John Whitehead's Commentary

"When you see news as a product, it's impossible to really serve democracy."
--Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

A global corporate takeover of newspapers, television and radio has occurred. Over the last 20 years, multinational conglomerates have subsumed most media sources. Determined to cut costs and make money from the news, corporate greed is slowly doing away with diversity and independent reporting. Most importantly, it poses a dire threat to American democracy.

Although there are still hundreds of newspapers, magazines and television stations, the number of owners of such news outlets continues to shrink. A handful of corporations now control most of the media industry and, thus, the information dished out to the public. For example, in 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every media outlet. In 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine. In 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty-three. By 1997, the number had been reduced to ten.

Laurie Garrett began working for New York Newsday in 1988. But what she saw at the once independent news system has now caused her to quit. In an interview (www.democracynow.org), Garrett said that the corporate powers at Newsday "felt that the profit returns they were realizing on the investment were rather small compared to many of their friends and wealthy compatriots who were invested in other kinds of businesses, and so on. And they brought in from General Foods Corporation a CEO who had never had anything to do with media, had no understanding of journalism. Frankly, as far as I could tell, didn't give a darn about journalism. His mandate was to raise the stock value."

In a recent farewell memorandum to her Newsday colleagues, Garrett noted that this is the trend in the corporate media world:

"They serve their stockholders first, Wall Street second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships. The deterioration we experienced at Newsday was hardly unique. All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions."

Indeed, long gone are the days when reporters filled their columns and news reports with items that challenged government authority. Garrett continues:

"When I started out in journalism, the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their way through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters, most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way. Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college degrees. All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many make themselves the story."

The basic mission of the so-called "grunts in the newsrooms" is to serve as a check on the government, both local and national. That is why the freedom of the press is such an integral part of our First Amendment. However, this can hardly be accomplished when journalists are forced to cater their content to the business whims of corporate media. Garrett touched on this in her memo to Newsday staff:

"Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of 'snappy news,' sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now. But you just can't realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it's damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere skeleton crew of reporters and editors. This is terrible for democracy."

As a result of the merging of news and entertainment corporations, news reports have increasingly taken on the character of entertainment pieces. As Mark Crispin Miller has written in The Nation, "Of all the media cartel's dangerous consequences for American society and culture, the worst is its corrosive influence on journalism. Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom, et al., the news is, with a few exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that the cartel also vends nonstop."

There still remain some local newspapers and other media that strive to report on what is happening in their communities, and that is commendable. Nevertheless, until the conglomerates are broken up, which is not likely to happen, the responsibility for actively seeking out the truth rests with the public. Americans must seek out credible and balanced information and be discerning about what we believe. And we must teach our children to be discerning and take an interest in the world around them. Thankfully, the internet has provided a proliferation of independent news sources. But, even there, the long arm of corporate takeovers can be seen so that the responsibility for ferreting out the truth rests with us.

With freedom comes a moral and civic duty to stay informed about what's going on in our government. It is no longer enough to trust only mainstream media sources for the truth. We can no longer afford to absorb everything without filtration or fact-checking. Instead, we must resolve to seek it out from a variety of sources. In fact, an informed citizenry is our only hope if we are to maintain a democracy. As Thomas Jefferson once declared, "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."

Thus, we are duty bound. Again, to quote Garrett: "It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake."

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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