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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive.
Editorial: 5/5/2000 I have been threatened by dictators and I have been threatened by advertisers. I
prefer the dictators. Whether it was Manuel Noriega in Panama, the military junta in
Sudan, or Saddam Hussein, the dictators were at least straightforward. We don't like
what you're reporting, they would say through their security agents--usually burly
men who looked like Teamster shop stewards--so we'll knock you around a little,
toss you in jail for a few hours, and then escort you to the airport.
Advertisers are a good deal more insidious and a lot more sensitive. People like
an executive with a pizza chain who phoned my office to rail about the bombing of Serbia
and wondered why the liberal media didn't make the connection between "..the FBI murder
of David Koresh in Waco and Bill Clinton's war in the Balkans." He got so upset he
pulled his ads from the radio station and called my bosses.
Or take the restaurant chain owners who were incensed at a story about how they
had posted "reserved parking" signs for their customers all over a mall parking lot they
shared with several other businesses. They were forced to take the signs down. They
pulled their ads and made the obligatory call to the corner offices. Or the Ford dealer
who was upset over a crash test story that ranked some Ford products near the bottom.
Out go the ads, in come the phone calls.
One of the people on the receiving end of all the telephoned spleen even wrote me
a memo saying, quote, "The bashing of big business is intolerable and has to stop."
I have it framed over my desk, right next to the front page of a Noriega-run newspaper
declaring me an Enemy of the State, a reminder that corporate control of the media
and government control may amount to the same thing.
The Columbia Journalism Review's survey of 206 reporters and 81 news executives,
network and local, drives this home with the subtlety of a ballpeen hammer. Just
about one-third of them admitted they've altered or avoided stories altogether so as
not to upset advertisers. Since fewer companies now own more news outlets than
ever, expect it to get worse.
Viacom achieves the ultimate synergy with CBS by absorbing it and wiping the CBS
stock ticker symbol off the face of the Dow-Jones. Disney absorbs ABC, lets it be
known they don't want ABC reporters doing many Disney stories, and then goes to war
over a cable blackout with the Time Warner/AOL/CNN empire. NBC floats somewhere in
GE's swimming pool, Fox is just a branch of Rupert Murdoch's world-wide News Corp.
holdings, the Chicago Tribune buys the LA Times, CBS Radio absorbs the Mutual and
NBC Radio Networks and closes them. You get the picture.
A co-incidence, mayhap, that the two highest paid executives in the US are
Disney's Michael Eisner and CBS/Viacom's Mel Karmazin? Not when you consider that
major corporations that control most of the information you get are run not by
broadcasters or journalists, but by salesmen. As salesmen, they live by the creed
common to Willie Loman and Sumner Redstone--keep the client happy.
Running critical stories about companies who advertise on your radio station/
TV network/newspaper chain/websites does not make the clients happy. They
complain. Memos fly. Stories are killed. And that leads to the most dangerous kind
of censorship of all, self-censorship.
I've known reporters in police states who've killed stories before they're ever
started, just to avoid having the Politburo's Jimmy Hoffas knocking on the door at
three a.m. And I've known reporters in Seattle who've spiked critical Boeing stories,
scribes in St. Louis who've sat on stories critical of Anheuser-Busch, broadcasters
in Cincinatti who've backed off of stories critical of Procter and Gamble.
Consolidating the media into the hands of a few giant conglomorates means the
public has fewer and fewer independent sources of information. It also means
increasing pressure on journalists not to offend advertisers. Going after the
government will always be acceptable, since the government doesn't buy ads. But going
after the private sector is another matter. Dot coms might be the cure for this
except for their limited reach and the fact that most 'Net start-ups dream of the day
when they can sell out to one of the big boys and cash in.
Like Mulder and Scully say, the truth is out there. But we may be getting less
and less of it, not because of a knock on the door, but because of a memo.
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