Can U.S. Democracy Survive Monopoly Media
A forum moderated by Robert W. McChesney
November 11, 2004
Summary by Marjorie Burns
The question "Can U.S. Democracy Survive Monopoly Media?" was addressed by a panel of four media experts on November 11 in Reidy Friendship Hall. The forum was co-sponsored by All Souls' Peace Task Force, the Action for Justice Committee of the Community Church of New York, and the Faith in Action Committee of the Fourth Universalist Society.
The forum was moderated by Robert W. McChesney, president and co-founder of Free Press, an organization working for media reform, and author of The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. The panelists were John Nichols, Janine Jackson, and Ben Bagdikian.
Mr. McChesney focused on long-term problems in the media that he said were evident even before the presidential campaign. The press coverage of the build-up to the war in Iraq was a new low. Its failures underline the severe political crisis we are in and show how closely involved our media system is in the deterioration of our democracy.
Increasingly, what we are seeing is a lack of connection between the citizenry and the decisions that are being made in our name. Policies are being made corruptly behind closed doors by very powerful special interests. Monopolistic media companies are doing everything in their power to minimize public involvement in policy-making. The historical record is clear about what happens when we have this sort of deterioration of democracy: it invariably leads to an increase in inequality and a rise in corruption. If we are going to have anything close to a democratic society, we have to democratize policy-making by shining the light of informed public attention on the process. We must also revive local media. At present we have no local media, and without local media you won't have a free society.
John Nichols is Washington correspondent of the Nation magazine and the editorial page editor of The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), the most progressive daily paper in the U.S. He is also the author of Dick, the Man Who Is President and the editor of the forthcoming Against the Beast, an anthology of the greatest writings in American history against being an empire.
Mr. Nichols confirmed that only a free flow of information can enable citizens, not kings, to make decisions about the course of the country. If we needed proof of the necessity of a free and independent press, we got it in this election season. We are in the midst of an illegal and immoral war, launched on the basis of lies. This was to be a cleansing election where we set right our nation. Instead, we had a screwed-up election -- not because the American people are bad, but because our media system is dysfunctional.
"What I say publicly," Mr. Nichols said, "other journalists are saying privately about the disaster that has taken place in our craft. I am ashamed of what our craft did to the citizens of this country this year. I am ashamed of our treatment of Dennis Kucinich, whom we dismissed as unelectable and unworthy of being listened to because he was too short, he didn't look like a president. I am ashamed of our treatment of Howard Dean, of the fact that we dismissed him because he was passionate...
"I am ashamed of the fact that when Dick Cheney said you can't trust John Kerry to defend this country, our media did not point out that when John Kerry volunteered to go into the face of enemy fire, Dick Cheney sought and received five deferments from the draft and did everything in his power to avoid serving in Vietnam.
"What have replaced civic and democratic values with commercial and entertainment values. We cover an election in the same way that we cover the Superbowl. The Bush administration got a virtual free ride out of the 2004 election cycle. That free ride did more to determine the outcome than anything the parties or the candidates did. And that free ride was defined by spin that good journalists should have said no to."
Janine Jackson is Program Director of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting), and host and producer of the radio show Counterspin (heard locally on WBAI). She began by asking the question "What would a vital press corps be doing now?" Her answer: It would be investigating voter repression, intimidation, and disenfranchisement in the election. But our press is not doing that. Instead, we have Time magazine's list of winners and losers. Michael Moore, who made the most successful documentary of all time, is a loser because his guy lost. John O'Neill, who concocted the Swift Boat Veterans campaign out of egregious falsehoods, is a winner. Ann Coulter, who said that she wished the Oklahoma City bomber had hit the New York Times building, is a winner. Presumably, about 48 percent of our population are losers.
There is pressure on reporters to use something other than journalistic judgment in deciding what to cover and how to cover it. "But," Ms. Jackson said, "I think it's less about pressures on journalists and more about journalists' willful abandonment of basic responsibilities."
For example, during the campaign journalists failed to cover any of the substantive issues affecting African-Americans and other people of color. They also failed to do even the simplest fact-checking. And they refused to call a lie a lie.
It is a testament to the success of right-wing strategy that reporters are more afraid of being called liberal than of anything else. We saw this in the false balance that reporters felt they had to create: they thought they couldn't mention misstatements by Bush without including an equal number by Kerry. When Kerry said that the cost of the Iraq war was 200 billion, the Washington Post accused him of exaggerating. It said that only 120 billion had been spent, and that the remaining 80 billion was only what Bush was expected to request in the future. But surely the cost of something is the total amount that you pay for it. When you put a down payment on a car, you don't say that's the total cost of the car.
A vital and independent press would not have held back certain stories until after the election. CBS decided not to air its program about the administration's use of forged documents to support its claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake from Niger. Apparently they thought that because the information might affect people's thinking about the election, it would be wrong to air it. "Well," said Ms. Jackson, "if you don't want to do journalism that changes anything, then you don't want to do journalism."
It's clear that we don't just need a few changes here and there; we aren't talking about refresher courses for journalists. We need to redefine the whole project. We need to decide what we mean by the public interest and what a vital, independent press that really served the public interest would look like.
Ben Bagdikian is considered by many to be the founding father of the modern media reform movement. He covered the civil rights movement and was involved in the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the Washington Post. He is the author of a classic work, The Media Monopoly (1983) and of The New Media Monopoly (2004) and a memoir, Double Vision.
The most effective way to fix people's attitude toward something is to control the first image they see. The first impression is powerful and persistent, and if it is false, by the time the truth finally arrives the suffering and damage that's been done is frequently irreversible. The majority of people get their news from a handful of ideologically one-sided media giants, and it's these companies that create the first impressions.
Journalists use as their primary sources the powerful in corporations and government. These people deserve to be covered because they are important, but they are only half of the story. The other half of the story - the needs and desires of ordinary citizens - does not get reported. Of course, these top business and government officials do not always tell the truth. But reporters are afraid that if they question the veracity of these sources, they will lose access to them.
Mr. Bagdikian gave three examples of the tragedy that can grow from this habit of permitting powerful officials to implant a flawed picture in the public mind. By the time the corrections catch up, the initial framework has created irreversible social and human damage.
The first example was the case of two Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In 1921 the two were convicted, on the basis of false evidence and perjured testimony, of murder. The newspapers highlighted the prosecution's position and failed to investigate the abundant evidence that the two men were innocent. As a result, the public was convinced that the convictions were ironclad. Six years later, journalists, police, officials, and many citizens knew the truth, but Sacco and Vanzetti were executed anyway.
The two other examples he cited were (1) the 1950 exploitation of Americans' fear of communism by Senator Joseph McCarthy and (2) the Vietnam War, both of which were not accurately reported on by journalists until after extensive damage and tragic deaths of thousands of people.
There are parallels between the media's role in these examples and its role during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. We entered the Iraq war because of what the president of the United States said in his State of the Union address. He said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was a source of al Qaeda terrorists, and posed an imminent threat to our security. The news media ignored their own files and ignored or denigrated those who provided evidence that the president's accusations were false. The president lied or was dangerously vulnerable to self-serving fantasy.
Despite evidence to the contrary, the early false impressions have persisted. Ten days before the election, 38 percent of voters still believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, and 37 percent actually believed that the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 were Iraqis.
With ideologues in power, there is little chance of correction from inside. The correction must come from outside. We need an honest ballot box, and we should have at least some assurance that our votes will be counted. We should return to the practice of fifty years ago, when the FCC made those who used the public airwaves prove that they were serving the public interest. We should reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, which gave anyone who was attacked on the air the right to reply on the air. We need multiple noncommercial channels, supported not by political legislation but by a fixed fee on all electronic receiving equipment. We can no longer let democracy in the United States drift at the behest of those with money and power. Truth is not a private enterprise.
We need to alert people to understand the risks we face. We should remember the warning of James Madison: "I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
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