a leveraged buyout in 1984 worth $I. I billion, sold off various parts of this system in 1985-86 for $5. 5 billion, at a personal profit of some $3 billion (Gary Hector, "Are Shareholders Cheated by LBOs? " Fortune, Jan. 17, 1987, p. 100). Station KDLA-TV, in Los Angeles, which had been bought by a management-outsider group in a leveraged buyout in 1983 for $245 million, was sold to the Tribune Company for $5IO million two years later (Richard Stevenson, "Tribune in TV Deal for $5IO Million," New York Times, May 7, 1985). See also "The Media Magnates: Why Huge Fortunes Roll Off the Presses," Fortune, October 12, 1987.
19. A split among the the heirs of James E. Scripps eventually resulted in the sale of the Detroit Evening News. According to one news article, "Daniel Marentette, a Scripps family member and a self described 'angry shareholder,' says family members want a better return on their money. 'We get better yields investing in a New York checking account,' says Mr. Marentette, who sells race horses" (Damon Darlin, "Takeover Rumors Hit Detroit News Parent," Wall Street Journa~ July 18, 1985). The Bingham family division on these matters led to the sale ofthe Louisville Coun'er-Journal; the New Haven papers of the Jackson family were sold after years of squabbling, and "the sale price [of the New Haven papers], $185 million, has only served to publicize the potential value of family holdings of family newspapers elsewhere" (Geraldine Fabrikant, "Newspaper Properties, Hotter Than Ever," New York Times, Aug. 17, 1986).
20. The Reagan administration strengthened the control of existing holders of television-station licenses by increasing their term from three to five years, and its FCC made renewals essentially automatic. The FCC also greatly facilitated speculation and trading in television properties by a rule change reducing the required holding period before sale of a newly acquired property from three years to one year.
The Reagan era FCC and Department of Justice also refused to challenge mergers and takeover bids that would significantly increase the concentration of power (GE-RCA) or media concentration (Capital Cities-ABC). Further- more, beginning April 2, 1985, media owners could own as many as twelve television stations, as long as their total audience didn't exceed 25 percent of the nation's television households; and they could also hold twelve AM and twelve FM stations, as the 1953 "7-7-7 rule" was replaced with a "12-12-12 rule. " See Herbert H. Howard, "Group and Cross-Media Ownership of Tele- vision Stations: 1985" (Washington: National Association of Broadcasters,
1985).
21. This was justified by Reagan-era FCC chairman Mark Fowler on the grounds that market options are opening up and that the public should be free to choose. Criticized by Fred Friendly for doing away with the law's public-
interest standard, Fowler replied that Friendly "distrusts the ability of the viewing public to make decisions on its own through the marketplace mecha- nism. I do not" (Jeanne Saddler, "Clear Channel: Broadcast Takeovers Meet Less FCC Static, and Critics Are Upset," Wall Street Journa~ June II, 1985). Among other problems, Fowler ignores the fact that true freedom of choice involves the ability to select options that may not be offered by an oligopoly selling audiences to advertisers.
22. CBS increased its debt by about $1 billion in 1985 to finance the purchase of 21 percent of its own stock, in order to fend off a takeover attempt by Ted Turner. The Wall Street Journal noted that "With debt now standing at 60% of capital, it needs to keep advertising revenue up to repay borrowings and interest" (Peter Barnes, "CBS Profit Hinges on Better TV Ratings," June 6, 1986). With the slowed-up growth of advertising revenues, CBS embarked on an employment cutback of as many as six hundred broadcast division em- ployees, the most extensive for CBS since the loss of cigarette advertising in 1971 (Peter Barnes, "CBS Will Cut up to 600 Posts in Broadcasting," Wall StreetJourna~ July I, 1986). In June 1986, Time, Inc. , embarked on a program to buy back as much as 10 million shares, or 16 percent of its common stock, at an expected cost of some $900 million, again to reduce the threat of a hostile takeover (Laura Landro, "Time Will Buy as Much as 16% of Its Common," Wall Stt'eet Journa~ June 20, 1986).
23. In response to the Jesse Helms and Turner threats to CBS, Laurence Tisch, of Loews Corporation, was encouraged to increase his holdings in CBS stock, already at 11. 7 percent. In August 1986, the Loews interest was raised to 24. 9 percent, and Tisch obtained a position of virtual control. In combina- tion with William Paley, who owned 8. 1 percent of the 8hares, the chief executive officer of CBS was removed and Tisch took over that role himself, on a temporary basis (Peter Barnes, "Loews Increases Its Stake in CBS to Almost 25%," Wall Street Journa~ Aug. 12, 1986).
24. The number would be eight if we included the estate of Lila Wallace, who died in 1984, leaving the controlling stock interest in Reader's Digest to the care of trustees.
25. As we noted in the preface, the neoconservatives speak regularly of "lib- eral" domination of the media, assuming or pretending that the underlings call the shots, not the people who own or control the media. These data, showing the wealth position ofmedia owners, are understandably something they prefer to ignore. Sometimes, however, the neoconservatives go "populist," a n d - while financed by Mobil Oil Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife-pretend to be speaking for the "masses" in opposition to a monied elite dominating the media. For further discussion, see Edward S. Herman's review of The Spirit ofDemocratic Capitalism, "Michael Novak's Promised Land: Unfettered Cor- porate Capitalism," Monthly Review (October 1983), and the works cited in the preface, note 3.
26. Similar results are found in Peter Dreier, "The Position of the Press in the U. S. Power Structure," Social Problems (February 1982), pp. 298-310.
27. Benjamin Compaine et aI. , Anatomy of the Communications Industry: Who Owns the Media? (White Plains, N. Y. : Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982),
P? 463?
28. Ibid. , pp. 458-60.
29. See Edward S. Herman, Corporate Contro~ Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 26-54.
30. For the interests of fifteen major newspaper companies in other media fields, and a checklist of other fields entered by leading firms in a variety of media industries, see Compaine, Anatomy of the Communications Industry, tables 2. 19 and 8. 1, pp. II and 452-53.
31. The merger had been sanctioned by the FCC but was stymied by interven- tion of the Department of Justice. See "A broken engagement for ITT and ABC," Business Week, January 6, 1967.
32. Ibid.
33. On the enormous and effective lobbying operations of GE, see Thomas B. Edsall, "Bringing Good Things to GE: Firm's Political Savvy Scores in Wash- ington," Washington Post, April 13, 1985;
34. The widely quoted joke by A. I. Liebling-that if you don't like what your newspaper says you are perfectly free to start or buy one ofyour own-stressed the impotence of the individual. In a favorable political climate such as that provided by the Reagan administration, however, a giant corporation not liking media performance can buy its own, as exemplified by GE.
35. Allan Sloan, "Understanding Murdoch-The Numbers Aren't What Re- ally Matters," Forbes, March 10, 1986, pp. II4ff.
36. On the Nixon-Agnew campaign to bully the media by publicity attacks and threats, see Marilyn Lashner, The Chilling Effect in TV News (New York: Praeger, 1984). Lashner concluded that the Nixon White House's attempt to quiet the media "succeeded handily, at least as far as television is con- cerned . . . " (p. 167). See also Fred Powledge, The Engineering ofRestraint: The Nixon Administration and the Press (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971), and William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).
37. Of the 290 directors in his sample of large newspapers, 36 had high-level positions-past or present-in the federal government (Dreier, "The Position of the Press," p. 303).
38. One study showed that of sixty-five FCC commissioners and high-level staff personnel who left the FCC between 1945 and 1970, twel"e had come out of the private-communications sector before their FCC sel ;e, and thirty- four went into private-firm service after leaving the commission (Roger Noll et aI. , Economic Aspects ofTelevision Regulation [Washington: Brookings, 1973], p. 123).
39. "The symbiotic growth of American television and global enterprise has made them so interrelated that they cannot be thought of as separate. They are essentially the same phenomenon. Preceded far and wide by military advisers, lobbyists, equipment salesmen, advertising specialists, merchandising experts, and telefilm salesmen as advance agents, the enterprise penetrates much of the non-socialist world. Television is simply its most visible portion" (Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], p. 158). For a broader picture, see Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultu- ral Domination (White Plains, N. Y. : International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), especially chapters 3-4.
40. Is it not possible that if the populace "demands" program content greatly disliked by the owners, competition and the quest for profits will cause them
to offer such programming? There is some truth in this, and it, along with the limited autonomy of media personnel, may help explain the "surprises" that crop up occasionally in the mass media. One limit to the force of public demand, however, is that the millions of customers have no means of register- ing their demand for products that are not offered to them.
A further problem is that the owners' class interests are reinforced by a variety of other filters that we discuss below.
41. Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 31.
42. Ibid. , p. 41.
43. ". . . producers presenting patrons [advertisers] with the greatest oppor- tunities to make a profit through their publics will receive support while those that cannot compete on this score will not survive" (Joseph Turow, Media Industries: The Production of News and Entertainment [New York: Longman, 1984], p. 52).
44. Noncommercial television is also at a huge disadvantage for the same reason, and will require a public subsidy to be able to compete. Because public television does not have the built-in constraints of ownership by the wealthy, and the need to appease advertisers, it poses a threat to a narrow elite control of mass communications. This is why conservatives struggle to keep public television on a short leash, with annual funding decisions, and funding at a low level (see Barnouw, The Sponsor, pp. 179-82). Another option pursued in the Carter-Reagan era has been to force it into the commercial nexus by sharp defunding.
45. Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. II8-26. " 'The dominant paper ultimately thrives,' Gannett Chairman Allen H. Neuharth says. 'The weaker paper ulti- mately dies' " (Joseph B. White, "Knight-Ridder's No-Lose Plan Backfires," Wall Street Journa~ Jan. 4, 1988).
46. Quoted in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 43.
47. "Advertising and the Press," in James Curran, ed. , The British Press: A
Manifesto (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 252-55.
48. Ibid. , p. 254.
49. 1984 CBS Annual Report, p. 13. This is a further refinement in the measure- ment of "efficiency" in "delivering an audience. " In the magazine business, the standard measure is CPM, or "costs per thousand," to an advertiser to reach buyers through a full-page, black-and-white ad. Recent developments, like CBS's CAP , have been in the direction o f identifying the special characteristics of the audience delivered. In selling itself to advertisers, the Soap Opera Digest says: "But you probably want to know about our first milestone: today Soap Opera Digest delivers more women in the 18-49 category at the lowest CPM than any other women's magazine" (quoted in Turow, Media Industries, P. 55). 50. William Evan, Organization Theory (New York: Wiley, 1976), p. 123.
51. Turow asserts that "The continual interaction of producers and primary patrons plays a dominant part in setting the general boundary conditions for day-to-day production activity" (Media Industries, p. 51).
52. Quoted in Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983),
P? 253?
53. Pat Aufderheide, "What Makes Public TV Public? " The Progressive (Janu-
ary 1988).
54. "Castor oil or Camelot? " December 5,1987. For further materials on such
340 NOTES TO PAGES 17-20
NOTES TO PAGES 20-22 341
interventions, see Harry Hammitt, "Advertising Pressures on Media," Free- dom of Information Center Report no. 367 (School of Journalism, University of Missouri at Columbia, February 1977). See also James Aronson, Deadline
for the Media (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 261-63.
55. According to Procter & Gamble's instructions to their ad agency, "There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking in all sentiment or spiritual motivation. " The manager of corporate communications for General Electric has said: "We insist on a program environment that reinforces our corporate messages" (quoted in Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, p. 160). We may recall that GE now owns NBC-TV.
56. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 135.
57. Advertisers may also be offended by attacks on themselves or their pro- ducts. On the tendency of the media to avoid criticism of advertised products even when very important to consumer welfare [e. g. , the effects of smoking], see Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, pp. 168-73.
58. This is hard to prove statistically, given the poor data made available by the FCC over the years. The long-term trend in advertising time/programming time is dramatically revealed by the fact that in 1929 the National Association of Broadcasting adopted as a standard of commercial practice on radio the following: "Commercial announcements . . . shall not be broadcast between 7 and II P. M. " William Paley testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in 1930 that only 22 percent of CBS's time was allocated to commercially sponsored programs, with t. he other 78 percent sustaining; and he noted that advertising took up only "seven-tenths of I percent of all our time" (quoted in Public Service Responsibility ofBroadcast Licensees, FCC [Washington: GPO,
Mar. 7, 1946], p. 42). Frank Wolf states in reference to public-affairs program- ming: "That such programs were even shown at all on commercial television may have been the result of FCC regulation" (Television Programmingfor News and Public Affairs [New York: Praeger, 1972], p. 138; see also pp. 99-139). 59. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 134.
60. For Alcoa's post-antitrust-suit sponsorship of Edward R. Murrow, and ITT's post-earlY-1970s-scandals sponsorship of "The Big Blue Marble," see Barnouw, The Sponsor, ibid. , pp. 51-52, 84-86. Barnouw shows that network news coverage of ITT was sharply constrained during the period of ITT program sponsorship.
61. Barnouw, The Sponsor, p. 150.
62. Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 198o), p. 143.
63? Ibid. , pp. 144-45.
64. Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 2 (1972), pp. 662-64?
65. United States Air Force, "Fact Sheet: The United States Air Force Infor- mation Program" (March 1979); "News Releases: 600,000 in a Year," Air Force Times, April 28, 1980.
66. ]. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (New York: H. Live- right, 1970), p. 88.
67. Ibid. , p. 90.
68. An Associated Press report on "Newspapers Mustered as Air Force De- fends BIB," published in the Washington Post, April 3, 1987, indicates that the U. S. Air Force had 277 newspapers in 1987, as compared with 140 in 1979? 69. "DOD Kills 205 Periodicals; Still Publishes 1,203 Others," Armed Forces
Journal International (August 1982), p. 16.
70. Its nine regional offices also had some public-information operations, but personnel and funding are not readily allocable to this function. They are smaller than the central office aggregate.
The AFSC aggregate public-information budget is about the same size as the contract given by the State Department to International Business Com- munications (! BC) for lobbying on behalf of the contras ($419,000). This was only one of twenty-five contracts investigated by the GAO that "the Latin American Public Diplomacy office awarded to individuals for research and papers on Central America, said a GAO official involved in the investigation" (Rita Beamish, "Pro-contra Contracts are Probed," Philadelphia Inquirer, July 22, 1987, p. 4A).
71. The NCC's news services are concentrated in the Office of Information, but it has some dispersed staff in communications functions elsewhere in the organization that produce a few newsletters, magazines, and some videotapes and filmstrips.
72. In 1980, Mobil Oil had a public-relations budget of $21 million and a public-relations staff of seventy-three. Between 1976 and 1981 it produced at least a dozen televised special reports on such issues as gasoline prices, with a hired television journalist interviewing Mobil executives and other experts, that are shown frequently on television, often without indication of Mobil sponsorship. See A. Kent MacDougall, Ninety Seconds To Tell It All (Home- wood, Ill. : Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981), pp. II7-20.
73. John S. Saloma III, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), p. 79.
74. MacDougall, Ninety Seconds, pp. II6-17.
75. Thomas B. Edsall, The New Politics ofInequality (New York: Norton, 1984), p. IIO.
76. Peggy Dardenne, "Corporate Advertising," Public Relations Journal (No- vember 1982), p. 36.
77. S. Prakash Sethi, Handbook ofAdvocacy Advertising: Strategies and Applica- tions (Cambridge, Mass. : Ballinger, 1987), p. 22. See also Edsall, New Politics, chapter 3, "The Politicization of the Business Community"; and Saloma, Ominous Politics, chapter 6, "The Corporations: Making Our Voices Heard. " 78. The April 14, 1986, U. S. bombing of Libya was the first military action timed to preempt attention on 7 P. M. prime-time television news. See Chomsky, Pirates & Emperors, P. 147.
79. For the masterful way the Reagan administration used these to manipulate the press, see "Standups," The New Yorker, December 2, 1985, pp. 81ff.
80. Fishman, Manufacturing the News, p. 153.
81. See note 70.
82. On January 16, 1986, the American Friends Service Committee issued a news release, based on extended Freedom of Information Act inquiries, which showed that there had been 381 navy nuclear-weapons accidents and "inci- dents" in the period 1965-77, a figure far higher than that previously claimed.
. .
342 NOTI! S TO PAGES 22-25
NOTES TO PAGES 25-28 343
The mass media did not cover this hot story directly but through the filter of the navy's reply, which downplayed the significance of the new findings and eliminated or relegated to the background the AFSC's full range of facts and interpretation of the meaning of what they had un~overed. ~ typic~headin~; "Navy Lists Nuclear Mishaps: None of 630 Impenlled Pubhc, ServIce Says, Washington Post, January 16, 1986.
83. The Harvard professor in charge of t~eprogram, Harvey ~. ansfield,stated that the invitation to White had been a mIstake anyway, as he IS a representa- tive of the far left," whereas the forum was intended to involve a debate "between liberals and conservatives" (Harvard Crimson, May 14, 1986).
84. See Edward S. Herman and Frank.
