"We decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is." [View All]

Published on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

The People's Media Reaches More People Than FOX Does

by Jim Hightower

 
While Big Media is "simply in the business of selling products, the people's media reaches more people than FOX does.

Democratic reformer Henry Adams, who decried the decline in democracy as the robber barons rose to power in the nineteenth century, did not mince words about the failure of the news media of his day: "The press is the hired agent of a monied system," he wrote, "and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved." Imagine the verbal scorching Henry would give to today's media barons, who are not merely hired agents of monied interests‹they have become the interests, fully corporatized, conglomerated and well-practiced in the art of journalistic lying to perpetuate the power and profits of the elites.

A handful of self-serving corporate fiefdoms now controls practically all of America's mass-market sources of news and information. GE now owns NBC, Disney owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS, News Corp. owns Fox, and Time Warner owns CNN; these five have a lock on TV news. Of the 1,500 daily newspapers, only 281 are independently owned - three companies control 25 percent of the daily news circulated in the entire world.

These aloof giants openly assert that meeting their own profit needs is the media's reason for existence - as opposed to meeting the larger public's need for a vigorous, democratic discourse. Lowry Mays, honcho of Clear Channel Inc. (which owns more than 1,200 radio stations - a third of all the stations in America), opines that: "We're not in the business of providing news and information We're simply in the business of selling our customers' products."

This single-minded mercenary focus combines with general corporate arrogance to bloat the egos of media chieftains, leading them to think that they really are the infallible gods of our daily newsfeed, with no need to be accountable to the public: "We paid $3 billion for these television stations," said an executive with a Fox affiliate in Tampa; "We decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0615-14.htm