Search News
For the Media
For media inquiries, call CWA Communications at 202-434-1168 or email comms@cwa-union.org. To read about CWA Members, Leadership or Industries, visit our About page.
The Media and Democracy: Who Owns the News?
You’ve got a hundred or more channels on TV cable, loads of AM, FM and even satellite radio stations, your bookstore sells countless magazines and newspapers and there are infinite news sites on the Internet.
But how many — or more to the point, how few — media companies are behind those seemingly endless sources of news?
The alarming fact, say journalists and other First Amendment advocates, is that a handful of giant corporations control the vast majority of media sources today.
“Our society is built on the premise that a free press is composed of many voices,” said Linda Foley, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA, which co-sponsored an October seminar on the threat posed by so much media consolidation. “Having a few large corporate conglomerates control the news is potentially dangerous to our democracy.”
The seminar, “The Corporate State (of Mind) and Free Expression,” examined how a corporate mindset and bottom-line mentality are affecting free speech and access to information in the media and in academia. It also illustrated the critical role of unions in the battle between civic and corporate interests.
Speaker Robert Kuttner, co-editor of American Prospect magazine, said labor is an “oasis, a true democracy,” in a society in which even the media — once the fiercest protector of the First Amendment — is ruled by the market.
“The media have ceased to see themselves as having a special calling,” Kuttner said. “The only hope is the labor movement.”
Corporate Bullies
Corporate influence on college campuses includes bankrolling research, underwriting department chairs and otherwise financing projects with strings attached — such as deciding when, whether and how a drug study will be published. Conference speaker Lawrence Soley, a professor who has written extensively about corporate control at universities, called it “leasing the ivory tower.”
“The public isn’t aware of the degree of influence corporations have on free speech,” Soley said. “It’s an invisible form of censorship that has a chilling impact.”
Reporters often turn to university professors and researchers as sources of objective analysis of news events — asking a teacher in the business school, for instance, to comment on a company’s bankruptcy or ethical practices.
But Philadelphia Inquirer business reporter Henry Holcomb says he’s finding professors increasingly reluctant to talk because corporations have endowed their chairs. “Symbols of corporate America are decorating the walls of academic buildings,” said Holcomb, president of TNG-CWA Local 38010. “That makes it hard for reporters to find ‘expert’ sources.”
In the media, large companies continue to swallow smaller ones. The marriage of TBS and Time-Warner, which then merged with AOL, means a single company controls the world’s largest web server, the world’s most prominent cable news channel, CNN, and myriad other popular cable stations, magazines and movie and music production companies.
Another rising media giant is Clear Channel, which owns more than 1,200 radio stations and controls half of the pop radio market. Print media is dominated by the Gannett and Knight-Ridder chains, which own 126 daily newspapers as well as many TV stations. Smaller chains control the majority of other daily and weekly newspapers in the United States and in Canada, where the CanWest Global chain for a time required all publishers to run the same national editorials.
Tossing the FCC Rulebook
U.S. laws and Federal Communications Commission rules once protected media diversity by regulating how many TV and radio stations any one company could own and barring companies from owning more than one TV station in a single market, or owning a TV station and daily newspaper in the same community. Those rules have been relaxed in recent years, and pending changes are even more grim, experts say.
“There’s a battle going on over who will dominate and control our democracy in the 21st century,” said conference panelist Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
The public doesn’t know — because, Chester said, the corporate media won’t report it — that the Bush Administration’s FCC wants to weaken what’s left of policies that once ensured a system of media checks and balances. Companies would be allowed to own newspapers and TV stations, even multiple TV stations, in the same town; one or more of the four major networks — ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox — could be allowed to merge; and dominant media companies would see their power over online media grow.
“In short, this is a huge giveaway of public resources and political power to a tiny few,” Chester said, writing for Alternet.org, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
The policy changes are on the table for public comment, and media companies have weighed in heavily in favor of them. An issue with such profound consequences for all Americans ought to be making headlines, but Chester said readers are lucky to find an occasional story tucked away in the business section.
“The failure of the news media to report on their own political activities — lobbying — raises very serious questions about the corporate media’s level of integrity,” he said.
For instance, he said the New York Times Co. last December filed reams of paper urging the FCC to lift the ban on the TV-newspaper ownersiip rule. While the company made “lots of claims and promises about how communities would benefit,” the Times never reported any of it.
No News is Bad News
Looking at the big picture, writer and editor John Nichols put it bluntly: “Our industry is in crisis.”
While many print journalists are still committed to the First Amendment principles that drew them into the field, Nichols said their values and story ideas are being pushed aside by media companies that put profit above all else — believing entertainment sells and community news doesn’t.
He said only a handful of papers still assign reporters to beats covering such fundamental subjects as labor and agriculture. Even political and legislative reporting is being cut back.
Nichols, who contributes to The Nation magazine while working as a columnist and editor at The Madison Capitol Times in Wisconsin, said an annual survey of newspapers shows that “the number of reporters covering state government has been in steady decline for years” and many newspapers that once ran bureaus in Washington, D.C., have closed them.
On the radio front, he deplored the death of thousands of voices that have disappeared in recent years. He said media watchers estimate that at least 10,000 and as many as 20,000 radio personalities — from newscasters to DJs — have lost their jobs since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed conglomerates to gobble up once independent stations.
As for TV news, he called it a “cesspool” of celebrities and weather, along with canned segments deceptively presented as local stories on such matters as newfangled medical tests. “If you want to see the future of local TV news, watch Entertain-ment Tonight,” he said. “That’s what their consultants say it should be.”
In fact, a two-week study of TV news in late September and early October — just a month before the Nov. 5 election — showed that half of all stations did exactly “zero election coverage,” said Janine Jackson, program director for FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Yet, she said, the same stations that devoted no news time to politics collectively earned millions in advertising revenue running campaign ads.
Like Nichols, she said the shame doesn’t belong only to broadcast media. She noted a Time magazine series on the environment last summer sponsored by Ford Motor Co. — with no stories about automobile pollution.
“The goals of democracy are on a collision course with the goals of the media as a profit-driven business,” Jackson said.
Between the crushing weight of corporate influence and state and federal government rollbacks in freedom of information, Nichols said the First Amendment is taking a beating. “We are so overwhelmed in the fight,” he said. “We have been losing for 20 years and it’s getting worse.”
He called for a broad-based movement to bring the issues to the forefront and urged unions to take a leading role, for their own sake and the greater good. “Unions must be actively engaged in this fight,” he said. “The trade union movement cannot begin to renew itself and grow in the current media climate.”
Unions have already been a powerful force in some First Amendment fights. In New York state, trustees of the state university system tried to dictate what the history curriculum would be at its 29 schools, with no input from the professors who teach it. The curriculum imposed was a whitewashed version of history with scarce mention of African-Americans, women or labor. The faculty union revolted, voting to censure the state board.
“They wanted to impose a curriculum that fit their political agenda,” said local President Bill Scheuerman, a vice president of the national AFT. “If the union hadn’t gotten involved, we would have lost that fight.”
Read more about pending FCC changes on the Center for Digital Democracy website www.democraticmedia.org.
But how many — or more to the point, how few — media companies are behind those seemingly endless sources of news?
The alarming fact, say journalists and other First Amendment advocates, is that a handful of giant corporations control the vast majority of media sources today.
“Our society is built on the premise that a free press is composed of many voices,” said Linda Foley, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA, which co-sponsored an October seminar on the threat posed by so much media consolidation. “Having a few large corporate conglomerates control the news is potentially dangerous to our democracy.”
The seminar, “The Corporate State (of Mind) and Free Expression,” examined how a corporate mindset and bottom-line mentality are affecting free speech and access to information in the media and in academia. It also illustrated the critical role of unions in the battle between civic and corporate interests.
Speaker Robert Kuttner, co-editor of American Prospect magazine, said labor is an “oasis, a true democracy,” in a society in which even the media — once the fiercest protector of the First Amendment — is ruled by the market.
“The media have ceased to see themselves as having a special calling,” Kuttner said. “The only hope is the labor movement.”
Corporate Bullies
Corporate influence on college campuses includes bankrolling research, underwriting department chairs and otherwise financing projects with strings attached — such as deciding when, whether and how a drug study will be published. Conference speaker Lawrence Soley, a professor who has written extensively about corporate control at universities, called it “leasing the ivory tower.”
“The public isn’t aware of the degree of influence corporations have on free speech,” Soley said. “It’s an invisible form of censorship that has a chilling impact.”
Reporters often turn to university professors and researchers as sources of objective analysis of news events — asking a teacher in the business school, for instance, to comment on a company’s bankruptcy or ethical practices.
But Philadelphia Inquirer business reporter Henry Holcomb says he’s finding professors increasingly reluctant to talk because corporations have endowed their chairs. “Symbols of corporate America are decorating the walls of academic buildings,” said Holcomb, president of TNG-CWA Local 38010. “That makes it hard for reporters to find ‘expert’ sources.”
In the media, large companies continue to swallow smaller ones. The marriage of TBS and Time-Warner, which then merged with AOL, means a single company controls the world’s largest web server, the world’s most prominent cable news channel, CNN, and myriad other popular cable stations, magazines and movie and music production companies.
Another rising media giant is Clear Channel, which owns more than 1,200 radio stations and controls half of the pop radio market. Print media is dominated by the Gannett and Knight-Ridder chains, which own 126 daily newspapers as well as many TV stations. Smaller chains control the majority of other daily and weekly newspapers in the United States and in Canada, where the CanWest Global chain for a time required all publishers to run the same national editorials.
Tossing the FCC Rulebook
U.S. laws and Federal Communications Commission rules once protected media diversity by regulating how many TV and radio stations any one company could own and barring companies from owning more than one TV station in a single market, or owning a TV station and daily newspaper in the same community. Those rules have been relaxed in recent years, and pending changes are even more grim, experts say.
“There’s a battle going on over who will dominate and control our democracy in the 21st century,” said conference panelist Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
The public doesn’t know — because, Chester said, the corporate media won’t report it — that the Bush Administration’s FCC wants to weaken what’s left of policies that once ensured a system of media checks and balances. Companies would be allowed to own newspapers and TV stations, even multiple TV stations, in the same town; one or more of the four major networks — ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox — could be allowed to merge; and dominant media companies would see their power over online media grow.
“In short, this is a huge giveaway of public resources and political power to a tiny few,” Chester said, writing for Alternet.org, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
The policy changes are on the table for public comment, and media companies have weighed in heavily in favor of them. An issue with such profound consequences for all Americans ought to be making headlines, but Chester said readers are lucky to find an occasional story tucked away in the business section.
“The failure of the news media to report on their own political activities — lobbying — raises very serious questions about the corporate media’s level of integrity,” he said.
For instance, he said the New York Times Co. last December filed reams of paper urging the FCC to lift the ban on the TV-newspaper ownersiip rule. While the company made “lots of claims and promises about how communities would benefit,” the Times never reported any of it.
No News is Bad News
Looking at the big picture, writer and editor John Nichols put it bluntly: “Our industry is in crisis.”
While many print journalists are still committed to the First Amendment principles that drew them into the field, Nichols said their values and story ideas are being pushed aside by media companies that put profit above all else — believing entertainment sells and community news doesn’t.
He said only a handful of papers still assign reporters to beats covering such fundamental subjects as labor and agriculture. Even political and legislative reporting is being cut back.
Nichols, who contributes to The Nation magazine while working as a columnist and editor at The Madison Capitol Times in Wisconsin, said an annual survey of newspapers shows that “the number of reporters covering state government has been in steady decline for years” and many newspapers that once ran bureaus in Washington, D.C., have closed them.
On the radio front, he deplored the death of thousands of voices that have disappeared in recent years. He said media watchers estimate that at least 10,000 and as many as 20,000 radio personalities — from newscasters to DJs — have lost their jobs since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed conglomerates to gobble up once independent stations.
As for TV news, he called it a “cesspool” of celebrities and weather, along with canned segments deceptively presented as local stories on such matters as newfangled medical tests. “If you want to see the future of local TV news, watch Entertain-ment Tonight,” he said. “That’s what their consultants say it should be.”
In fact, a two-week study of TV news in late September and early October — just a month before the Nov. 5 election — showed that half of all stations did exactly “zero election coverage,” said Janine Jackson, program director for FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Yet, she said, the same stations that devoted no news time to politics collectively earned millions in advertising revenue running campaign ads.
Like Nichols, she said the shame doesn’t belong only to broadcast media. She noted a Time magazine series on the environment last summer sponsored by Ford Motor Co. — with no stories about automobile pollution.
“The goals of democracy are on a collision course with the goals of the media as a profit-driven business,” Jackson said.
Between the crushing weight of corporate influence and state and federal government rollbacks in freedom of information, Nichols said the First Amendment is taking a beating. “We are so overwhelmed in the fight,” he said. “We have been losing for 20 years and it’s getting worse.”
He called for a broad-based movement to bring the issues to the forefront and urged unions to take a leading role, for their own sake and the greater good. “Unions must be actively engaged in this fight,” he said. “The trade union movement cannot begin to renew itself and grow in the current media climate.”
Unions have already been a powerful force in some First Amendment fights. In New York state, trustees of the state university system tried to dictate what the history curriculum would be at its 29 schools, with no input from the professors who teach it. The curriculum imposed was a whitewashed version of history with scarce mention of African-Americans, women or labor. The faculty union revolted, voting to censure the state board.
“They wanted to impose a curriculum that fit their political agenda,” said local President Bill Scheuerman, a vice president of the national AFT. “If the union hadn’t gotten involved, we would have lost that fight.”
Read more about pending FCC changes on the Center for Digital Democracy website www.democraticmedia.org.