'Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed'
Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media
Reform
By Bill Moyers
t r u t h o u t | Address source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/111403E.shtml
Saturday 08 November 2003
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:
1.Tax luxuries
2. Tax Inheritances
3. Tax Large Incomes
4. Tax monopolies
5. Tax the Privileged Corporation
6. A Tariff for Revenue
7. Reform the Civil Service
8. Punish Corrupt Officers
9. Punish Vote Buying.
10. 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.
-------
Jump to TO Features for Friday 14 November 2003
Print This Story
E-mail This Story