"Corporate" Media

 by Allan Levite  

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Does the news have a "pro-corporate" bias, simply because the major news media outlets are corporate-owned?

Despite much evidence to the contrary, some people claim that because the major media are corporate-owned, they must serve "corporate interests" and so the news must have a pro-corporate bias. Peter Phillips, Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, expressed this view:

If we believe the corporate media give us the full uncensored truth about key issues inside the special interests of American capitalism, then we might feel that they are meeting the democratic needs of mainstream America. However if we believe – as increasingly more Americans do – that corporate media serves its own self-interests instead of those of the people, than we can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead we need to say that corporate media is corporate America, and that we the mainstream people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for our news and information.

This hardly explains the jubilant front-page headline of a San Francisco Examiner early April 7, 2000 edition: "3 smokers beat Big Tobacco"! Also, when I used to watch CBS-TV's 60 Minutes, every other week featured an exposé of some business enterprise, often a major corporation. One 2003 episode ("Toxic Secret: Alabama Town Was Never Warned Of Contamination") exposed chemical giant Monsanto.

The professor mentioned several major media and their connections with major firms, through interlocking boards of directors. One of the media was the New York Times, which has such ties with Eli Lilly. So what happens when we Google them together? A New York Times story appears: "Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill," published December 17, 2006. Yep. It's just as much an exposé as the headline insinuates.

The professor's list also connects NBC with Chevron. It took me only seconds to find a story by a pro-business web site entitled, "NBC Accuses Oil Firms of 'Fleecing' Taxpayers. But reporter's complaint is really that government forgot to tax oil drilling."

. . . “Oil companies earn billions of dollars pumping oil from federal lands and are required to share the wealth with taxpayers through royalty payments,” reporter Lisa Myers began her September 28 Nightly News story. Anchor Brian Williams had introduced her segment as “a new twist” on “The Fleecing of America.”

. . . The Business & Media Institute has found that the media, including NBC, have repeatedly drilled oil companies in the past year for their profit margins, attacking them as greedy and unconcerned with providing affordable energy to consumers.

One of the oil firms was Chevron. Wasn’t this a rather impertinent way for a bought-off news medium to treat the corporation to which it has board-of-directors ties?

Professor Phillips' list also shows a similar connection between the Washington Post and defense contractor Lockheed Martin. But on the Post's web site is an article entitled, "On YouTube, Charges of Security Flaws. Ex-Lockheed Worker Takes Concerns Over Coast Guard Ships to the Web." A Lockheed engineer had posted a video on the web to explain that there are:

blind spots in the ship's security cameras, equipment that malfunctions in cold weather and other problems. 'It may be very hard for you to believe that our government and the largest defense contractor in the world [are] capable of such alarming incompetence and can make ethical compromises as glaring as what I am going to describe.' In response to De Kort's charges, a Coast Guard spokeswoman said the service has 'taken the appropriate level of action.' A spokeswoman for the contractors said the allegations were without merit.

Finally, according to Professor Phillips, AOL-Time Warner (CNN) has the same kind of corporate link to the Estee Lauder firm. But when I Googled Estee Lauder and CNN together, I found: "Estee Lauder sued over skin-care claims. Report: Florida woman's suit says company's skin-care products don't have 'anti-aging' benefits."

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - A 62-year-old woman is suing cosmetics company Estee Lauder, saying their skin-care products promised to control the visible signs of aging, but didn't deliver, a newspaper report said Thursday.

I fail to see how a "corporate media" would have let these stories — and many more like them — slip through their supposed net of censorship. Also, if such "corporate interests" really dictated news policy, anti-corporate activists Ralph Nader and Erin Brockovich could not be media celebrities, portrayed as heroes. Nor would we have been told for so many decades that General Motors President Charles Wilson had "said" that what is good for G.M. is good for the country. Here is the New York Times' account of what he actually said (January 24, 1953, page 8): "I cannot conceive of one [a situation where he might put G.M.'s interests above the country's] because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." Quite a different sort of statement, isn't it?

My memory about what was said about G.M. for so long can be confirmed. Comeback by Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White (a 1994 book about the U.S. auto industry) states on page 94 that Wilson had told Congress: "What's good for General Motors is good for America." One author was a Wall Street Journal Detroit bureau chief and the other a deputy bureau chief there. It was their job to cover Detroit's auto industry, and even they repeated this bogus urban legend! Also, the title of the 2003 book 24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America hardly implies that the Journal always shields and defends corporate America.

There are other problems with the "corporate media" perspective. Liberals routinely call conservatives "corporate apologists" even though conservatives constantly disparage the media — which allegedly represent the very same "corporate interests" for which the conservatives are shills and apologists. So we are asked to believe that conservatives don't know who their real allies are!

The "corporate media" ruse also implies that since movies are produced by giant firms, they too should have a pro-corporate bias. But anti-corporate films abound: A Civil Action, Class Action, Executive Action, Erin Brockovich, The Insider, Silkwood, Norma Rae, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, John Q ("The enemy is us — we shot down national health care"), and Michael Clayton. I’ve lost count of how many TV drama series episodes featured the Big Evil Pharmaceutical Company as the main villain, such as the September 30, 2003 episode of Law & Order SVU, "Manic." The episode I saw on February 6, 2007 ("Loophole") used the Evil Pesticide Company instead. Would real "corporate media" allow this?

In sum, to imply that the media must have a pro-corporate slant because of corporate ownership interests is like saying that every employee of every big company should have pro-corporate opinions. To a credulous ear, it might sound logical, but the facts just don't substantiate it.

Culture: Media

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