Who Controls the Media?

At first glance, I thought that a research paper on the “controllers of the media” would be fun and interesting. But the further I researched into this topic, the more I realized how daunting this complex subject was going to be. The real challenge was that the more I researched and understood what the media was about, the harder it was to discriminate which ‘media source’ wasn’t intent on simply brainwashing me. What I mean is, these books, articles, columns, discussions, etc. all have the same thing in common – the conclusion that the media is everywhere present today, and that the ‘other side’ is taking advantage of it. The definition of the ‘other side’ usually ranges from race, to religion, and to politics. Each of these writers has different opinions, and none should be fully trusted. The motives of each writer are different, but the desires to control your views are the same for every message. To go into this further, lets define the word ‘control’ and the ‘media.’ As defined in the Cambridge Dictionary, control is to “order, limit, instruct or rule something, or someone’s actions or behavior,” while the media is defined as the “medium” or middle man that includes newspapers, magazines, radio, the television, books, movies, (and now the internet). For the following paper, we intend to cover the televised medium and to understand why it matters in order for us to reveal the relevance of its controllers. Then we will explore our current situation with the media, determine if there are any dangers that lie ahead, and try and guess its future.
“Failing to report important news, or reporting news shallowly, inaccurately or unfairly – can leave people dangerously uninformed” (Kaiser 6). Particularly for televised media, the biggest problem with this medium is that the channel of communication is only open to one message at a time, but the reason that televised media is so widespread is that many people access it for its “advantages over newspapers in immediacy, motion, color, and convenience” (Bagdikian 6). Bagdikian also argues that the news on T.V. avoids placing anything too controversial on its program for fear that viewers might flip the channel. Bagdikian’s assessment is probably inaccurate since it doesn’t seem to account for media networks solely geared towards politics and the controversial issues attached with it. However, he does make a good point for the programs that indeed avoid controversial issues. The limited coverage of stories and issues matter here because the programs are only thirty minutes to an hour long. The controllers (in the long run) ultimately decide what gets coverage, and what gets discarded. And the stories that do get covered might only take up a few minutes of the program, giving its audience a watered-down, biased version of the real story. In other instances, the limited about of time to cover all the stories in the news affects us, and has affected us. For example, “the news media failed to report adequately on the overextended and corrupt savings and loan industry before it collapsed and cost depositors and taxpayers billions of dollars during the 1980s. And the press failed to discover and expose the tobacco industry’s cover-up of evidence of the addictive and cancer-causing effects of smoking and its clandestine marketing of cigarettes to young people until the plaintiffs’ lawyers discovered both in the course of liability lawsuits during the 1990s” (Kaiser 6). In these two cases, the media’s failure to inform the public was a direct result of the controller’s reluctance to cover them. Their reluctance to cover them could be justified as a lack of time to place the story on the air or maybe because the tobacco and loan industries paid them not to report it.
Whatever the reason might be, according to Bagdikian, here lies one of the threats that the media provides (particularly televised media) - subtle control. “Because each of the dominant firms has adopted a strategy of creating its own closed system of control over every step in the national media process, from creation of content to its delivery, no content-news, entertainment, or other public messages-will reach the public unless a handful of corporate decision-makers decide that it will” (Bagdikian 2). The detriment here lies with the uninformed patron. If the patron remains ignorant by using television as his/her only source of information, and if he is deprived of his choices or is misled by the media, then his own thoughts and decision will ultimately be flawed, and of course, will remain ignorant. We wouldn’t know if the Atkins’ diet was a legitimate diet or that Intel had the Athlon chip as its competitor. We wouldn’t know of the addictive nature of tobacco or the scandals of the loan industry. The point is, sometimes not knowing the facts can be just as dangerous to consumers as being told a lie, and if not knowing is as dangerous as being lied to, then we as consumers of information must not be misled. Thirty-minute programs simply can’t cover all the information we need to make good, solid decisions. Those of us that don’t realize this don’t realize that in those short programs, ‘someone’ is trying to control how you think and feel by withholding information. “We live in a dirty and dangerous world,” Washington Post Company owner Katharine Graham said in a 1988 speech to CIA officials at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows” (Steindel). And then there are other examples what a silent media can create. In regards to the Red Scare, where one man accused all his enemies as being Soviets, “many competent journalists had evidence that McCarthy 's statements were lies or clever distortions, some of it in the private admissions of the senator himself during his jocular drinking bouts with journalists and editors. But most journalistic organizations held to the doctrine that required use only of "official" statements by the most dramatic authority figure, and McCarthy was a United States senator” (Bagdikian 5). And because the media neglected to point out the truth, we find people that blame the government for the media’s deception, “I remember when I was a kid, you know, this whole Cold War thing. They had us scared of the Russians. 'The Russians, the Russians, the Russians. ' So it’s almost like what’s real and what’s not?” -- Queen Latifah (Hawkins).
Now consider if all the media sources give slightly different accounts of the same story, or over-simplifying their versions of the news. If in fact we assume that biased stories arise from simplified news, then we might realize what effects this has on society. Just take the print media for instance. In one book I find the following excerpt, “almost all of the media leaders, possibly excepting Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting, are political conservatives, a factor in the drastic shift in the entire spectrum of national politics to a brand of conservatism once thought of as extreme” (Bagdikian 4). In Bagdikian’s version, he labels Ted Turner as possibly being liberal. In another article an unknown writer who was upset at the Jewish dominance over the media, wrote this, “When Ted Turner, the Gentile media maverick, made a bid to buy CBS in 1985, there was a panic in the media boardrooms across the nation … furthermore, Jewish newsman Daniel Schorr, who had worked for Turner, publicly charged that his former boss held a personal dislike for Jews” (unknown). In one case, Turner is portrayed as slightly to the left, if not a moderate. In another, he is a Jew hater that other conservative networks (who the unknown writer charges as being ran by Jews) were in a ‘panic’ over.
But perhaps Bagdikian states it best on the reasons why he feels the media is dangerous to our society, “In the reign of the new media cartel, the integrity of much of the country 's professional news has become more ambiguous than ever. The role of journalists within news companies has always been an inherent dilemma for reporters and editors. Reporters are expected by the public and by reportorial standards to act like independent, fair-minded professionals. But reporters are also employees of corporations that control their hiring, firing, and daily management- what stories they will cover and what part of their coverage will be used or discarded” (Bagdikian 5).
Now that we have seen the significance of media control and influence, let’s explore realm of who owns or controls the media. Basically all the books and articles I’ve read say the same thing, that “In the last 5 years, a small number of the country 's largest industrial corporations has acquired more public communications power-including ownership of the news-than any private businesses have ever before possessed in world history. Nothing in earlier history matches this corporate group 's power to penetrate the social landscape. Using both old and new technology, by owning each other 's shares, engaging in joint ventures as partners, and other forms of cooperation, this handful of giants has created what is, in effect, a new communications cartel within the United States” (Bagdikian 1). Various books and articles list a different set of ten corporations that control the majority of the media. “At the top of the global media system is a tier of fewer than ten transnational giants – AOL Time Warner, Disney, Sony, Viacom, News Corporation, and General Electric” (McChesney 3). In regards to our spectrum of the media, there are seven top cable networks on television, NBC, Turner Broadcasting, WB, ABC, CBS, UPN, and FOX news. According to the NOW Foundation (National Organization for Women Foundation), these top seven networks are owned by five corporations. General Electric owns NBC, Time Warner owns Turner Broadcasting and the WB, Walt Disney owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS and UPN, and News Corporation owns FOX news. In terms of overall media influence not limited to cable television, GE pulls in a estimate of 100 billion in 1998, Time Warner with 27 billion, Disney with 23 billion, Viacom with 19 billion, and News Corp. with 13 billion.
As far as those with influence and control over the company, there are the advertisers that hold a substantial amount of influence on what the network “does not” broadcast, and then there are the CEOs and other management that have influence over their employees, namely, their reporters. According to Letto, consumers are generally concerned about our environment. ABC had 54 environmental stories in 1994, however, “very little if any of this time was devoted to the environmental records of the kinds of corporations that are often sponsors of newscasts, a check of the Vanderbilt University television news archives suggests” and “of four major corporations in different industries that have major (negative) impacts on the environment -- DuPont, Chevron, Weyerhaeuser and GM -- none was featured in any environmental reporting on the three nightly evening network newscasts in 1994, according to the Vanderbilt abstracts. The fact that most of the information TV viewers receive on corporate environmental records comes from ads, not news, doesn 't surprise PR Watch 's John Stauber. "There is absolutely a connection," Stauber said, "between the millions and millions of dollars in green washing ads spent on network TV, especially around news programs, and the failure of network TV news programs to air good educational, hard-hitting, investigative environmental reporting" (Letto). So, the CEOs of the advertisers carries significant weight on what the network broadcasts. The CEOs for DuPont is Charles O. Holliday, Dave O 'Reilly for Chevron, Steven R. Rogel for Weyerhaeuser, and Nathaniel P. Ford for GM. Then of course, there is the management types in the networks such as the producers, general managers, operations managers, all the way up to the CEO of the company that have influence over what news is being reported. So who really controls the broadcasting medium? Fortunately for us, many sources seem to agree that not one single person controls the media. “The structure of the media is not perfect. Individual decisions by editors, publishers, and owners are not always those that someone else, with different standards, would make. There are awful policy mistakes made, as when the US Congress supported the lobbying efforts of the broadcasters to be given digital spectrum at no cost. But even that is democracy at work: there were other large constituencies lobbying against the give-away” (Compaine). What he means is that with so many interest groups and ownerships of the networks, it’s hard to control every aspect of it. The give and take relationship is ever-present, and there is always room for compromise. However, this doesn’t mean that the reporters can freely cover the stories they wish, or tell the stories that neutral, unbiased, professional reporters are meant to. On the contrary, reporters are simply the employees of the companies that hire them. They report what the upper management allows them, and they are asked to twist or conceal the truth. “Nearly three years ago when NBC and Microsoft joined forces to launch MSNBC, melding television and the World Wide Web, Tom Brokaw talked to an interviewer about the need to manage cyberspace for young people. ‘We can’t let that generation and a whole segment of the population just slide away out to the Internet and retrieve what information it wants without being in on it,’ he said. Brokaw echoed the perspectives of his bosses, the top executives at General Electric, which owns NBC. The green Internet beckoned. It was the color of money” (Steindel).
The media that currently influence and control our dispositions are branded by several sources as a “mass media monopoly,” and according to Bagdikian and McChesney, we have accepted the mass media monopoly on two levels. The first level is through our government, and the second level is our acceptance of what the media describes as ‘fair and balanced’ reporting. On the first level, Bagdikian explains how the government came to accept the mass media monopoly unknowingly, “a prime exhibit of the cartel 's new political power is the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This act was billed as a transformation of sixty-two years of federal communications law for the purpose of "increasing competition." It was, with some exceptions, largely described as such by most of the major news media. But its most dramatic immediate result has been to reduce competition and open the path to cooperation among the giants. The new law opened the media field to new competitors, like the large regional telephone companies, on the theory that cable and telephone companies would compete for customers within the same community. In practice, the power of one company in television was enlarged to permit a single firm to reach 35 percent of all American households. The act made it possible for the first time for a single company to own more than one radio station in the same market. A single owner was now permitted to own both TV stations and cable systems in the same market. License periods for broadcasters were expanded” (Bagdikian 3). And here on the second level, the illusion of ‘professional journalism’ is what allows us to accept the media monopoly. As McChesney describes the consumer’s distaste for biased newspaper rings, “the solution to this problem was the birth of professional journalism, based on the idea that news should not be opinionated. To cite the slogan for Murdoch’s US Fox News Channel: “We report, you decide.” In theory, trained professional editors and reporters would be free of the political bias of their owners and advertisers. Readers could trust the news, and not worry about the paucity of local newspapers. Of course, professional journalism was hardly neutral. Even after professionalism became the rule in the United States by mid-century, it was never pristine. But it did serve to make the concentrated ownership of media appear less significant than it would otherwise have been” (McChesney 1).
Is the monopoly media a danger to our society? Many sources argue that it is, and argue that corporations are solely in it for the profit, without regard to absolute journalistic integrity. But if in fact we realize what the mainstream media does and how it is shaping our judgments, wouldn’t we turn to less biased, less corporate controlled mediums? If there are five large corporate competitors, and each of them wants a share of billion-dollar news market, then each one must out-do the other. For example, CNN’s ratings have plummeted drastically due to its bias, particularly in Middle Eastern affairs (cited by several sources when looking up “CNN bias” on google), while FOX news ratings have gone up. Just from simple observation, it would seem that if and when the consumer realizes they are being misled by one medium, they simply tune into another network. But the best question is, do consumers even want the truth, or would they like to be told what they want to hear? Or does it even matter?
For now there is still ‘some’ competition, but what about twenty years or thirty years from now? What if these competitors eventually merge and eliminate the rest of the competition completely? It would seem to me that if such a company existed that had both the financial power and broadcasting power with no other competitors, we would truly be under the rule of that one company. Then the question of “who controls the media” would be simple, whoever owns that company, owns the media. The following are suggestions and solutions on what we need to do. “We need to democratize media policy-making, and take it from the hands of the self-interested media corporations. We need to determine how to establish a well-funded viable and healthy non-profit and non-commercial media sector, independent of big business and government. We need to maintain a strong and vibrant non-commercial public broadcasting service that provides a full range of programming to the entire population. We need strict ownership and public interest regulations for media firms that are granted broadcast or cable licenses. And we need policies that promote the creation of small commercial media as well as media workers’ trade unions. In combination, these reforms would go a long way toward democratizing our media systems and blasting open the corporate grip over our political culture. It is not necessarily the most important task for those who favor a more egalitarian, democratic and humane world, but it is nonetheless indispensable” (Compaine). The only problem is that Compaine provides neither explanation nor plan of how to go about implementing a change in the media. And of course, if he’s not willing to provide the answers, I’m certain the corporate office will broadcast their recommendation.

Works Cited

Bagdikian, Ben. The Media Monopoly: The New Communications Cartel, Beacon Press, 1997.

---. The Media Monopoly: Democracy and the Media, Beacon Press, 1997.

Kaiser, Robert and Downie Leonard. The News About the News: American Journalism in Pearl, Vintage Books, February 4, 2003.

McChesney, Robert. Policing the Thinkable, Open Democracy, October 25, 2001.

(Online Sources)

Compaine, Benjamin. The myths of encroaching global media ownership, August 11, 2001. Online source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/ViewPopUpArticle.jsp?id=8&articleId=587 Hawkins, John. Celebrities Discuss the War on Terrorism – The Quotes, 1999-2003. Online Source: http://www.rightwingnews.com/quotes/celeb.php Letto, Jay. TV Lets Corporations Pull Green Wool Over Viewers’ Eyes, August 1995. Online Source: http://www.fair.org/extra/9507/green-wool.html

Steindel, Mike. Media Control, March 4, 1999. Online Source: http://aspin.asu.edu/hpn/archives/Mar99/0025.html

Unknown. Who controls U.S. media. No Date. Online source: http://compuserb.com/mediain1.htm

Cited: Bagdikian, Ben. The Media Monopoly: The New Communications Cartel, Beacon Press, 1997. --- Kaiser, Robert and Downie Leonard. The News About the News: American Journalism in Pearl, Vintage Books, February 4, 2003. McChesney, Robert Steindel, Mike. Media Control, March 4, 1999. Online Source: http://aspin.asu.edu/hpn/archives/Mar99/0025.html Unknown